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Yeah, the black sand is fairly coarse and glitters strongly in the sun as it has visible facets.
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I’m not qualified to speak on hormesis. Anyone with common sense can see the difference between the same quality of radiation being delivered slowly-over-time vs all-at-once.
If you have some kind of case to make go ahead. Hormesis might be bullshit. Have fun with that.
Desert sand tends to have rounded grains which makes it really useful when identifying the origins of different types of sandstone. See rounded grains and some iron oxide - that came from a desert, so you can immediately start reconstructing the palaeoclimate where the rock formed.
Those rounded grains also make desert sand unsuitable for concrete as they don’t allow the mix to bind properly. Therefore, it is possible to make a fortune selling sand to Saudi Arabia.
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There are also monazite beaches along the Queensland-New South Wales coastline of Australia and in Tamil Nadu, India - the latter being why the Indians have had a long interest in developing thorium reactors which could run on abundant domestic fuel.
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i’d wonder about ingestion too…
because that sounds like it could also get in the local water supply 
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Man, several years ago I fell down the rabbit hole of “we should be building Thorium reactors”, and I kept waiting for someone smart to say why it wasn’t a good idea. But the take away I was left with was: it is a better, safer, less waste nuclear reactor, and it wasn’t ever seriously considered as a power source because you couldn’t use the waste to make bombs.
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Considering the state of the art regarding interactions between ionizing radiation and the immune system, i am of the opinion that avoiding what you can (it can never be taken to zero) is the wisest choice.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016041202032167X
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The highest concentration is in Kerala - just across the hills from Tamil Nadu. More Thorium by a lot than Uranium.
Yup! The so-called “three stage” nuclear programme. They just inaugurated the prototype fast breeder which is stage 2. Thorium burners are next up (maybe by the time my kids have grandkids at the pace they’ve been going).
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Pretty sure the guiding principle is still ALARA - as low as reasonably achievable
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We visited a wonderful black sand beach in Jamaica.
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I’m seriously impressed that India is pushing ahead with fast breeder reactors after the US, UK and France all concluded the benefits were outweighed by the technological complexities of plumbing for liquid sodium-potassium coolant.
Good luck to them.
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We’ve got Blackhall beach up here in the north east, but it’s not, well, beautiful. Striking might be the word:
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I’m not sure about the water there, but i guess it also has a higher radiation level than the average.
But, water contaminated with radioactive materials happens in several places, and if i’m not mistaken, the deeper it is stored, the higher is the radioactivity (but it also depends a lot on what is around the source and it might not be correlated with the background level on surface).
There are standards to measure if it is safe to drink, i.e., it doesn’t give much more radiation than the expected background level, and how to deal with it if necessary, for example mixing it with a non-radioactive source until you get a “safe” mixture.
One of my teachers told that when there was a drought in brazil around 2014, which was more severe than usual, the government started to open deeper wells to get water from the aquifer, but then had to deal with a more radioactive source.
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I thought of Get Carter before I even read the article.
You may in fact have already seen this beach on the cinema screen before; it featured in the climax to the 1971 cult classic movie Get Carter where gangster Jack Carter played by Michael Caine met his violent end.
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This review summarizes some of the relevant historical and scientific data bearing on the question of radiation hormesis. We find the data in support of most of the hormesis postulates intriguing but inconclusive.
I would not seek exposure to ionizing radiation based on this. As with many things, more study is probably warranted, but any effect seems to pretty small if there at all.
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Sad, but true. Headlines like this remind me of the ongoing problems at popular destinations like Vieques (though the situation there is not for naturally-occurring reasons):
Also, blending to get a “safe” mixture of water is what they did in my town back in the '90s. Tests on a new municipal well revealed high levels of radium in the water, but officials determined once it entered the existing system the levels would be acceptable. The Environmental Working Group’s contamination maps are both eye-opening and depressing:
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Is the question really whether it’s better to be hit by a baseball bat in the nuts once or punched in the nuts everyday or is it whether it’s better to not be punched in the nuts at all?
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I think the postulate here is that some level of nut-trauma could be beneficial (in the analogy). I won’t be lining up to find out.
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Why do you hate wellness, Nuke! WHY!?! /s
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