Plutonium: The most dangerous substance known to man?
worksinprogress.co
worksinprogress.co
There's "our design docs are photos of whiteboards" normalization of deviance and there's whatever the hell this is. Absolutely bonkers that there wasn't a demon core-like incident.
Would it be better to walk down the hall twice? Slightly, sure. Turns out it wouldn't have made a difference that we know of.
Half joking. Is the material and spatial separation of a lab coat enough to prevent a reaction between two lumps of plutonium of sufficient combined critical mass? It might be since it's so bad at penetrating anything solid, but I don't know.
It's still a horrifyingly unsafe thing to do.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon_core#/media/File:Ticklin...
https://www.science.org/content/article/near-disaster-federa...
One of the things modern "computing practices" taught us is the myriad of ways things can go wrong, they were probably a bit more naive at that time
It's Murphy's law squared
This isn't the case!
Plutonium 239 is relatively safe, merely an alpha emitter which is what you're talking about. But that isn't where the danger comes from. The danger comes from the Plutonium 240, which is present as a contaminant in all plutonium weapons cores. Plutonium 240 spontaneously undergoes fission, releasing neutron radiation which is very penetrating. If you bring two halves of a core together, neutrons from the spontaneous fusion of Pu-240 can cause a chain reaction; this is the reason gun-type bombs don't work with Plutonium cores; they give off too much neutron radiation and would react prematurely if you tried to build a Plutonium bomb like that.
Inverse-square law [0][1] applies...
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverse-square_law
[1] https://energyeducation.ca/encyclopedia/Inverse_square_law
Somehow I think it’s more likely people will fiddle with their loaded gun than with two halves of a nuclear bomb.
I'm inclined to see that as uncomfortably close to fingering the trigger.
(Just letting my mind wander - I realise using plutonium as a cue ball is very unlikely)
Unfortunately, it never really went away.
https://www.science.org/content/article/near-disaster-federa...
Otherwise, a great article!
Being a teenager I asked “what would happen if I jumped into the reactor?”
The researcher (this was a medical and research reactor) laughs and says “well, if you just jump into the water and splashed around we’d have hell to pay with filling out an incident report to <something important sounding, I forget>, but physically you’d be fine since the water shields you from the radiation. If you did a swan dive down toward the glow your skin would all melt off before you got to the reactor” maybe he was just saying this for effect but it’s always stuck in my head that water is a really, really good insulator against radiation.
Absolutely. There is this[1] horror story about a diver who was doing maintenance in a transfer pool next to two spent fuel pools. After he was done with the work he found an unidentified object at the bottom of the pool and was instructed to put it in his tool basket. The object was a broken piece of irradiated reactor component. They realised that something is very wrong when the diver was lifting the basket out of the water and the area radiation monitors started to alarm, so they lowered the basket back into the water.
On the 10th slide of the document there is a diagram showing the water's shielding as a function of distance. At 1.4 meters there is no dose they can measure while they measure extremely high doses at centimeter distances.
1: https://isoe-network.net/publications/pub-proceedings/sympos...
But just to be sure, I got in touch with a friend of mine who works at a research reactor, and asked him what he thought would happen to you if you tried to swim in their radiation containment pool.
“In our reactor?” He thought about it for a moment. “You’d die pretty quickly, before reaching the water, from gunshot wounds.” """
Actually, at a depth of 3-5 feet the bullets wouldn't hurt you: https://www.google.com/search?q=bullets+in+water
But if you take a photo of it and think you're done with documenting your design, you A) lose most of the context of the decisions that were made to arrive at that design. And B) have ensured that your documentation will get outdated and become useless pretty soon. You've basically decided not to have design documentation but filled yourself into believing that you do.
If you are serious about documenting software design to help future developers understand the system, you really do need those diagrams in a digital, easily updateable format and with textual explanations of the underlying decisions. And if doing that seems more work than it's worth, do it anyway, just with less details.
