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More Pu
- Captain Plutonium!
More Pu
Online reply to John C. White, and comments regarding Dr. Goldman's comments:
(John, see my off-line comments, and the rest of you will just have to
wonder.)
I must respectfully disagree with a couple of Dr. Goldman's statements
(although I am in full agreement with #s 1 and 2, and 6, which applies even
more so to my following comments:
"Airborne Pu is usually of particle size distributions too large to be an
inhalation concern."
If this is so, then I wonder why most Pu facilties in the US (and presumably
in the world) have hoods and gloveboxes in which essentially all Pu work is
performed. I also must wonder why lots (well, some anyway) of the folks who
worked at such facilities now have measurable amounts of Pu either in their
lungs or being excreted. (I have seen the bioassay data and lung count
results.) Sure, lots of the activity will be of large enough particle size so
that inhalation will be very inefficient - but it doesn't take all that much
Pu to get interesting doses!
"If true contamination existed as you suggest, all the locals would be showing
interesting effects, if not sooner, than later."
Come on now. Look at all the follow-up done on the Manhattan project folks
who received significant exposures to Pu. The most that they can scrape out
of this data is "maybe" one bone cancer - occuring many many years down the
road. You could have a whole facility full of people getting snootfuls all
the time, and you wouldn't see any effects, "interesting" or otherwise in "all
the locals."
If you don't know what your guys are getting into, it would be prudent to
assume the worst, and take whatever precautions you could - particularly if Pu
is involved.
Captain Plutonium
aka Gary Mansfield
mansfield2@llnl.gov
DISCLAIMER:
The opinions expressed above are my humble own, and not those of the
University of California, LLNL, or the DOE.