Wagga, thanks for the NatGeo article.
I don't know if anyone cared about my earlier rantings on food supplies, but I feel it's very important to protect our natural resources so we have viable soil to grow our crops and raise our livestock. With the USA having 104 nuclear power plants it's a scarey thought that if our plants were to have disasters similar to Chernobyl we could lose our farmland to radiation for many, many, many years. In the NatGeo article Wagga posted, the harmful effects from Chernobyl are pointed out, as follows:
"Those who stayed behind still inhabit a contaminated landscape. The two most pervasive radionuclides from Chernobyl, cesium 137 and strontium 90, will remain in the environment for decades. Schools and other public buildings in southern Belarus are regularly washed down. Fields are fertilized with potassium to limit the uptake of cesium into crops and lime to block strontium. Lengthy regulations spell out what should be grown in which soils (only potatoes in peat but a wider range of crops in clayey soils, which lock up radionuclides). The most contaminated land—several hundred thousand acres—still lies fallow, though the government of Belarus is taking steps to reclaim it. At a gate and guardhouse 18 miles from the reactor, cultivation stops entirely."
