Thursday, March 31, 2011

I've Never Had An Overwhelming Desire To Glow In The Dark

Amazing! Trace amounts of radiation found in the milk in California. However, parents are being told not to panic. In the age of full disclosure, including 200,000 diplomatic papers in the hands of Julian Assange, we seem to feel the need to know everything. Why? To cause panic?

Tell me something. We know the radioactive iodine is being spread to the US. We keep hearing how minimal it is and how we don't have to worry. However, we aren't hearing what we need to know which is, what the hell can we do about it? The obvious answer is absolutely nothing. So, since we don't seem to need to be proactive in protecting ourselves, why are we being so fully informed? Forgive me, I had a weak moment. The reason is called ratings.

Back in the 1960's almost every news reporter knew of JFK's peccadillos with other women. Was it blasted across the airwaves of our nightly news? No, of course not. Back then, private lives were...well...private. Not so today. Today, gossip is now news. It seems that the news media has caught onto the ignorance of the average American, and is using it to boost their ratings.

Back in the day, before Americans embraced ignorance and called it "transparency", I saw a movie. It was called "China Syndrome". I felt, that given the nature of humans and their ability to screw up nearly everything they touch, I didn't want to trust that nuclear energy would remain a safe option for very long. That feeling was cemented by the near melt down on Three Mile Island, which was caused by...human error.

Another thing that bothered me is the storage of nuclear waste. The town of Love Canal in NYS became a major brownfield of toxicity because chemicals were stored in underground barrels. If chemicals could eat through these barrels, what about nuclear waste? How good would all that released nuclear waste be for the health of our children? Would this so called transparency apply to that situation should those barrels, buried in a mountain, start leaking? Funny thing, there is no answer for any of those questions, yet, we use nuclear energy to create electricity. Apparently, some folks don't believe in human error.

The good thing about all this, is that I will save a bundle of money since I won't have to buy organic produce. Think about it. With all this radioactive iodine floating around, produce grown under any situation will contain it, in trace amounts. What the heck, since I'm going to be exposed to all those trace amounts of toxic radioactive iodine, I might as well save my money. Probably need it for the doctor bills.

12 comments:

  1. Sherry:

    Think positively. If you will glow in the dark, you can save money on your electric bill. :)

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  2. Whit,

    I wouldn't be able to save enough money to pay the doctor bill. My electric bill isn't that high anymore.

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  3. I had heard about trace amounts in Japanese milk but not in California milk. Will have to look into that.

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  4. We've been buying Guida's milk, which is local here in Connecticut. I'm not buying Hood anymore because it comes from cows in California. I don't know what they can do about it, but I'm sure dairy farms in Cali are not appreciating this.
    You also have to remember that the media loves a problem, and will embellish all they can.

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  5. Sherry,
    So far as I know, the atomic iodine or what ever it is that's getting here and into the milk is in amounts far below the danger level. This of corse assuming we are getting a true report of it. The focus now is we need to press any government body or elected official to drop the idea of more nuke plants. I wrote some notes on my blog about the three land based disasters we have had todate, and this did not include the USSR and USA's nuke subs that sank for unknown reasons some years ago, perhaps their reactors played a part in their demise.

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  6. Skinny,

    I was listening to the nightly news report as I typed this post last night. California and Washington both I believe.

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  7. Mosquito,

    The amounts are so negligible that it really doesn't make a difference. I'm more concerned about our own nuke plants here rather than what's in the milk. Some of our plants are on fault lines same as Japan's. It isn't making me overly happy, never has.

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  8. Fringe,

    It seems to me that Three Mile Island should have been a wake up call. Apparently some people didn't hear the call.

    I never thought a nuke plant anywhere was a good idea, and there are intelligent people out there who just don't see it my way, despite Three Mile, and Chernobyl and now Japan.

    Nothing will ever convince me that we know what's happening with the stored waste and some day something will happen to prove me right. It isn't even a matter of not building new plants, we need to close the ones we have and work on finding alternate sources that are safer.

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  9. Radiation is a word we tend to think of only in terms of the type produced by fissionable materials, but of course we now know that radiation from the sun may cause cancers when one is overexposed. We tend not to think of sunburn as a radiation burn, but it is. The point is, I suppose, that we live in a world that seems to want to kill us, notwithstanding our propensity for killing ourselves with aeroplanes and automobiles, garden tractors, and industrial machines. I would do away with all those things immediately, to judge from the statistics. Glowingly good post, by the way.

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  10. John,

    Isn't it amazing? Everything is conspiring to kill us. Of course, it has our help. Here we are fretting about minimal radiation in milk, when as you say, we spend hours on beaches or in our yards exposing ourselves to radiation. To the point where we burn and in later years have skin cancer. You gotta love it.

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  11. I lived in Western New York when the Love Canal incident took place. We had friends that lived there and had to be relocated. It was very, ver scarey and upsetting.

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  12. Martha,

    For me, what happened at Love Canal was the epitome of everything that's wrong with both big corporations, and the underground storage of nuclear wastes.

    When the companies buried their waste in Love Canal, they didn't know it wasn't safe. It was the cheapest thing to do for them and businesses will always take the cheapest way out. We have the proven history of the ineffectiveness of burying waste and with Three Mile, Chernobyl and Japan we now have a history of the volatility of nuclear energy.

    It's pretty transparent to me that just because someone with a lot of letters after their name says something is safe doesn't make it so.

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