9. Health and environmental effects of gallium

Gallium is found in very small quantities in the human body. There are 0.7 mg of gallium in the body of a 70 kg person, with no proven dysfunction. Its presence is probably due to small traces in the environment, in water, vegetables and fruit. Some commercially distributed waters contain traces of gallium at levels below one ppm.

Gallium can make the use of plutonium in nuclear weapons tricky. In fact, it is used to maintain several bombs in nuclear wells, as its property of strongly absorbing neutrons...