
Marie Curie’s Research Papers Are Still Radioactive - Petiver
http://www.openculture.com/2015/07/marie-curies-research-papers-are-still-radioactive-100-years-later.html
======
theophrastus
"Her notebooks, her clothing, her furniture, pretty much everything surviving
from her Parisian suburban house, is radioactive, and will be for 1,500 years
or more." ... the most stable isotope of Radium has a half-life of 1600 years
(the decay product of which is Radon gas Rn-222, itself radioactive). We'll
assume that's where the article got "1,500 years", yet that being just one
half-life the "..or more" isn't so much an option as a certainty.

~~~
kijin
Moreover, even 1/2 or 1/4 or 1/8 of the original amount can be dangerous
depending on how much there was to begin with.

Many people seem to assume that a half-life is how long it takes for a
radioactive substance to become safe. That's understandable, since the half-
life is usually the only time scale that scientists mention when they're
talking about radioactivity.

Maybe we should stop mentioning half-lives in public communication and instead
emphasize exactly how long something will take to decay to a safe level
(either to a level specified by relevant regulations, or to the average
background level).

~~~
andrewchambers
Well thats impossible to know unless you know the amount of material you are
talking about also.

~~~
kijin
Whoever put those notes in a lead box and is responsible for granting access
knows exactly how much radiation is coming off of them, and how its amount and
composition change every year.

Once you have that data, it shouldn't be too difficult for someone with
relevant expertise to figure out roughly how much of each radioactive
substance is in there and how they will decay over time.

------
nickhalfasleep
Science's own Icarus, with a tale of woe to tell being so ahead of the rest.

Or like Ozymandis, a monument to greatness we can look back on in wonder.

Part of the human condition is passing such information forward, as these
papers represent.

~~~
logicallee
I don't know. At first I get your Icarus reference, it seems appropriate
because Curie, too, flew close to the forefront of science and was left dead.

But the take-away from Icarus seems to be about hubris - he should have just
flown low as his father besought. But Curie's contributions are lasting, she
didn't fly too close to the forefront of science out of pure hubris that left
her with nothing, with others warning her not to. There was no middle ground
of escaping Crete (ignorance) while flying low only - if she hadn't done her
research, she wouldn't have learned and accomplished what she did.

Likewise the point of Ozymandias is that nobody remembers who the guy even was
- it's just arrogance. But Curie will go down in history forever, and her
research has fundamentally changed civilization at the expense of her own
life. I would say she is the opposite of Ozymandias, building no monument at
the time (her public image was dragged through the mud anyway by some affair),
but really changing history by contributing a lasting foundation.

~~~
a1369209993
> But the take-away from Icarus seems to be about hubris

No, the take-away from Icarus is that wax is a shitty adhesive. The rest is
good points though.

~~~
batou
I came up with the same answer many years ago at school. I was told I'd make a
good engineer but a bad philosopher by my teacher :)

~~~
logicallee
Haha, that's hilarious. Teacher: "Write a report on the story of Icarus. What
lessons can we learn?" Then you write up a report like a post-mortem of a
failed rocket launch. Materials science, testing, dry runs, abort procedure. A
graph of wax temperature versus sheer strength, tensile strength. Altitude
versus temperature graph. Temperature versus phase diagram for wax. Finally
conclude that besides lack of a suitable abort procedure the major error was
in choosing a midday launch, dusk should have been chosen in order to reduce
incident light, which would have kept the temperature within design
constraints for the altitudes Icarus was flying. Until more suitable materials
were found, the Greeks should stick to night-time launches.

~~~
dekhn
You missed that a good sounding rocket would have shown temperatures drop as
you increase in altitude.

~~~
batou
Friction and drag coefficient may have removed all the feathers in the boost
phase :)

------
WalterBright
Wouldn't material with a half life of 1500 years necessarily not be emitting
much of any radiation? I.e. it'd be far, far less dangerous than something
with a half life of 4 years?

~~~
radu_floricica
Depends what you do with it. If it somehow gets in the body you have a higher
chance of cancer even if the radiation per se doesn't hurt you.

~~~
WalterBright
Chemical poisoning is a different issue from radiation poisoning.

------
zitterbewegung
How many Curie's will one of her papers emit?

------
ekianjo
> And she managed many of her breakthroughs after the passing of her husband
> Pierre in 1906, who slipped and fell in the rain on a busy Paris street and
> was run over by the wheels of a horse-drawn cart.

Even back then, people were dying much more of traffic incidents than
radioactivity exposure. Yet people fear radioactivity way more than taking
their own car.

~~~
atmosx
You are twisting reality to fit your views :-)

You need to compare the % of people driving cars vs dying on car accidents, vs
the people working with highly radio-active material (without protection at
the time) vs people dying from radio-active material under that specific
conditions :-)

~~~
amelius
Well, a different premise, but still exemplifying people's fear of radio-
active material: nuclear power is still way less deadly than oil (actually, by
a factor of 400 or so) [1].

[1] [http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-
de...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-deathprint-a-
price-always-paid/2/)

~~~
dimitar
I've heard this claim very often, but I can never be sure if the fatalities
includes those from Uranium mining which was historically very dangerous and
did cause many deaths in the former Eastern Bloc.

A lot of the fatalities are from coal, not oil or natural gas. Coal is much
more widely used than nuclear energy, so I'm not sure if they were used on the
same amount which would have more casualties.

Not to mention that this depends on the country as well, since countries
differ wildly in terms of workplace safety and the existence/enforcement of
environmental standarts.

I would avoid repeating this claim.

~~~
maxerickson
Coal is at around ~10x the generation of nuclear.

The nuclear death rate is ~1/375 that of coal. This is because emissions are a
major contributor to the death rate for coal.

Looking it up, the first analysis I find says that uranium _ore_ is likely
more energy dense than coal[1] so it shouldn't be the case that it is a lot
more dangerous than coal mining.

[1] [http://www.plux.co.uk/energy-density-of-
uranium/](http://www.plux.co.uk/energy-density-of-uranium/)

