News You Can't Use: Highly Radioactive Substance found in Swiss Dump

I think I'm going to switch to an All-Swiss News format in a concentrated effort to dethrone the Zurich Daily Double or whoever as the best source of information about that tiny slice of Europe. I know it sounds drastic, but the righteous and amazing stories keep falling from heaven and I'm well versed in the basic stereotypes so it will be quite awhile before the watch/knife/avoidance of entangling alliances humor runs out. Consider today's wacky tale of dumps, radiation, substances and, I'm assuming, not allowing foreign passions to draw a nation into disastrous adventures.

A highly radioactive substance, emitting in some places radiation 100 times the permitted amount, has been discovered in Switzerland, local media reported Sunday, adding that authorities had covered it up for 18 months.

So yeah, your top-quality watch actually wasn't supposed to glow in the dark and that knife shouldn't have had three corkscrews.

It just writes itself. Maybe a "Heidi" reference next?

Swiss weeklies Le Matin Dimanche and SonntagsZeitung reported that federal, regional and local officials decided not to reveal the fact that they had found radium deposits in an old dump in the town of Bienne so as not to scare the 50,000 local inhabitants.

Nice to see that literally the best, most civilized nation in the world is not immune from allowing horrible things to happen so as not to anger the peasants. After all, we wouldn't want to ruin my idyllic childhood being raised by my Grandpa in the Alps with awful truths about why I'm sterile and my teeth keep falling out.

"120 kilogrammes of radioactive waste was obtained after sorting. We measured doses of several hundred microsieverts at the source," Daniel Dauwalder, a spokesman for the Swiss federal office for public health (OFSP), told Le Matin Dimanche.

"This is bad," he further clarified after receiving blank stares.

Exposure for three hours to that level of radiation would be equivalent to the tolerable level over a whole year.

Please help us make a big deal out of this.

The OFSP judged the risk to public health "weak", although SonntagsZeitung said that tests on the water table would begin next month.

We'll then cover up those water table results for a decade or two because we don't want anyone getting upset.

Public health authorities have shifted the blame back and forth, with local officials saying the OFSP should have informed the public about the incident, and the OFSP saying the responsibility lay with municipal authorities.

"I was on vacation that day!"

The president of the federal commission in charge of monitoring radiation (CPR), which was not informed of the incident, said the various authorities had made a "mistake".

I guess that's a fair assessment.

"Me, I trust the total silence from our government."

"This will all come back to bite us and it is much more difficult to stay credible and win back the public's trust," Francois Bochud told Le Matin Dimanche.

"I don't expect to win much of the ghoul vote in the next election."

Full Story.

Komment Korner   

It probably got dumped there by another country that paid Switzerland for the right.

I REALLY want a true 'glow in the dark' watch again. What's a little radiation when juxtaposed against the quality of life?

Meanwhile a giant radioactive Reindeer is growing in the forest, getting ready to challenge Godzilla for supremacy.

Radiation is everywhere- concrete for example often is emitting radiation. We go outside, the sun blasts us  

This is what big gov't gets you. "It's their fault, no It's their fault!" lol

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