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
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.
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