I read somewhere that the average human has 0.1 milligrams of uranium in their body. How did it get there, and does it do anything?

Question

I read somewhere that the average human has 0.1 milligrams of uranium in their body. How did it get there, and does it do anything?

In: Biology

Answer 1

Uranium is found in the earth and rocks. It can get into food, and you ingest it.

Uranium-238 is really weakly radioactive, and U-235 isn’t too much worse. If you ate lots of uranium, you would die from heavy metal poisoning at much smaller doses than would be needed for radiation poisoning.

The 0.0001g isn’t going to do much It takes about 5g to give you a 50% chance of dying. The LD50 of salt is 240g for an 80kg person, so it would be equivalent to worrying about eating 5mg of salt. Or 80 grains of salt.