Thanks for those links, Nora! I watched that one 20 minute lecture on Cesium 137...very scary! I think I'll watch it again...and then buy a Geiger Counter..and stop eating fish and bananas...and everything else?

We're all gonna die! ...sooner or later...but I'd rather it were later...much later! But Fukushima may pull the plug a litte sooner, I'm afraid. And the governments are lying to us...what else is new? Thyroid cancer...here we come!

I have a relative who is a professor at the Colorado School of Mines and who teaches Liberal Arts and International Studies. Most of her students are engineering bound, though (students who are pretty clueless about environmental issues, she says). She has also written about and done scholarship on nuclear power and other energy issues, given that she must be up-to-speed on those subjects in school conferences and within classroom discussions. Generally, she tends to be a liberal progressive on most subjects, but I learned recently that she's "on the fence" about nuclear power. Just between you and me, I think the propaganda that compares nuclear power with coal has her confused, so that she's not able to take a stand unequivocally against nuclear power. Apparently, her scholarship has not led her to the debunking by environmentalists on that position.

How anyone could be on the fence about nuclear power, especially after Fukushima, is beyond me.

I do know that as a resident of San Diego county, where the San Onofre nuclear plant used to loom depressingly in my mind before its demise, I feel deeply relieved that in this earthquake-prone area we at least don't have to worry anymore about a Fukushima-style meltdown here. Of course, that doesn't deny the on-going threat of Fukushima-related issues here now. I'm certainly not eating any fish caught in the pacific, for one thing.