Don't Eat The Snow

**old guy** · March-31-11, 05:09 PM

Originally Posted by lpg

Thanks for the information. Looking back a very strange time.

It does seem like they were strange times. I would imagine people will look back 50 years from now and think what strange times these are. I think all generations are naive as to what's really going on.

Without trying to sound like a total moron, I think about how much we didn't know back then. I can actually remember riding a bike at night following trucks that were moving really slow and spraying for mosquitoes. A big cloud of DDT. We thought it was pretty cool with a flashing light in the fog of DDT. In my own defense, they did add a perfume smell of some sort to the DDT. I can remember the guy driving the truck smiling and waving to us. My lungs were probably stuffed full of asbestos and the DDT didn't affect me.
We didn't have any idea. We'd just head down to the Sears store, step up on the Buster Brown shoe display and turn the X-Ray machine on to see your feet inside the shoes. No problem, there was a piece of cardboard on the front of the machine blocking the radiation.

**lpg** · March-31-11, 08:01 PM

Originally Posted by old guy

It does seem like they were strange times. I would imagine people will look back 50 years from now and think what strange times these are. I think all generations are naive as to what's really going on.

Without trying to sound like a total moron, I think about how much we didn't know back then. I can actually remember riding a bike at night following trucks that were moving really slow and spraying for mosquitoes. A big cloud of DDT. We thought it was pretty cool with a flashing light in the fog of DDT. In my own defense, they did add a perfume smell of some sort to the DDT. I can remember the guy driving the truck smiling and waving to us. My lungs were probably stuffed full of asbestos and the DDT didn't affect me.
We didn't have any idea. We'd just head down to the Sears store, step up on the Buster Brown shoe display and turn the X-Ray machine on to see your feet inside the shoes. No problem, there was a piece of cardboard on the front of the machine blocking the radiation.

Lets not forget playing with mercury on our desk tops in school just before lunch.

**maxx** · April-03-11, 03:12 PM

"This American Life" has stories from Chernobyl including symptoms of radiation poisoning. That part starts about one quarter into the entire show.

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radi...31/see-no-evil

**old guy** · April-05-11, 05:23 PM

Tip: Don't load up the fallout shelter with jumbo cans of pork & beans.
Attachment 9269

littlebuddy · April-06-11, 11:44 AM

So who is right? Is radation fallout killing us all, bringing on cancers and other problems? How much problems did blowing all those atom bombs out west hurt us? How long does this stuff take to break down, if ever? How much did the DDT spraying hurt us? If we didn't eat so much and get off the couch, we might be a healthy nation, long lifes,etc.

**maxx** · April-06-11, 12:59 PM

There are probably manmade carcinogens everywhere. When a chemical compound is brought to market, no one has asked about its impact on human health. That would take studies lasting 20 years or more. So we just keep making more and more and hoping that medicine can stay ahead of the health issues they create or that nature will develop a microorganism that will eat the compounds. The chickens may be coming home to roost as younger and younger people develop cancers.

**old guy** · April-06-11, 03:13 PM

Originally Posted by littlebuddy

So who is right? Is radation fallout killing us all, bringing on cancers and other problems? How much problems did blowing all those atom bombs out west hurt us? How long does this stuff take to break down, if ever? How much did the DDT spraying hurt us? If we didn't eat so much and get off the couch, we might be a healthy nation, long lifes,etc.

It's hard to say. We know radiation is bad for us but it's everywhere. Sunlight's good for you and bad for you. Like lpg said, we used to play with liquid mercury. I sucked in a lot of DDT over the years. I probably ate radioactive snow. A large number of us grew up living in houses with lead pipes. I worked for a few weeks in Ann Arbor tearing down a Sears store. One day we were working in the bottom of an elevator shaft and I looked up at the sunlight coming in through a loading door. There were so many tiny fibers floating around it looked like it was snowing. Someone said, oh that's asbestos. I mentioned that I had heard that was really bad. [[This was a long time ago.) A guy standing next to me said, I'd worry more about the PCB's leaking from this machinery. I've been exposed to agent orange by unscrupulous farmers.
It's all bad stuff, but after all these years I've been lucky I guess.
After being exposed to all those chemicals etc., I ended up in the hospital because of my love of bacon.

**Jimaz** · April-06-11, 05:09 PM

It was probably in Driving Mr. Albert: A Trip Across America with Einstein's Brain that I read an account of the delivery of the first processed uranium to Los Alamos for the first atomic bomb. Few people understood its special properties or hazards so they didn't take any precautions. They noted this metallic sphere was oddly warm to the touch even though it hadn't been heated.

Different isotopes decay at different rates depending on their half-life. List of radioactive isotopes by half-life shows half-lives range from a tiny fraction of a second to over 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years.

It is chemically impossible to decontaminate nuclear waste. The best you can do is wash it off, collect it and isolate it.

**Jimaz** · June-01-11, 07:00 PM

Here's a story that's all at once grotesque, sad and heroic. Some Japanese elderly are volunteering to work at Fukushima because they have less life to lose than others.

Japanese seniors volunteer for ‘suicide’ nuclear jobs

The end of Japan’s nuclear crisis, however, is still nowhere in sight.