Why are Hiroshima and Nagasaki safe to live while Marie Curie’s notebook won’t be safe to handle for at least another millennium?
In: Physics
Nuclear bombs are designed to convert as much of the radioactive material into energy as possible. As a result, they use very little radioactive material and the stuff they use ends up decaying pretty quickly, so it ends up being mostly safe a few years later.
Marie Curie on the other hand investigated a bunch of random radioactive materials, including many that decay really slowly. Normally this wouldn’t be a problem because slow decay = very little radiation/second, but she studied large quantities of them and they also turned into radioactive dust, so handling her stuff would get a bunch of radioactive dust onto you which would slowly release a bunch of radiation into you over a longer period of time.
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