radiation
i feel like there's a lot of misconception out there about radiation. i don't know if there really is or not. but i feel like there is. for example, radioactivity hazard is inversely related to half life. radioisotopes with short half lives are very radioactive. iodine for example, is "hot". but not for long. one should definitely be concerned about these things in your food. but it really doesn't take long for the danger to pass. like days. however, radioisotopes with very long half lives are not very radioactive. at all. you could watch a single uranium atom for 100,000 years and not see it go poof. yet we seem to be afraid of long half life stuff because of the radiation. there's the misunderstanding. plutonium, for example, has a half life of thousands of years. so it's not very radioactive at all. it is, however, spectacularly poisonous to living creatures like you and i. that's poisonous in the classic chemistry biology sense. like arsenic and strychnine. and yeah, we shouldn't be using this crap. not in bombs and not as a fuel.