Re: More Pu

[mgoldman@ucdavis.edu (Dr. Marvin Goldman)]

>                                        - 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.

Goldman replies;

I was not referring to a "facility", where anything as mentioned above can
happen!  I thought you were asking about a possible old event "outside" the
fence.  The observation is that old contamination events may not have a
significant resuspension of respirable particles, and that aging
agglomeration results in the larger particles.

At the othe extreme, massive inhalations, such as have ocurred in 1948-55
at MAYAK at Chelyabinsk cause lung damage, chronic radiation sickness,
pulmonary fibrosis and death at "incandescant" doses.

Plutonium is very toxic in the body, but may not be too hazardous if you
understand its poor environmental transport dynamics.

I do not mean to make light of it, and all the safety precautions in the
occupational setting are needed, and for the most part have been most
effective, at least here in USA over the most recent decades.