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Path: utzoo!linus!philabs!cmcl2!seismo!harvard!h-sc1!mccauley
From: mccauley@h-sc1.UUCP (john mccauley)
Newsgroups: net.bizarre
Subject: Re: Re: plutonium :-((
Message-ID: <495@h-sc1.UUCP>
Date: Sat, 3-Aug-85 22:09:03 EDT
Article-I.D.: h-sc1.495
Posted: Sat Aug  3 22:09:03 1985
Date-Received: Mon, 5-Aug-85 00:31:24 EDT
References: <541@bentley.UUCP> <499@mit-vax.UUCP> <217@kitty.UUCP> <479@talcott.UUCP>
Reply-To: mccauley@h-sc1.UUCP (john scott mccauley jr.)
Organization: Harvard Univ. Science Center
Lines: 28


In article <479@talcott.UUCP> tmb@talcott.UUCP (Thomas M. Breuel) writes:
>I seem to remember that plutonium causes cancer in sub-milligram
>quantities. To make a bomb you need of the order of 10kg (probably
>a lot more). Therefore, even a dilution of 1:10^7 may still be dangerous.
>I realise that the New York water supply is probably bigger than
>10^7 cubic meter, but not much bigger (New York has of the order of
>10^7 inhabitants, and probably the overhead of a water supply
>per inhabitant is not greater than 1 cubic meter). Altogether,
>even assuming a uniform distribution, you might conceivably reach
>the dangerous level of plutonium. If the distribution is non-uniform,
>well...
>
>					Thomas.
>

	Since the U.S. and the Soviet Union have "uniformly distributed"
about 4 tons of plutonium into the atmosphere via above-ground nuclear
testing, every liter of air has about 10^6 atoms of plutonium in it.
According to an old _Guiness Book of World Records_, one atom is
enough to give terminal lung cancer...

		Scott.

P.S. Don't worry too much about 10^6 atoms. I don't think that 10^15 atoms can
even be weighed. Along similar lines, there is a classic problem that shows
that there is more than a 95 % chance that the air in your lung has at
least one molecule that was part of Julius Caeser's dying breath ....