240 DASA 2019-2 The Spanish AEC colleagues were extremel; knowledgeable and extremely cooperative, Their attitude was, ‘We'll worry about the people; you worry about the tomatoes and the contaminated fields. We'll take care of the people." They did a beautiful job. Here was cooperation, as you see, that was unbelievable and knowledgeable. There were only three or four of these people, but the two principals had spent a year or tuo in this country at Rechester and at Brookhaven, So they knew somethiag about what they were dealing with, and some people took at quite lightly. Their tomato plants are trained gently by hand to grow up ina tripod of stocks, They'll grow seven feet high and they were just loaded with vine-ripened tomatoes, in January on the European market they bring a nice price. This incorm:¢ was what was going to keep them going until their next crop. The tomato vines gave readings of 1%,000 to 20,0093 counts per minute. The first effort was to get the vines raked up ina pile so that the plutonium wouldn't blow around and create a further inhalation harvard. Encugh plutonium taken into the lung or the liver or bone would produce cancer. We've done this hundreds of times in arima!s. Plutonium, if taken in systemically is, indeed, bad, There's no doubt about that, And some people have referred to it an the most toxic substance known to itnan. I think this ia erroneous, but you can get that belief by locking into the industrial toxicology tables at the maximum tolerable levels of various materials; and ‘when you gct to plutonium you'll find that plutonium- 239 has one-half of a microgram as the MPL, ‘That's one-half of a millionth of a gram as the maximum permissible body burden, If you're worrying about the plutonium- 238, it's 250 times lower. BUSTAD: I think that you should point out that ingestion as such. .. LANGHAM: [ woula, yes. But the whole idea, as ! said, is it's systemic deposition, [he reason I fee! plutonium shouldn't be given this terrible reputation is that it is extremely difficult to get into the body and one can eat it and absorb cnly about 3/1,000 of 1 percent of what passes through the gastrointestinal tract, sorption is a little bit higher perhaps. Inthe luo the ab- EISENBUD: I've heard the statement made many times. I[ don't understand the basis for it since the maximum permissible body burden for radium is 1/10 of a rnicrogram,