The US nuclear weapons program had several hundred people who were accidentally exposed to measurable doses of plutonium. Those workers did not die at the time. The government set up The United States Transuranium and Uranium Registries (USTUR) to track long term health outcomes for such exposed workers.
https://wpcdn.web.wsu.edu/wp-spokane/uploads/sites/1058/2024...
When I worked with the USTUR, they had also acquired some data from former workers in the Soviet nuclear weapons complex. The most exposed workers there received higher doses than any American workers. Even then health impacts were not immediately fatal.
Here's the NIH summary on plutonium toxicology:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK599402/
It's a lot to read, but there has yet to be a human plutonium exposure accident so severe that the exposed individual died quickly. Or at least no published accident of that sort. There is however a dose-dependent risk of lung cancer from inhaling aerosolized plutonium.
Basically any mercury that I'm going to ingest accidentally is likely to be a salt. Because elemental mercury is going to evaporate.
> Especially not when the evidence is absent because we can’t get there because everyone dies first from the more obvious bad things happening.
Rats given Pu-239 show LD-50's of hundreds of milligrams per kilogram. Versus something like 20 mg/kg for inorganic mercury.
We have human studies where people were injected with several micrograms of plutonium and went to live on normal lives; and we have human studies where adults absorb less than 1/1000th of the plutonium ingested.
Who do you think will be fine, and who not?
Why do you dodge the question?
When we talk about mercury in the environment, we talk about the forms that it exists in-- just like we'd be talking about plutonium oxide.
> Why do you dodge the question?
I'm sorry-- I assumed we were talking about something useful or that made sense-- not to say, it's more dangerous than mercury (when choosing the form of mercury that's not implicated in toxicity events too often).
Why are you moving the goalposts? We have animal and, unfortunately, a lot of human data on plutonium exposure.
Just like arguing that the only common form of mercury people would run across in daily life (elemental!) isn’t applicable, since it isn’t implicated in toxicity events (duh! Because it’s not particular toxic and requires massive exposures over time!) - when we’re talking about relative toxicity of elemental plutonium and mercury compounds, eh?
Or do you want to try to guess if we can make a plutonium equivalent of methyl mercury - which we haven’t really tried to make, because it’s insane.
We have nearly zero experience with weathered or bio modified plutonium. And the experience we do have with plutonium compounds, is limited by the fact people die awfully fast when they’re anywhere near them.
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Especially not when the evidence is absent because we can’t get there because everyone dies first from the more obvious bad things happening.