This is all to say that if you 1) invent novel terminology for things that already exist, 2) don't document anything, and 3) run your team like a high school clique then you never have to worry about finding yourself out of a job. Thankfully my current gig has loads of video training and an interactive dictionary for proprietary terms in an attempt to combat this.
Yeah, eventually management will nuke the whole division, but at least it provides those with jobs a bit more runway.
How much of the bemoaning of such adversarial tactics by engineers themselves is simply annoyance at what it causes them at their jobs, or the fact they have internalized pro-management propaganda?
So they were only wearing a lab coat on one half of their body? I'm confused.
I don't know how confident I would be about this, given that our body is mostly made out of a very good neutron moderator (water)…
Edit: in fact the first ever recorded criticality accident ever recorded involved the water in the body of a scientist (Otto Frisch), though the water was acting as a neutron reflector here, and not as a moderator.
Plutonium metal likes to form a hydride layer that rapidly oxidizes in the presence of any water; this oxide then vigorously reacts with water. Plutonium fires have occurred at several national labs in the US, including two incidents that contaminated the Rocky Flats site.
Forget demon cores and use as an elaborate poisoning agent, the stuff is a huge conventional safety hazard.
Edit: my vote for actual most dangerous substance known to man, though, goes to chlorine trifluoride[1]. It will vigorously react with sand, bricks, asbestos, and other stuff that is usually reliably inert.
[1] https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/sand-won-t-save-yo...
I wonder if the Aliens movies got their idea for the blood from this stuff.
> There’s a report from the early 1950s (in this PDF) of a one-ton spill of the stuff. It burned its way through a foot of concrete floor and chewed up another meter of sand and gravel beneath, completing a day that I'm sure no one involved ever forgot. That process, I should add, would necessarily have been accompanied by copious amounts of horribly toxic and corrosive by-products: it’s bad enough when your reagent ignites wet sand, but the clouds of hot hydrofluoric acid are your special door prize if you’re foolhardy enough to hang around and watch the fireworks.
See?! So safe even dentists recommentd it!111 /s
_Yikes_.
I believe this date is inaccurate; the injections of Plutonium happened in 1945 through 1947. The Manhattan Project was disbanded in 1947. Those experiments might have continued, but they wouldn't have been under the Manhattan Project in 1950.
The government covered up most of these radiation mishaps until 1993, when President Bill Clinton ordered a change of policy and federal agencies then made available records dealing with human radiation experiments, as a result of Welsome's work. [...]
The committee issued a controversial 1995 report which said that "wrongs were committed" but it did not condemn those who perpetrated them. The final report came out on October 3, 1995, the same day as the verdict in the O.J. Simpson case, when much of the media's attention was directed elsewhere." [0]
"The US government settled with the victims' families, paying $400,000 per family." [1]
Even if the verdict had not been announced that day, the visit of the Pope would have overshadowed the release of a 1,000 page advisory committee report which itself was only a slightly expanded investigation of an incident that had already been covered by a congressional committee report nine years earlier.
Some people use the coincidence to imply that the administration tried to bury it, but it was actually an open-government initiative by the Clinton Administration meant to highlight their pursuit of injustice and had been on the calendar for weeks, with the printing of hundreds of copies of a 1,000 page book, the scheduling of a White House ceremony, and guests having been flown in from all over the country.
The president even gave a 20-minute speech about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=StId27Dmx78
Whereas it was impossible to predict when the OJ Simpson verdict would be announced.
Have a look at the blog "Things I won't work with":
https://www.science.org/action/doSearch?AllField=Things+I+wo...
One example I recall from the blog is
"It is, of course, extremely toxic, but that's the least of the problem. It is hypergolic with every known fuel, and so rapidly hypergolic that no ignition delay has ever been measured. It is also hypergolic with such things as cloth, wood, and test engineers, not to mention asbestos, sand, and water—with which it reacts explosively."
