Radioactive Cesium Levels in Bay Area Milk Exceed EPA Limit

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Comments

[Mary Jana]

I always make sure to drink at least a glass or two of moo with every meal because sis Kat says it gives me that certain glow. WTF!?!

[Dan Underhill]

Panic and anxiety are definitely not good for your health, but eventually neither is complacency. It is sometimes hard to find the appropriate middle way. Things like radiation, smoking tobacco, and myriad pollutants in our air, water, and soil aren't necessarily going to cause you any notable harm. They only increase the odds of certain health problems. Many of the standards for what amounts of exposure to any of these things constitutes a risk have been determined either by, or with, substantial input from those industries that stand to gain the most from lax regulations.

[Matthew Levie]

On the chart in the article there is a number in parentheses next to each measurement. In the case of the latest Cs-137 measurement, it is 2.4e+04, which is 24,000. This website has deleted the line that explains the significance of this number, but it can be found here, on the linked page that contains the original data: http://www.nuc.berkeley.edu/UCBAirSampling/MilkSampling

This number (24,000) represents the number of liters of milk you would need to consume to equal the radiation exposure of ONE flight from San Francisco to Washington, D.C. (and there are 3.78 liters in a gallon, so we're talking about more than 6,000 gallons).

Of course, we should all keep our radiation exposure as low as we can, and I don't in any way mean to minimize the devastation of the events at Fukushima, but its effects in California, while detectable, seem to be extremely insignificant so far.

I would also ask myself why ENENews chose to delete that explanation when it reprinted the chart.

[Dan Underhill]

I was talking to an old guy with a background (about 60 years) in nuclear engineering today. He speculated that it came airborne from Fukushima, Japan. This is speculation, but it is from a fellow who has studied this stuff for a while. That is how much he said and the rest is my somewhat less expert opinion: Unfortunately, the only thing we can do is avoid those products where the radioactive toxins concentrate. Milk products are a good example. Unfortunately, our government is presently in the pocket of corporate industry and will NOT be offering us any warnings that might cause us to curb our purchase of products, and it won't be telling us when we should filter our breathing, as lots of people going about with face masks due to radiation concerns might cut into the profit margin and public support of the nuclear industry. One of the primary reasons we don't have a properly socialized public health system here is that such a system would be in a position to find concentrations of specific diseases and link them to the corporate industrial practices that cause them.

[John K]

Are you testing whether anybody's reading?

Holy cow! Is it Fukushima?