You may have heard the news that
Fukushima is being ravaged by radioactive wild boars. No, it is not. The boars are not ‘radioactive,’ they would
be irradiated. The difference between the two words is not
mere pedantry, they describe very different phenomena. I talked about this in my last reminiscence
post for the fifth anniversary of 3/11.
Radioactive means the material is unstable and throwing it’s own
particles around. Irradiated means the
organism or object has absorbed radioactive material, and could potentially
become toxic. Buried under the alarmist
headlines is a very real, very important story about nature and some of the
possible long term consequences of 3/11 that have gone largely unremarked on until
now. There really are animals running
wild in the parts of Fukushima that were evacuated and are still devoid of
humans. Japan has always had a large
wild boar population, so it is no surprise that they turn up in numbers inside
the Fukushima exclusion zone.
