Subscribe to Receive the Daily Report

Thursday, March 14th, 2019

Potassium iodide distributed in Canada is denied Americans

Author:     Keith Gunter
Source:     Beyond Nuclear International
Publication Date:     January 27, 2019
 Link: Potassium iodide distributed in Canada is denied Americans
Stephan:   This story encapsulates why I so dislike what is happening in America, and why I find this moral and ethical impoverishment so repugnant. We are not going to survive as a country that is anything like the words we say about ourselves until we make wellbeing our first priority. I do SR every day, pay the money that it costs, put in the hours that it takes, to give my readers information to help them make different choices. It is only the actions arising from our individual intention in service to our collective wellbeing that is going to get us through what is coming, what is almost here.

In the wake of the still ongoing March 2011 Fukushima disaster, governments in Europe and Canada began implementing more pro-active radiological disaster plans — including pre-distribution of potassium iodide (KI) in reactor emergency planning zones (EPZs). Potassium iodide is now directly delivered in advance to populations around nuclear plants throughout Europe, including Belgium, Finland, France, Germany, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Romania, Slovakia, Sweden, and Switzerland. However, no such program exists in the United States.

KI is a safe, stable form of iodine and is commonly used to iodize table salt. If ingested in prescribed doses in time when a nuclear accident occurs, it saturates the thyroid and blocks the absorption of radioactive iodine-131. Exposure to iodine-131 has been definitively linked to increased rates of thyroid cancer, most demonstrably after the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster in the former Soviet Ukraine, and the 2011 Fukushima disaster in Japan.

However, KI works only to block absorption by the thyroid of radioactive iodine-131, a rapidly mobile radioactive gas released during a nuclear accident and one of the first hazards to arrive.  KI is by no means a […]

Read the Full Article