It will be interesting to see how this plays out. The rocks they have been using to build the new dam contain uranium. The dam officials admit that “long term ingestion” is a concern.
Oops!
This is why I never eat dam.
As the cite says*-The concern about uranium is not about radioactivity or things people often associate with uranium. But, it is from the standard of long term ingestion," Stahla said."*
Uranium is a poisonous metal, like lead, but somewhat safer than lead- still not by any means “safe”.
Most heavy metals can be dangerous over long term ingestion. Uranium is one of them- it is not the radioactivity.
The world’s largest Revigorator.
God dam!
Would this thread be considered “breaking news” and we should avoid political humor?
I’ll tell you one thing, I bet very few workers wore any respiratory gear. At best most construction guys might wear a bandanna. So a few years of breathing traces of uranium.
It will eventually turn into lead, right?
Yes, mostly through alpha emission, and some beta. Beta rays are very easy to shield against, and alpha is actually very difficult to not shield against. So an alpha/beta emitter outside of the body is basically harmless (at least, with regards to its radiation). The problem comes when an alpha or beta emitter gets inside of an organism. It’s still really easy to stop the alpha or beta rays, but what’s stopping them is living tissue, which is basically guaranteed to get damaged in the process, and if it’s specifically DNA that gets damaged, it’s likely to lead to cancer. So ingestion (whether by eating, inhaling, injection, whatever) of alpha/beta sources is really bad, even though they’re mostly harmless outside of an organism.
This is in contrast to gamma rays. Gamma rays are highly penetrating, which means that you need really hefty shielding to protect against them (usually something like a meter or more of concrete). But by the same token, a gamma ray that passes through a living body, even from the inside, is likely to just go right through without interacting (they can still interact and cause damage, of course; it’s just less likely). So the scale of danger is mostly alpha and beta inside the body as the most dangerous, then gamma rays from any source, and then beta and alpha outside of the body.
Three-eyed fishies in a ittie bitty pool…
Durango was a Uranium mining / processing town during the Cold War. One of the legacies of that mining was the tailings being used for fill in roadways and houses. It’s an ongoing problem.
https://www.durangoco.gov/DocumentCenter/View/16139/Uranium-Mill-Tailings-Fact-Sheet