text: In popular culture, plutonium is credited with being the ultimate threat to life and limb which is wrong; while ingesting plutonium is not likely to be good for ones health, other radioisotopes such as radium are more toxic to humans.  Regardless, the introduction of the transuranium' elements such as plutonium into the environment should be avoided wherever possible.  Currently, the activities of the nuclear reprocessing industry have been subject to great debate as one of the fears of those opposed to the industry is that large amounts of plutonium will be either mismanaged or released into the environment.
  In the past, one of the largest releases of plutonium into the environment has been nuclear bomb testing.
  *Those tests in the air scattered some plutonium over the entire globe; this great dilution of the plutonium has resulted in the threat to each exposed person being very small as each person is only exposed to a very small amount.
  *The underground tests tend to form molten rock, which rapidly cools and seals the actinides into the rock, so rendering them unable to move; again the threat to humans is small unless the site of the test is dug up.
  *The safety trials where bombs were subject to simulated accidents pose the greatest threat to people; some areas of land used for such experiments (conducted in the open air) have not been fully released for general use despite in one case an extensive decontamination.