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
There are lots of different ways to blow up a nuclear bomb, and each has it’s own, well I guess you could say pros and cons, but it feels weird to think of nuclear weapons in that regard.
In the case of Nagasaki and Hiroshima they detonated the bombs relatively high up in the air above the cities (as opposed on impact with the ground) which meant most of the radioactive material got carried away by the wind and was dispersed widely enough to be concentrated and nasty. Kind of like how you can see the smoke clouds of fireworks just blowing away slowly as opposed to raining back down as ash immediately. The radioactive materials that did fall-out decayed fairly quickly (within a few days/weeks) and the rest dispersed enough to be lost in the natural radioactive background of our daily lives.
Marie Curie’s notebook is essentially coated in radioactive dust and that dust will take hundreds of years to decay.
For what’s worth, her notebooks aren’t actually especially nasty either and could be handled quite safely, and could also be stored a normal container too, but policy is ‘better safe than sorry’.
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