From Wikipedia:
> This oxidizing power, surpassing that of oxygen, causes ClF3 to react vigorously with many other materials often thought of as incombustible and refractory. […] In one particular industrial accident, a spill of 900 kg of ClF3 burned through 30 cm of concrete and 90 cm of gravel beneath.
Two things: First, the idea of burning (not melting!) through 1.2m of what is effectively stone is wild. Second, somebody had 900kg of this stuff in one place?!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon_core
The article actually mentions it (not by name). But I think that the difference between the Demon Core and your average chunk of Plutonium (non-critical) is not well understood by most people. Which is why people are afraid of all sharks- A single frame of reference for something that's multi-faceted.
Or maybe I’m just not in the mood for this article right now.
That's pretty close.
With a bit of Google Scholar search I found David Krieger's 1975 article "Terrorists and nuclear technology" in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, at https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00963402.1975.11... which says:
> Plutonium-239, the product of the nuclear fuel cycle used for the construction of nuclear weapons, is one of the most toxic substances known to man. It is also a substance which occurs rarely in nature and is almost entirely man-made in the nuclear fuel cycle. One microgram of plutonium-239 ingested into the lungs is capable of causing lung cancer. Approximately, one 8,000,000th of a pound of inhaled plutonium has caused lung cancer in animals. Thus, when effectively dispersed, a much smaller quantity of plutonium than would be needed for a nuclear bomb could necessitate the evacuation of dense urban areas.
There's the 8 billion.
We know that quotes get mis-attributed to more famous people.
My guess is that Krieger's comment got rephrased and mis-attributed to Nader, who was, after all, talking about the same topic.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cecil_Kelley_criticality_accid...
The Real Problem: Walter Cronkite's statement was true, but in a big-picture contextual and somewhat poetic sense. The fraction of humanity with any reason to care about the MSDS safety of plutonium is ~0%. The fraction of humanity living in (in 1977, and often since) a world which seems threatened by a hellish large-scale nuclear war is ~100%. Making the "MSDS Argument" to people in the latter group is often a good way to convince them that you're an obnoxious and uncaring little jerk, eager to show off that he read a science textbook at school.
Analogy: Read a bit about the lethality of WWI battlefields in Europe, how many millions died on them, and how traumatized European society was by that war. Imagine that someone from that era claimed that the most dangerous substance known to man was the special steel alloy used to make artillery gun barrels and machine gun barrels.
In both cases, familiarity bred contempt and a minor slip-up caused the thing to go critical. Same casual attitude as "carrying half a critical mass on each side in a lab coat pocket". What if once you forget and hang up the coat with the pieces still in the pockets?
Not to mention archeology scholars have suggested it was the cause of the destruction of Atlantis.
Personally, I’ve been on a multi day abstention from dihydrogen monoxide in my diet. I’ve been drinking only grain alcohol instead and based on the burning and tingling sensations I’ve been feeling I’m fairly certain my body is finally purging all the toxins I wasn’t able to when I was addicted to dihydrogen monoxide. I’ll make sure to post another update as I gather more data.
If you’d like to learn more about this important subject that’s gone under the radar for too long, I’ve attached the MDS [0] about dihydrogen monoxide. We really need to ask our congresspeople to pass regulations and fund research investigating the potential harms of dihydrogen monoxide before it’s too late.
It causes your body to metabolize, age and die.
You could live forever if you would stop breathing oxygen.
Here's a summary of his book from which this article seems to be taken.
https://rootsofprogress.org/devanney-on-the-nuclear-flop
The book is here: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1098308964
I suppose the next one in the scale is grey matter, that with a bit more than a Kg could kill all life in the planet in the right conditions.
Basically the Big Bang may be younger than the matter in the universe.
As an aside, I believe Plonium-210 [1] is widely viewed as more toxic than plutonium. The only thing more toxic than that is fentanyl and that's only if you're a cop [2].
