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
Her notebook isn’t actually very radioactive, you can safely handle it for long periods of time with minimal risk as long as you wear gloves.
>”We found that potential external doses to those handling the notebook were low; whole-body dose rates being marginally above the background of 0.1µSv/h. Even regular exposure to the notebook is likely to result in annual whole-body doses of less than 10µSv and hand doses of less than 35µSv. To put this in perspective, 10µSv is roughly the dose you would receive on a return flight from the UK to Spain.” ([Source](https://blog.bir.org.uk/2015/09/02/the-radioactive-legacy-of-marie-curie/))
[Radiation dose chart](https://xkcd.com/radiation/) for reference
Hiroshima/Nagasaki also aren’t very radioactive anymore because most of the fallout was dispersed and the nastiest isotopes have decayed, like I-131 which is the major concern in nuclear fallout, but is gone within weeks due to its short half life. Other isotopes are a problem but it takes decades of exposure to them in the low environmental levels to pose any risk. The US and USSR detonated thousands of nuclear weapons during the cold war, Hiroshima and Nagasaki are mildly contaminated in comparison to those test sites and the people that lived downwind.
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