r/todayilearned • u/accidentaldeity • 4d ago
(R.1) Inaccurate TIL in 1952, Navy LT Jimmy Carter led a team of nuclear scientists in disassembling a Canadian nuclear reactor undergoing meltdown. Carter, alongside others, personally lowered himself into the reactor to disassemble it by hand, exposing himself to one thousand times the level of safe radiation.
https://www.fox5atlanta.com/news/jimmy-carter-nuclear-meltdown-clean-up-canada-navy-history[removed] — view removed post
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u/Betteradvize 4d ago
And still made it to 100.
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u/RetroMetroShow 4d ago
Maybe not a coincidence
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u/CheckYourStats 4d ago
Confirmed that Jimmy Carter is the secret identity of Radioactive Man.
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u/CircleCityCyco 4d ago
The goggles, they do nothing!
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u/antiblasphemy 4d ago
That explains those staggering peanut harvests!
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u/Miyagidokarate 4d ago
That much lethal radiation and the only powers he got were long life and power over peanuts. That's pretty disappointing from a story telling perspective.
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u/EstroJen 4d ago
Is Mr. Peanut an ally or an arch enemy in this situation?
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u/Miyagidokarate 4d ago
That's a damn good question.
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u/EstroJen 4d ago
I think they start as enemies, then join forces to destroy the Jolly Green Giant. Or maybe a huge jar of jelly.
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u/Farwalker08 4d ago
The kool-aid man, he is the villain destroying property and spreading diabetes. They fight him.
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u/Captain_Sacktap 4d ago
It’s his super hero identity
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u/throwawayinthe818 4d ago
Blasted by atomic gamma rays from Canada, handsome Navy officer, atomic engineer, and peanut farmer Jimmy Carter becomes…
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u/CtrlAltDeliberate 4d ago
until you factor in how many people surprisingly have peanut allergies, and it's lethal to many of them
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u/NUMBERS2357 4d ago
Minor point but the original line is "my eyes, the goggles do nothing"
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u/TheseusPankration 4d ago
I hear he drinks a cup of high pH acid every day.
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u/mattgran 4d ago
Just one? I hear he drinks eight full glasses of the highest pH acid known to man!
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u/bigfoot17 4d ago
You might want to revisit that thought
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u/Underwater_Karma 4d ago
What? He just drinks the least acidic thing that can legally be sold as acid.
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u/cylonfrakbbq 4d ago
Pretty sure back in the day, SNL did some type of superhero skit with Jimmy Carter at 3 Mile Island
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u/MulletMayflower 4d ago
For real. My wife’s grandfather worked at a nuclear facility in Colorado and lived to 98. They got that nuke juice.
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u/gwaydms 4d ago
Some people exposed to large, nonfatal amounts of radiation, go on to live a long time. It's not exactly common, but it happens enough to make people like me wonder.
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u/tangledwire 4d ago
When the nuclear bombs were dropped on Japan, there was a radius of low level radiation that apparently helped extend the life of some people or help with cancer. It's been debated but there are articles supporting this.
https://genesenvironment.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s41021-018-0114-3
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u/Viend 4d ago
Okay what the fuck is going on?
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u/DuplexFields 4d ago
Just GenX going to live forever because we sat so close to the CRT TVs.
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u/VagrantShadow 4d ago
While I am not a Gen Xer, I remember many Saturday mornings having my face up close to the TV watching Swat Kats and Pirates of Dark Water.
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u/2monthstoexpulsion 4d ago
But what kind of TV? Anything semi modern won’t give you super powers
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u/VagrantShadow 4d ago
My grandmas giant wooden frame TV from the 70s. Then when that TV broke in she just put another tv on top of it.
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u/Zealousideal-Army670 4d ago
It's the same thing as anecdotes about a 2 pack a day smoker living to 99, some people just get lucky or have excellent genetics.
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u/bmf72286 4d ago
Maybe he's the hulk? He's just never angry....
