In today’s episode of “weird shit I stumbled onto on the internet”, I bring you: nuclear-powered pacemakers.
Some of the earlier pacemakers made in the US, around the 70’s, were powered by a very small amount of plutonium. If you’ve ever heard of the term radioisotope thermoelectric generator or RTG in relation to eg. satellites, that’s what the pacemakers used. The upside of using an RTG was that the device could run for decades without needing to get its power source replaced. The downside is that you now have plutonium sown in to your chest cavity – which actually isn’t as bad as it sounds considering the amounts used, but it’s still a highly radioactive element and presents some fun challenges, some of which are discussed in the article.
Here’s an article on the technical details on how they, and thermoelectric kajiggers in general, work https://blog.plover.com/tech/seebeck-effect.html
The Radium girls were from the 1920s or even before that. While they didn’t know about the dangers that the Radium paint posed to them, their employers certainly did. Not only did those companies hide the truth from the women, they actively sabotaged any efforts to identify the problem and hold them responsible. These weasels went so far as to secretly pay the doctors around to falsely diagnose the women with syphilis instead of radiation poisoning - in an attempt to destroy their reputation and discredit them. The reckless use of radioactive substances back then wasn’t entirely unintentional or based on innocent motives.
The action those women took was a revolution in workers’ rights. But the moral of the story is, if a company can make money by subjecting you to hidden, but mortal dangers, they will - no matter how fatal that danger is. Then they will use a portion of that money to destroy your image and pin the blame on you. This tendency is even stronger today than it was back then. It was radiation back then - today there are a dozen other problems - lead, microplastics, PFAS and God knows what else.