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Carrie McLaren is a guest blogger at Boing Boing and coauthor of Ad Nauseam: A Survivor's Guide to American Consumer Culture. She lives in Brooklyn, the former home of her now defunct Stay Free! magazine.
I found this 1972 Investor-Owned Electric Light and Power Companies ad in a Taschen collection.Radioactivity. It's been in the family for generations. In fact, scientists can tell us just how old our remote ancestors are by measuring the radioactivity still in the bones of prehistoric cave dwellers.
Was this really reassuring? All of the dead people you've ever heard about are radioactive! Why not: "Radiation: because EVERYTHING causes cancer!"
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Why not: "Radiation: because EVERYTHING causes cancer!" But this simply isn't true, not everything causes cancer. There are many many materials that are way too poisionous to cause cancer. If it kills you quickly, you won't live long enough to get cancer.
Oh goody! I get to go first and point out that everything produces radiation! A married couple who worked as health physics told me that a man and his wife expose each other to given amount radiation as lay together. How you like those apples!
Was this ad meant to reassure their customers or a way of saving money by not putting extra shielding on their reactors?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZcdRQkJulAU
Radioactive cereal anyone?
Granite countertop in your kitchen (if you have one) also produces radiation. No kidding. Just google "granite radiation" and see it for yourself. Scary!
my god...the state (lack) of science education in our culture is truly frightening....
Although this ad is admittedly poorly executed, as a physicist, I can see where this ad is coming from. The point, I think, is to try to make people less afraid of the words "nuclear" and "radiation". The ad authors are correct: virtually everything in the universe is radioactive and, contrary to what most people have been lead to believe, this is not a bad thing. It's just how nature works.
People totally misunderstand (a) what "radiation" is and (b) that there's nothing inteherently dangerous implied by the word "nuclear". For example, when you get a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scan done, a _nuclear_ process involving "radiation" is taking place. We used to call MRI "nuclear magnetic resonance imaging", but dropped the word "nuclear" because it was scaring people. People can no longer hear the words "radiation" or "nuclear" without them conjuring images of Hiroshima or Chernobyl. This is sad, because it leads to a lot of uninformed opposition to things like nuclear power generation. People think that all kinds of "radiation" are equally bad. It's just like people who think that "chemicals" are universally bad. Water is a chemical. Glucose is a chemical.
The ad in this post is trying, I think, to dispel some of the fear surrounding the word "radiation". As I said, the ad doesn't work very well, but it's not the grand corporate lie it appears to be.
You see, children, everything gives off some form of radiation. The birds in the air, the fish in the sea, why, even the flowers in your back garden! And ESPECIALLY television.
Sometimes this radiation can even be very healthy for you! Some "good" radiation comes from the sun, and it helps your skin make vitamins that keep you strong!
People may tell you that the nuclear plant near your house is very very dangerous and could kill you if it ever had its way. These people are most likely old people, or young people who are what mommy and daddy like to call "easily indoctrinated." Those are big words, I know!
You see, when the old people were young, scary things were happening with nuclear bombs and nuclear power plants that got a bad temper and got out of control! But nice people, very very smart nice people, figured out much better ways to keep things safe. And now, your neighborhood nuclear plant is much, much nicer than the grumpy coal-fired plant that used to be there, and cleaner, too!
So, the next time someone tells you that the florescent lights in the bathroom are going to kill you, or that the nuclear plant on the edge of the city in which you live is going to explode like a big bomb and kill you and mommy and daddy, well, you just tell them this: "Quit your fear-mongering and do some research, and maybe you'll realize that things aren't always guaranteed to destroy everything, and sometimes scientists are smarter than you are."
Recently I had a physicist associated with a cancer hospital explain to me that medical radiation is safe because it only slightly exceeds background radiation. Background radiation is safe, therefore doubling it is also safe, voila! Also, he explained, there is a village in Tajikistan or some such place where villagers are exposed to natural radiation levels five or six times greater than our local exposure, yet their cancer rates are lower than worldwide average. Radiation is good for you!
