🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1993Jan8.165057.3965@elroy.jpl.nasa.gov> pjs@euclid.jpl.nasa.gov writes:
>> The radiation hazard from plutonium 238 is insignificant; it's pretty much
>> a pure alpha emitter, and human skin stops alpha particles completely.  (A
>> sheet of paper will do likewise.)  You don't want to eat the stuff...
>
>Somewhere in the recesses of my mind lies a memory of a scientist
>who offered to eat some plutonium if the journalist covering the
>event would eat the same amount of caffeine.  No takers, obviously,
>but does this mean that it would be safe to eat plutonium?

Plutonium 239 would not be very toxic if eaten as the metal, I would think.
(Whereas caffeine in bite-and-chew quantities would be lethal.)  I don't
know as I'd call it "safe", but it might not be certain death.  Inhaling it
into the lungs as fine dust is the quick way to die from plutonium.  The
metal probably wouldn't be absorbed very efficiently when eaten.

Eating any heavy metal isn't exactly recommended, mind you.

>...it should be passed in due course with only the mucus coating
>the alimentary canal getting irradiated.

Most of the body isn't radiation-sensitive enough to be hurt much by
a relatively long-lived isotope like Pu239.  As I recall, what kills you
is getting it into your bone marrow.

Eating Pu238 wouldn't be any worse in terms of radiation, but it would
be extremely painful and possibly fatal because the stuff is *hot*.
Thermally, not radioactively.
-- 
"God willing... we shall return."       | Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
       -Gene Cernan, the Moon, Dec 1972 |  henry@zoo.toronto.edu  utzoo!henry