charles wrote:
In article ,
John Rumm wrote:
The Natural Philosopher wrote:
J G Miller wrote:
On Wed, 23 Sep 2009 20:43:33 +0100, dennis@home wrote:

Uranium for instance can be safely kept in a cardboard box under the
bed.
And breathing in the radon gas is not a hazard?

What radon gas?

You also forget that aside from the radioactive hazards of uranium,
it is a toxic metal.

Indeed. its as nasty as lead or mercury really.

Mercury is a good deal nastier since it is liquid at room temperature
and hence emits mercury vapour... It don't take much of that to
seriously FYU!

an interesting concept. When BBC RD were experimenting with video delay
lines in the late '60s, the prototype was an open mercury bath - with a
moveable dam at one end to alter the path length. I don't know of anyone
there who suffered ill effects. I'm certainly still alive - 40 years later.

The thing is, no one really has the data.

We know that long term mercury exposure at level X does things that
don't happen when there is no mercury exposure.

Short of subjecting people to low dosage and seeing if e.g. their hair
falls out, no one knows what happens in between.

So Elfin Safety tends to look at these things and pick some arbitrary
fraction, like 1/1000th of the level known to cause (with long term
exposure) damage, and then say that's the maximum single dose anyone
should be subjected to, ever.

Simply because, for the most part, there is no NEED to expose people to
mercury at all, so why not draw the line on the very safe side of the fence.

Its further complicated by the fact that with e.g. radioactive
materials, there is a huge element (sic!) of luck.

If a radioactive particle gets trapped inside a lung, it will over time
almost certainly breed a cancer.

The correlation between smoking (which suppresses the lung clearing
action), and radon TOGETHER, as a huge increase in cancer likelihood,
more than either of them on their own, seems well founded.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/96142.stm

and also

"In the UK, where radon levels are lower than in many European
countries, radon in ordinary homes causes about 1,000 deaths each year,
which is about 1% of all cancer deaths."

Compare and contrast with the nuclear industry.

Which would be shut down immediately if it could be shown to cause even
10 deaths a year. Probably even ONE death a year.