I am an Astronaut out in space., away from my space craft.  I am using
an individual back pack transporter.
I am examining an alien craft.  The craft has an explosion of it's
plutoniam warheads.  What dose of radiation could I receive to cause
me to develop acute leukaemia? What would be the time between the
exposure and the disease onset? Will the radiation cause rapid hair
loss /

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Request for Question Clarification by andrewxmp-ga on 21 Jul 2003 06:14 PDT

I'm *assuming* that you mean you're not actually exposed to the
nuclear explosion, only the radioactive aftermath, otherwise you'd
have a few other more pressing issues.

With that in mind, I could answer for you the questions about
radiation exposre through a spacesuit, the possible times to develop
lukemia, the hair loss thing, as well as radiation doses.  This is
kind of a hypothetical question, of course, but the above questions
could be figured if you let me know the amount of radiation this
spacecraft is putting out (usually expressed in REMs or milliREMs, and
at what range from it you are.  Try to give me a little more to work
with, and I would love to answer this quite interesting
question...thanks.

My guess is that if you were the victim of a point-blank plutonium
warhead explosion, yeah...you'd "probably" lose a little hair, but
hey...your atoms would be so scattered about the universe that I doubt
you'd care less how you look anymore.

tutuzdad-ga

Make sure your space suit is radiation-shielded and fully armored.

Em.. Wouldn't there be a lot of cosmic radiation as well?  This'd do a
significant amount of damage too, I would have thought...

But I guess it depends on where you are in space...

More than likely, fast neutrons pose the greatest danger of inducing
long term bodily disfunctions such as leukemia. Only great separation
distance or vastly thick shielding would prevent such damage to living
bodies. Oddly enough, good ole paraffin wax provides the best neutron
shielding material due to the high density of hydrogen atoms in the
molecular structure. The actual levels of radiation damage are
measured in RADs by the military and is a measure of accumulated
integral dose of harmful radiation. Check with military sources for
shielding design of sophisticated electronic enclosures and tolerance
limits of living bodies. Finally, as noted above, energetic gammas are
likely to fry people much sooner than a dense flux of fast neutrons.

Assuming that you were not blown up by the "explosion" but just
received a massive dose of radiation, from the criticality burst. You
might expect to live for about 30 days if you received intense medical
care. Without it you would probably die in one to two weeks, as your
body slowly decomposes around you.  If there was distance or shielding
between you and the burst it might not even make you sick at all.