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All Belgians To Be Given Iodine Pills In Case Of Nuclear Accident (phys.org)
mdsolar quotes a report from Phys.Org: Belgium is to provide iodine pills to its entire population of around 11 million people to protect against radioactivity in case of a nuclear accident, the health minister was quoted as saying Thursday. The move comes as Belgium faces growing pressure from neighboring Germany to shutter two ageing nuclear power plants near their border due to concerns over their safety. Iodine pills, which help reduce radiation build-up in the human thyroid gland, had previously only been given to people living within 20 kilometres (14 miles) of the Tihange and Doel nuclear plants. Health Minister Maggie De Block was quoted by La Libre Belgique newspaper as telling parliament that the range had now been expanded to 100 kilometers, effectively covering the whole country. The health ministry did not immediately respond to AFP when asked to comment. The head of Belgium's French-speaking Green party, Jean-Marc Nollet, backed the measures but added that "just because everyone will get these pills doesn't mean there is no longer any nuclear risk," La Libre reported. Belgium's creaking nuclear plants have been causing safety concerns for some time after a series of problems ranging from leaks to cracks and an unsolved sabotage incident. Yesterday, a nuclear plant in Germany was reportedly infected with a computer virus.
I highly doubt the failure of a Belgian nuclear plan will come as an accident. They're afraid of terrorist attacks on their nuclear plants, and are preparing by handing out iodine pills instead of eliminating the underlying threat.
But it is much cheaper to hand out iodine pills rather than deal with the terrorists or even to properly maintain an aging reactor.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Unless the pills come with a warning less than two sentences long in large print explaining WHY the instructions should be followed*, this will hurt more people than it will save. Some people won't trust advice like "do not take this except in the case of a nuclear accident." They'll take them for their cold. They'll take them to treat cancer. They'll take them to see it it gets them high. And if, God forbid, there is an accident some will take disastrously large doses leaving others without. You could publicly distribute clearly marked salt pills and expect 10 cases of salt overdose within the week.
*and a huge public education effort as well
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
You don't use iodine pills to commit suicide!
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Yes, you can overdose. Heck, you can overdose on salt or even water, and they are not normally considered poisons. If you want to play it safe, or if you don't have an iodine pill, the best thing to do when your local nuke reactor goes critical is to grab the little bottle of iodine that has been in the medicine cabinet for ages and smear the iodine solution liberally all over you. Your thyroid wants iodine and it is going to do what it can to get it, The reactor just released some nasty radioactive isotope of iodine. So the best thing that you can do is get the hell out of there and expose your body to as much non-radioactive iodine as you can safely, so that the thyroid takes up that rather than the nasty radioactive isotope.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Do I take radiation pills for an iodine accident?
Table-ized A.I.
They did this in Ireland about 10 years or so ago at a cost of a few Million Euro as Dublin is closer to the Sellafield Nuclear Power station in England than Leeds is. However the tablets had an expiry date of 3 years or so and it has never been repeated so that was a useful investment. :-)
Most of the "green" credit in politics here comes from shutting down stuff that has reached it's end of life anyway or getting close to it and getting free publicity for something that would be done anyway. Keeping that old plant going would mean serious rebuilds. Remember it's not just reactors - there's a lot of pipework under stress that doesn't last forever.
The real decision was made years ago because you can't have a civilian nuclear industry without building a reactor every few years so that the skillsets are not lost - so the choice was made to halt and we're seeing nothing but the tail of what was. Outside India, China and Russia the civilian nuclear industry is effectively dead and would require a very expensive restart before anything better than early 1980s technology (AP1000) can happen.
is now going to be a nation of ghouls!
It's perfectly safe and anyone who disagrees is a tree-hugging enviro whack-job!
They might be unreliable in regards to uptime, but until now, there has never been a serious nuclear incident at any of them. Obviously, even the tiniest issue in any system even remotely related to those plants is being magnified and overexposed and used as a bad example why nuclear is bad.
Nuclear is bad because of the bad politics that surround it and Belgium is no exception. Those plants should've been replaced by newer plants about 15 years ago.
This has been the case in Switzerland for some time. You get them when you first move to a "danger area". Then you rapidly forget where you've put them.
soylentnews.org
Given that Brussels, where the EU bigheads find themselves fairly often, is in Belgium this would appear to include them as well.
