Marie Curie’s Research Papers Are Still Radioactive | Hacker News Reader

Marie Curie’s Research Papers Are Still Radioactive

openculture.com

96 pointsPetiver25 comments

"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.

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).

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

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.

Even that's not straightforward though. She lived to 66 in a house filled with all manner of radioactive material. I suspect someone could safely spend significant time going through her notebooks without being in much danger assuming they didn't ingest any radioactive particles.

The dose rate on contact (assuming someone is handling it) or at the location in which that person would be working is easily measured. Radiation workers have an annual dose limit, and it is trivial to determine how long they can work somewhere before exceeding that limit.

Surface contamination is a separate concern, getting radioactive stuff on (or in) you is not my --or presumably anyone's-- idea of a good time.

Why wouldn't someone elect to look at pictures of the notebooks? Is there more scientific value in holding them? Or would this be like "Oh I just got a government grant, let me spend it on travel to go view the documents?"

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.

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.

> 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.

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 :)

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.

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

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

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

That's the cashed interpretation from ancient times (when flying was for gods). Do we think Wright brothers were guilty of hubris and arrogance too? Or Otto Lilienthal for better analogy?

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?

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.

Chemical poisoning is a different issue from radiation poisoning.

Nope, half of 1 tonne of Radium is still a half of a tonne of Radium. Also Radium and Curium first decay into other radioactive elements like Radon gas.

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

> 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.

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 :-)

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...

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.

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/

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