6 hours agoShareSaveRebecca Morelle, Alison Francis and Victoria GillBBC News Science TeamShareSave”In terms of toxicity to the human body, you certainly don’t want to breathe in uranium particles and you don’t want to ingest them either,” she said.”That’s because the uranium particles could become lodged in the cells, inside either your lungs or your stomach, and slowly, radioactively decay, and that will cause damage.”As well as radioactivity, chemical exposure could also be a problem for anyone nearby.”If there was an incident and the centrifuges were to release the uranium hexafluoride, the gas contained within the centrifuges, then it would be a really severe chemical incident,” said Prof Simon Middleburgh, a nuclear materials scientist, from Bangor University.”If this uranium hexafluoride comes in contact with moisture in the air, it’s really quite corrosive and nasty because it can form this very, very strong acid,” he said.”But it’s not going to have a massive environmental impact beyond the very, very local area.”The IAEA said its Incident and Emergency Centre had been working around the clock and it would continue to monitor the status of Iran’s nuclear facilities and the level of radiation at its sites. …
