Comment by eqvinox

4 days ago

This is "long-lived" in the ecological sense, not radiological. The grains of uranium oxide dust remain grains of uranium oxide dust, rather than breaking apart. If you ingest a few molecules of uranium oxide, it pretty much doesn't matter, you're fine¹. Ingest these dust particles, not so much. It's a question of concentration, and it seems that it's not diluting out naturally.

¹ humans contain, on average, 90µg of uranium. [https://www.iaea.org/sites/default/files/DU_Eng.pdf]

(P.S.: the radiological stability and lifetime of uranium doesn't make much sense to question; the dust flakes aren't large & concentrated enough to significantly shorten their half-life due to their own neutron emissions cascading and this isn't what the study was researching. Note the article talks about weathering: "It remains largely unclear why these particles weather at different rates in their environment.")