Radioactive Rabbit Feces

Radiation Level:  cesium-137

Listening To:  The Righteous and the Wicked by Red Hot Chili Peppers

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This story was recently published in the New York Times.  Just another example of life post-bomb.

Even Rabbit Droppings Count in Nuclear Cleanup

By MATTHEW L. WALD

WASHINGTON — Anything that hops, burrows, buzzes, crawls or grazes near a nuclear weapons plant may be capable of setting off a Geiger counter. And at the Hanford nuclear reservation, one of the dirtiest of them all, its droppings alone might be enough to trigger alarms.

A government contractor at Hanford, in south-central Washington State, just spent a week mapping radioactive rabbit feces with detectors mounted on a helicopter flying 50 feet over the desert scrub. An onboard computer used GPS technology to record each location so workers could return later to scoop up the droppings for disposal as low-level radioactive waste.

I know I like to joke, but seriously, you can’t make this kind of sh*t up.

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The area had been used by rabbits that had also burrowed into other areas that were contaminated. Many of the contaminants were in the form of salts, which attract wildlife. The rabbits carried strontium and cesium, which emit gamma rays, back out of the area in their digestive tracts.

Marylia Kelley, the executive director of a California group called Tri-Valley Communities Against a Radioactive Environment, said the rabbit cleanup was “kind of funny, in a sick way.”

Happy Easter from FalloutGirl.

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