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Muttling -> RE: Lets cut to the chase on nuke fall out, help (3/31/2011 9:40:33 AM)
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If you're really in a panic about it, buy some potassium iodide pills and take them. There are 2 primary contaminants coming from the plant, iodine-131 and cesium-137. The fears you are mentioning all come from iodine-131 problems. The body can't tell the difference between non-radioactive iodine and iodine-131 so it puts all of it in the thyroid gland at the base of the throat. If you load that gland up with all of the non-radioactive iodine it can handle through potassium iodide, the body will pass any new iodine it takes in through the body via urine and it won't be in the body long enough to cause damage that isn't easily healed.
Cesium-137 exposure from these plants is massively smaller. If you've ever gone swimming in a lake, creek, or river you have been exposed to much more Cs-137 as it's in the sediments from our nuclear weapons testing back in the 1940's and 1950's. However, even these exposures aren't nearly enough to make you sick.
The exposure in North America from Japan's nuclear plants is quite tiny and your body is adapted for living with small amounts of radiation exposure. Radiation is a normal part of our world, it's when you go WAY beyond what the body can heal from that problems are caused. If you were alive in the 1980's, you got a far larger exposure from Chernobyl and never even noticed it because it was something your body can easily deal with.
The real concern is for those who live in Japan and the major concern is for the workers at those plants who are struggling to get those units under control. We are half a world away and we aren't being exposed to things that our bodies can't heal from. The same can't be said for those workers and I fear for their health over the next few years.
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