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u/PeachMan- 4d ago
That should really show you how incredibly conservative the official "safe" limits of radiation exposure are.
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u/responsible_use_only 4d ago
The rules like that are writ in blood - or in this case cellular death.
Nuclear engineers are generally very familiar with the risks and limits - those who voluntarily expose themselves beyond those limits to avert disasters are heroes.
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u/KatShepherd 4d ago
I think this is one area where the rules are not directly written in blood but instead extrapolated downward from WW2 nuclear attacks using the linear no-threshold model to establish a safe dose for radiation exposure.
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u/Master-Shinobi-80 4d ago
Not when it come to this. Like others have said it was based on LNT which is a discredited model.
LNT is like saying "Jumping off of a 1 foot step 100 times is the equivalent of jumping off of a 100 foot step once."
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u/LightOfTheFarStar 4d ago
Radiation is something where after the safe limit it's a gamble on whether you turn ta soup, I'd rather the limits be conservative in such circumstances.
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u/Sir_Wheat_Thins 4d ago
yeah general principles for radiation is ALARA, As Low As Reasonably Achievable
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u/DivisonNine 4d ago
“Safe” is also variable. Yearly safe limit? Daily?
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u/HuJimX 4d ago edited 4d ago
I'm sure the specifics of this event / reactor are available somewhere to be able to estimate the actual exposure, but even the 1000x estimate in the title appears to come from a decades-past recollection from Carter himself in 2008.
"They let us get probably a thousand times more radiation than they would now. It was in the early stages, and they didn't know."
There are plenty of ways to measure the hazard posed by radioactive sources (by amount of harmful radiation expelled from a source over time, level of exposure one would face with a given source, etc), but this statement doesn't seem to be based on any actual quantified measure.
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u/OldPersonName 4d ago
The quote really just doesn't mean anything. He says: "They let us get probably a thousand times more radiation than they would now. It was in the early stages and they didn't know."
The ICRP limits workers to an average of 20 millisieverts per year, with a single year max of 50 mSv (and OSHA is similar). 1 Sv (so 1000 mSv) of radiation increases your lifetime chance of fatal cancer by like 5%. 1000 x 50 mSv would be 50 Sv and would kill you basically immediately. People who got 6 Sv at Chernobyl died within a month.
A more realistic number would be 10x. That would be akin to what some Chernobyl residents were exposed to.
That limit isn't particularly super conservative. I recently got some testing that exposed me to like 10-20 mSv, around the yearly average for a nuclear worker under the ICRP, and my lifetime risk of getting cancer as a result of that testing is now a pretty non trivial 1/650. Imagine getting that dose every year. For a single individual it's maybe not so bad, but when you're dealing with a large workforce it's not the most conservative number.
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u/SCOTTGIANT 4d ago
Yeah like I can't think of anything else that you can be exposed to 1,000x the limit of and survive.
Like aspirin, dead. Lead, dead. Hell even water, dead.
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u/TurdCollector69 4d ago
There is no safe dose of radiation!
I am a radiation worker in radiation oncology.
As part of our training we learn about "ALARA" or "as low as reasonably achievable." The reason that's the standard is because there is no safe dose of radiation.
This concept is the cornerstone of modern radiation safety.
This article probably meant to say 1000x background radiation (the amount of radiation you take in from cosmic rays and radioactive decay in the environment) or is using some outdated standard.
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u/PeachMan- 3d ago
Oh yeah we're on the same page, I used to do nuclear outages. I'm more directing that comment at people that fear monger about the dangers of nuclear plants when the existing coal plants around them have been slowly killing them by spewing radioactive coal dust into the air all of their lives.
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u/Monster-Zero 4d ago
And that is why, like Godzilla, he will live forever. Constantly regenerating, both a benevolent protector and terrifying threat, capable of blasting his foes with his atomic breath, Jimmy Carter is a true legendary force of nature.
