Word: strontium
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Last week, in confirming an embarrassing blunder, U.S. officials acknowledged that their assessment of Bikini was premature. Periodic radiological surveys conducted by the Government since 1975 showed that the earlier tests had been inadequate. Bikini's well water still contains strontium 90 and cesium 137, radioactive products of the bomb tests, and so do the coconuts, fruits and vegetables grown on the island...
...Interior Department, which has supervisory authority over the island as part of the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands, insisted that none of the people on Bikini had shown any adverse effects from radiation during periodic health checks. But officials found that levels of strontium and cesium, as well as of plutonium, were rising alarmingly among the returned islanders, and they now believe that Bikini probably will not be safe for long-term human occupation for another 35 to 50 years. "It is now clear," as the department put it, "that for the foreseeable future the island of Bikini should...
...Russians, by contrast, seem less advanced in the use of solar energy and employ nuclear power supplies more frequently in earth orbit. Furthermore, to generate high power (100 kilowatts or more), they use a fission process, which produces radioactive strontium 90, cesium and iodine - all far more threatening to human life than the alpha particles generated by the U.S.'s plutonium 238 fuel...
...Boston Edison Pilgrim II plant will be 1180 megawatts) produces as much high-level waste as 1000 Hiroshima-sized bombs each and every year. There are over 28 different radioactive substances routinely emitted from these nuclear reactors, all of which are ecologically dangerous and some of which, such as strontium-90 and cesium-131, will be a disposal problem for 600 to 1000 years. The most deadly emission, of course, is plutonium. Its lethality is such that one-millionth of a gram is sufficient to cause lung cancer--and a large reactor annually produces 400 pounds. Once produced it must...
...experiments have often proved false in the past. Robert A. Millikan, winner of the 1923 Nobel prize in physics, predicted that atomic energy would never be harnessed by man. When that idea was discredited scientists told the public that radioactive fallout was only minimally dangerous. Then came Hiroshima and Strontium 90 and Iodine...