Wonder how long it'll be before the EU puts pressure on BE to actually make safe (however that needs to be done) the reactors in question.
blindly antisocialist = antisocial
This must be the thinking of the early nuclear days of around 1945. Iodine pills will cause your thyroid gland to absorb the iodine from the pills, rather than radiated iodine from the environment (water, food, etc). That's great, because you don't want your thyroid going all super-mutant on you. But, radiation can have bad effects on you in more ways than messing up your thyroid! It would seem to me that if there were a nuclear incident, it would be better to evacuate, than to just sit there and take a couple of pills and think "OK, now I'm safe".
I'm usually in either Silicon Valley or western Nevada.
After Fukishima, but before the fallout cloud got here, I tried to get some iodine supplement pills, to load up on non-radioactive iodine before the cloud arrived.
Couldn't do it.
There were no iodine supplements in the drug stores, or the health-food stores.
Also no tincture of iodine, iodine-based water purification tablets at the camping stores (where it used to be available as a water purifier - and has since been replace by other chemicals, ultrafilters, and backpack-sized pressure-cookers.)
(Even iodized salt was hard to find - and would have been poisonous at the necessary levels absent major iodine extraction.)
A compounding pharmacy offered to make up some - for an exorbatant fee - but they didn't have potassium iodide or other iodine compounds in stock. They would have had to back-order it, and the pills would have taken a month (while the fallout cloud would arrive in a couple days.
WTF?
Turns out that it's a casualty of the Drug War. Iodine is used in some street-drug manufacturing process. So (like pseudoephedrine) the government has imposed massive red tape on sales to the general population. These make it unprofitable, so the major outlets have all dropped it and moved on to other things.
Many months later I heard someone being interviewed on a conservative talk radio show, suggesting that the government should stock iodine supplements around the country and make them available on a moment's notice for protection from radiological attacks and other events - and for people to stock them themselves. He and the host were lamenting that the stupid bureaucrats wouldn't take such an obvious preventative measure. If I hadn't been on my way to work at the time I'd have called in and told them "It's the Drug War, stupid!"
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
here, and do not forget that, if you see a mushroom cloud, you have to pick up the phone and call the local police!
Until now, everyone living within 20km of a nuclear power plant had to have immediate access to iodine pills. The High Council for Health (a scientific body responsible for giving advice concerning health regulations to the government) has advised to increased this radius to 100km, and the government has followed this advice. Everyone in Belgium lives within 100km of a Belgian, Dutch or French nuclear power plant. Hence, iodine pills for everyone.
Donate free food here
They didn't get the same "no child left behind" or "ebonics" cut-price education that would require what you suggest.
One thing I've learned over time is that idiocy is pretty universal. Us Americans just like talking about it more.
I don't read AC A human right
Because she didn't destroy security for all Europe, or even Germany?
Also, it's spelled "Merkel". If you can't even get that right, why should anyone listen to anything you have to say on the matter? Clearly you don't have a full grasp of the situation.
"Thousands of terrorists"? Are you really that scared? Or just massively ignorant? Either way you are not operating rationally, and seem woefully confused about reality.
Belgium currently has a rather conservative "rightist" government.
The verb "given" is slightly misleading since nobody will actually get any pills.
The pills will be distributed to pharmacists in the country.
Belgians will be able to retrieve (women and children first) their box of pills only after a nuclear incident has occurred.
Nevermind, my reading comprehension failed yet again.
It seems you were discussing the neighbouring countries' governments.
What a surprise!
http://thesolutionsproject.org...
Yeah, mdsolar, I believe anything you say about the safety records of nuclear power plants in civilized countries about as much as I believe a birther talking about Obama's citizenship.
Interesting point for anybody about to come to MD's defense here: Ever once see him whine about all the nuclear power plants they are building in China? No? Maybe it's because his agenda really has nothing to do with "protecting" us all from the "evils" of nuclear power and maybe he's just out spreading propaganda for his masters.
AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
Rueters urges all nuclear plants be under international security control. http://blogs.reuters.com/great...
There have been drone incursions as well. http://m.smh.com.au/world/dron...
It depends what you call a terrorist of course. Is a terrorist someone who blows himself up? Well we don't have thousands of terrorists. Is a terrorist someone who actively supports terrorists with logistics and money and safe houses? Well then we have a few thousand terrorist, but indeed 'thousands' seems to be an exaggeration. Is a terrorist someone who sympathizes with the radical ideology and sees them as heroes, without active support? Well then we have tens of thousands of terrorists.
Terrorism is a spectrum. Not only those will kill or blow themselves up are terrorists. The entire system can be seen as a terrorist organization. It is up for debate where the boundaries of the system are.
