IF you go to Google and do a search for pictures of how foreign scientists handle Thorium-232 and even pure enriched Uranium-235 and 238, you would be able to find a lot of pictures that clearly show that you can safely hold pure thorium or uranium pellets or rods in your hands.
This is because Thorium-232, when it decays, produces only alpha particles and no gamma rays.
Because of the very long half life of Thorium-232, which is 14 billion years (the age of the universe is only 13.7 billion years), the amount of Thorium-232 which is transformed to Radium-228 after, say a year, is incredibly small.
As such, only a tiny amount of alpha radiation (helium atoms without their electrons) is produced by the thorium atoms.
Alpha particles do not penetrate the human skin and are, therefore, not dangerous.
Thorium-232 is safe, provided we are not stupid enough to eat it or grind it up into a fine powder and inhale it.
Even if you were to consume the non-radioactive Lead-208, you would not be staying healthy for long.
Thorium-232 does not produce the dangerous penetrating ionising gamma rays.
The 0.09 MeV of gamma radiation detected comes from Thorium-228's decay to Radium-224 to Radon-220 to Polonium-216 and ultimately through a number of pathways to the stable non-radioactive Lead-208.
That is why I really cannot understand why people in Kuantan are so irrationally fearful of Lynas Corporation's rare earth plant, which will produce only a small amount of Thorium-232 in their waste product.
That plant is neither a nuclear reactor nor a nuclear bomb manufacturing facility.
It is only a plant to extract rare earth from its ore, which is dug up from the ground.
And the rare earth ore has been in the ground for billions of years.
The situation has become ridiculous, and even farcical.
For instance, one of my friends has even stopped construction of his new house in Kuantan because he is fearful of a nuclear explosion in the Lynas plant.
This impossibility has become a probability in the minds of the intensely brainwashed people in Kuantan.
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