Pee U - 235
October 18, 2015 7:25 PM   Subscribe

There is a club among atomic scientists who have worked at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. How much plutonium in the body does it take to join the club? Enough so that it comes out in your urine.
posted by Chrysostom (21 comments total) 12 users marked this as a favorite
 
"One was a lung-cancer death, and two died of other causes but had lung cancer at the time of death. All three were heavy smokers."

So... smoking is worse for you than plutonium exposure.

"But overall, “the mortality rate for the group is about 50 per cent lower than the national average.”"

Wow. 50% of them are never going to die. Amazing.
posted by GuyZero at 7:44 PM on October 18, 2015 [11 favorites]


Some folks may be confused by
When it was done, we cut open the bomb
Manhattan Project workers referred to the sealed crucible vessels used for reduction as "bombs". For more details (and a picture of Ted Magel in a sweet cowboy hat), see Plutonium Metal: The First Gram.

The article that the post takes details from is also worth a read: On The Front Lines.
posted by zamboni at 8:05 PM on October 18, 2015 [4 favorites]


I thought I was jaded but the last link in that story, to the book review about the people that were unknowingly injected with plutonium. Jesus.
posted by bonobothegreat at 8:40 PM on October 18, 2015 [3 favorites]


Three more decades??!!!!!!!
posted by carping demon at 8:53 PM on October 18, 2015


Oh please, the Navajo drink it daily. The feds started measuring wells out on the reservation, started closing them right and left, gave up and ran away.
posted by Oyéah at 9:28 PM on October 18, 2015 [3 favorites]


"Pee U - 239", if you please. Pu235 only has a half-life of about 25 minutes, so it's unlikely that a significant amount of it would make it all the way to the outside world.
posted by McCoy Pauley at 9:39 PM on October 18, 2015 [2 favorites]


If you pee plutonium I guess you could say urine trouble.
posted by Splunge at 2:44 AM on October 19, 2015 [13 favorites]


Transuranic indeed.
posted by justsomebodythatyouusedtoknow at 3:37 AM on October 19, 2015 [7 favorites]


In addition to its radioactivity, plutonium was once thought to be extremely toxic. Ralph Nader called it "the most toxic substance known to mankind, but that was apparently untrue. It seems fears about a "dirty bomb" are perhaps greatly overstated?
posted by three blind mice at 3:54 AM on October 19, 2015


No, that makes no sense. Because even if the risk of radiation far exceeds to chemical toxicity, there's still a lot of radiation there. Especially if it contaminates a water supply because many forms of radiation are even more harmful when ingested.
posted by C'est la D.C. at 4:39 AM on October 19, 2015


When they do die, they may opt to donate their bodies to the WSU Transuranium & Uranium Registries, where a friend of mine turned down a job just itching to be featured in a B movie: custodian of the most radioactive preserved cadavers in the United States.

The mortality rate of radiation workers is generally lower than average. Which some use to defend the not-totally-crazy but also certainly not established or generally accepted notion that small amounts of radiation are good for you. (Radiation hormesis, worth a metafilter post in itself), others think they might just live longer because they tend to be better educated and have higher incomes than the population as a whole.

This pee mostly isn't being collected to assess the health risks to the Pee U-235 club (Pu was actually chosen as a joke), it is to gather information on the biokinetics of these nuclides in the body to inform the field of internal dosimetry. For anyone who is interested here is a 42 page slideshow from the NRC that gives a pretty good background in the subject.

Everyone has detectable levels of uranium in their pee and it is possible to look at the isotopic ratios of U-235:U-238 and assess whether that was exposure to natural uranium, depleted uranium, or enriched uranium. With applications from defending against worker safety claims to investigating nuclear proliferation.
posted by Across the pale parabola of joy at 5:49 AM on October 19, 2015 [8 favorites]


Depleted uranium count?
posted by Smedleyman at 7:43 AM on October 19, 2015


In addition to its radioactivity, plutonium was once thought to be extremely toxic. Ralph Nader called it "the most toxic substance known to mankind, but that was apparently untrue. It seems fears about a "dirty bomb" are perhaps greatly overstated?

