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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: koan who wrote (604764)	3/22/2011 11:21:31 PM
From: TimF	1 Recommendation Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1575429

And like merccury radiation accumulates in the body. Mercury comes in different forms that accumulate in different ways (elemental mercury, methyl-mercury or monomethymercury, dimethylmercury which is really nasty, ethylmercury which has not been found to bioaccumilate, mercury cloride, mercury oxide, etc.) Is similar with radiation. "Radiation" is actually a fairly general term. Visible light is radiation. It can refer to any part of the electromagnetic spectrum, or to netrons, protons, alpha particles (essentially helium nucli with no electrons, electrons (high speed electrons are "beta particles"), or to radioactive materials. EM radiation doesn't bioaccumilate or cause secondary radiation. Particles can cause other materials to become radioactive, radioactive materials (the real concern here, no one is being doused directly with large amounts of gamma rays or neutrons), sometimes bioaccumulates and sometimes it doesn't. It depends on what materials you are talking about, and also other issues (for example radioactive iodine can accumulate fairly readily, but not so much if you already have accumulated non-radioactive idodine). The problem with food is more on of contamination than death. A lot of food will have to be tossed. Some areas won't produce food for a time (both from contamination, and also from the tsunami's more direct effects). Its a more serious issue if you just ignore it, take no precuations, no exclusion zones, no iodine tablets, no checking food, but Japan hasn't been doing that and I don't see them starting to do so in the future. radiation is a very dangerous thing. Its very dangerous. Its also harmless. Just saying "radiation" doesn't say anything about the type or the intensity. Its also something that we encounter every day in all sorts of forms. "Radiation is a very dangerous thing" doesn't really have a truth value, because its too unspecific. For a good quick look at some radiation levels (without too much in the way of specifics about the type other than that the chart deals only with ionizing radiation) see xkcd.com