Skip to main content

Take a Seaweed Pill and Call the Police in the Morning

By
Greenpeace Canada Seaweed PillsHat tips to Stephen Dubner's Freakonmics blog post, When Scare Tactics Backfire, and TreeHugger for pointing us to this rather bizarre story out of Ontario. Per the National Post,
Toronto police issued an alert today after residents in Rosedale and downtown received an information placard from Greenpeace Canada warning against radiation from nuclear power plants — with a little green pill attached.

The pill was said to be potassium iodine, which is meant to prevent thyroid cancer, one of the most common radiation-caused illnesses.

Officers arrived to a home in the Bloor and Sherbourne streets area Saturday evening and seized the pill.

“It’s an unknown substance in pill form being delivered… we’re kind of concerned,” Staff Sergeant Dan Sabadics said. “We treat it as unknown and hazardous until we know what it is.”

Investigators have determined that it is not hazardous but Health Canada is doing further analysis to identify it.

“Since then, Greenpeace has agreed to cease and they’ve turned over all remaining [pills]. We’re just testing them now,” he said.

“It seemed like a good idea at the time. But once it’s explained that you’re delivering pills and a child [might] get a hold of this. What effect it will have on a child? We don’t know. There are liability issues.”
Wondering if Jon Evans, brand manager [former?] for Disaronno Amaretto, had a hand in this marketing campaign gone awry.

Labels:

Comments

Anonymous said…
It is a medical fact that KI can cause allergic reactions in some people. I think the incidence rate is about 2 per million people. I always advise people not to use KI. The risks are greater taking it than not, even in a nuclear accident. It is a thyroid blocker and will only be effective if the contaminant is "fresh", i.e., effluent from an operating core, relatively fresh fuel, or a nuclear weapon recently detonated.

By taking this action, Greenpiece is poisoning the population, exposing people to risks much greater than any from nuclear accidents.
April 9, 2009 at 1:47 PM
Pedro said…
The pills would work in case of a great accident like Chernobyl where high incidence of tyroid cancer has been detected. So, their action it's not completely crazy. Of course distributing this product you may be taking some risks and that would not be acceptable.
April 9, 2009 at 5:11 PM
lad said…
And these are the people who feel qualified to advise the Ontario government on our energy supply plan? Those old unintended consequences just keep coming back to haunt them. Why the mainstream media even continues to give their opinions serious credence is beyond me.
April 9, 2009 at 7:58 PM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Sneak Peek

By
There's an invisible force powering and propelling our way of life.
It's all around us. You can't feel it. Smell it. Or taste it.
But it's there all the same. And if you look close enough, you can see all the amazing and wondrous things it does.
It not only powers our cities and towns.
And all the high-tech things we love.
It gives us the power to invent.
To explore.
To discover.
To create advanced technologies.
This invisible force creates jobs out of thin air.
It adds billions to our economy.
It's on even when we're not.
And stays on no matter what Mother Nature throws at it.
This invisible force takes us to the outer reaches of outer space.
And to the very depths of our oceans.
It brings us together. And it makes us better.
And most importantly, it has the power to do all this in our lifetime while barely leaving a trace.
Some people might say it's kind of unbelievable.
They wonder, what is this new power that does all these extraordinary things?
Post a Comment
Read more

A Design Team Pictures the Future of Nuclear Energy

By
For more than 100 years, the shape and location of human settlements has been defined in large part by energy and water. Cities grew up near natural resources like hydropower, and near water for agricultural, industrial and household use.

So what would the world look like with a new generation of small nuclear reactors that could provide abundant, clean energy for electricity, water pumping and desalination and industrial processes?

Hard to say with precision, but Third Way, the non-partisan think tank, asked the design team at the Washington, D.C. office of Gensler & Associates, an architecture and interior design firm that specializes in sustainable projects like a complex that houses the NFL’s Dallas Cowboys. The talented designers saw a blooming desert and a cozy arctic village, an old urban mill re-purposed as an energy producer, a data center that integrates solar panels on its sprawling flat roofs, a naval base and a humming transit hub.

In the converted mill, high temperat…
Post a Comment
Read more

Seeing the Light on Nuclear Energy

By
If you think that there is plenty of electricity, that the air is clean enough and that nuclear power is a just one among many options for meeting human needs, then you are probably over-focused on the United States or Western Europe. Even then, you’d be wrong.

That’s the idea at the heart of a new book, “Seeing the Light: The Case for Nuclear Power in the 21st Century,” by Scott L. Montgomery, a geoscientist and energy expert, and Thomas Graham Jr., a retired ambassador and arms control expert.


Billions of people live in energy poverty, they write, and even those who don’t, those who live in places where there is always an electric outlet or a light switch handy, we need to unmake the last 200 years of energy history, and move to non-carbon sources. Energy is integral to our lives but the authors cite a World Health Organization estimate that more than 6.5 million people die each year from air pollution.  In addition, they say, the global climate is heading for ruinous instability. E…
Post a Comment
Read more