Word: strontium
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...Caesium 137, which is a genetic peril because it spreads throughout the body. ¶ Strontium 90, which affects the bones, especially of young children, because it is absorbed like calcium. ¶ Carbon 14, which has a half-life of 5,700 years and has probably risen in all living matter -3%-.6% since the beginning of nuclear weapons tests...
Carbon 14. As that uproar quieted, Nobel Prizewinning Chemist Linus Pauling, 57, head of the chemical labs at the California Institute of Technology, made headlines with his newest point: the most dangerous element of nuclear-test fallout over a period of five to 10,000 years is not strontium 90 but carbon 14, a low-radioactivity but long-lived (half-life: 5,568 years) isotope that from tests already held will, said Pauling, cause 5,000,000 defective children in the next 300 generations. Atomic Energy Commissioner Willard Libby, one of the world's top authorities on carbon...
...Contamination of food crops from strontium-90 fallout can be reduced by simply adding lime to the soil, said the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory's Dr. Eric B. Fowler. His team found, in "Project Green Thumb," that plants growing in calcium-poor soils are avid for strontium: give them enough crushed limestone (which is 40% calcium), and they lose much of their appetite...
...Strontium-90 from fallout may be a greater-than-average danger to the aged as well as the very young (whose fast-growing bones naturally take up the calcium-mimicking element quickly). A group of Columbia University scientists found that in oldsters over 60, the strontium uptake appeared markedly higher than in their juniors aged 20 to 60, was concentrated in the vertebrae, the breastbone and the ribs...
...Greatest danger is from the strontium isotope with atomic weight 90, which has a long half-life, but the metal's other radioisotopes could also be harmful...