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A Handy Radiation Dose Chart From XKCD
An anonymous reader points out Randall Munroe's latest contribution to public health awareness, a "chart of how much ionizing radiation a person can absorb from various sources, compared visually. 1 Sievert will make you sick, many more will kill you, however, even small doses cumulatively increase cancer risk." It's a good way to think about the difference between Chernobyl and Fukushima.
DELICIOUS.
Fascinating, the mention of bananas was smart, since there's something known as Banana Equivalent Dose
An additional useful chart can be found here, in a slightly more readable and intelligible format:
http://eq.wide.ad.jp/files_en/110315houshasen_mext_en.pdf
Not as all-inclusive as Randall's work, but still good.
Every experiment which ends in a big bang is a good experiment.
xkcd, not XKCD.
Meh, at least he/she is not rude about his/her viewpoints. They are at least better at debate then the rest of the ACs
So what you are saying is that XKCD did more research and analysis for a web-comic than the 24 hour news networks do for a story?
I'm sorry, but the link above on the equivalent yearly radiation in Tokyo would only be correct if you were outdoors 24 hours per day, 365 days per year.
Any link to the updated levels of radiation on Fukushima?
Uh, not rude? I'm pretty sure calling your opponent a fuckwit qualifies as rude. To say nothing of the rest of the comment.
Being rude doesn't matter from a standpoint of factual correctness, but a person can have the facts of their side and still come off looking like a raving lunatic when they write an entire paragraph where every third word is "cock".
Erotic is when you use a feather. Exotic is when you use the whole chicken.
There are so many radiation units out there and people keep using them without regard to what they really mean. It's nice that you've got your Sieverts covered. Now you'll have to learn about Grays, Curies, Becquerels, Rads, Rems, and Roentgens. Here's a handy conversion chart.
It's a good way to think about the difference between Chernobyl and Fukushima.
No. It is not a good way to do that. It would have been if it had included measures like "Ten minutes next to the reactor core of Fukushima after partial meltdown" or "Dose from spending an hour on the grounds at the Fukushima plant in 2036". I'm not saying Fukushima is anywhere near as bad as Chernobyl, but if you want to compare them this chart is not what you need.
I found one source that said firefighters had radiation levels of 27 mSV after a 13 hour operation (presumably to cool down the reactor). Which doesn't seem to me to be a severe healthrisk after looking at the chart provided. Maybe I'm wrong but I'm vastly annoyed with the media, given how they talk you'd think people were losing their hair and growing skin lesions.
The Sievert is a measure of ACCUMULATED dose. Time is a factor. Therefore being exposed to 1 Sievert for a second (the real unit behind the sievert is the J/s, which is equivalent to Watts) is the same as being exposed to 1 milisievert for 1000 seconds, or 1 microsievert for 10^6 seconds.
This is also why many measurements are done on a "per hour" basis. 400 milisieverts per hour (near the pool between reactors 3-4) is not harmful to you if you are going to be there for 5 minutes. If you stay there for 2.5 hours, however, you could experience signs of acute radiation sickness.
I find it laughable, however, how the press a) fails to understand this and b) has obvious trouble converting between micro and mili.
Finally one must bear in mind that radionuclides will decay over time (Iodine-131 being the main culprit here, has a half life of 8 days). So in 5 half lives (40 days), most of it will be gone. And also that the chronic health risk of radiation is usually overestimated, especially for such small doses as currently seen in Japan. It's statistical roulette, just like smoking. It just takes one cigarette to unleash the chain of events that will eventually lead to cancer. However the odds of it being the cigarette you are currently smoking are quite small. But if you smoke all your life, you're likely to buy the winning ticket eventually. The same with radiation. There are still living survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and these people were exposed to far more (and more harmful) radiation - gamma rays vs. beta particles. And yet not that many of them have "grown a third arm". Yes, there have been cancer deaths, but considering the population exposed, it wasn't all that much.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
This is not an incredibly informative measurement, it would be more useful to learn of the radiation levels in the evacuated areas (10km & 20km, last I heard) as well as the cautioned areas (30km, stay indoors).
SYS 64738 NO CARRIER
Anyone acquainted with any of the literature in radiation exposure up through the late-1990s (including classic and still standard works like The Effects of Nuclear Weapons by Glasstone and Dolan) will have encountered discussion of radiation exposure in terms of rems, not sieverts. It is useful to know that a centisievert (cSv) is essentially identical with a rem, so expressing doses in cSv terms allows direct comparisons with the large body of older but still relevant literature.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
Would be useful if he gave some comparison with Sulawesi...
I would like to have seen the dosage given by using the backscatter machine at an airport listed.
Deltron 3030 - Virus (music video)
Comparison between the exposure of an aid worker who flew from the US / EU to Japan and right back again, and what he would have accumulated in a week saving people 100 miles away from Fukushima.
Fandroids hate facts.
1 Sievert? What is that in feet?
Coal fired powers stations emit more radioactivity than nuclear power stations and also release greenhouse gases and ash. We should be shutting all of these as soon as possible to protect the Earth and its people. The deaths due to coal mining annually exceed all deaths in over fifty years of nuclear power generation.
