Mensaje citado por: John McCarthy <jmc@steam.Stanford.EDU>:
How does the amount of radiation in the vicinity of Rocky Flats compare with the radiation in the same area from cosmic rays?
Having spent my childhood near Denver (altitude 5000 feet), I have now spent a comparable or longer time living in Puebla (altitude 7000 feet) and in both cases there were worse things than cosmic rays to worry about. The studies have even extended to Lake Titicaca (altitude 13,000? I'm not sure); by and large the varying radiation dosages at different altitudes haven't seemed to have had gross effects. The Rocky Flats story has never been fully public, activists have certainly used it as a pretext, and the furor has more or less died down. One of the complaints was that they were transporting the finished pits in piper cubs relative to who knows what regulations governing the movement of hazardous materials. Of somewhat more serious concern, although mostly to the health of the employees, were the occasional plutonium fires which covered the laboratories with plutonium oxide which had to be mopped up. The area has never been much good for pasturage (or anything else except scenery, which is why the plant was located there in the first place}, so there shouldn't be too much concern over concentrating plutonium from grazing. But the area is a target for housing development, which makes plutonium-bearing soil a possible source of higher than normal radiation. The metal as a simple soil contaminant is otherwise probably negligible. It is one thing to say that all heavy metals are toxic (some may have held mercury in their hands or put in their mouths, but in chemistry we sometimes de-amalgamated silver coins by heating them in a Bunsen burner; you sure couldn't do that in a chemistry lab nowadays), but some are more toxic than others. As I understand, plutonium likes to settle in bones along with or instead of calcium. Being radioactive (an alpha emitter?) its physiological effects are surely different than those of lead, which makes neurons malfunction or whatever. Another problem from which Colorado has suffered is the tailings from all those mines. It must have been quite a problem; every farm roundabout where we lived had its little settling pond to get the mud out of the irrigation water. In the 30's they had fallen into disuse, but the water was still pretty murky. When I was in college, they dynamited the smokestack of the Globe Smelter, which had been a prominent Denver landmark. Well, we got the runoff, but most of the tailings lay where they were dumped, containing all kinds of unrecovered minerals. And, emitting radon, which was later a problem when people started levelling off the terrain and setting up housing developments. Of course towns grew up around the mines, and as population grew and mines were abandoned, it was a temptation to use the vacant land. In any event, this carried with it more radiation than the cosmic rays were delivering. Or, rather, in addition to them. Still, I don't like that professor's declamation. Cosmic rays irradiate the body uniformly, whereas ingesting plutonium procedes by an entirely different mechanism; it concentrates internally and persists. Hence the proposed experiment seems to lack planning and controls. Today he might find an assortment of worthwhile universities at which to spend his sabbatical, but had he offered to do this experiment a hundred years ago he could have died of boredom, not radiation. - hvm ------------------------------------------------- Obtén tu correo en www.correo.unam.mx UNAMonos Comunicándonos