Image: “Il babau” by Dino Buzzati

The nuclear cloud forecast to be passing over Italy tonight or the early hours of tomorrow morning, Thursday 24 March 2011, is good. Fazio, the Minister of Health, said so “Italy is at zero risk. There is no danger for health and the contamination of food.” The cloud is kept under control by a capillary network formed by ARPA, by the network of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, by the network of the Ministry of the Environment and by various monitoring networks stretching from the Alps to Capo Passero. Ms Prestigiacomo and Maroni are giving the guarantee.
It’ll be a tranquil radioactivity, that goes by and leaves no trace. The cloud that is worrying all Italian mothers: “Shall I take him to school tomorrow or not?” is described with a type of language between the courtly and the encomiastic: “According to the French agency for nuclear safety some masses of air weakly contaminated with radioactive material released at Fukushima is due to pass over France today and go on to Italy, that should be passed over between today and tomorrow. The ASN makes clear that the level of radiation could even be lower than the limits recorded on the instrumentation.” In a single agency message there’s the attribution of the news item to a third party (the French agency) so if something happens it’s their fault …. two expressions of minimisation: "some masses of air" “weakly contaminated”, three conditionals ("dovrebbero", "dovrebbe", "potrebbe essere" {literally translated in English as should, should and could}) and a badly hidden satisfaction for a “level of radiation could even be lower than the limits recorded on the instrumentation”. Thus, we are already more radioactive than the Japanese. Basically the cloud does not do good, but almost. There’d be the need for more clouds that are so polite, well-mannered, basically Japanese, in transit in our skies.
Giancarlo Torri, the head of the Radiometric Measuring Service at ISPRA’s Nuclear Department declared: “Any exposure would be very rapid.” He’s an optimist. In a single sentence he used just one hypothesis and a conditional. Giorgio Mattassi, the technical-scientific director of ARPA in Friuli Venezia Giulia is reassuring: "No risk to health. I’m not expecting any consequence that could be compared to that caused by Chernobyl, where there was nuclear fusion. First of all, the cloud is mixed with other air that is not contaminated. Then we need to see whether it rains and where that happens. Anyway, that rain will not have a Japanese origin.”
Crikey, I feel like Attilio Regolo in a barrel of contaminated iron. It’s not Chernobyl (what luck!) and the rain is not Japanese, perhaps it is really from Alto Adige. Really high air, really pure and only a little radioactive … “Less dangerous than a CAT scan” according to Giuseppe Remuzzi head of the unit for nephrology and dialysis at the United Hospitals of Bergamo. I can’t wait for the arrival of the next cloud so I can create an aerosol for myself.