Also, that is not the case for the cesium or strontium species, which both have half lives of around 30 years. Any radioactive decay of these species would be negligible by the time they reached the West Coast.

True, but irrelevant to the subject of this post:

Japan nuclear crisis: “Should I take potassium iodide pills to protect against radiation exposure?”

KI protects against absorption of radioactive iodine but does nothing to protect people against absorption of cesium or strontium (or uranium or plutonium or…). Cesium and strontium are entirely relevant to discussions of long-term radiation risk in the US, but they are (or at least should be) irrelevant to the KI hysteria.

My American mother and English father both insisted it was nerve-racking – must be an inherited prejudice!

A little research indicates that the difference would seem to be in degree, not kind: When one’s nerves are Racked, it would indicate that they are being tortured, strained, etc. When they are Wracked, it would mean they are being destroyed, wrecked.

Nothing like a little wordplay fun to take one’s mind off the horrible news, huh? Thanks!

Cancer as a result of radiation seems kind of a crap-shoot to me. But it still happens, though. Is it because of the radioactive isotopes remaining in the body or the relentless bombardment of particles? If the DNA strands have to get struck with a particle in order for the bases to get damaged and then get recombined wrong,c ausing mutation, then the particles released from the isotopes have to be hammering away pretty intensely.

Either nerver-racking or nerve-wracking are acceptable, according to Merriam – Webster. They’re linguistic isotopes. Maybe that would make anagrams isomers?

http://eggcorns.lascribe.net/forum/viewtopic.php?id=177

There is no need for someone to have a thyroidectomy and the radiation following. It is COMPLETELY unnecessary if you take iodine.

There is a complete iodine protocol where people are cured from thyroid cancer, which most people who are “diagnosed” with it don’t really have it 90% of the time. So someone goes through all that and then didn’t need to lose their thyroid, a VERY important organ of the body.

You can learn more at http://health.groups.yahoo.com/group/iodine/?yguid=23991874.

We have been lied to for a very long time about the demise of the food chain. Regular table salt is BAD for us. However, I take 1/2 tsp of Himalayan salt every day. And then I put salt on EVERYTHING I eat! Since starting the Iodine Protocol, I have been healthier. So are many on that Yahoo Group.

We need to take our own health care seriously.

Due to taking my iodine daily, keeps me fearless of the radiation that will come OR not come.

Glad Maggie is getting at the fact that we don’t need to be concerned, yet. Why hasn’t the media picked up on this? Just kidding.

Your friend’s chances of getting cancer in the future as a result of her radiation treatments should be less of a concern, as she already has cancer – the die has already fallen, the possibility has already been realized.

PS: Sorry to hear about your friend, hope they fully recover.

OK found some info in the Journal of Clinical thyriodology (free downloads).

review articles from 2008 – overall conclusion is that I-131 therapy increases chances of second primary malignancies.

But – as usual – the follow up research is behind the curve. Data from patients collected over 10-40 years, and the average dose was 163 mCi. These are patients treated as many as 30-40 years ago, before tailoring doses to the risk level of the patients. Most of our patients now are getting less than 100 mCi. One reviewed paper which had the lowest average dose (70mCi) had no increase in cancers, but it was a small number of patients

so there is no hard data about what the lower doses would do – and we will have to wait 20 years to find out.

Finally, these secondary cancers may, in a way, be irrelevent:

“Lastly, it is important to know that an important study by Links et al. (2) which investigated life expectancy in patients with thyroid cancer found that patients who were free of disease had a normal residual life span after being cured, whereas median life expectancy was reduced to 60% in patients with residual disease.The authors concluded that treatment, including radioiodine, is safe and did not affect life expectancy.”

http://www.thyroid.org/professionals/publications/clinthy/clinthy_v202.pdf

How can people live their lives like that?
Stockpiling against non-existant threats because talky-mcTalking head tells them to…
Huddling in their McMansions, cradling shotguns, afraid of every snapping twig and sudden breeze.

There is no “away”. One planet. And the ocean life is life, which is likely to be profoundly effected by radiation falling into the ocean.
And nothing in this article about plutonium.

Still, thanks.

Ariadne

@OldBrownSquirrel: My point precisely. Some people believe that taking potassium iodide protects against any radioactivity. It would also be useful for that to be explicitly stated in Maggie’s article.

It seems that the staining agent Prussian Blue can chelate cesium-137. I am looking forward to seeing people with Mentat-style stained lips walking around Hollywood once this knowledge becomes more common.

It might help put people at ease to remind them that we have detonated over a thousand nuclear weapons in Nevada alone, 100 of which were above ground, and that we’re all still doing fine afterward.

Are these particles actually discrete quanta with a specific and specifiable direction of travel from the atom emitting it; or, does it a wave of energy, which expands spherically in all directions from the atom?

…or is it both at once?

This was an unprecedented step by the Polish government who acted to protect the country’s citizens even though it meant disobeying their Soviet handlers. Another step was replacing regular dairy products with those based on powdered milk for the next few weeks. The Soviets, BTW, provided no information on the explosion. For two full days nobody knew that anything had happened. Then the radiation monitoring stations in eastern Poland detected radiation levels that were half a million times higher than usual. At first they thought a nuclear bomb exploded somewhere in the Soviet Union but soon the government learnt what happened. From the BBC.