Not GP, but plutonium is overhyped in how scary it is.

Don't get me wrong, it's super deadly, but there are loads of toxins that are more deadly than plutonium. And while its radioactivity is seen as ultra scary, it's actually pretty nice, because you can at least detect it. Harder than beta or gamma, but still, it announces its presence.

How I wish I had a magic wand (spectrometer) that I could wave over my food to see if cyanide, ricin, mercury, or lead were there.

This. I wish people made a Geiger counter equivalent for pm2.5 and other atmospheric pollutants, people would never get to the subway again. And breathing air in any big Asian city is much more dangerous than doing the same in Prypiat.

Yeah, the problem is the overhyping of radiation's danger kind of covers-up the other problem, radiation weakens everything. Hairline cracks are a threat because the radiation is going to weaken the cement that's holding the very high pressure steam that's generating electricity.

Nuclear meltdowns have been common but dangerous radiation leaks rare and over-hyped, sure. But meltdowns involve an extraordinarily expensive piece of equipment irrevocably breaking and that is what has made nuclear power uneconomical, not environmentalists' hand wringing. Indeed, I'd suspect nuclear company executives love to say the environmentos killed things, much better than saying their operations weren't economical.

> plutonium is overhyped in how scary it is... it's super deadly

"Super deadly" sounds enough scary to me, thanks

There are things that are "super deadly premium" of course. Stupidity terrifies me more than Plutonium. Specially when both things come together, but in the end the result is not much different.