Excretion rate and retention of plutonium 10,000 days after acquisition

Three persons who had been injected with known amounts of plutonium in 1945 to 1947, were hospitalized on a metabolic ward in 1973. All excreta were collected for at least eight days and the samples were analyzed for plutonium. For the two subjects who had been injected intravenously with tetravalent 239Pu as the citrate, the urinary excretion rates were 7.6 and 4.7 pCi/day at approximately 104 days after injection; these rates corresponded to 2.52 x 10-3 percent of the injected doses per day respectively. The fecal excretion rates were about 40 percent of the urinary rates. The third subject received an intramuscular injection of hexavalent 238Pu as the nitrate, in the left leg, which was amputated four days later. Almost 50 percent of the amount injected was found at the injection site and the urinary excretion rate about 9500 days later was 0.06 pCi/day, corresponding to not less than 1.2 x 10-4 percent of the initial systemic burden. The excretion rate and retention of 239Pu up to 10,000 days post-injection were calculated