posted on Mar, 24 2011 @ 01:27 PM
Originally posted by alpinestar
Everyone keeps saying were screwed on the west coast. If radiation can travel 5000 miles why would it just stop on the west coast? Wouldn't it be on
the east coast a couple of days later?
IF it's from the leak, it's not so simple.
First, these numbers go up and down all the time. You get spikes that can last for seconds to hours. You'll go nuts if you leave a Geiger counter on,
it's tick...tick...tick..BUUUURRRPBZZZZZZZ...tick...tick...tick and you'll never know what the ruckus was about. Maybe a star a few hundred light
years away ate an asteroid or something, but it's never the same all the time. Up, down, burst, up, down, burst.
Second, it's not "radiation traveling", that's a confusing way to look at it. It's radioactive particulates. A cloud of gas in the case of
radioiodine or radiocesium, Maybe tiny dust sized clumps of crap from rods burning. As it travels, some will drop into the ocean. Some will become
less radioactive - the half life of radioiodine is eight days, so it loses half its activity every eight days that pass. It'll hit and stick to land
as it passes, or be rained into the dirt, and it'll disperse and become less dense. So it's not like a wave of something immutable that's sweeping
across the land like sunrise, it's more like a long range poisonous fart. The more room it's got to spread in, the less it stinks.