G'day Theodore,

I was just browsing your periodic table site researching plutonium batteries for a project and I came across your reference to plutonium powered pacemakers.

Having just left 15 years in the pacemaker industry to pursue a career as a high school physics teacher I can not only tell you that such things did exist I can provide you with a photo of the beast:


The R9000 was circa about 1970 and was, by today's standards, quite simplistic. It sold mostly behind the old iron curtain and some devices are still going but not many. The idea did not take off in the west for two reasons. The first is the hysteria of implanting plutonium. The second is that most pacemaker companies (and there are only 4 that sell world wide-the list goes up to about 6-8 if you include companies that sell in Europe only) and each company will bring out a new model every 1 to 2 years. Today's devices use either lithium iodine or lithium monofluride batteries and last around 8 years. That means that by the time your battery runs out your device has been superseded at least 3 times.

These days the improvements are minor but as you go back the jumps get more significant. Getting an R9000 would mean spending the rest of your life driving a manual car with no air conditioning, no radio and probably no seat belts either. In the pacing industry you want devices to have a finite lifetime.

Cheers,
Andrew Hansen.

Now for the info that will that will really rock you. They probably would bury someone with a plutonium pacemaker - reason: who would know?

Let me explain. The only people who really know anything about the device would be the company rep that sold it to the hospital and maybe the physician who implanted it. In Oz (where I hail from) company reps attend most implants and the physicians often do not know a lot about the
internals of the devices. The patient and family often know nothing as they are generally senior citizens by the time they get a pacemaker. I am generalizing of course.

When patients reach the end of their lives the first thing they do is stop coming to their routine follow up checks (usually done every 12 months) and so the only people who know anything about what is in them lose contact.

When the patient finally dies the mortician may look for and explant a pacemaker - they're easy to see as they are implanted between the skin and the muscle in the upper chest just under one of the collar bones - but if the family plan to bury rather than cremate then the mortician may not bother.

Pacemakers must be explanted for cremation as a lithium iodine cell has a lot of really powerful chemistry in it - usually 1.2Ahr with a rundown curve that stays flat at the nominal voltage for 90% of its working life before a rapid rundown. If you incinerate one of those little beauties they will actually damage the furnace (which happened here in Oz some years back).

So you can see that it all hinges on the mortician and companies and other health care workers generally have very little contact with them so they have no idea what to do or what to look for.

As for getting hold of one - little chance I would think. They really did not take off in the west so there won't be many in people's desk drawers as "my first pacemaker".

Cheers,
A.