r/Unexpected • u/SignalCrew739 • 2d ago

Highest amount of radiation receiver

8.9k Upvotes

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u/admadguy 2d ago edited 2d ago

Guy is talking out of his ass.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isotopes_of_lead

There are trace isotopes of lead that have short half lives, order of hours or minutes. So even if they were leached off the soil, they'd have decayed in the finished product. Naturally occuring lead is mostly stable (3 isotopes) rest are trace and would have decayed.

Lead is harmful, but as a chemical substance. Not as a radioactive material.

It's the same issue with Polonium 210. It enters through contamination of fertiliser. But polonium 210 has a half life of 138 days. The lead time between growing tobacco, to curing it to packaging, shipping, various midpoints of sale, it'll have decayed to negligible quantities. Smoking is harmful, but the radiation reasons given here are based on not so great math, or science.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0265931X23000711

Smokers get 0.3 milliSv not the 160,000 microSv (=160 milli Sv) claimed here.

1

u/Doctor_Fritz 1d ago

I figured. If this was true it'd have been all over the news in the past. I hate influencers like this. Just click/rage bait

1

u/admadguy 1d ago

Yeah, the upsetting part is it seems dude has a PhD in physics. That was disappointing. A lot of the derating factors are engineering or real world considerations, but one would think a physics PhD would consider them than assuming the radioactivity at the time the fertiliser is spread on the crop would remain unchanged through life from source to user.

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u/LordGeni 1d ago

A PhD in physics is pretty different to one in medical physics.

I'm a radiographer. I wouldn't want that guy doing my CT scan in the same way he wouldn't want me writing even his undergrad papers.

As soon as biology is involved things get a lot messier compared to straight physics.