A number line would have done so much more.
The thing that very few people are mentioning is:
The exposure occurring over the days and weeks.
Not everyone has an x-ray every day.
The Japanese ministry is suppressing both the radiation figures for Fukushima and the areal photos recently taken.
The atom is an amazing thing because it makes people lie so much?
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
The EPA-dose pertains to exposure to manmade radiation. A third of your yearly exposure can be stuff like X-rays, but no more.
That was helpful. But after a 10 days of study I'm missing the information about the non-ionizing radiation that the water in those spent fuel pools was there to adsorb. The cancer link is also curious - the WHO report on Chernobyl states 4000 cases of thyroid cancer from milk in children with a 99% survival rate, just 9 deaths. I have cancer myself and visiting a reactor would probably be good for me because tumors hate radiation.
Seeing the wild claim I have seen on various network, and web news aggregator, I would say anybody researching *a bit* did more research than news networks...
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Will I gain super powers if I visit the reactor?
Or read this article about how the US coverage from nearly all outlets (not just Fox) is sensationalist, late, and often just wrong?
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Talking-Points-Memo/~3/JNlPwKP6WAs/taking_stock_3.php
Example: "This has not been just Fox News, but also CNN, MSNBC, ABC, and even the New York Times to differing degrees. They get the reactors mixed up or report information that is simply wrong (e.g., writing that the TEPCO workers had fully abandoned the effort to control the plant because of radiation levels when TEPCO had only withdrawn some non-essential personnel). They are perpetually late, continuing to report things the Japanese media had shown to be wrong or different the day before. They are woefully selective, bringing out just the sensational elements ("toxic clouds" over Tokyowhen in fact radiation in Tokyo now is actually less than that in LA on some days). They are misleading (implying for instance that the dumping of water from the air was some last ditch effort to cool the core, when it was just an effort to replenish the water in the spent rod poolswhich are now full in reactor 3 and back to normal temperature)."
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
I think one major cause of nucleophobia is that doses of a millionth of anything dangerous or less are easily measurable
Negligible doses of most every poison is always around, but are unmeasurable. Radiation radiates its presence and is observed, reported and terrifying.
Do all those boxes remind anyone else of a good old fashioned defrag?
Read this: http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/2011/03/taking_stock_3.php
According to reports by the Japanese government and media, the situation is not unstable. Levels are decreasing. Stop listening to US news coverage.
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
Read your own friggin' articles and stop spreading FUD.
"Yukio Edano, Japan's chief Cabinet secretary, confirmed at a news conference Saturday that milk produced by a farm in Fukushima Prefecture near a crippled power plant and spinach from the neighboring Ibaraki Prefecture were found to be tainted with radiation levels SLIGHTLY [emphasis mine] above that set by the government.
However, Edano said, the contaminated food posed no immediate threat to human health. The public should remain calm, he urged.
Referring to the milk, he said, "drinking it for a year would only expose consumers to the radiation equivalent of one medical CT scan.""
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
Most of the casualties from Chernobyl (4000 to 8000 fatalities and counting) were from Thyroid cancer.
Check your facts! 4000 cases of thyroid cancer and only 9 fatalities, because it is 99% curable (I think I read somewhere else 15 deaths).
Exactly. It's pointless to discuss radiation dosages without talking about the method of exposure. The problem with fallout is not strictly the radiation levels, but rather the spread of radioactive particles -- the source(s) of that radiation.
Depending on the particular particles, ingestion/inhalation can pose a risk 20-100x the same exposure outside the body. Heavy alpha emitters like polonium can do a lot of damage in a relatively short amount of time; beta and gamma emitters like cesium work a bit less quickly, but have a relatively long biological half-life.
But hey, we have a nearly irrelevant chart to tell us we're all safe, so let's just go with that.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
You're contradicting yourself. If the Sievert already has units of a rate (J/s), then the 400 mSv per hour you mention is a double rate (energy/time^2), some kind of energetic acceleration, which doesn't make sense here. Your second paragraph is correct, but it contradicts your first.
As others have noted, the units for a Sievert are J/kg, not J/s. This is a very important distinction. An accumulated does requires these units, as J/s is a rate, and then you have to know how long a person is exposed, i.e. there is no accumulation. An accumulated dose implies that if you receive 1 mSv, that is all one needs to know: there is no time scale involved. It is a certain amount of total radiation received. Correcting your first paragraph, 1 Sv received in 1 second is (approximately) the same as 1 Sv received in 1000 seconds and as 1 Sv received in one million seconds. Sieverts are therefore a useful measure for directly determining the effects the radiation will have on a person.
So in fact Randall's image is accurate, unless there is some minor error in it that hasn't yet been discovered. Given your own misunderstanding of the situation, I hope the press's confusion is a little less inexplicable. You still come to the correct conclusion, which they often do not, but sometimes, science is hard.
Excellent idea, poorly executed. The graphic is too crowded, contains too much information, and is overwhelming.
Randall needs to read and head Tufte.
I am now scared of bananas.
I had 40 Gray to the head in 1980 and another 40 Gray to a soft tissue tumor in 1982, both go arounds were in 2 Gray doses.
