I want to tell you how soundly I sleep. When I wake up in the morning, my bedding is completely undisturbed. I can make my bed with one finger. Always. Friday, I bolted upright at 1am and rushed down to my computer. I don't know what made that happen. It was a first.
I saw the news reports on the catastrophe in Japan. I sent out a few tweets... like the ones above. If you follow DWT with any regularity-- or my Facebook page or Twitter feed-- you know I don't hesitate to ruffle feathers. I've been holding powerful figures to task for years-- and not just easy targets like Bush, Limbaugh, Rove, Emanuel, Boehner, Palin, Lieberman and Beck but even occasionally misguided allies like Obama, Reid, Feingold or... Emily's List and Michael Moore (was I ever wrong on the Moore front). But I never got a reaction like the one I got yesterday: scores of tweets-- many from engineers (remember them from college?)-- attacking me for reporting the news about Japan's nuclear reactor problems. Arturo Mirando Bencomo's, WebSquirrel's and PolPotWasLeftie's-- never heard of them either-- were typical:
Hopefully they'll unfollow me quickly because they're not part of any discussion I'm in. I have no doubt that the nuclear reactor at Chernobyl was very different from the ones at Fukushima and the other Japanese sites-- and different from the ones at San Onofre and Diablo Canyon. And I'm sure a bunch of physicists and engineers could have a rip-roarin' debate about containment vessels. Let me know the results-- but keep it to 145 characters. My problem is something else-- something unfortunately engineers don't consider-- the reason, for example, why technological advancement's outpacing mankind's moral advancement has our species, if not the planet-- for the first time ever-- on the precipice of extinction.
Nuclear energy may be very profitable for the companies involved in generating it, especially when it's subsidized by the politicians the companies pay off, but that doesn't make it viable. And handing out iodide pills isn't a satisfactory answer.
News reports from Japan indicate that officials there are preparing to distribute iodide pills to citizens in order to prevent certain types of radiation sickness should a nuclear meltdown occur.
If the reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, or any of the others that have been damaged after the 8.9-magnitude earthquake and tsunami, does indeed melt down, several types of radioactive materials could be expelled into the environment. Cesium-137 and strontium-90 present long-term environmental hazards and can be absorbed throughout the body, particularly bones. Plutonium-239 exposure often leads to lung cancer, and it has a half-life of 24,000 years, so it would be around for a long, long time. (A half-life is the amount of time it takes for half of the radioactive isotopes in a substance to decay.)
But one of the most dangerous materials that could come out of the reactor is iodine-131. Iodine has a relatively short half-life of about a week, but it can do a lot of damage in that time. It will most likely escape in gas form, which makes it easy to pick up, and the body rapidly funnels it to the thyroid, where it can accumulate and cause cancer in a relatively short amount of time.
posted by DownWithTyranny
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