Gundersen: 26 nuclear plants in area where Hurricane Sandy likely to hit —

[PamW]

78. Here's the SCIENCE

Here's the SCIENCE!!

There's about 10 metric tonnes of Plutonium in the environment, and practically ALL of it came from atmospheric nuclear weapons testing in the 1940s and 1950s.

However, even then; the amount of radiation exposure that one gets from weapons testing fallout is LESS than 0.03% of natural background exposure.

http://www.umich.edu/~radinfo/introduction/radrus.htm

Only Chernobyl and Fukushima released Plutonium; and from the radiation measurements, the amount from Fukushima is about 2 grams.

You say radiation kills; but germs also kill. You going to go around dousing everything with alcohol???

We evolved in a sea of natural background radiation, and we have a radiation damage repair mechanism just like we have an immune system.
It's like an immune system for radiation. So you can't say that every tiny bit of radiation kills or does damage. The vast majority of the damage is repaired.

From scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory:

http://newscenter.lbl.gov/news-releases/2011/12/20/low-dose-radiation/

“Our data show that at lower doses of ionizing radiation, DNA repair mechanisms work much better than at higher doses,” says Mina Bissell, a world-renowned breast cancer researcher with Berkeley Lab’s Life Sciences Division. “This non-linear DNA damage response casts doubt on the general assumption that any amount of ionizing radiation is harmful and additive.”

Although we use the LNT - linear no-threshold model for devising regulations because of its simplicity; the scientific consensus is that the radiation damage response is actually more complicated than the LNT model, and we don't use LNT when we want to know what the damage actually is.

PamW