Talk:Albert Stevens

A fact from Albert Stevens appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know column on 24 February 2013 (check views). The text of the entry was as follows:

Did you know... that for a Manhattan Project experiment Albert Stevens was secretly injected with what was expected to be a lethal dose of plutonium, and paid for providing samples of his urine and feces?

A record of the entry may be seen at Wikipedia:Recent additions/2013/February. The nomination discussion and review may be seen at Template:Did you know nominations/Albert Stevens.

Wikipedia

Did you know?[edit]

This article is nominated for Template:Did you know. This appeared on 2/24/2013 and received about 10,000 views. It also doubled the views of the Manhattan Project for the day!

False argument for Pu-238 vs Pu-239[edit]

"Had only the long-lived Pu-239 been used as in similar experiments of the time, Stevens's lifetime dose would have been significantly smaller even with the same amount of activity."

Since the energies in the decay chain for the different isotopes seems to be rather similar, what is the argument behind receiving a lower lifetime dose if he had been injected with the same activity of the longer lived isotope? I think this makes no sense. Cjesch (talk) 12:56, 21 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]

That is easy to explain. Let's suppose a mad scientist has two vials: each has 1 µCi of plutonium, one of the Pu-238, and the other with the Pu-239 isotope. He forces you to get injected with one. Now, you say it wouldn't matter to you, but let's look at the facts. If I took a Geiger counter to each vial, the counts per second is the same. But if you looked closely at the vials, you would see one to be "darker" because one has more mass in it. The Pu-239 vial is darker because there is 270 times more plutonium in it. You choose the lighter one with Pu-238. It decays faster and so its activity in 87.7 years will be reduced by half. If you chose the darker vial, the activity of the Pu-239 would be roughly the same in 87.7 years. You chose correctly and got less radiation dose over the 87.7 years of your life and less chemical plutonium in your body, which is toxic in its own right regardless of radioactivity. You ended up with a little more uranium going this route, which is better than the plutonium.

So you are correct. The argument (as quoted by you from the article) is flawed , and the comparison might have been rewritten to use mass as a constant. If activity is constant, you want to choose the one with the shorter half-life because the daughters are just long-lived uranium. I like to saw logs! (talk) 07:15, 2 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Looked at [1] to figure out how much material by weight he was injected with. In Appendix I it says “the injected dose of 238Pu and 299Pu was equivalent 103 micrograms of 239 Pu (6.3 ^Ci of total alpha activity).” So that’s a guess. There are formulas to covert mass to curies but I don’t feel confident using them. Only thing I could conclude is that they were estimating around 100ug of Pu injected.Technophant (talk) 00:27, 23 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

reference to Manhattan "District"[edit]

Is that supposed to be "Project"? 38.73.253.217 (talk) 09:58, 8 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

No. I like to saw logs! (talk) 08:45, 21 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]