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
the material from a nuclear weapon falls out of the sky pretty fast due to mostly being very heavy. a sub-critical (not exploding) piece of uranium or plutonium is actually fairly safe to be around for short periods of time. After the bomb explodes, the spicy rocks not turned into energy “fall out” and flow down stream in a matter of days. the gamma and x-ray radiation was only dangerous with direct exposure, they didn’t radiate objects. If you look up the Demon Core experiments that killed several scientists, it wasn’t until the screwdriver slipped and caused the sub-critical masses to go critical for a fraction of a second that the damage was done. Curie’s possessions have radium in them now, it never fell out and went down stream. the same thing with Chernobyl.
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