Why are Hiroshima and Nagasaki safe to live while Marie Curie’s notebook won’t be safe to handle for at least another millennium?

Question

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

Answer 1

OK, so two things to correct in your question premise here.

Marie Curie’s notebook (and body) aren’t remotely dangerous. They’ve just got some radium contamination on/in them. Museum rules aside, you don’t need any special training or gear to handle them, relative to some ordinary object like a leaky bottle of rat poison. Wear gloves, and don’t eat the paper.

And the notebooks will be just as contaminated 1000 years from now. Radium has a 1620 year half-life. So the contamination will be detectable for around 162,000 years.