Fear of nuclear fallout from Japan's nuclear meltdown crisis is causing panic buying of iodine pills, kelp and seaweed in Arcata. The North Coast Co-op struggling to meet the demand of customers looking for products that will help protect against radiation poisoning. some of my friends have recommended taking kelp, seaweed, and leafy greens to mitigate the danger. The Co-op was restocking their kelp pills this morning, but was out of iodine pills that customers keep asking for.
2 comments:
The fallout map is fraudulent, as researched by urban legend web site snopes.com .
It was not created by the Australian Radiation Service (or the US NRC) and it shows levels more likely from bomb fallout than anything that will happen at the Japanese nuclear plants.
http://www.snopes.com/photos/technology/fallout.asp
Even if that map hadn't been a fake, what that map didn’t show is that most, if not all, of the airborne radioactive particles are likely to have already “precipitated out” of the atmosphere long before they could reach us.
I wish they could quantify our risk here in North America in terms of something that people could undertand, like Tanning Bed Hour Equivalents. I think that might calm people down a bit, because even in a worst-case scenario, we’re not likely to get much fallout over here.
Even in the case of Chernobyl, which involved an explosion and massive fire and NO containment building, the actual radioactive fallout didn’t make it more than 1,000 miles, and the overwhelming amount of the fallout and health effects were much, much closer to the plant.
I’m not saying there’s no risk here in North America, or that we can be sure that our exposure here will be zero (although that’s quite possible) but even in the worst-case scenario our exposure will probably not be anywhere near enough to justify all the hysteria and the iodine-grabbing panic.
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