Boss Radio

That was a quote from a farmer back in 1957. His farm was close to the Windscale nuclear reactor, and back in '57 they had an incident. It was a fire, but over the entire period of the incident and its aftermath it was never referred to as such. With the cooperation of the authorities and a much more pliant news service than we have today it was described as all manner of weird things, all of which translated into 'fire', but the 'F' word was never used.

Speaking today a present day "Nuclear expert" said it was ridiculous. "They said that the smoke coming from the chimney was steam and completely harmless," he said. "But nothing visible should come out of that chimney. Whatever you could see meant you were in trouble." No one told the poor old farmer that and he went on his merry way believing that a little iodine dissolved in steam was completely harmless. It took a travelling salesman who called in on the farm to tell him that his cow's milk was now dangerously polluted and was going to have to be poured away.

News footage of the day showed churns of milk being poured down the drain. This was actually staged by angry farmers, the milk was, in fact, watered down until the radiation was 'harmless' and then poured into the sea.

Some of the harmless radiation washed up on the shores of Ireland.

I doubt anyone needs reminding that they're having a bit of a nuclear problem in Japan right now. On our news we were assured that it was unlikely that any radiation to escape into the atmosphere would be "Negligible" and "Harmless" (There's that word again). The 20 Km exclusion belt was a precautionary measure they said, and so was the 30 Km exclusion belt. When radiation was found in the sea they said it was mostly normal and probably unconnected with the accident. On the BBC a weatherman, put on the spot, opined that "The radioactive iodine is unlikely to reach us". Later in a more researched answer another meteorologist stated that we were lucky as we were on the other side of the world. If any of the radiation from Japan did reach us, he said, it would be unmeasurable. Today (Actually I've just noticed that it's now yesterday...) they told us that the radiation had reached us but it was only about a 10,000th of background radiation.

So it IS measurable then.

Meanwhile in one of its 'Number crunching' spots 'Private Eye' listed the following:-
200,000: Approximate number of people evacuated from around the Fukushima nuclear power plant.
2002: Year in which a whistleblower alerted the authorities to falsified safety records at the plant.
29: Number of times that Tepco (Plant owners) were found to have falsified records to conceal damage to reactors.

I'm not like that farmer. If a nuclear engineer told me grass was green I'd agree with him, but if he told me nuclear power was safe I might just laugh at him a bit.