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u/7573 4d ago
Washington, Washington. 12 stories high and made of radiation.
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u/SGTX12 4d ago
He'll save the children, but not the British children. He'll save the children, but not the British children!
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u/OddGuideofGreyFort 4d ago
I heard that motherfucker had, like, 30 goddamn dicks.
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u/notyogrannysgrandkid 4d ago
I heard he once held a rival’s wife’s hand
In a bowl of acid
At a party
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u/guynamedjames 4d ago
If Carter is Godzilla who is that Swamp Rabbit that tried to eat him?
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u/Monster-Zero 4d ago
The obvious answer is Hedora, but an argument could be made for Orga or Biolante
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u/somethingfishrelated 4d ago
So he was not actually into the reactor but in a compartment near to it, and the reactor was not “undergoing meltdown” it was being decommissioned after experiencing a meltdown. The danger was past, they were just going through the process of cleaning up after the fact.
And the dose he received was approximately 8.5 millisieverts, which is comparable to the dose received in a single CAT scan.
Not to diminish his actions by any means, but people often speak of the danger of nuclear power when in reality it’s no where near as bad as you think.
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u/dudeduckman 4d ago
So the entire post is inaccurate, cool
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u/HurshySqurt 4d ago
TIL is probably one of the worst subs when it comes to click bait titles.
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u/TargetDecent9694 4d ago
It’s in the name, “I’ve known about this subject less than 24 hours.”
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u/poonmangler 4d ago
Yeah but it's clever in that way, since Murphy's law of the internet says the best way to get an answer is to post the wrong info
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u/Irish_Tyrant 4d ago
Futurology is worse but TIL is for sure in the top 5 at the very least lmao. As far as large and welk known subs go anyway.
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u/IWasGonnaSayBrown 4d ago
Hahaha I was going to say, this is an entirely exaggerated version of the events I've heard.
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u/biggyofmt 4d ago
He also was NOT in charge of the clean up effort, as "lead a team of nuclear scientists" would imply. Considering he was 28 years old and had only been commissioned in the Navy for 6 years at the time, putting him in charge of the entire clean up would have been questionable. This was the worst nuclear power incident to date, so he basically there as a learning exercise.
He was in charge of some men, but only 12 out of over 1000 involved in the overall clean up.
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u/somethingfishrelated 4d ago
He was in charge of the US navy team of nuke workers that got sent to provide aid and learn from the incident.
I’m not trying to downplay his achievements at all as being where he WAS at 28 was not unimpressive, but you’re right he was definitely not leading the response or cleanup, especially because he was an American and this was a Canadian incident.
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u/Dogbir 4d ago
8mSv is equal to 17% of the federal annual limit
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u/somethingfishrelated 4d ago
*current federal annual limit for nuclear workers
In the 1950s the limits for that were much higher / kinda didn’t exist.
As a modern nuclear worker, getting 8 msv on one job is quite unlikely, but I have seen it happen, and at operating plants, not ones which had a meltdown.
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u/Dogbir 4d ago
Yup. I meant to say that 8mSv isn’t very high by today’s standards, let alone in the 50s. I’ll probably get about half of that this year and I do not have a very high dose job. Picked up about 80mrem today and will get another 50 or so tomorrow
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u/singbirdsing 4d ago
I'm sorry, but even though you provided an excellent and thorough answer, I only accept values expressed as BED (Banana Equivalent Dose), where 1 BED = 0.1 microSierverts or 100 milliSieverts.
If 8.5 milliSieverts = 8500 microSieverts, Jimmy Carter was exposed to the radiation of 850 typical bananas.
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u/somethingfishrelated 4d ago
I think you messed up your conversion there. 0.1 microsieverts is definitely not 100 millisieverts.
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u/theanghv 4d ago
8500 microsieverts is correct. Your mistake is multiplying microsieverts with BED when you should be dividing microsieverts with BED.
