Remember back in ’50s and early ’60s, when we set off something like 900 atomic bombs in Nevada? And how we just let the fallout blow wherever and it landed all over the eastern US? And how it wiped out life as we know it and all that was left from Colorado to the Atlantic were six-legged rats battling two-headed cockroaches in the glowing ruins?
Yeah. Exactly. So shut up with the panic already.
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(Via Small Dead Animals.)
Update: On the other hand, it’s a small but perfectly formed panic: “CNN sends 400 reporters to royal wedding, only 50 sent to Japan.”
Kind of explains Harry Reid though…
I remember a story from back in the sixties (I know of no documentary evidence that this story actually occurred in reality.)
A company that manufactured industrial and medical sources containing radionuclides of all sorts was inspected periodically by the AEC (the cognizant federal authority at the time.
Among things done during an inspection was to take “wipes” (scrubbing a surface with piece of dry filter paper) which were then “counted” in a scintillation chamber–measured for radioactive contamination.
the company was frequently “busted” for contamination on the floor of the office areas–a serious nono and really hard to explain because out in the “labs” people had to step over a barrier into foot coverings on their way into the lab areas, and out of the lab foot gear, over the barrier, into an area where hands and feet were check with an ion chamber or a Geiger counter.
Story goes that one day there were several wipes found to be “hotter than a pistol” to use one of the technical terms of the day (actually the true technical term involves an owl with an odd physical configuration). Turns out these wipes had been added to the mix by local folk–and had been obtained from the floor of the Post Office.
The cure, I hear, was to take a hose and wash down the parking lot a day or two after every event at Yucca Flats.