Like any caring person, right now our thoughts and prayers are with the victims of the tragedy that has hit Japan and that has so profoundly affected all of humanity so deeply.
It is as if we are caught in a nightmare that will never end or stop. For elderly Japanese in particular with the memories of World War 2, this must be like the end of the world all over again.
As conditions worsen, rumor and panic are becoming heightened and more widespread. Germany just shut down all its nuclear power plants. The British yesterday told all their nationals to “get out of Japan NOW before the situation gets any worse.”
To help you make sense of what is fact and what is fiction, what the danger really is, how likely a “worst case scenario” is, and how to be prepared if we really do experience nuclear fallout and how to prepare yourself ahead of time “just in case”, please read this article.
And to help those in the epi-center of this disaster right now, please stop everything for sixty seconds and say a prayer that peace will come soon on wings from up high.
The China Syndrome
Most of the near-hysteria about this nuclear meltdown is in what is called “The China Syndrome”. Hollywood made a movie about it, the scenario being that the intense heat from the reactor would burn a hole all the way through the Earth to China.
Well, that just won’t happen. But the radiation will get into the atmosphere and it will get picked up by the trade winds and transported all over the globe. That’s how the world works.
The bottom line is that even if there is a meltdown in one of the Japanese reactors, it is unlikely to breach containment in an upward direction. The containment around nuclear reactors is really, really strong. In the United States they must be strong enough to withstand the impact of a fully loaded passenger airliner without rupture – for obvious reasons.
“Unlikely” however does not mean “impossible.” There is some degree of risk, no matter how small, that significant amounts of radiation may leak from one or more of the Japanese reactors, make its way into the upper atmosphere, and ultimately drop down on the rest of the world.
With radiation, small amounts of exposure can have significant health consequences – particularly for the weak, the vulnerable. The particularly dangerous forms of radiation are iodine-131/134, strontium-90, and cesium-137.
Your Thyroid is the Most Vulnerable
In a nuclear radiation disaster, even a “scare”, there are 3 things to do:
- Protect your thyroid, the most vulnerable organ in your body.
- Remove as much of the radiation as possible from your body, immediately.
- Protect your DNA from genetic mutation.