Reply to post: Re: seriously Trevor

Re: seriously Trevor

"It decays via beta emission into Barium 137(m) which pukes out a gamma ray on its way to ground state. The Barium is what's bad for your health."

Yup and there's good evidence that all that polonium fizzing away in a smoker's lungs(*) doesn't do diddly squat through radioactive damage and it's when it breaks down to barium or beryllium on the way to ground state that it causes trouble. Beryllium is particularly bad news.

(*) Polonium? Yup. It collects on the fur on tobacco leaves and tobacco companies have been trying to figure out a way to get rid of it for 50 years - so far, no sucess. The EPA wrote it up a while back: https://www3.epa.gov/radtown/tobacco.html

Obfacts of the day:

- A pack-a-day for 20 years smoker's lungs are seriously radioactive - so much so that they count in the top 5 "most radioactive places on earth" and would be treated as high level radioactive waste if dumped on the grounds of a nuclear power plant.

- So is a truckload of bananas (not not as radioactive as the lungs) and they've been known to set off radiological detectors tuned for bombs or bomb materials at ports.

- The cancer rates in Hiroshima and Nagasaki spiked for a couple of years after the bombs (mostly due to gamma-burst radiation exposure damaging immune systems and leaving exposed people slightly more vulnerable to all diseases for a few years) and since then have been about 0.25% higher than normal "background" rates in Japan.

- Coal plants emit more radioactive materials around the planet each year than several Chernobyl class events.

- If they were subject to the same radioactive emissions limits as nuclear plants, every coal power station on the planet would be shut down tomorrow.

- Enhanced thyroid screening around Chernoybl turned up a vastly increased tumour rate - but so did enhanced thyroid screening in Korea with no nuclear events in sight. The funny thing is when you go looking for something you didn't previously check for, you'll find it. Correlation is not Causality. (Look that statement up)

- It's worth looking into the size of the plumes from USA continental atmospheric nuclear bomb tests in the 1950s (Hint, they weren't small, they went over populated areas and yet noone was evacuated)

On the other hand:

- Since the start of the industrial revolution, burning coal has been the prime driver of the world oceanic mercury level more than doubling - and I'm more concerned about mercury poisoning from my tuna than about radioactives, thankyouverymuch. Mecuric compounds sequestered in fish fats pass up the food chain and keep on poisoning over a span of centuries. Radioactives break down.

- You might like to look up "Minamata bay" sometime.

- In the same period, ocean acidity has increased by 30% and anoxic deadspots have been spreading. More recently, measurements of dissolved oxygen levels have been decreasing slightly. You might want to look up "anoxic oceanic event" and "Leptav sea methane" then consider what happens if 2-5Gigatons of carbon pops up into the atmosphere or hydrosphere from all that Methane Clathrate warming up (and then there's the tsunamis - look up "Storegga Slide" sometime)

- Cancer rates downwind of coal-fired power stations are _significantly_(as in, more than 10%) higher than background levels

- The _2_ largest environmental disasters in the USA so far in the 21st century were coal power plant ash slurry pond dam breaches (Deepwater Horizon isn't even 3rd) and there are around 5000 more of them that the EPA is aware of and worried about.

So yes, let's worry about a small amount of radioactive material which can be detected from a distance and ignore the elephant in the room of the possibility of atmospheric oxygen levels dropping to 15% (equivalent to about 7000 foot altitude) or possibly as low as 11% (about the same as 11-14,000 foot altitude(**). Bugger sea level changes, that's a side show. Once you're below 11%, oxygen starts having major trouble crossing into the bloodstream.

(**) Human physiology reacts to reduced oxygen levels by thickening the blood, leading to congestive heart failure (it happens sooner or later, sooner is also known as altitude sickness, later is a shortened lifespan and sluggish mental state). There are only 2 ethnic groups which have adapted to continuous life at high altitudes without ill-effects and unless you're of Tibetan or Nepalese descent you're not one of them.