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Comment by lxe | Hacker News Reader

When they say “bathed in radioactive cloud” they actually mean “wind carried trace amounts of radioactive materials”. Anytime anything “nuclear” is involved, the reporting gets very poetic.

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I think when we're talking about wine, the correct way to say it is "contains notes of tobacco and radioactive isotopes".

Particularly visible in the graph of radioactivity from various times. Fukushima isn't even a visible blip - it's just that our tools are unbelievably sensitive.

Yeah, I wish they would point out that the pollution from China regularly swamps the radiation detectors in the US that are monitoring Fukushima.

"Bathed in a radioactive cloud" actually holds more for Chinese coal pollution than anything from a nuclear plant with the possible exception of Chernobyl.

Interesting. Do you have a source for this?

References:

https://boingboing.net/2011/08/18/what-fukushima-can-teach-u...

http://www.pnas.org/content/108/35/14422

According to those sources, there’s a major difference between the radioactive Sulfur(from the nuclear plant) vs Sulfur dioxide(from coal plants). Apples vs oranges.

Wait until someone tells the author about the sun. I get bathed in a radioactive death rays most mornings.

At the very end of the article:

> ...the levels of cesium-137 are barely detectable...

You'll get a lot more exposure from a single plane flight!

The sun is radioactive. Sunlight is not radioactive, it's radiation.

Sunlight does effectively produce radiation burns in your skin, however. And that definitely causes cancer. If we treated sunlight the way we treat barely detectable nuclear radiation, we’d never go outside and we’d use blackout curtains.

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