The Answerer

These two questions are in 100 QUESTIONS Vol.1: Q.55 and Q.87.

I add this now because it will maybe shed a little light on unknown sickness and cancers. I heard on the news last week that kids in Japan around the four damaged nuclear power plants in 2011 must now wear radiation monitors so they do not get atomic radiation poisoning. ’YUK!’ What are they supposed to do if there is radiation? run 200 miles away?

In 1945 and up to 1965 the USA, France, Russia, Britain, (Britain tested several in Australia) and maybe a few other countries set off thousands of atomic bombs to learn more about them. Two atom bombs were dropped on cities in Japan to end six years of World War II. The poisonous bits (microscopic size poisons) fell all around the world and are still there – in food, water and the air, but invisible, odourless and tasteless.

Nuclear waste, radiation and other such ’nasties’…this world can do without!! Some of it causes cancers (one of my children died of cancer at age 4) so this writer will never trust nuclear energy in any form to be safe because many who want it make money from it! The waste must be stored for many thousands of years – hundreds of tonnes of it. And my grandkids and future generations will carry the burden of the cost and the danger from this highly poisonous radioactive ’stuff’.

Recently I saw a TV programme about Hiroshima victims. That city was the first to have an atomic bomb dropped on it. It was a year, (or years) after the bomb fell. Quite a few were still alive. The natural, long term decay of nuclear particles is a bit like a lottery. Nobody can tell just when a microscopic poisonous bit will decay (a bit like a tree trunk rotting over years in a forest) in your kidney, liver, leg, arm, etc. When the particle decays a nearby cell in your body will be damaged by its decaying. When a cell is damaged it cannot make new cells so a cancer might develop, or it may not develop! A real ’Lottery’ inside the body of the ’victim’.

If you, a family member or friend has cancer there is a very helpful website in Australia by CanTeen. It is www.whatnow.org.au . A very helpful mob.