Marie Curie's notebooks are still radioactive and will be for more than a millennium.

[NNadir]

This came in on one of my news feeds:

Marie Curie’s notebooks are still radioactive and will be for more than a millennium.

Alot has changed in the 90 years since Marie Curie’s death, but one thing that hasn’t is the status of her notebooks — they’re still radioactive. Not having the benefit of hindsight despite being one of the 20th century’s most pioneering scientists, Curie was known to store radioactive elements out in the open, in part because she enjoyed how they “looked like faint, fairy lights.” She even walked around her lab with them in her pockets. Consequently, her clothes, furniture, and even cookbooks are also radioactive, and will be for the next 1,500 years. In order to be as safe as possible with her remaining materials, France’s national library stores Curie’s notebooks in lead-lined boxes to this day, and anyone wishing to view her manuscripts must sign a waiver and wear protective gear. Her other personal items are stored with similar precautions at the Musée Curie (Curie Museum) in Paris...

The article is scientifically misleading, since long after 1500 years the notebooks, clothes, etc. will still be radioactive, but after roughly 1600 years they will be half as radioactive as they are now. (The misinterpretation of what a half life is, is actually rather common; when I was a child, I would have made the same mistake as the writer of this article.)


Radium, of course, occurs naturally and is generally, on a planetary scale, in secular equilibrium with uranium. Interestingly, the people who showed that it was possible to induce radioactivity in non-radioactive materials were Irene Joliet-Curie and Frederick Joliet-Curie, respectively Marie Curie's daughter and son-in-law.

The only way to prevent the formation of radium is to fission uranium: It is well known among nuclear scientists and engineers that it is possible, if humanity were to put the transuranium atoms to use, that the use of nuclear power would, after a few centuries, lead to a reduction in the overall radioactivity of the planet, although the planet always has been, and always will be, radioactive.

I noted this elsewhere: 828 Underground Nuclear Tests, Plutonium Migration in Nevada, Dunning, Kruger, Strawmen, and Tunnels

...Although anti-nukes are prone to deny it, because they are most often discussing topics about which they know nothing, however, the situation is very different at weapons sites as opposed to commercial nuclear reprocessing sites. The recovery of the transuranium actinides using a wide variety of processes is well understood, and all of them, not just plutonium but also neptunium, americium, and curium are potential nuclear fuels. I therefore always argue that it is just stupid to bury them, as they are vital resources in a time of climate change and massive rising air pollution death rates.

The following figure shows the very different case obtained if one separates the uranium, plutonium and minor actinides (neptunium, americium and curium) and fissions them, whereupon the reduction of radioactivity to a level that is actually below that of the original uranium in a little over 300 years:



The caption:

Fig. 4. – Radiotoxicity (log-scale, unit: Sv/tSM) of 1 t of heavy metal (SM) from a pressurized water reactor (initial enrichment 4.2% U-235, burn-up 50 GWd/t) with regard to ingestion as a function of time (log-scale, unit: years) after discharge. Left-hand frame: contribution of fission products (FP), plutonium (Pu) and minor actinides (MA) to radiotoxicity. Right-hand frame: Modification of radiotoxicity due to separation of U, Pu or U, Pu, MA. The reference value is the radiotoxicity of the amount of natural uranium that was used to produce 1 t of nuclear fuel. Source: [17].

(Hartwig Freiesleben, The European Physical Journal Conferences · June 2013)

Source 17, in German, is this one: Reduzierung der Radiotoxizität abgebrannter Kernbrennstoffe durch Abtrennung und Transmutation von Actiniden: Partitioning. Reducing spent nuclear fuel radiotoxicity by actinide separation and transmutation: partitioning.

It is important to note that simply because a material is radioactive does not imply that it is not useful, perhaps even capable of accomplishing tasks that nothing else can do as well or as sustainably. Given the level of chemical pollution of the air, water and land, in fact, the use of radiation, in particular high energy radiation, gamma rays, x-rays, and ultra UV radiation may prove to be more important than ever, but that's a topic for another time...

The article notes that Marie Curie died from aplastic anemia and it is widely assumed, and most probably accurate, that her death was induced as a result of her work in the discovery and industrialization of a radium industry. What is not noted in these accounts is that she lived a relatively long life for her times, dying at the age of 66 in 1934. (She was born in 1867, in Poland.)

Her husband, Pierre Curie, was killed in a road accident. Had he not been killed, it is possible, as was the case of Madame Marie-Anne Paulze Lavoisier, the wife of the "discoverer" of oxygen, Antoine Lavoisier, one of the world's earliest scientific chemists, Madame Marie Skłodowska Curie's work would have been largely attributed to her husband, although they both received the Nobel Prize while he was still alive. (Marie Curie would later receive a second Nobel Prize, making her one of only three people, including Linus Pauling - chemistry and peace - and K. Barry Sharpless, the latter, winner of two prizes in Chemistry, asymmetric synthetic organic chemistry and click chemistry, who is still alive, and who I saw speak a few years back on the subject of how to do science.)

As an aside, the reason that we know as much as we do about the work of Antoine Lavoisier is the work of Marie-Anne Lavoisier, who was a great chemist in her own right. She kept records of her husband's (and her own) work, in which she was a professional as well as personal partner, after his execution by guillotine in the Great Terror of the French revolution.

I had the privilege of seeing Dr. Sharpless speak at the Museum of Science and Industry in Philadelphia, the web page of which includes a short biography of Marie Skłodowska Curie:

Marie Sklodowska Curie

If you find yourself in Philadelphia with some time on your hands, the small free museum is certainly worth a visit. It's near some of the Benjamin Franklin historical sites, which is appropriate, since Franklin was originally famous for his scientific work, before he went on to invent the United States, which lasted well over two centuries before falling because of an ignorant, uneducated, orange pedophile, something of an absurdity, but all the same true.

To return to Dr.Sklodowska Curie

One of the fun things to know about Marie Sklodowska Curie is that after her husband's death, she had an interesting, at the time controversial and scandalous, sex life, famously conducting a fairly well known affair with the married physicist Paul Langevin. Besides being a great scientist, one of the greatest of all time, she was rather attractive physically as a young woman, albeit being, especially in her time - although things are not all that much better in our times - a rare case where her public image generally disregarded her looks in favor of her mind.

Have a nice weekend.

[rampartd]

1. that is the most informative post i've read in a month.

not only the notebooks, but everthing in and around that lab including her white coat. must have a 1/2 life.

my biggest objection to nuclear power is the disposal of spent fuel rods. somehow burying them for 100,000 years seems a worse idea than melting them down into projectiles for machine guns.

if those elements can be safely recovered i;m all for it.

[wolfie001]

5. It def caught my attention!

Well-written and the details eye-opening! 💯

[evemac]

2. She was an amazing scientist

And it is so fortunate that her work was actually attributed to her.

[niyad]

3. The things one learns on DU! Thank you for this most fascinating

article!

Somebody should tell Marie that we have none-radioactive fairy lights. I have several strings of them.

[Old Crank]

4. Yes it would have been nice

To include which materials and their half lives in the article.

[Orrex]

6. we can't know for sure until Trump has read all of them very carefully.