Quote:
Originally Posted by sjastro
Slighty off topic but still relevant to the thread.
A few years when I worked for a major Japanese automotive company, we purchased an X-ray spectrometer to analyse the presence of heavy metals in car components that might get into the environment.
As a side issue and a bit of fun I decided to have one of my baby teeth that I kept analysed. To my horror I found the tooth had significant amounts of radioactive thorium.
I decided at the companys' expense (although they didn't know about it) to have the tooth retested at an analytical laboratory. (For the technical boffins out there they used the much more accurate ICP for testing). They confirmed the presence of thorium in the tooth.
A bit of research revealed the thorium most likely came from the British nucleur testing at Maralinga and Montebello Islands in the 1950s.
If you were born in the late fifties/early sixties there is a good chance you might have briefly been walking around with a radioactive cocktail in your body.
Steven
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Thank you very much for this highly relevant point.
It highlights the dangers of atmospheric testing of nuclear bombs, and the serious nature of its terrible consequences.
I still remember the random tests in schools after this period, where radioactivity was monitored in children - often done either with urine tests, blood tests and bone samples. The problem of course was with Strontium-90 and milk, as it is absorbed with calcium into bone tissue. It has a half-life of 29 years - about the same time as Saturn's orbit (which my science teacher in Year 9 science taught us), and about one-third of it is
still active in soils in Victoria, New South Wales and South Australia. Although it is beta decay radioactivity, it can cause real problems in dense bone over long periods. (It was a significant problem in Chernobyl.) It is significantly useful in trace amounts for medicine, but pretty nasty is higher concentrations.
I was not told much about it as a kid, but was terrified to learn of it in the early 1980's.
Not something to joke about… 