Phillamb168 wins the "Snarky Comment of the Week" award.
*applause*
(Oh, and breeder reactors FTW. There shouldn't even be any reason for Yucca Mountain.)
and then the Three Mile Island accident came along a few years later, ensuring radiation would be in the family for generations to come...
People say "oh, chernobyl was badly designed, we will never have another chernobyl" but the problem of stupid behaviour by primates was not caused by the admittedly dangerous design of Chernobyl's reactor. I don't believe people can be trusted to run nuclear plants, at least not at our current stage of social and economic development.
http://www.greenpeace.org/international/news/chernobyl-deaths-180406
#6, Ito Kagehisa:
It's not just carbon dating that uses radiation. Potassium-argon dating is often used for dating early hominid remains, as carbon dating just can't measure this far back.
The description of early man as 'cave dwellers' is laughable, though.
AmyConnor #5
Back in 1981, when I was taking a physics class at the University of Texas, one of my favorite instructors was Dr. Rory Coker. At the time, we were having regular anti-nuclear demonstrations organized by the No Nukes campus club to force the shutdown of the South Texas Nuclear Project (STP), a reactor under construction near Houston.
To address the concerns of some students in the class, Dr. Coker once showed us a slide of radiation level measurements from all over the city, and pointed out that the highest levels of radiaton recorded in Austin were not at the nuclear reactor in the basement of the physics building below our classroom nor at the Texas Experimental Tokamak (TEXT) fusion reactor down the street in Wheeler Hall, but at the State Capitol Building downtown, where the legislature was currently in session. The Capitol was constructed almost entirely of granite and marble, and with so much granite in such a concentrated structure, its radiation levels were much higher than those around our local nuclear reactors. He pointed out that the governor and all the elected representatives in Texas probably didn't know or understand how much radiation they were exposing themselves to simply by going to work every day. Then again, the background radiation at the Capitol was still well within the normal safety range.
Amazing -- so our cavemen ancestors had to constantly worry about dinosaur attacks AND radioactivity????
what ever happened to those studies in the nineties that revealed all the "safe dose" calculations for ionizing radiation exposure that they used for decades were based on fast and dirty, flawed field science going all the way back to Hiroshima?
And I don't believe fat men should be trusted to wear speedos. But I would like to hope, that at our current stage of social and economic development, that it would take more that blind emotions to write off a source of energy.
Modern nuclear reactor designs make meltdown a physical impossibility (as in, a violation of the laws of physics), and produce less radioactive waste than solar power or wind (that release trace radioactive materials from silica sand in the silicon manufacturing).
it's in the air for you and me! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eaScyfSHc-Y
or on a slightly more modern note: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kXD6Gtinvbc
Sadly, because of the ignorance and fearmongering of the no nuke crowd, we find ourselves more dependent on oil, produced by some very unsavoury types that don't like us. Nuclear power is the cleanest, safest and most efficient power out there. But, America loves fear, and scientists will always be ignored when some high school drop out Hollywood actor decides to opine about something they know nothing about.
More nukes, less oil. More reason, less ninnies.
#20: But how do you propose we harvest the energy from these fat men in Speedos? Blue-Sky thinking is all very well if you work for DARPA, but this is the real world, dammit!
Also, is it just me, or is anyone else picking up a 4Chan motivator vibe off that poster?
@ Gilbert Wham, OH crap, Gil. You said their (its?) Name, NOW they'll show up in droves!! ;) j/k
Some people are accidentally funny. Phil Lamb is accidentally serious.
DiHydrogen Oxide is FAR more lethal though. Tens of thousands die per year!
Human bones are full of radioactive potassium isotope. So are bananas. Be safe, avoid bananas, and have your bones removed.
For a good scare, take a GM counter with you on a cross country airline flight. It's a few hundred counts per minute. Professional pilots have elevated cataract incidence from radiation exposure.
Glossy magazines use kaolin clay with a bit of uranium. So does clay-type kitty litter
http://www.orau.org/PTP/collection/consumer%20products/magazines.htm