Reply to post: Uh, no.

Crooks swipe plutonium, cesium from US govt nuke wranglers' car. And yes, it's still missing

Robert Sneddon

Uh, no.

Extremely toxic as in radical amputation required.

Actually no. Plutonium is a lot less toxic than, say, arsenic or beryllium. There's a lot of scare stories about Pu and of course similar fairy-tales about uranium (see Gulf War Syndrome for a worked example) but generally they're not a real biochemical threat or even a serious radiological worry. There's a "hot particle" theory that's mostly wild imagination crossed with movie-script physics and biology about how a particle of Pu could cause instant lung cancer. Healthy lungs are good at clearing dust and particles out if the airways and such a particle wouldn't stay resident in the lungs for more than a couple of days.

People who worked on the Manhattan Project back in the 1940, doing things in a hurry without modern Elf and Safety rules got Pu in cuts and grazes, inhaled and ingested Pu particles etc. and they were mostly OK decades later.

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