Yeah it wasn’t that bad on the guardian’s part, papers have always written headlines that sell. And you absolutely 100% don’t want to inhale plutonium dust. It alpha decays with a lot of energy, which even in small amounts is a recipe for lung cancer. IDK specifics for how much it would take to get kicked up and be deadly.

I didn’t realize the paper was linked! It specifically mentions:

600 Bq / kg

This is a unit of radiation / mass. Going by a WolframAlpha example, one cubic meter of “typical” emits soil about 10,000 Bq. 1 cubic meter of the tested soil emits about > 900,000 Bq, though the high end is an outlier:

So 90x above ambient soil radiation, it seems.

…This is not a lot! Dirt is not very radioactive, we are talking microscopic amounts compared to radiation sources like X-rat machines. You wouldn’t want to inhale a ton of the soil, but still.

showed concentrations of plutonium at the islands were fourto 4,500 times higher than those found in sediment samples taken at two distant coastal sites

Emphasis mine.

Not saying this isn’t a big problem, but the article seems like it’s fearmongering too, or at least not providing enough specifics. 4-4,500 times higher than almost zero is still extremely low, and it’s only dangerous if inhaled.

On the two subs I frequented:

• /r/thelastairbender is just cultish and shallow now. I abandoned it. But it’s painful for me, as this is like the only sane place left the fandom has any critical mass. /c/thelastairbender is nice, but very quiet.

• /r/localllama Has… lost its intelligence? Like no one seems to experiment or talk technically anymore, good talk seems to be on github, or shattered across Discords, while the ‘critical mass’ is in the AI Bro black hole of Twitter and Linkedin. I read it, but never post anymore. localllama here is better, but smaller and downvoted to hell.

Also, I’ve been shadowbanned on like 4 accounts in 3 different IPs/machines, no explanation, no recourse. I never post anything political or even remotely provocative (unless links to Lemmy count) and only visit those two subs, so… Yeah, kinda sick of that.