Dangerous radiation?

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Interesting article about Manhattan Project scientists contaminated by Plutonium.

The Scientists Who Pee Plutonium

Government conducted live-long study of the 26 contaminated people. Results, quote: "the mortality rate for the group is about 50 per cent lower than the national average."

It appears that up to a certain level of radiation, its effects don't seem to be harmful and it is possible (though not proven) that it may even be beneficial. See also the other posts on the subject.


More quotes:

It may be a surprise to learn that the members of the UPPU club have all done well, especially when compared to national averages. “They’ve fared pretty well as a group,” George Volez and expert on plutonium exposure told Los Alamos Science in 1995. “Of the original 26, only seven have died, and the last death was in 1990.

Update (20/07/2018, thanks @Hokushinsai )

Updated 31/07/2018 (thanks @TuckerGoodrich)

This Giant X-Ray Generator Helped Set Safe Doses for Radiation,
Physicist Lauriston Taylor also found X-rays effective against athlete’s foot and bursitis. By By Evan Ackerman, 28-April-2017

Quote:

“The only single documented whole body exposure that I know that I’ve had was in 1929, and it was measured to be 150 [Roentgen]…. I sat in an X-ray beam for 20 minutes or half an hour or something…. I was just sitting right smack in the beam…. [With that much radiation] you’re supposed to get nauseated, but we didn’t know that in 1929, so I wasn’t.”

For the record, 150 Roentgen is equivalent to 1.4 sievert, which according to this chart starts to put you in the realm of “severe radiation poisoning, in some cases fatal.” But since the chart wasn’t around in 1929, Taylor was just fine. Indeed, he told the interviewer in 1995, “I also used to treat [my] athlete’s foot.... I don’t remember what the dose was, but it was probably four or five hundred R [3.7 to 4.7 Sv].”

“That exposure in addition to medical radiation treatment for bursitis and other benign conditions and from radiation experiments resulted in an estimated whole-body dose-equivalent in excess of a thousand rem [10 Sv],” Taylor’s obituary for the Health Physics Society stated. “He experienced no discernible adverse effect.”

Taylor continued working until the age of 97, and having published over 160 scientific papers and writing or contributing to 24 books, he died in 2004 at the age of 102.