Is it true if a heart pacemaker is incinerated or burned in a fire, it will produce a nuclear explosion?

...an explosion powerful enough to level a city block? A friend of mine told this to me and I find it difficult to believe.
Answer:
no, you have to be joking. Or have an extremely low IQ. First off if it was that unstable it would not go in someones body.

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Nope. That type of fuel could not undergo such a dramatic reaction.

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Your friend is not very bright. Simply put, the answer is "no".

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It's true.

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I don't even know how they work, but no it is not possible, for one they would have to be nuclear powered (which there not) and for two a fire will not set off a nuclear reaction.

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I'm glad you were skeptical, because that is completely bogus. A pacemaker is nothing more than a battery and a computer chip. It's about as dangerous as a wristwatch.

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Absolutely not. To have a nuclear explosion you need a critical mass of a radioactive material. Somewhere around 20 Kilograms. An entrie pacemaker does not even weight a pound.

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Your friend is wrong...Very wrong.Pacemakers contain no nuclear isotopes and even if they did there would be no possibility whatsoever of a fission reaction.Pacemakers have used Lithium Iodine batteries for the past several years, before that I believe they used zinc-cadmium or something similar.No radioactive materials involved at all.

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Aaaah. That would be a "no."

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No, not a nuclear explosion! But I do know that if a body with a pacemaker is cremated, it will have some explosion. A funeral director told me that he forgot to remove one once and it ruined the cremation unit. He had to but the crematory a new one!

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i'd say there would be an explosion but not a nuclear one. the explosion is due to the battery used in the pacemaker (Li-I) or (Cd-Zn) these batteries produce enormous amount of heat due to exothermic reactions triggered by the heat from the fire so they explode.

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That's how the terrorists plan to attack us next. They're using funeral homes as fronts. Not much security there. Just taking suicide bombing to the next logical level - suicide corpses.

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Is your leg longer? Your buddy's been pulling it. One of the major hurdles the Manhattan project members had to solve was the method of "crushing" the uranium core to obtain critical mass in exactly the right way. The soccer-ball shape of the conventional charge and the wiring to get each segment to ignite simulataneously was a stroke of genius. It's very difficult to obtain this condition, and pacemakers tend not to be chock-full of explosives.

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The answer is NO. But I can add a little trivia to this discussion. Many years ago, say in the early seventies battery technology is not what it is today. Pacers back then basically used mercury batteries so the search was on to find a longer lasting battery. Medtronic used a nuclear pile battery that they claimed was good for 20 years. I am not making this up, I actually saw one during a tour of the medtronic plant here in MN and saw one. There was a catch, the patient had to sign papers stating that the pacer would be removed from the patient prior to burial. You cannot bury a nuclear battery.

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nononononononononononono!!...

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