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My cousin in Pickering, just east of Toronto, lived near the nuclear power plant for 45 years and for the past 15years lived in an area deemed heavy in ground radon emissions...he still has good vision in all 3 eyeballs.

I don't know either. Scared me a bit as a kid in the late 80's when people were freaking out over it and my dad had some radon tests in the house. (nothing)

Then it just disappeared and I've only ever heard it mentioned maybe once again, before you brought it up. I just think it is odd that it was such a big deal for a brief moment, then completely forgotten. Maybe I just didn't live in areas where it was a thing.

In Texas, basements are rare. Don’t know why, they seem useful. They say the ground is too rocky to dig, but every second house has a pool, so that doesn’t add up. So I’ve never heard of radon down here.

I remember the Radon fear fest when I was a kid. And the ozone hole, the black mold, the killer bees, the Lyme disease, acid rain, mad cow. It was coming for us all.

I think this radon thing might not be bullshit. Did a bit of research and when non smokers get lung cancer the first thing they tell them is to check their home for radon. Often, it’s there. It occurs often enough that they rank radon as the second leading cause of lung problems, after smoking.

It’s a gas so can’t you blow it out your basement windows, if you have any, to reduce the concentration?

The good news is, you have uranium under your house. Which sounds pretty cool.

I always wear a tinfoil hat and condom 24/7

Radon ain't shit

Radon is an alpha emitter which is effectively 10 times more damaging to the tissue than beta/gamma radiation. The awesome part about it is that alpha particles are more dense that beta/gamma and neutron radiation so your outer layer of skin or even a sheet of paper will block them. That shit won’t work for beta/gamma and neutron radiation. Sounds cool, right?

I’ll explain why you’re gonna get fucked in a bit but let’s take a second to understand the difference between contamination and radiation. Contamination is like dog shit. It’s physical matter, it emits an odor and you can step in it and track it all over the place. Radiation is like the smell of dog shit. It has source, it can be detected but it can’t be spread around (pretend that moving air around has no effect for sake of the explanation). Make sense?

Now here’s how you get fucked and how to practice a term called ALARA: As Low As Reasonably Achievable. You don’t have radiation leaching into your basement. You have an airborne source that emits the radiation finding it’s way in. If you spent five years in your basement with a supplied air mask then your committed effective dose would be zero because the alpha particles are too dense to cause any tissue damage. But who’s going to do that? When you breathe the air you will inhale radon. That radon will get trapped in your lungs and at some point will alpha decay and shoot the alpha particle into you lung tissue and fuck one of the cells up by damaging that cell’s dna strand. Sounds bad? Well kind of.

This damaged cell now has a fucked up set of instructions and four things could happen. The cell could die, it could live and reproduce two daughter cells that are fine, it could live and produce two daughter cells that are fucked up and they die or it could live and produce to daughters that are fucked up and those move on to produce more fucked up cells and then, you guessed it, you now have cancer. So it’s an odds game. The more exposure the higher the chance of getting cancer. How do you reduce those odds? Minimize the exposure by spending as little time down there as you can or ventilating the basement out if you plan on spending some time in there. And by time I mean more than three or four hours every day.

Figure out the volume of the basement and divide that by 2. Buy one of those bounce house blowers and see how many CFM in moves. Now take half the volume of the basement and divide by the CFM of the blower and you get the amount of time, in minutes, that it takes to replace half of the volume of air in the basement. It is generally assumed in the scientific community that after five half-lives the concentration of what you are trying to dilute or remove is zero so multiply that time by 5 and that’s how long you have to run the blower to be able to reasonably assume you have replaced the entire volume of air in the basement with fresh air from outside. Just run a ceiling fan while you do it to ensure that the basement air is mixed up well so you can make sure you turn all of the air over down there. Good luck!

Huff it.

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Jews killed Jesus, so I don't think random is the worst of your problems