After being alerted to the looming nuclear dangers by the tragedy in Japan, ACT on Campus feels it is our social duty to alert the public to the next imposing nuclear catastrophe to hit us: bananas.
The average banana contains around 450 mg of potassium and will experience around 14 decays each second!
The radiation dose from consuming only one banana is greater than that sustained from living near to a nuclear power plant for a full year. This has raised concerns because of the well known dangers of living near nuclear reactors.
People who overdose on banana by eating by eating one every day for a year take in 3.6 millirems during that year! We feel it is especially important to reach out to the triathlete community about this fact and other athletes.
As a multi time Ironman athlete myself, I'm guilty of frequently overdosing on bananas (ate two this morning for breakfast before I discovered this news!). We sports people used to view bananas as perfect food, packed with all those carbohydrates to power us during our long training sessions. Niftily contained in a convenient biodegradable wrapper which you can open and eat with just one hand (good for while you're cycling!), and tasty too!
But no more! We call for the government to scan ALL bananas for signs of radioactivity, then to ban all these bananas found to be radioactive (and should open an investigation as to what further dangers their country of origin poses). We must do this far the sake of all our whānau, and especially the tamariki.
Greenpeace and the Greens Party in NZ are especially objecting to the fact some radioactive bananas have been coming into NZ "by stealth", when NZ is meant to be a nuclear free country! This is quite outrageous, and makes a mockery of the nuclear ban David Lange put in place in 1984 which we as NZers are all so proud of.
There is good news on the horizon however, since NZ is once again leaping to the front in farming technology with special genetically modified bananas being researched that will be guaranteed to always be free of radioactivity. To give consumers peace of mind, the new, safe bananas will be destingulishable by their blue skins.
