[microwavecamera]

To be fair, most products and practices in the 1950's would be considered wildly dangerous by today's standards. Hell, we were still using leaded gasoline (gasoline with tetraethyllead additive) up until the 90's. Think about how dangerous lead poisoning is and now imagine that we used to add it to gasoline and every gas powered motor was spewing vaporized lead. Good times.

[beambot]

They still use that fuel in airports: avgas

[jlj]

I had no idea. FAA confirms: https://www.faa.gov/news/fact_sheets/news_story.cfm?newsId=1...

[Gibbon1]

Yeah it's a problem because there is no money in light aviation and a lot of liabilities. And leaded aviation gas appears as a liability, especially to refineries.

There are increasing attempts to produce diesel aircraft engines. Complicated by there not being any money in light aviation.

[fnord77]

so there's lead raining down on us from piston powered planes?

[mhh__]

The Windscale nuclear power plant was spewing out radiation years before it caught fire