Good question! Since you asked: it is largely in cooling pools and piling up in empty lots around nuclear power plants, waiting for safe, secure storage to appear.
> Something is either highly radioactive for a short amount of time, or not very radioactive for a long amount of time.
This is not true at all, unless you consider "short amount of time" to include decades to centuries to millenia.
Exactly what I said.
> This is not true at all
Yes it is.
I mean, if you’re going to dispute my point without providing any evidence, then all we’ve got is opinions.
If we’ve got data, let’s go with the data. If all we’ve got is opinions, let’s go with mine.
Pure Americium-241 is extremely radioactive 0.0000045 grams of the stuff puts off useful amounts of radiation for smoke detectors, it’s half life is also 432 years.
As an alpha emitter it’s not that bad to stand next to but internally it doesn’t take much to be lethal.
Also, I don’t know how to gauge “useful amounts of radiation for smoke detectors”.
α-particles can be stopped by a sheet of paper.
This is a manufactured product not waste from a nuclear reactor. We use it because it’s an alpha emitter, there’s harder to shield material with similar half lives they are just less useful. I bring this up because longer half lives don’t mean safety. If you’re looking for a weapon, salted nukes are the stuff of nightmares if they use something with a month long half life or several hundred years.
> I don’t know how to gauge
And that’s the issue here, you need to do some more research before making such statements.
Actually, it's exactly what I said. Here's the quote:
>It is largely in cooling pools and piling up in empty lots around nuclear power plants, waiting for safe, secure storage to appear.
See? Exactly.
> Yes it is.
No it isn't.
> I mean, if you’re going to dispute my point without providing any evidence
lol, you never provided us with any in the first place! Why would I waste more time and effort disproving some claim of yours, than you spent trying to prove the original claim in the first place? That'd be falling for gish gallop.
Until you produce sufficient evidence to convincingly prove that your original claim is true, we can safely assume it is not. So, onus is on you: It's up to you to prove your own point, nobody else. If you’ve got data, let’s see the data.