Radioactive boyscout

[Leslie]

and here I'd been going along with the sense that I should be encouraging my boys' interests in science and nature, and helping them along to be independent, creative and inventive

now I wonder...

FROM HARPER'S MAGAZINE BY KEN SILVERSTEIN Golf Manor, a subdivision in Commerce Township, Mich., some 25 miles outside of Detroit, is the kind of place where nothing unusual is supposed to happen, where the only thing lurking around the corner is an ice-cream truck. But June 26, 1995, was not a typical day. Ask Dottie Pease. Cruising down Pinto Drive, Pease saw half a dozen men crossing her neighbor's lawn. Three, in respirators and white moon suits, were dismantling her next-door neighbor's shed with electric saws, stuffing the pieces into large steel drums emblazoned with radioactive warning signs. Huddled with a group of neighbors, Pease was nervous. "I was pretty disturbed," she recalls. Publicly, the employees of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) that day said there was nothing to fear. The truth is far more bizarre: the shed was dangerously irradiated and, according to the EPA, up to 40,000 residents of the area could be at risk.

source

 

[Kawaii]

Chris Harmon labels the story: "Bogus! Lantern mantles haven't used thorium since the 1970's. You wouldn't need to 'separate the ash from the thorium' -- the ash was the thorium. Once burned, it is inert. I've actually been in the mantle production room. You would need something like half a million, a million mantles to amount to anything. Same for the smoke detectors, which are made by our sister company, First Alert. First Alert never sells damaged detectors under any circumstances; product liability suits would eat them alive. All in all, I say this story is total BS." Chris Harmon, Web Designer, The Coleman Co., 4 Jan 2004

Darwin: "This story could be the authorities' attempt to flush out potential juvenile deinquents and terrorists... They broadcast this story, then monitor and investigate large sales of old smoke detectors in junkyards. Perhaps this lovely piece by Ken Silverstein is not a security problem, but rather, a security solution."

Quite interesting anyway.

 

[Leslie]

hmmm...i'm kinda relieved that that's a fake