By an incredible coincidence, Gamow and Edward Condon, who had discovered simultaneously and independently the explanation of radioactivity (one in Russia, the other in this country), came to spend the the last ten years of their lives within a hundred yards of each other in Boulder.
— Stanislaw Ulam
Passioned Radioactivity quotations
Why should people be afraid that we use a few small pellets of uranium at the nuclear power plant in Bataan? Don't they know that we're surrounded by uranium? We have the world's fourth largest deposits of uranium. Yes, we're all radioactive -- must be the reason why we have so many faith healers!
Radioactivity is shown to be accompanied by chemical changes in which new types of matter are being continually produced. .... The conclusion is drawn that these chemical changes must be sub-atomic in character.
When one studies strongly radioactive substances special precautions must be taken. Dust, the air of the room, and one's clothes, all become radioactive.
It's perilous and foolhardy for the average citizen to remain ignorant about global warming, say, or ozone depletion, air pollution, toxic and radioactive wastes, acid rain, topsoil erosion, tropical deforestation, exponential population growth. Jobs and wages depend on science and technology.
Ketchup left overnight on dinner plates has a longer half-life than radioactive waste.
When a reader falls in love with a book, it leaves its essence inside him, like radioactive fallout in an arable field, and after that there are certain crops that will no longer grow in him, while other, stranger, more fantastic growths may occasionally be produced.
Perhaps most ridiculous of all is the suggestion that we 'keep' our radioactive garbage for the use of our descendants. This 'solution', I think, requires an immediate poll of the next 20,000 generations.
I have said many times before, interactivity is the equivalent of radioactivity.
For interactivity effects a kind of disintegration, a kind of rupture.
Do radioactive cats have eighteen half-lives?
I think money is due for some sort of collapse.
People are going to realize that money has a half-life, like radioactive elements.
I think money is due for some sort of collapse.
People are going to realize that money has a half-life, like radioactive elements.
Hiro watches the large, radioactive, spear-throwing killer drug lord ride his motorcycle into Chinatown. Which is the same as riding it into China, as far as chasing him down is concerned.
There are many different kinds of radioactive waste and each has its own half-life so, just to be on the safe side and to simplify matters, I base my calculations on the worst one and that's plutonium.
Individual scientists like myself - and many more conspicuous - pointed to the dangers of radioactive fallout over Canada if we were to launch nuclear weapons to intercept incoming bombers.
The Laboratory for Radioactivity consisted of only two rooms at the time;
at a later date, when tests of radioactive substances became more extensive, it expanded into four rooms.
I dont have a thyroid anymore. I had radioactive iodine treatment, which destroyed my thyroid. I take medication every day.
Connection between life and radioactive nuclei is straightforward.
No life without tectonic activity, without volcanic activity. And we know very well that geothermal energy is mostly produced by decay of uranium, thorium, and potassium.
The technology used to detect if vehicles are carrying radioactive material is so sensitive it can tell if a person recently received radiation as part of a medical procedure.
In the pre-Internet age you had to find gay things - or things that were slightly radioactive with erotic interest. You had to go to the library, you had to find the books; you had to find the coded things. When everything's available and everything's okay, what does it become? It becomes shopping. We're shopping all the time, basically, whether for objects, or people. On Manhunt or Grindr, or whatever. It's click to buy.
I base my happiness on the relationships in my life.
I would rather have the absolute worst acting career or, I don't know, whatever the worst job would be... picking up radioactive material? I would much rather have that and a good marriage than a horrible marriage and a brilliant career. That's just not a trade off I'd make.
If radioactive waste were dissolved as water soluble compounds and then widely dispersed in the oceans, no health or other environmental risks would ever occur.
One time Allie and I skipped school and went to see this foreign film called Los Diablos, where these villagers found a glowing blue ball and peeled pieces off of it to see what was inside. Only the ball was really radioactive, and they all died from the poison. I think that’s what happens when you look too deep inside for the truth. The poison comes out, and you die, even though you have beautiful glowing pieces of blue truth in your fingers.
I am a member of a fragile species, still new to the earth, the youngest creatures of any scale, here only a few moments as evolutionary time is measured, a juvenile species, a child of a species. We are only tentatively set in place, error prone, at risk of fumbling, in real danger at the moment of leaving behind only a thin layer of of our fossils, radioactive at that.
We know that al Qaeda is seeking radioactive materials and technology to launch a devastating attack, and that hundreds of radioactive sources have been lost or stolen in the U.S. and around the world.
My time inside there was very short compared to the amount of time it took to take on and take off this suit and to test me for how much radioactivity I have.
Look at Fukushima. Should we or should we not agree with the U.S. government that none of that radioactive energy is making its way here? Hello!
In 1903, I finished my doctor's thesis and obtained the degree.
At the end of the same year, the Nobel prize was awarded jointly to Becquerel, my husband and me for the discovery of radioactivity and new radioactive elements.
With the exception of gravitation and radioactivity, all of the phenomena known to physicists and chemists in 1911 have their ultimate explanation in the laws of quantum electrodynamics.
It's ridiculous that time and time again we need a radioactive cloud coming out of a nuclear power-station to remind us that atomic energy is extraordinarily dangerous.
There's a point in me where it's beyond sad, seeing the state of the world today. It's so screwed up. It's terrible, and it will be getting worse and worse. More concrete everywhere, more pollution, more radioactivity. There's no wilderness left, no pure air. They're chopping the forests down. They're polluting all the oceans.
Now, all America sits in front of television sets and those television sets exude, I am sorry to say, a considerable amount of radioactive material. It's not huge, you know, but it's enough so that people who have made a habit of watching TV ... get the TV radiation.
It is hard to partner with someone when you become so radioactive no one wants to stand next to you.
Granddad was superstitious about books.
He thought that if you had enough of them around, education leaked out, like radioactivity.
Letting the perfect be the enemy of the good is one of the reasons we have a coal-dependent infrastructure, with the resulting environmental impact that all of us can see. I suspect environmentalists, through their opposition of nuclear power, have caused more coal plants to be built than anybody. And those coal plants have emitted more radioactive material from the coal than any nuclear accident would have.