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Forgive my ignorance on this subject, but I am working at a credit union office inside a nuclear plant right now and thought I should find out about this stuff. We have a credit union office here and I am filling in part-time. I haven't heard any talk about KI in the New Orleans area. Is this a prescription thing, or can I just buy it off the shelf in a regular drug store?

You can order 200 tablets for $21.00 from here.
For adults, the recommended dosage is 2 tablets per day for 14 days, followed by 1 tablet per day for 71 days. A total of 99 tablets per adult. Therefore, one bottle of 200 tablets would be enough for 2 adults.
Potassium iodate saturates your thyroid system, thus blocking the absorption of the bad stuff.
However, if you're Ben Affleck, you can wonder around for hours and hours in an area thick with clouds of radioactive dust and debris, swirling all about you, breathing it all in while walking and running, with no adverse impact. (See "The Sum of All Fears").

Forgive my ignorance on this subject, but I am working at a credit union office inside a nuclear plant right now and thought I should find out about this stuff. We have a credit union office here and I am filling in part-time. I haven't heard any talk about KI in the New Orleans area. Is this a prescription thing, or can I just buy it off the shelf in a regular drug store?

What can I say? Do what you feel you have to do. If it makes you feel more secure to have those pills in your pocket or medicine chest, go right ahead, its not illegal or anything. But, I have to tell you, since I'm sitting right now about 30 feet from the core of a (research) reactor, I don't feel the need for those things. You'd be amazed what a reasonable amount of simple shielding material, like water and (barytes) concrete, will do.

What I do worry about with this KI business is that a non-zero percentage of the population has a tendency for deleterious reaction to injested KI. They're allergic. Some allergic reactions can be fatal. My worry is that nut-case buttwipes like Billary and that other Westerchester County whack-job politician will just start alarming the sheeple with this unrealistic nuclear terrorism baloney, so much so that some of them will just start taking the KI as a matter of course, you know, "just in case". And, if some of them are sensitive to the compound in a negative way, they'll needlessly suffer. You have to balance the risks against the benefits, and, in this case, as is often true, that hasn't been done.

KI is ok, but I would (and did) get the KIO3. It is easier to digest, easier to give to children, and comes in child size doses. Adults just take twice as much. It might have a longer shelf life, too. The Feds SHOULD have ordered KIO3 for these reasons but there was some kind of screw up between the NRC and the FDA on the bid and they ended up putting out the bid for KI. I think medicalcorps.com or .org (whoever is represented in that big display above)is the best source. That's where I got mine. I got a bunch, figuring that IF and that's a big if the gov would supply it, they would get it to us too late. So I got enough to hold out for a while.