mamale in e northern hemisphere has a tiny load in his gonad--it's from weapons testing days, and plutoniumum is still falling ou. and the man is cremated,d, the smoke goes up the e chimney with the plutonium,m, so you can breathe it in, another man can, and it's ad infinitum because plutonium has a half-life of 24,400 years and laststs for a long time. but the other thing is that thee body thinks plutonium is iroron--it's an irn analogue--so it's stored in the liver, where it causes liver cancer. it's stored in the bone marrow to cause--to produce hemoglobin in the red blood cells, but it causes leukemia or bone cancer. it crosses the placenta into the developing embryo--which lets nothing through it, incidentally, except plutonium and a few other nasties. it's stored in the testicle, too. so it't's a ubiquitous, really dangerous isotope, and from the time they discovered it in the manhattan project, they knew its dangers. >> does plutonium come only from nuclear weapons testing, or is there a risk of it escaping from nnuclear pow plalants as w well? >> it's not emitted by y power plaants ro