“theoretically enough to kill everyone on Earth with lung cancer 1100 times, if it were to be uniformly distributed into the lungs of every human being.”

One could say the same thing about the water in an Olympic swimming pool. “enough to drown everyone on the planet…”

The real question is whether there is a plausible mechanism for this bit of magic to occur. It turns out that Plutonium is heavy and not very mobile in the environment. Coupled with the shear size of the planet, this makes her idea preposterous. But as people have said before, never let the facts get in the way of a good story.

@martindeane…Here is a recent update to counter your unfounded fear of malformed embryos etc. from the respected publication “Nature”
http://www.nature.com/news/fukushima-s-doses-tallied-1.10686

“Experts agree that there is unlikely to be a detectable rise in thyroid cancer or leukaemia”

“A far greater health risk may come from the psychological stress”

That is stress caused by people like Caldicott who “temper the facts”.
Causing people unneeded psychological suffering does not sound like the actions of a “Humanist”

I notice there is no update more recently, detailing the meltdowns, and the extent of the actual Level 7 disaster, and that it is a major failure for the industry.

Why not turn your mind to a different approach? What it is likely to mean for real human beings on the ground? Or who eat the fish? Or who breathe the air at the wrong time and the wrong place? The embryos malformed, the congenital defects, the children who die of heart attacks, the thyroids to be excised, the leukaemias that develop and , of course, the cancers.

But sometimes the cold facts need tempering when there are potential dire consequences at hand. And if anything requires a warning label, it’s a nuclear reaction inside of a dubious “containment” vessel that cannot be simply switched off in an emergency like the one playing out at Fukushima.

In other words, your learned comments are an important part of the discussion, but no more so than Helen’s dire warnings given the insidious and corrosive power of this energy source toward all things living.