A Place to Stand

After years of reporting about how "hot spots" keep being found on the Dounray beach here we have another one EVEN WORSE!!!!

Material from a Fife beach is to be removed to check for radioactivity.
The contamination at Dalgety Bay is believed to come from the luminous dials of wartime aircraft thought to have been dumped there after the war.

The Scottish Environment Protection Agency has agreed to spend £50,000 to find out the extent of contamination and whether it presents a health risk.

Sepa said more radioactive items were being detected at the Fife headland than at Sandside Beach near Dounreay.

More than 50 particles have been found on the Sandside Beach, near the Caithness nuclear plant, during monitoring of the area.

................She said: "When they did some monitoring here last year they found 90 radioactive items, clearly far more than have been found at Sandside Beach near Dounreay.

"Some are more active than others - the point of this next piece of monitoring is to take the material away and find out just how dangerous it is and whether or not it is fine enough to be swallowed or inhaled.

Health advice

"It could give you a skin burn if you held a piece of this clinker for a long time, for many hours, but it could be quite dangerous if you swallowed it or breathed it in and that's what they want to find out about."

What absolute nonsense. There is clearly absolutely no real world problem whatsoever. This is said to be material from illuminated dials on WW2 bombers destroyed at the end of the war. Imagine how little the amount left now compared to what was handled back then.

However this is described as much more serious than the repeated hysterical stories the media spin about Dounray & I'm sure it is. On one occasion I remember that there was likely to be a microscopic particle at which, if eaten, MIGHT increase the cost of cancer & to ensure safety they would have to remove the top 6 inchs of the beach. So if you ever choose to eat the top 6 inchs of a beach don't go here & it you'll be perfectly healthy.

Of course having done stories about Dounray, failing at all times to mention how "hot" the hot spots actually are, they couldn't ignore this nonsense.

If you fancy a radioactive beach try a holiday in Brazil. At a beach in Guarapari, Brazil, it is over 5 millirem in a single hour -- but only a few residents who use that beach receive doses in excess of 500 millirem per year. I think that is about 3 times the official safe limit for humans. There are many other places where natural radioactivity is well above any manmade material we are exposed to without any harm (quite the reverse -see previous articles on hormesis).

Michael Crichton made a point which I can't agree with but can't dispute - that if it is wrong for someone to deliberately shout "fire" in a crowdwd theatre is it not equally wrong for a newspaper or broadcaster to report "radiation" scares or "global warming" or "DDT kills" in a crowded world if they know, or should know, it is unjustified?