All those post-democratic problems are a symptom of a failing state. This article is about nuclear power. Although a majority of the population wants them gone, and that's a fact for over 15 years, the last government decided against the will of the majority, and didn't close them at the agreed date, but even prolong their existence for another (at least) 10 years.
This decision was made by the industry against the will of the population. Practically all of the western democratic countries have the same post-democratic problems. In the US it's the same as in the EU. The US has Trump as anti-establishment, Europe has many more (less known because the EU is still a collection of smaller independent states). These politicians are all symptoms of the failing democracies.
They are in fact a voice against the left wing liberalism, against the so called political correctness, the propaganda that diversity is only good, that multiculturalism is the only way forward etc. For me personally multiculturalism is the opposite, it is mono culture. Regional languages are disappearing and are replaced by mono cultural Americanism. From East to West, South to North, everyone watches television or youtube, everyone watches the same programs or plays the same games. Local cultural initiatives no longer survive. Small sport and culture clubs can't survive the high amount of bureaucracy and the infiltration of incompatible cultural elements (this last element is a non recognized but real problem, it is still a taboo to talk about this problem). Many people have had enough but politicians don't listen. And this is why extreme politicians become so popular. Instead of looking at the real problem and listen to how the people feel, the current people in charge decide to focus on the messenger and ignore what is on peoples mind.
For a guy calling himself 'mdsolar', how many pro-solar power articles have you seen him post? He doesn't even seem to be pro-renewable energy or anti-fossil fuel, just solidly anti-nuclear.
I'm convinced that he's actually an Eliza bot run by the coal industry.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a youtube comments section scrolling - forever.
If you read that, you'll see I oppose a carbon tax. So, your claim seems unsupported.
Different energy range and particle composition. You seem confused.
Here are a couple cool ones that did not get picked. Resubmit them if you like. https://slashdot.org/submissio... https://slashdot.org/submissio...
http://www.chernobylreport.org...
Regulation is what keeps free markets free. Where would we be without antitrust regulations? In a competition free zone of monopoly-only enteprise. Zero creative destruction. Stuck and sinking into a nazi hell. Your understanding of capitalism seems weak.
You do seem silly.
That is not evidence. That is your guesswork dressed up with a link to Wikipedia. You're not really looking like someone who gives a shit about credibility.
A terrorist is someone who uses violence or the threat thereof to enact political change. So no, you can't just say "it's a spectrum" and include anyone you want. Well, you can, but it's illogical and anyone with more than a fleeting familiarity with critical thinking knows you are off your rocker.
So yeah, you are an Anonymous Coward par excellence.
We have had these pills for as long as i can remember, the only difference is that now everyone gets them, not just hose living close to the nuclear plants or research centers. But since this is a tiny country it's only a small part of the population that didn't already have them.
What the fuck are you talking about? Do you think that acknowledging that your country has a very real problem with an unassimilated immigrant population that has a propensity for committing terrorism is the same thing as RACIAL GENOCIDE?!?
Do me a favor. I want you to call up your mother tonight and apologize to her for growing up to be a complete fucking idiot.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
Just not as easy to fix. Cesium and strontium are both a problem https://vceenviroscience.edubl...
So what is your final solution?
US debates plan to hand out ice cubes in case of global warming.
In common fictional TV shows, nuclear disasters ALWAYS end with a big flashy atomic mushroom cloud. Also, radiation kills people in about 5 to 15 seconds after giving them epileptic seizures.
Due to the way certain news agencies presented facts, some people honestly believe that Fukishima had three atomic explosions that killed 10,000 people.
And then they pray to there imaginary sky fairies for help. Sadly there are entire TV channels dedicated to just that specific retardation.
oh good, so you've completed your initiation into the McCarthy club so that now simply failing to deny or denounce is the same as an admission of membership.
I used to think your clownishness knew at least some bounds.
seems I was wrong.
your choices regulated of topic also seem interesting....and ill-informed as usual.
healthcare hasn't been regulated to death. it did it to itself.
the same goes for internet service, which oddly enough is more robust in countries that DID regulate it in the public's interest creating the competition you crave so desperately.
at this point you're no more intelligent nor insightful than a windup toy:
say the magic word and you spout the same predictable BS.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
Why not just say "LEARN TO SPEAK AMERICAN!" and save me from sitting through a fucking advertisement before making it to some sort of joke as lame as mine above?