Slashdot Mirror
Fukushima and Chernobyl Side-by-Side
gbrumfiel writes "It's now been six months since an earthquake and tsunami sparked a triple meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. New data from the Japanese government is now allowing a closer comparison of the fallout from the disaster with the Chernobyl. In terms of Cs-137, the contaminant of greatest concern, Fukushima appears to be about a fifth as bad as Chernobyl. Nature News has a Google Earth mash-up that lets you see the two accidents together. Nature also reports that chaos and bureaucracy are slowing efforts to research the crisis." (Note: There's plenty left for Linux users in the accompanying text, but the Google Earth plug-in is for Windows and Mac OS X only.)
I had a friend who was actually considering buying a radiation detector back when this was in the news (he lives in Virginia, mind you). Of course, this is the same friend who also thought bird-flu/SARS/the West Nile Virus/ebola were going to sweep the world in a pandemic and Y2K was going to cause all our computers to explode. Some people are always looking for a reason to panic.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.