Anyway, so this is just a pro-nuclear power piece. Do with that what you will. I'll just point out that with incidents like the East Palestine derailment you will often find that the companies responsible have their liability limited by law. In the case of nuclear power plant operators, their potential liability is strictly limited by the Price-Anderson Act [3].
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polonium-210
[2]: https://www.grid.news/story/misinformation/2022/12/23/the-da...
[3]: https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IF/IF10821#:~:te....
Jedburgh actually brings together two subcritical lumps of plutonium in his hands, and causes a criticality incident.
You'll find botulinum toxin at dental, neurology, plastic surgery, etc. offices being safely used regularly. You're unlikely to find methymercury.
Poor old Karen Wetterhahn didn't even show symptoms for a year, from a milligram drop of it.
I'm not sure about FOOF, but that's definitely not the case with hydrofluoric acid. With hydrofluoric acid, depending on the concentration, burn symptoms can take several hours to manifest, luring victims of accidents into a false sense of security and causing them to delay seeking treatment.
Ignoring exponential decay, in five months at one liter a day she would have shed 30mg (so actual numbers were way higher).
Is it a typo/error or does this actually mean she was killed by way more mercury than a few drops through the glove?
I forget that not everyone on the Internet is aware of English idiom.
Like all tools, mass cooperation through money is a double edged sword. It's behind every war, every genocide, every enslavement. It's also behind every medical treatment, every piece of food in the grocery store, every act of emergency aid.
Without money, yes, we wouldn't have large scale devastation and consciously inflicted suffering. But we would also all still be living in huts and caves regularly dying of dysentery and starvation and would be lucky to see 2-3 of our 12 children make it to adulthood.
There are examples of war and enslavement that pre-date minted currency. Non-barter forms of exchange probably allowed for a specialist warrior class to develop though.
If you have the right plutonium isotope, in the correct shape and compress it just right.. it is a very dangerous metal.
if you have a small piece of it, it is rather harmless given it is an alpha emitter and can be stopped via single sheet of paper.
Tritium falls under the same category.
If you have a nuclear device, and put tritium in it, the tritium participates in the reaction and effectively "boosts" the yield.
If you have some Tritium, it is a weak beta emitter and you will either exhale it out (Tritium gas) or urinate it if it is in liquid form.
Like all radioactive material it does increase your chances of cancer, but you would need a fair amount of it.
Given Tritium is an isotope of Hydrogen, it isn't "like water" it IS water..but radioactive.
water - H2O Heavy water - D2O Super heavy water - T2O
Thing with alpha emitters is, if you get it on you the outer layers of skin will stop it before it does much damage. If you get it *in* you, where there's living tissue way closer to the surface like in your mouth or your lungs, it'll give you an absolute rip-roaring tumour.
I think case with plutonium is helped by the fact that we do not normally eat lumps of metal.
But agree, Alpha emitters are a problem if taken internally, which is why i stated breathing/drinking tritium increases cancer risks.
there is not a clear line between "alpha exposure" and "rip-roarding tumour"... See "nuclear medicine", "radioactive tracers" etc for examples of where alpha emitters are intentionally given to patients.
Just build the plants well, in a safe part of the world (no quakes, tidal waves etc), and have some well paid, high I.Q people running them. They'll be fine. Nuclear power is such a gift to humanity. As much power as we need, and comparatively little waste. But no, some people fear it, so we have to build endless bullshit windmills, and strip mine Africa for the elements required for solar panels (branded as "sustainable energy", though both just go into landfill when they reach the end of their life).
Unfortunately even well-paid and high IQ people have been known to cut corners and take risks. Look at the space shuttle among many examples.
What do you mean I picked up the wrong coat?
“Just build the plants well” is the civil engineering version of “No True Scotsman”.
We strip mine much more to get the freaking coal and oil and other fossil fuels - we consume them in billions of tons a year.
And defining any operators of nuclear plants with serious accidents as low-IQ, as you imply, is very convenient - yet doesn't make any sense.