Originally posted by: CyberDuck
Originally posted by: seemingly random
Yes, it got lots of airplay. People love to hear about death and destruction. But the specific comment I made about the nuclear cloud being mentioned but then not followed up is how I remember it. Maybe it turns out that nuclear fallout isn't really dangerous after all. And I haven't thought or heard of chernobyl for years before I started reading this thread yesterday.
Again, my post was in response to the comment that nuclear power plants aren't dangerous. I don't know how anybody can state this with a straight face. This doesn't mean that the danger can't be managed but there is danger.
A few comments about the nuclear fallout. My country, Norway, was one of the countries with a lot of fallout from Tsjernobyl. Some parts of Norway got relatively high doses. Most of it was washed away by rain and disappeared, but some of it was taken up by vegetation, and then by plant eaters, and also lake fish. Mushrooms also concentrate up the waste when they break down plant material, and animals (and people) eating mushrooms could get high doses if not careful. So the government issued warning about how much could be eaten of fish and mushrooms in the affected areas. The main problem however was that most of the stricken wilderness areas were used for gracing by sheep and reindeer. During a season their nuclear content became to high for human consumption, so they had to be fed hay from uncontaminated areas for a long period after gracing to come down to legal levels before they could be eaten.
Now most of the problems are gone, but some hay feeding was necessary as late as 2006 since this year there was particularly much mushrooms.
All this said, as far as I know there has not been a measurable amount of increase in cancer in my country because of the accident, and I?m of the impression that the implications of the accident were heavily overstated. And I?m definitively pro nuclear, especially thorium power.
Btw, it seems humans are a much larger threat to wildlife than radiation is:
Wildlife defies Chernobyl radiation
Regards
Jostein