Rain soaked clothes: wash or bag and toss out?
With all of the heavy rain recently, is it safe to wash clothes soaked in radioactive rain or should we bag and toss? I've read people should do both (I'm assuming based upon radiation levels). If it's safe to wash the clothes, is it okay to co-mingle with other non-rain soaked clothes?
I never thought I'd ever be asking this question. Keep up the great work!
Just wash your clothes. The
Just wash your clothes. The levels of radiation we've observed in the rain are many orders of magnitude too low to worry about.
Wash the clothes
Confirm:
Just wash the clothes.
The Fukushima radionuclide storm is reportedly, substantially reduced.
Even owing to the oddities of wind dispersion, few sets of California rain-soaked clothes were signficantly hazardous during the March and early April precipitation. Even then, regular washing was appropriate.
If I lived within 200 miles of Fukushima, a final hand-rinse in RO or distilled water would have been added, for about a month, at most. But on the US West Coast, such measures were NEVER necessary.
soaked clothes
I also never thought I would have had to research this, but I found a military protocol online that states to take a bath with sodium bicarbonate (baking soda) if the skin is contaminated since it can bind the radiactive particles. Since then I add that when I do laundary. I personally thought cannot guarantee this is a sufficient remedy for the rain we are getting right now. Also I'm not associated with UCB, I'm with UCSD.
here are a couple relevant
here are a couple relevant links:
adding clay to the wash:
http://newparadigmdigest.com/5706/additional-radiation-protection-from-b...
some info on water:
http://crisismaven.wordpress.com/2011/03/22/dangers-properties-possible-...
Don't wash your rain soaked clothes
If only 1% of our tap water is made up of rain water (in reality it is probably much more) and you use 10 gallons of said water to wash your clothes, there will be 1 ounces of rain water running through your clothes, which is much more than the amount of rain there was on your clothes to begin with. So you're definitely going to be increasing the amount of iodine and cesium sticking to the fabric when you wash them, unless you use filtered water...
Stupid
A very unhelpful comment.
Stupid or deliberately irritating.
Mocking worried moms is not cool. They have enough to worry about. You are a (total) loser.
I don't know that this was
I don't know that this was mocking.
Depending on your source of tapwater (let's say yours is from an open-air source like a river, and you also know your city got a lot of fallout in its rain back when EPA bothered to tell you), if it's also unfiltered (generally the case for laundry) I am not entirely certain that soaking ones clothes in it wouldn't contain more contaminants than, say, a sprinkling of rainwater. (A rain-soaking on the other hand would clearly favor laundering rather than not, as would an underground tapwater source or filtered tapwater source.)
Without testing I'm not sure any one of us could say which is the better alternative, in terms of radioactivity. But we all have to do laundry sometimes, so I just do it. No point in worrying about what we cannot do anything about.
However, my understanding is that baking soda and/or borax int the wash should help (it binds to that instead of the clothes). So easy to do, why not try?
avoid rain and don't bring rain water into your home
Avoid rain as much as you can. Cover up, use an umbrella, if you have to be out. Don't drag rain water into your home. Take off shoes and wet clothes at the door, and leave umbrella outside (but not IN the rain!), if that's an option.