In the 1950s came a rash of nuclear-war books. The worst is, I think, Nevil Shute's On The Beach, worse even than Ryder Stacy's porn and the Gamma World oeuvre. I just got through Pat Frank's Alas, Babylon. That one was mostly okay, for a Kennedy voter. You know... a voter for the guy who put Confeds in Portraits in Courage.
My recent interest has been in neutron activation. Which is a sideplot in this story, as the gathering of gold becomes the undoing of several characters as beta-decay hits the higher isotopes of precious metal.
Except that gold-198's halflife is 2.6946 days. Push that up to mercury-198, and after that... nothing happens. (Hg-199 would be trace but that's stable too.) Maybe the bulk of the gold, annealed as it will be with mercury, will chip away a little more on the outside. Would mercury poisoning be a problem for rings and watches? Either way, after a few weeks it shouldn't be radioactive no mo'.
Silver-108 and -110, they say, stay hot for longer.
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