Or is it just smoking them? How did the radioactive elements come to be?
In: 5
Probably the same way every human being alive has more radiation in them than people did 100 years ago. From us testing nuclear bombs. That’s actually one of the ways you can test to see if a painting is a forgery.
Edit: Tobacco farmers use fertilizer to help their crops grow. These fertilizers contain a naturally-occurring radionuclide, radium. Radium radioactively decays to release radon gas, which then rises from the soil around the plants. As the plant grows, the radon from fertilizer, along with naturally-occurring radon in surrounding soil and rocks, cling to the sticky hairs on the bottom of tobacco leaves, called trichomes. Radon later decays into the radioactive elements lead-210 and polonium-210. Rain does not wash them away. Polonium-210 is an alpha emitter and carries the most risk.
I’m not sure tbh if the radon in fertilizer was naturally occurring before all the nuclear tests or not.
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