That plutonium paperweight on your desk...

[Externet]

Greetings...   You have a chunk of plutonium on your desk 🤥.   What is the danger ?  Is it its thermal emission;  its electromagnetic radiowaves emission;  other invisible emission;  its dust particles emission;  poisoning ionizing emission of (α),(β),(γ) rays ?   What gets ionized nearby in its presence ?   -The word radioactive confused with radiowaves to the public-    

If that chunk of plutonium on your desk is small as a grain of salt or larger as a golf ball, will it harm you slower or faster ?   If that chunk of Pu is embedded in a plexiglas block; does it change anything ? 🤨

 

 

[swansont]

Plutonium is chemically nasty, like most heavy metals. So ingestion would poison you, in addition to nuclear effects.

Pu-239 decays by alpha emission, and alphas aren’t a problem externally - they would be stopped by the dead layer of skin. If inhaled or ingested, though, that would be bad. So don’t eat it, and a bare chunk might have some dust you could inhale.

Alpha decays usually don’t have an associated gamma. But further down the decay chain you might have some beta decays, which do. Encasing it will attenuate them somewhat. The dose rate will depend on the number and half-life; Pu-239 has a ~24k year half life, and the daughter, U-235, is over 700 million years, so there wouldn’t be many isotopes from further down the decay chain.

Pu-244 has an 80 million year half-life. It alpha decays and occasionally spontaneously fissions, where you would get gammas and products that beta decay. Not sure if the 244 on that one cube indicates the isotope or the average atomic weight. Probably the latter

Bigger chunk has more surface area, so more of a problem. Alphas would not tend to make it out of the interior