The scariest water terror scenario I've heard so far would be to take a few grams of plutonium and toss it into a reservoir. Easier than making a bomb, and a coordinated attack could poison a large region. Chlorine would be useless. Calm down, my friend. This article, and your comment are both...well...unfounded in reality.
Plutonium is heavy, and if tossed into a body of water, would sink to the bottom and into the mud, where it would remain forever, doing absolutely nothing to anybody.
Don't believe me? Then try your own experiment. Toss a chemically-similar metal, "a few grams of lead" [a shotgun pellet would do] into a lake, and let me know when folks start showing symptoms of lead poisoning.
Backflow preventers have vacuum breakers - that's the difference from simple check valves.
If you're really worried about this stuff, use bottled water, distill/filter your own, collect rainwater, or better yet, move to the country.
This whole scare is just union propaganda to scare the gullible into clamoring for more union workers to "make their water safe".
"Plutonium is heavy, and if tossed into a body of water, would sink to the bottom and into the mud, where it would remain forever, doing absolutely nothing to anybody. Don't believe me? Then try your own experiment. Toss a chemically-similar metal, "a few grams of lead" [a shotgun pellet would do] into a lake, and let me know when folks start showing symptoms of lead poisoning. "
The plutonium scenario was described to me by a friend of mine who's a physicist. There may be more details that I'm not aware of.
As for chemically similar metals, silver and gold are chemically similar, but not similarly reactive, no?
I'm not a chemist, so I don't know, but are lead and radioactive plutonium going to react the same way when immersed in water?
Silver and Gold don't. Mercury is a neighbor in the periodic table, and it will react even more differently.