I'm sure that in 2100, plutonium is available in every corner drugstore, but in 2015, it's a little hard to come by. The idea for a dirty bomb is just to spread radioactive material around to do damage without a nuclear detonation. Pu dirty bombs are extraordinarily unlikely because Pu is so hard to come by. Why go through all the work of either creating and separating or obtaining Pu illicitly if all you are going to do is disperse it, and vastly more common radionuclides like Cs-137 would work just as well for your purposes. So Pu's toxicity is irrelevant to the seriousness of dirty bomb fears.

Nader's quote is not based in fact, though Pu is pretty toxic. He also said something ridiculous like a pound of Pu could kill everyone on earth. Which I guess is true if you fed the same Pu to everyone in series or took a small block of it and hit people with it one after another. It's not even the most radiologically toxic substance, some radiums for example are worse. A Pu LD50 might be 5 ug/kg while botulin toxin for example is more like 1.3 ng/kg, orders of magnitude lower and we regularly purposefully inject people with that for cosmetic purposes.
posted by Across the pale parabola of joy at 7:44 AM on October 19, 2015 [4 favorites]


GuyZero "But overall, “the mortality rate for the group is about 50 per cent lower than the national average.”"

Wow. 50% of them are never going to die. Amazing.


You're thinking of mortality probability. Mortality rate is calculated as 1/(time of death).
posted by yeolcoatl at 8:05 AM on October 19, 2015 [1 favorite]


Exposure standards in the nuclear industry are really very tight. It's not possible to build a reactor in Cornwall, for example, because the natural ambient radioactivity from U-238 in the granite and the radon gas that it produces is above the permissible level for the industry. I have a granite sample picked up in a car park in Gunnislake that has visible flakes of (I think) pitchblende and runs around 1.5 mrad/h on my (b+g) counter.
posted by Devonian at 8:11 AM on October 19, 2015 [4 favorites]


Mortality rate is calculated as 1/(time of death).

I don't think it's that either because a bunch of them aren't dead yet.

I wasn't really being serious, I think what they mean is that relative to a similar sample of the general population, fewer people from the group of people exposed to plutonium are dead than you expect. It's just hard thing to say both accurately and succinctly.
posted by GuyZero at 8:17 AM on October 19, 2015


We can still calculate a lower bound on the mortality rate with the ages of the living people.
posted by clew at 9:03 AM on October 19, 2015


I'm sure that in 2100, plutonium is available in every corner drugstore, but in 2015, it's a little hard to come by.

Another cause of mortality related to Plutonium is Libyan terrorists.
posted by randomkeystrike at 10:18 AM on October 19, 2015 [1 favorite]


Across the pale parabola of joy: "others think they might just live longer because they tend to be better educated and have higher incomes than the population as a whole"

It would be interesting to see how the rate compares to say tenured professors.
posted by Mitheral at 10:46 AM on October 19, 2015


Another possible explanation of lower mortality (IIRC this has also been observed in veterans with embedded DU shrapnel, but don't quote me) is that people who have been accidentally exposed are put under stricter medical monitorig, and the benefits from additional scrutiny (e.g. early warning) may outweigh the small additional risk of a low exposure.
posted by Dr Dracator at 11:01 AM on October 19, 2015


I received an email today from a school teacher emeritus who went out to an elementary school at Gray Mountain, Az. The area is on abandoned Uranium mines, they bring in water twice a week, and there is a high incidence of cancer and birth defects.

Lots of folks are exposed to DU with no medical supervision whatever, people who work or live on, or downwind of bombing ranges; people who live on old, or in active, war zones. Hormesis is a buzzword used by folks who are planning for nuclear war. The concept is used to soften resistance to the planning for nuclear war, or the expansion of nuclear industry.
posted by Oyéah at 11:33 AM on October 20, 2015 [1 favorite]


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