Depends on the isotope, of course. There are different ways it can hurt you.
If you put together a critical mass of ²³⁵U, it undergoes fission and you die in seconds without needing to ingest it.
Naturally ocurring uranium (²³³U-²³⁸U, mostly ²³⁸U) has a half-life of billions of years, so it’s very weakly radioactive. It would take a lot of it to harm you from decay radiation. Or very little if you pick a very unstable synthetic isotope outside the 233-238 range (but every element “has” such radioactive isotopes, though not in nature).
Uranium is chemically toxic, which is whal will kill you if you ingest a small amount of a common isotope.
If you’ve got more than 52 kg of uranium 235 on your hands, I would be alarmed to learn you didn’t understand how criticality worked. Although now that I think of it, there’s probably an awful lot of people who indirectly handle that much when they move around a nuclear warhead and most of them probably only had a single lecture on the concept.
The thing that always blows my mind is just how freaking dense uranium is. A sphere weighing 52 kg is only 17 cm across.
I think they are referring to Uranium with natural isotopic abundance. Which is complete bullshit when you put a picture of a nuclear power plant behind it – which in most cases can not function with the natural isotopic abundance (heavy water reactors being the exception, not the rule).
I can ingest nearly 10g of uranium and not die?
Interesting.
Depends on the isotope, of course. There are different ways it can hurt you.
If you’ve got more than 52 kg of uranium 235 on your hands, I would be alarmed to learn you didn’t understand how criticality worked. Although now that I think of it, there’s probably an awful lot of people who indirectly handle that much when they move around a nuclear warhead and most of them probably only had a single lecture on the concept.
The thing that always blows my mind is just how freaking dense uranium is. A sphere weighing 52 kg is only 17 cm across.
I think they are referring to Uranium with natural isotopic abundance. Which is complete bullshit when you put a picture of a nuclear power plant behind it – which in most cases can not function with the natural isotopic abundance (heavy water reactors being the exception, not the rule).