Your Daily Dose (Maintain Safe Distance From Screen)

More than a few friends sent this story from CNN my way with a modicum of panic and hope that I could explain things a bit more. 

Now that I am teaching radiation safety at a local community college in addition to my day job, it has been made very, very clear to me:

1. What little the average person knows about radiation has mostly come from movies and 30 second news blurbs.
2. The students that came to my class know how little they know and lay it squarely at the feet of shitty science-ignorant media reporting.

To a reporter acquaintance, I said to his shamed face "Science reporting would have had to have been informed reporting before it could have been slanted.  Most of what I read comes across as opinion piece at best.  This article definitely would have received an F if I got it as a student paper."

I think the highlight of inconsistency in this story is the statement in paragraph 2 "...authorities discovered the Uranium 238, known as yellowcake, in a garage..." versus the paragraph 13 "...will perform an expert analysis of the seized uranium to establish the enrichment percentage and the country of origin".  Paragraph 9  "...undercover policemen acquired less than one gram of the substance and sent it to the United States for analysis, which confirmed that it was uranium 238", if true means paragraph 13 is unnecessary and this whole story belongs in the Those Dumb Crooks section of the paper.

( I Explain Why They're Idiots In More Detail )

It's hard enough to convey chemistry to people.  When you try to tell them that the entire Periodic Table of the Elements is only one axis on the Chart of the Nuclides (the axis of # of protons vs. the axis of # of neutrons) so you can build all the isotopes, their eyes go funny.