Know nukes.

Someone who knows a bit about radioactive clouds explains why Chernobyl II is not going to be happening, concluding his post with:

Instead of spending money on potassium iodide tablets, how's about writing a check to the relief fund of your choice to help the folks on the other side of the Pacific who have no electricity, no food, no water, no shelter, and need to get their lives back on an even keel after witnessing so much death and destruction? You'll feel better, honest.

Meanwhile, in an editorial at CNN, one Patrick Doherty, director of the Smart Strategy Initiative at the New America Foundation, says that the Deepwater Horizon and Fukushima I incidents prove that we should move away from our dependence on oil and nukes and build our infrastructure in a way that is dependent on toxic heavy metals controlled by foreign powers with all the environmental concern of the old Warsaw Pact, and which doesn't work on still and cloudy days. Mr. Doherty's engineering credentials for designing this new infrastructure are impressive:

Before returning to Washington, Mr. Doherty spent ten years in the Middle East, Africa, the Balkans and the Caucuses working at the intersection of conflict and development. He served as Catholic Relief Services' European Regional Advisor for Peacebuilding, as a consultant to the Organization of African Unity, and advised the Israeli and the Palestinian Authority's education ministries. He also taught African politics at the University of the Witwatersrand. Mr. Doherty holds a master's degree in security studies from the Fletcher School, Tufts University, where he co-founded the Institute for Human Security, and a bachelor's degree from the School of International Service at American University.

You know, if he'd had a fine arts degree, I could at least think he'd operated something as technical as a kiln or had maybe gotten a rudimentary knowledge of chemistry by mixing pigments...

Meanwhile, in comments to an earlier post, reader docjim505 asks:

My grandfather ... worked at Oak Ridge during World War II and was exposed to beryllium and perhaps other things. He died of cancer at the age of 86. Did his exposures from forty years earlier cause the cancer? Or was it that he smoked most of his life AND worked variously as a coal miner and textile mill worker? Or did his heart disease, diabetes and plain old age do him in? How does one make that determination?

Well, that depends. Who are you getting your grant money from?
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