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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.
You don't use iodine pills to commit suicide!
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
You can, around 10-20mg/kg is the LD50 in most animals, however these will not be pure iodine pills.
Your take iodine to stop the body taking up radioactive iodine, which gets quite nasty due to its activity and retention.
If your bodies iodine requirements are met already, the radioactive iodine will pass through you with little effect.
For the general population, iodine supplements are highly beneficial, primarily to the brain development and function.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iodine_deficiency
This seems like a low risk, low cost, if somewhat paranoid precaution.
Iodine is not exactly a difficult thing to source in bulk if/when needed, but hey, why not.
Since I know someone who went through thyroid cancer, including ablation using I-131, I was somewhat familiar, with the issues, including the effects of insufficient iodine.
With no thyroid tissue (following radioactive ablation), the body won't retain any iodine.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
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.
Most people get enough iodine from table salt, since here in the west we've been adding it to that since the 1920's when they figured out it was a fast, easy and cheap way of fixing the problem. It's only the people who don't use salt at all that are really at risk. My mother had iodine deficiency as a kid(grew up in east germany), nothing like decades of problems with it and it's such a simple problem to fix.
Om, nomnomnom...
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.
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
Ah, a link to a video as a reply - how postliterate of you!
More seriously, one of my pet hates is links to videos without context but that's just me so I don't actually think less of you for it. I hate the trend for a long list of reasons, especially for those situations where someone tries to send me to an hour long TED talk when a single line comment about something I'm already aware of will do.
I will follow that link some time later.
Back on topic, I don't actually know how much damage the education funding cuts from Reagan onwards did but it looks like a hell of a lot. More typos in newspapers etc may just be due to staff cuts but the end result is hard to distinguish from idiocracy.
We live "near" two nuclear plants and a temporary storage and research facility in Switzerland. All households around here have these pills in storage. So far no major problems occurred with that. I expect in Belgium it'll be similar. In the US I couldn't say, although my prejudices are screaming at me to go all out ;).
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
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
But, radiation can have bad effects on you in more ways than messing up your thyroid!
Most of the other radioactive elements don't bio-accumulate like iodine does. They also don't concentrate quite so easily. So the pills are to prevent you from picking the iodine while they get you out and perform the other necessary decontamination.
I don't read AC A human right
Most salts don't contain iodine.
It is written on the package if it does. I usually salt with iodine but also simple sea salt, which contains all kinds of salts/minerals.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
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.
Most salts in the "west" (what the person wrote - assuming they mean the US) are indeed iodized. Sea salt however has no added iodine (though it has its normal iodine levels). Pickling/canning salt isn't iodized either.
"99 dead duelists of Dios on the wall. 99 dead duelists of Dios! Take one's ring, pass it around..."
Hmm, I can't seem to find an hour long TED talk describing how much I agree with you... so this "comment" will have to do. ((insert emoji of a sad chicken crying with its head in its wings here))
"99 dead duelists of Dios on the wall. 99 dead duelists of Dios! Take one's ring, pass it around..."
Potassium iodide isn't entirely stable in air(it's somewhat hygroscopic, so humidity isn't a good idea; and in the presence of carbon dioxide and oxygen it can gradually react to form potassium carbonate and elemental iodine; but unless your packaging and storage practices are unbelievably shoddy you should be able to get much more than 3 years of shelf life. Even if you don't flush with dry nitrogen before sealing, the oxidation products aren't excitingly dangerous so whatever air is left in the bottle would just degrade a portion of the product and leave a slightly impure but still almost full strength remainder.
Here's the site that they used in Ontario, not bad as far as public education sites go. I particularly enjoyed the "should I feed it to my pet" faq. Surely the result of a headdesk after too many people called the info line.
https://preparetobesafe.ca/
Min
On the whole, I find that I prefer Slashdot posts to twitter ones because I don't get limited to 140 chars before
Won't handing out the pills just make the public think the plant is more dangerous than they thought before?
actually, the computer is British invention, (http://www.bletchleypark.org.uk/content/hist/ ) that due to political lack of foresight we gave to the Americans and then destroyed and hushed it up as secret for 50 years.
The WWW is British too, so the internet as in webpages which most of your countrymen consider the "internet" isn't American either.
Thank you for demonstrating the stereotype of Americans being stupid, you win the internet.
Do you know what energy source kills the most people, and causes the most cancers? Answer = THE SUN. Compared to nuclear, solar energy has killed multitudes more people. But we are not afraid to go out into the sun, and yet some folks quiver in fear at the prospect of low dose radiation from a nuclear plant, even and accident. Chernobyl pales in comparison to those killed by solar energy.
Sadly, this is true. Its an interesting aspect of human behavior, fear things we are not familiar with.
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.
Back on topic, I don't actually know how much damage the education funding cuts from Reagan onwards did but it looks like a hell of a lot. More typos in newspapers etc may just be due to staff cuts but the end result is hard to distinguish from idiocracy.
And what cuts were those? The US spends vast amounts of money on education. Typically around 1/2 of all property taxes go to local education. That's in addition to federal education spending
Many will dismiss the link because it comes from the Cato Institute but they got the data from government sources. You're right that education sucks in America but it's not for a lack of spending.
Peace is easy to achieve, just surrender. Liberty is much harder get/keep.
http://www.chernobylreport.org...
The reason why here in the west(North America, most of Central America, most of Asia and most of Europe), we add iodine to salt is because goiter was such a wide spread problem at one point, that adding it fixed the problem. A lot of those countries you've visited, you'll find moderate to serious thyroid problems throughout the population.
Om, nomnomnom...
Thesupraman has everything right and I'm just filling in background.
What makes a radioisotope dangerous is
1. A long enough half-life that it is still around when the plume reaches its first victims
2. A short enough half-life to be intensely radioactive.
3. A tendency to get stuck in the body by looking like something the body normally uses. Strontium-90 mimics calcium. Iodine is iodine.
I've seen potassium iodide in mail order catalogs.