DANGEROUS PLUTONIUM BUTTON POSTER

Thick gloves protect a technician from certain death by the PLUTONIUM Button he holds at the Rocky Flats Plutonium Production Plant, which was decommissioned in the early 90s. Plutonium emits alpha radiation, a highly ionizing form of radiation, rather than beta or gamma radiation. When alpha-emitters get inside cells, usually inhaled into lungs, they are extremely hazardous. Alpha rays sent out from within cells cause somewhere between 10 and 1,000 times more chromosomal damage than beta or gamma rays. Plutonium enters the bloodstream via the lungs, then moves throughout the body and into the bones, liver, and other organs. It generally stays in those places for decades, subjecting surrounding organs and tissues to a continual bombardment of alpha radiation and greatly increasing the risk of cancer, especially lung cancer, liver cancer and bone sarcoma. There are documented cases of workers at nuclear weapons facilities dying within days of experiencing brief accidental exposure to plutonium. Furthermore, Plutonium will stay in the environment the longest. One isotope of plutonium, Pu-239, has a half-life of 24,100 years; that's the time it will take for half of the stuff to radioactively decay. Radioactive contaminants are dangerous for 10 to 20 times the length of their half-lives, meaning that dangerous plutonium released to the environment today will stick around for the next half a million years.