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When they say “bathed in radioactive cloud” they actually mean “wind carried trace amounts of radioactive materials”. Anytime anything “nuclear” is involved, th
by lxe 8y ago
When they say “bathed in radioactive cloud” they actually mean “wind carried trace amounts of radioactive materials”. Anytime anything “nuclear” is involved, the reporting gets very poetic.
- fred_is_fred 8y agoWait until someone tells the author about the sun. I get bathed in a radioactive death rays most mornings.
- thaumaturgy 8y agoAt the very end of the article: > ...the levels of cesium-137 are barely detectable... You'll get a lot more exposure from a single plane flight!
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- kolpa 8y agoThe sun is radioactive. Sunlight is not radioactive, it's radiation.
- Robotbeat 8y agoSunlight does effectively produce radiation burns in your skin, however. And that definitely causes cancer. If we treated sunlight the way we treat barely detectable nuclear radiation, we’d never go outside and we’d use blackout curtains.
- bsder 8y agoYeah, I wish they would point out that the pollution from China regularly swamps the radiation detectors in the US that are monitoring Fukushima. "Bathed in a radioactive cloud" actually holds more for Chinese coal pollution than anything from a nuclear plant with the possible exception of Chernobyl.
- lgvln 8y agoInteresting. Do you have a source for this?
- bsder 8y agoReferences: https://boingboing.net/2011/08/18/what-fukushima-can-teach-us-about-coal-pollution.html https://boingboing.net/2011/08/18/what-fukushima-can-teach-u... http://www.pnas.org/content/108/35/14422 http://www.pnas.org/content/108/35/14422
- lgvln 8y agoAccording to those sources, there’s a major difference between the radioactive Sulfur(from the nuclear plant) vs Sulfur dioxide(from coal plants). Apples vs oranges.
- Groxx 8y agoParticularly visible in the graph of radioactivity from various times. Fukushima isn't even a visible blip - it's just that our tools are unbelievably sensitive.
- gdubs 8y agoI think when we're talking about wine, the correct way to say it is "contains notes of tobacco and radioactive isotopes".