Radiation Quotes
Meitner and her nephew Frisch had been the first people to realize that the atom had been split. Meitner had described the process to her nephew and he made some drawings of the process she described. A few of these looked like a bacteria dividing. Frisch happened to meet with William A. Arnold, an American Biologist doing research in Stockholm. He asked Arnold what the biologists called it when a bacteria divided, and he replied, “fission”. Frisch told his aunt and she decided that they should use that term in the scientific article they were preparing on the splitting of the atom.
Breslin was criticized in a Federal report for his alarmist news coverage of the Three Mile Island nuclear mishap:
Any object that has been contaminated gradually loses its radioactive strength. It has a “half life”. This is the amount of time that it takes for the radiation in an object to lose half its strength. Different materials have different half lives. Nuclear waste from a power plant for example might have a half life of tens of thousands of years.
While this sounds like an idiotic statement, at the time very little was known by anyone about the effects of large doses of radiation. Groves had not then the benefit of the medical reports or interviews about the Japanese who had received high doses of radiation from the 2 atomic bomb attacks.
During the meltdown of the Japanerse nuclear reactors at Fukashima, American sailors were deployed to provide critical assistance fram an American aircraft carrier in the area. They played a significant role in getting the reactors under control. Many of the Japanese at the emergency area had suffered serious illness from the radiation exposure abd a number died. The crew of the aircraft carrier had developed a highly unusual prevelance of serious illness assocated with radiation exposure. The U. S. Defense Department was "styding the matter" but had not decided that the unusual illness patern was related to their assignment assisting in th emergency. A number of the sailors had come to japan and asked for damages from the Raactor company which like most American Corporations would not do or say anything. The Japanese government also was silent on the issue when the sailors came to Japan, However, this former prime minister felt so strongly that he visited the Sailors and took up their cause in letting the Japanese public know what had happened and how the government and the electic company were acting. This was Koizumi's tearful response to the press covering the saolors and their request.
