Plutonium........

[R1Geezer]

Question for the Nuclear Physicists among you! Come on Jake.....

Anyway Plutonium is highly radioactive and I once read somewhere that if you where in a small room with a pound of it you would be reduced to a puddle of water very quickly. Now in a completely separete article I read that someone held half a pound of the stuff in his hand! Simple Geezer that I am I'm confused. Can someone let me have the full sp, thanks!

[jake-the-peg]

Are you confusing Uranium with Plutonium.

I've stood and held a Unranium fuel rod ( before it went into a reactor not after!)

Plutonium is really nasty stuff - in addition to it's radioactivity it's highly toxic micrograms can kill if it gets into you.

There are different isotopes of Plutonium 239 is 300 times more reactive than 238.

Half a pound of Plutonium was used to power the Russian mars probe that crashed in Chile in 1996.

There was about a kilo in the Viking explorers.

See here
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_ther moelectric_generator

It depends on the particular Isotope but I'd certainly rather cautious around plut

[Teddio]

Plutonium-239 is an emitter of alpha radiation. If a person is contaminated with Pu-239 dust, in the lungs for example, the highly ionising alpha radiation with cause great damage to the living cells and their DNA.
A small (below critical mass) lump pf solid Pu-239 presents much less of a problem.