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
short answer: the strength of radiation, point source vs area effected, the half-life of the elements in question, and what is considered “safe”.
strength: without being too reductive, in the same way that a floodlight on a pitch is not blinding, but a handtorch to the eyes at short range can be, the absolute greater radioactive output of a nuke has less residual effect after being spread out over a city and allowed to decay for decades, than the highly contaminated notes if you holding them with bear hands.
half life: while the decay of any individual atom is random, the overall rate is pretty predictable. we measure this with “half life”, how long it would take for half the sample to decay. Higher levels of radioactivity, generally lead to shorter decay times (since that’s what radioactivity IS), and the fallout from the nukes was mostly this shorter half-life stuff. while the notebook is contamined by a long half-life isotope, so its pretty stable in its intensity.
“safe”: their are sources of radiation in our everyday lives, even pre-ww2, and their comes a point where the effects of the nukes in terms of radition effectively disappear into the background “noise” of life on earth. We’re not really seeing any statistical differences in illnesses related to radiation between Hiroshima and other parts of japan that were NOT nuked, so its basically as safe as we can detect.
the notebook, however, is still strong enough that special handling procedures are needed to minimise risk. we can still access the notes, its just that if we picked them up and walked around with them in a pocket, it would be *highly* likely we’d get cancer in areas near that pocket.
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