Friday, August 21, 2020

[ljqkvtij] Less radioactive sports drink

Potassium is the one interesting ingredient in sports drinks.  (Everything else, sugar, sodium, water, is easily gettable through other means.)

Natural potassium is slightly radioactive.  (Is it the most radioactive thing we typically consume?)  Use isotope separation and isotope enrichment methods to create slightly less radioactive potassium, then market your sports drink as being slightly less radioactive than the competition.

(Has the sports drink industry already thought of this?  If so, they may have already enacted regulations making it illegal to market a food or drink as "less radioactive", even if the claim is true.)

How difficult would it be to compare different sports drinks by their radioactivity?  On one hand, sports drinks contain approximately 10x less potassium than a banana; on the other hand, it seems it would be fairly easy to boil off the water in a sports drink to concentrate its dissolved constituents.  Is there an easy way to separate the sugar from everything else?

Polonium in cigarettes causes cancer.  Create and market slightly less radioactive cigarettes.  This seems very difficult because one would need to exclude natural radium from the tobacco's growing medium (soil).  Nevertheless, "slightly less radioactive" cigarettes does seem good for marketing.

Why does natural radium in soil become dangerous in cigarettes but not in everything else grown in soil?

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