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u/singbirdsing 4d ago
(Thanks! I backtracked a couple of times doing the calculations. I balked at imagining that many bananas so close to one man.)
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u/Sudden_Watermelon 4d ago
just going to throw this here because no one ever has a handle on radiation exposure meaning
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u/mpyne 4d ago
The danger was past
You have a good clarification but I do take issue with this. A recently-melted down reactor is going to be highly radioactive and hence, still dangerous if stupidly handled.
Carter's team was there to handle it smartly rather than stupidly, and even still he was still pissing detectably-radioactive urine for months after the cleanup was complete.
And while we know that the levels of radiation we can detect are far lower than what we'd consider immediately dangerous, I'd still not personally work on things that leave me pissing radiation for months afterward.
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u/somethingfishrelated 4d ago
if stupidly handled
I feel like this is the crux of it then. Nuclear work can be wildly dangerous if handled very stupidly, but there are so many controls in place that keep you from having the opportunity to be stupid.
And having detectable nuclides in your urine for a period after the job sounds far more concerning than it is. The detectors used to look for nuclear material are incredibly sensitive, so the fact that they could see it months after the exposure isn’t as concerning as you might think.
I know a guy who fell into the spent fuel pool and had an uptake of some isotopes. He was also pissing detectable levels on nuclides for about a month. The calculated dose he received from this uptake was 0.01 msv or 10 mRem, which is basically nothing.
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u/IndependenceMean8774 4d ago
No wonder President Carter has lived so long. He's nuclear powered!
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u/FoFoAndFo 4d ago edited 4d ago
He was so virtuous he couldn’t imagine and didn’t plan for Reagan stabbing him in the back (edit: mostly by promising to illegally sell weapons to Iran in exchange for keeping American hostages while Carter was president, source below, to a lesser extent normalizing relations with OPEC nations and Russia and ripping the solar panels off the WH roof) or people being unwilling to take small steps to save the world.
I give him the benefit of the doubt because imo the previous generation wouldn’t have gone for Reagan’s corporate cowboy BS or abandoned him when he told us we needed to cut our energy use and pollution. He obviously did his share and more, it’s a shame we didn’t fully embrace his vision, the world would be a much better place.
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u/yogopig 4d ago
How did reagan stab him in the back? What should I google?
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u/CaptObviousHere 4d ago
Supposedly the Reagan campaign was in communication with Iran during the hostage crisis and prolonged the release of the hostages to hurt Carter’s re-election chances.
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u/MishterJ 4d ago
Which is kinda treasonous imo.
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u/MasterpieceBrief4442 4d ago
Didn't Nixon do something similar with north Vietnam?
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u/fdguarino 4d ago
Nixon, though an aide, convinced the South Vietnamese to not participate in the peace talks (1968) Johnson had worked out.
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u/bagofboards 4d ago
Not supposedly. They did it. They purposely negotiated a delay with the Iranians in order to hurt Carter's reelection chances. And it worked as planned.
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u/Einaiden 4d ago
The Iran hostage crisis and Iran-Contra. It is alleged that negotiations with Iran to release the hostages were deliberately delayed/slowed down since it was seen to benefit Reagan politically.
Once Reagan won the elections negotiations concluded quickly, the hostages were released to coincide with the inauguration and immediately the US started (covert) weapon sales to Iran.
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u/Mama_Skip 4d ago
Thank you for speaking the man's truth and virtue, something we all could have a little more of in these days, instead of making yet another inane joke about radiation or godzilla.
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u/Expert_Penalty8966 4d ago
Carter is another in a long line of war criminals white washed by history. Funding genocide = virtuous apparently.
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u/Free-Bird-199- 4d ago
People often overestimate the safe level of radiation and underestimate their routine exposure.
Bananas, flying in airplane, dinnerware are all sources.
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u/exipheas 4d ago
Gotta stop using that classic fiestaware.
