I find it very hard to believe that materials that "have half-lives on the order of billions of years" produce enough radiation to be noticeable from the background radiation. That is exactly the kind of scaremongering that makes the reporting "emotive or otherwise sub-optimal".
Radiation is easy to detect and easier to vilify. But notice that no actual numbers we given in the article. The best they could get was "up to 88 times higher than those allowed under international guidelines." A statement so emotional and devoid of actual content.
That said, I wish companies would try to properly dispose of their toxic (and/or radioactive) waste products and not give it to people to paint their houses with.
Don't complain about fact poor reporting by countering with your own.
You have roughly 40 grams of potassium in your body at any given moment. Roughly 40 milligrams of that are a radioactive isotope (and a gamma emitter at that). Note that this isn't due to human industry: the radioactive potassium in your body was formed in stars billions of years ago. It's everywhere, and in nearly every natural aggregate material on earth, be it organic or not.
You are roughly 1 part per million radioactive potassium. Will this give you cancer? Possibly. Some couple 100 people per year globally will die of cancers induced by this potassium. This is just part of the radioactive background risk that we accept as natural.
You can't have an accurate conversation about material risks without quantifying concentration vs the background.
For example, living near Denver for a year will expose you to more radiation than living next to Fukushima during the accident would. This is because there's high radon in the Denver area geography.
But I'd bet if you asked all of the couple million people if they're safer from cancer in Denver or Fukushima all but a handful of nutbars and nuclear industry folks would answer Denver.
I don't mean to just be an apologist here: we should care a lot about toxic releases of all forms. But right now the discussion is entirely dominated by alarmism and there's little accurate information. This is disastrous because it means we direct too many resources toward lessor risks, and the media and population as a whole ignores larger risks.
Those people do not have the luxury of conducting scientific experiments, but we still have the responsibility to accurately report what is going on. This is important because inaccurate reporting can cause an unjustified marginalization in the future, if it is later discovered that the radioactive effects of the pollutants were not to blame. For example, if you frame an argument against depleted uranium munitions as "this stuff is radioactive!", you are going to lose valuable support and sympathy when it becomes clear that the radioactivity in depleted uranium does not account for the wide range of symptoms that you originally attributed to it.
"The food they are eating is radioactive" by itself, means next to nothing. It is true of all people. At least give us the radioactivity in estimated banana equivalent dosage.
With Fukushima, the Japanese government kept raising the 'safe' or "'allowable' limit of radiation, every time the detected levels breached limits, thus making a mockery of their own guidelines.
Meanwhile, discussion about safety limits were framed around 'natural' and 'background' radiation, without informing people that caesium-137 and strontium-90 are man-made by-products of nuclear fission (which some would argue the acceptable limit is zero).
By all means, let's do the science, but in the absence of rigorous experiments, I don't think it's scaremongering to err on the side of caution when anecdotal evidence points to serious health issues.
>Meanwhile, discussion about safety limits were framed around 'natural' and 'background' radiation, without informing people that caesium-137 and strontium-90 are man-made by-products of nuclear fission (which some would argue the acceptable limit is zero).
This just makes me suspect that you really are not qualified to have this conversation. What, pray tell, is the difference in danger between an alpha particle that comes from a man-made isotope, and one that comes from a natural isotope? That you use scare quotes ('natural' and 'background' radiation) gives me additional pause. You do realize that radiation is radiation, no matter how the source of it was made, right? Naturally occurring radiation is no less real than radiation that emanates from substances which we create.
Comparing radiation exposures to the baseline background levels is the only rational thing to do. It is impossible to have a rational discussion about radiation if you don't do that.
> I don't think it's scaremongering to err on the side of caution
Certainly. Tell people what is known, the limits of what is known, the consequences of possible realities, and what they should do to protect themselves. That is reasonable reporting.
However, simply mentioning that "radioactive things are being eaten", is scare mongering. It sounds scary, but the statement is true of from natural organic fruit from two-thousand years ago before industrialized society to a slightly charred poundcake from Hiroshima after August 6th 1945. Without specifying the parameters, it means nothing but induces fear nevertheless. It is textbook scare mongering, and besides being absolute shit journalism, it is actively harmful for the reasons I have previously laid out.
Writers use words like 'natural' and 'background' to not only correctly identify those sources of radiation, but also because the language is reassuring to readers; naturally occurring background radiation sounds normal and doesn't cause panic. If writers were to describe man-made sources of radiation as being the result of fallout from weapons testing or dispersal of waste material from a nuclear accident, readers would panic regardless of the details.
I would prefer reporting to distinguish between sources. Firstly, as people may mistakenly believe that all background radiation is natural without realizing that man-made sources are contributing to overall levels. Secondly, as radioactive isotopes affect the human body differently when ingested or inhaled, people should be aware of the different health risks from man-made sources. For example, Sr-90 is linked to bone cancer and leukemia, Cesium-137 concentrates in muscle tissue, while I-131 collects in the thyroid.
I wish there was more accurate reporting, with limits and parameters as you mention, but it seems problematic as the science is complicated, physicists are not physicians, journalists are neither, and vested interests are at play.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffmcmahon/2012/05/29/should-we...
I read this article today which does a decent job of estimating cancer deaths based on a certain amount of exposure: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000087239639044477240457758...
Some locations recorded doses as high as 22 rem (total exposure before evacuation). Afterward, the levels of radiation dropped quickly; the largest component came from iodine, and its level dropped by 50% every eight days.
How many cancers will such a dose trigger? To calculate an answer, assume that the entire population of that 2-rem-plus region, about 22,000 people, received the highest dose: 22 rem. (This obviously overestimates the danger.) The number of excess cancers expected is the dose (22 rem) multiplied by the population (22,000), divided by 2,500. This equals 194 excess cancers.
If you lived there and had seen the onset of serious health issues ever since the factory came to town, wouldn't the anecdotal evidence be enough to convince you of the cause? If I observe a zombie eating a person, and that person comes back from the dead to attack othres, I don't need to know if it's the bite that's responsible, I just need to stay away from zombies.