Expert predicts a major hurricane hitting Houston would be “America’s Chernobyl”

Re:Expert predicts a major hurricane hitting Houston would b... by walkingolof on Tuesday August 25, 2020 @07:15AM (#24270132)

Naive way of looking at it, Chernobyl caused huge changes to the way of life for many people, not only in the vicinity, I live in Sweden and I remember that day when it rained and how we decades afterwards sent meat, berries and other food stuff for testing ....

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Re:Expert predicts a major hurricane hitting Houston would b... by arethuza on Tuesday August 25, 2020 @07:18AM (#24270144)

I still remember standing under an arch in the Grassmarket Edinburgh on my way back from University classes on the day that the Chernobyl cloud passed over the UK and looking at the heavy rain and wondering whether it was a wise thing to walk home in it.

Edit: Of course I knew there was a tiny tiny risk - but still something I remember thinking about.

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Re:Expert predicts a major hurricane hitting Houston would b... by roenxi on Tuesday August 25, 2020 @07:31AM (#24270237)

> ...decades afterwards sent meat, berries and other food stuff for testing ....

What did they find? How bad was the impact?

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Re:Expert predicts a major hurricane hitting Houston would b... by paganel on Tuesday August 25, 2020 @08:05AM (#24270479)

I think you're still advised not to eat boar meat in Austria because of the radiations. This is an article from 2011 [1] documenting the fact, and this is a study from 2019 [2] which found that:

> The caesium levels of 8 wild boar and 11 roe deer samples exceeded the limit out of the 490 specimens

Now, 19 out of 490 specimens exceeding the Cs-137 concentration level limits is too high a percentage for me, but maybe other people are willing to take more risks in this area compared to me.

[1] https://www.medindia.net/news/wild-boar-meat-in-austrian-sup...

[2] https://www.ages.at/en/topics/radiation-protection/caesium-1...

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Re:Expert predicts a major hurricane hitting Houston would b... by walkingolof on Tuesday August 25, 2020 @07:42AM (#24270324)

It was pretty bad, high values of mostly cesium-137 in local food. Now some 35:ish years afterwards, its mostly reindeer that goes over the recommended thresholds.

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Re:Expert predicts a major hurricane hitting Houston would b... by throwaway0a5e on Tuesday August 25, 2020 @07:35AM (#24270268)

>What did they find?

They found that keeping testing going this century serves the valuable function of keeping the public at ease and the cost isn't that high (testing is pretty small scale now) so why not keep it.

The primary source of radiation was airborne dust (and therefore precipitation as well). Crops and farm raised animals have been clean for a long time. The primary risk is shooting a buck that ate a berry that had something nasty on it back in 1995 but between the half lives of the radioactive compounds in question and the pattern of events required to get those components to one's dinner plate the risk is beyond minimal at this point.

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Re:Expert predicts a major hurricane hitting Houston would b... by walkingolof on Tuesday August 25, 2020 @07:45AM (#24270350)

There has been about a 1000 deaths attributed to it in Sweden.

And you could argue that its "low", but its in the very sense "Russian roulette", you never know if it is you, maybe you where unlucky and ate a side of that wild boar that contained 39706 becquerel per kilo...

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Re:Expert predicts a major hurricane hitting Houston would b... by acidburnNSA on Tuesday August 25, 2020 @09:56AM (#24271381)

You're saying there have been 1000 deaths from Chernobyl in Sweden? That goes strongly against the UN-sanctioned scientific consensus of the radiation effects of the accident [1].

[1] https://www.unscear.org/unscear/en/chernobyl.html

The "Russian roulette" hypothesis is unsupported at dose rates near natural background radiation. For example, the natural background dose varies widely around the world, and we have not found a statistically link between high background areas (like Denver) and low background areas.

Radiation at low levels has been around for billions of years. Life evolved with it and can handle it to a degree. So the idea that a tiny bit more radiation is dangerous is wrong because of our repair mechanisms.

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