quote:
Originally posted by ElysianWort
Hmm well I guess time will tell if Hawaii gets affected in any way. There was another meltdown awhile back, think it was called Chernobyl. Scientists are still discovering long term effects. Call me a hypochondriac here, maybe but to be confident all is well and will be well after that catastrophic human-caused f**k-up in Fukushima, Japan seems unrealistic bordering on foolish. JMO
So what's the deal scientists and people who are in the know? Does radiation not spread as much through the ocean as through the atmosphere? I asked earlier about the radioactivity in the heavy metals just sinking right where they are, I wonder? Anyway here's food for thought:
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world.../83220302/
Edited to add this: Is USAtoday reputable?
With apologies for a long winded response...
To answer your last question first: Is USA Today reputable?" No. No more so than any media source that depends on sensationalized reporting to attract readers...
It's all about balance and relative risk. USA Today is hyperventilating over a projected 4000 deaths from the Chernobyl accident - and I am entirely sympathetic to those who will experience an early and painful death from their exposure. However, I would recommend you to CDC's web page for this somewhat comparable reality: "Cigarette smoking is responsible for more than
480,000 deaths per year in the United States, including nearly 42,000 deaths resulting from secondhand smoke exposure. This is about one in five deaths annually, or 1,300 deaths every day." Am I worried about Chernobyl or Fukushima? Ehhhh, not so much.
It seems that so many who agitate about exposures to one hazard or another come from a mindset that the world in its natural state is a benign place and if we could just control this or that rare and extreme hazard, we'd all live forever. Let's say we start from a different baseline: the world offers us an environment replete with hazards and is entirely indifferent to our survival. Everything in it can be toxic
at some exposure level and over the several tens of millions of years that mammals have occupied the planet, they have evolved to be able to tolerate some level of exposure to many of those toxins and, in fact, require exposure and uptake of some/many compounds
that are toxic at higher exposures in order to survive. A couple of common examples: salt - if your diet completely eliminated sodium chloride, you would die; drink a couple of liters of sea water, the salt will likely kill you or leave you without much kidney function... Much touted in recent headlines: hydrogen sulfide. If you were to eliminate it from your body completely, you'd be dead before you hit the floor (turns out, recent research has shown that it's a key metabolic regulator in the cells); inhale 1000 parts per million in air, same result. Oxygen: cut off your supply for any length of time, you're pretty well done. Go scuba diving to any significant depth with a tank of pure oxygen, you won't be coming back.
The same may be true of radiation. Many years ago I came across epidemiological research results that showed (the expected) reduction in cancer rates at progressively lower exposure levels
until a minimum in the cancer rates was reached where
lower radiation exposure levels were associated with
higher cancer rates. Not that I am advocating anyone intentionally seeking out higher radiation exposures - but I'd guess that one more or less flight to the mainland would represent a substantially higher radiation dose than any we are likely to get from Fukushima.
And to answer your first question: the marine transport of radio-isotopes from the Fukushima release is a very complicated question. Some of the isotopes released have a very low solubility in ocean water and will likely be precipitated out fairly quickly. Others will be taken up by marine biota - some of which will be precipitated out into the deep ocean sediments (e.g. in foram shells) and some of which will be consumed by larger marine life up the food chain. And some isotopes will be soluble and will drift around the oceanic currents - at highly dilute concentrations - until they decay away. Will they contribute significantly to my lifetime uptake of radio isotopes? Almost certainly not. If I skip my daily banana for breakfast, that'd probably cover it...
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