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u/RulerOfSlides 4d ago
It’s a chip ‘n dip!
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u/JerrSolo 4d ago
Have you considered trading it in for something a man would enjoy, like a .22 rifle?
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u/eh-guy 4d ago
People often overestimate the safe level of radiation and underestimate their routine exposure.
What's a safe level? What's the dose of a "routine" exposure?
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u/meanoldrep 4d ago
"Routine" exposure varies substantially but radiation workers in the US are allowed 5 rem of whole body exposure per year. To give you context, the average X-ray worker at the surface of their lead apron often revives <30 millirem per year at work.
That yearly limit value is kinda arbitrary to be honest. The exact long term effects of small amounts of chronic radiation exposure aren't really quantified. Currently the model is assumed that any exposure will automatically result in a chance of increased cancer risk, but no other carcinogen has a model like that. So why would radiation be any different?
If you want to learn more there's a whole debate in Health Physics about Linear-No-Threshold (LNT) vs. Threshold model.
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u/ChrisFromIT 4d ago
The title is misleading, same with the article. Jimmy Carter was part of the US military provided(150 personnel) clean-up crew and led a group of 12 men out of well over 1000 people involved in the clean-up. The reactor had already had its meltdown.
It also wouldn't have been possible for Carter to be lowered into the reactor. Carter's team was responsible for disassembling the headers.
Professor Lundeen claimed that “Lieutenant Carter had himself lowered into the damaged reactor”, which is patently untrue – the reactor itself was very radioactive and inaccessible. The location of the headers was above a 2.6 m thickness of the thermal shields and biological shields, well above the reactor itself. However, there would have been significant radiation fields due to contamination and from damaged channels.
Source
https://nuclearheritage.com/jimmy-carter-and-the-nrx-accident-how-legends-grow/
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u/pichael289 4d ago
He also basically eradicated the guinea worm, a horrific parasite that needed to be slowly pulled south of your skin inch by inch, wound around a stick over the course of a few weeks. What a nightmare.
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u/Rare_Entertainment 4d ago
Ugh, absolutely horrific to imagine. It's not quite eradicated yet, but very close. Let's hope it's achieved before he dies.
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u/eh-guy 4d ago edited 4d ago
1000x safe levels would just kill you on the spot; Jimmy didn't uptake 2000 REM or anything even close to it. That whole post is a bold faced lie.
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u/Intelligent_Grade372 4d ago edited 4d ago
Jimmy Carter will never die. He will just continue to diminish in size until he’s just a speck of dust filled with infinitely dense integrity. I wonder what the half-life of Jimmy Carter is??
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u/KelenHeller_1 4d ago
I voted for Jimmy Carter and remember well that he wasn't a very well liked president. I remember my mother said when the Reagans moved into the WH that 'now there would be some class again' because Jimmy had vetoed serving hard liquor at State dinners which saved taxpayer money. He told people to put a sweater on during the oil embargo so we wouldn't knuckle under to OPEC's price gouging. But many people at the time just couldn't criticize him enough at a time when he talked sense to the American people instead of courting popularity. So glad to know people are admiring him again.
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u/CharliesRatBasher 4d ago
Say what you want about Carter’s presidency but he is the absolute most genuine, stand-up, real human being to ever hold the office and it’s not even close.
Hard to stomach what we’ve become today
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u/No_Curve_8141 4d ago
And put his family’s peanut farm into a trust so he could avoid a conflict of interest while he was president. And he was known as a lame duck president. He got a bad rap x 10. Probably the last president who was truly a servant of the people.
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u/TheNordicLion 4d ago
This is the coolest fact about any president I think.
MF pulled off a K19 didn't die.
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u/MadBomber420 4d ago
Carter is actually the hulk but realistically. Using his powers to build houses and low key kill everything whith no noticeable problems
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u/ApplebeeMcfridays0 4d ago
That’s one hell of a peanut farmer