Wow, read some of their comments, I don't think he/she even really knows what radiation is, let alone how it affects thing. "They have the potential to render parts of the globe uninhabitable by humans for times well in excess of the length of human civilisations." Aside from the spelling mistake, seriously doesn't IE have spell check now too, this makes no sense. The amount of damage they are taking about would kill the whole planet, and is well behind the capability of a single reactor. It pisses me off that people like this are the reason we are behind in or even have yet to implement new reactor technology. Same people who still call 3 Mile Island a "disaster" .
Being rude doesn't matter from a standpoint of factual correctness, but a person can have the facts of their side and still come off looking like a raving lunatic when they write an entire paragraph where every third word is "cock".
Surely a limited data set but it seems to me that people who swear a lot when trying to present an argument often miss or lack a lot of information even though the information they do have may be correct. Swearing can be telling as to which part of the brain is being used and how frequently. It can also affect the person reading/hearing the word in the same region. From HowStuffWorks.
Language processing is a "higher" brain function and takes place in the cerebral cortex.
Emotion and instinct are "lower" brain functions and take place deep inside the brain.
Many studies suggest that the brain processes swearing in the lower regions, along with emotion and instinct. Scientists theorize that instead of processing a swearword as a series of phonemes, or units of sound that must be combined to form a word, the brain stores swear words as whole units [ref]. So, the brain doesn't need the left hemisphere's help to process them. Swearing specifically involves:
The limbic system, which also houses memory, emotion and basic behavior. The limbic system also seems to govern vocalizations in primates and other animals, and some researchers have interpreted some primate vocalizations as swearing.
The basal ganglia, which play a large role in impulse control and motor functions.
Ingestible isotopes have a far lower threshold of causing problems, you've made a chart of "shine", external source dose. Make a chart of ingested, integrated contamination with increase in death rate by cancer or incidence of cancer for this situation. Risk of death by cancer goes up 0.04% per REM of long term chronic dose (or 0.04% per 10 milli-Sievert), for example. Some colored squares to indicate piles of 1 and 10 dead people, about and beyond the norm, is the way to view this situation.
This chart applies only to "prompt" doses. Most of the casualties from Chernobyl (4000 to 8000 fatalities and counting) were from Thyroid cancer caused by exposure of children to radioactive Iodine....
The thyroid cancers, fortunately, did not cause many deaths, since it is highly treatable by thyroid removal (you were right when you counted them as casualties, but not as fatalities). This should not be treated lightly of course - who wants to see thousands of kids getting sick with thyroid cancer, have to undergo thyroid removal surgery, then be on thyroid replacement drugs for the rest of their life?
The eventual cancer death toll from Chernobyl is expected to top 10,000 or so eventually however, spread of millions of people.
Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age
The level for a mammogram is shockingly high compared to other ordinary x-ray diagnostics. Could this be wrong? Hundreds of millions of women regularly have mammograms. How can their exposure be thousands of times higher than other x-ray therapies? This must be an error.
Or read this article about how the US coverage from nearly all outlets (not just Fox) is sensationalist, late, and often just wrong?
As it is from EVERY news outlet regarding EVERY story. I was watching ABC World News last night (had nothing better to do) and I was severely facepalming at the sensationalist questions the anchor lady was asking the reporter in Libya. Everybody does it. Nobody is immune to it. You're delirious if you think Fox is the only station that's biased to any degree, and you're insane if you avoid them because of it. A well-informed individual gathers his news from all sources knowing that all sources are at best not in possession of the entire truth and at worst telling blatant lies, and averages it all together.
That rant ended up being a few sentences longer than I was hoping, but the facts still stand.
... to dead kittens?
That depends on whether they are put into sealed boxes with hammers and vials of poison gas.
Tepco has translated the Monitoring data at Fukushima Daiichi and Fukushima Daini Nuclear Power Stations, with all the measures available from 17/march/2011 to 20/march/2011:
http://www.tepco.co.jp/en/nu/monitoring/index-e.html
The next link points to the page in japanese that shows the monitoring data since the emergency was declared:
http://www.tepco.co.jp/nu/monitoring/index-j.html
Mexico: 100% conservative's America now!
So many people talk in terms of the exposure level at Fukushima since the accident, but that's never been the issue. They have, so far, avoided the disaster with some pretty amazing mitigating actions, and some very good luck. Speculation as to what will happen if those attempts at mitigation eventually fail is the scary part, not the *current* risk. But what would happen if their efforts fail and they end up with an exclusion zone that happens to include half the farmland that feeds Tokyo? THAT hasn't happened and probably won't happen, but if it did, all this talk about how wonderful and low the exposure is today would be irrelevant.
As I see it, the real problem is, whether there is a risk of the disaster taking a turn for the worse, it is impossible to gauge the risk because the people in control of information are not as forthcoming as they should be, considering they have been caught lying about things in the past. This, the fact that the people controlling information are already known not to be trustworthy, is the central issue of Fukushima.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
you fucking idiot! Some people swear during debates cuz the other side are just complete fucking dumb shits with no more brains than god gave a used kleenex, and if they weren't such a useless pile of useless piles, they would realize that they're wrong.
rewriting history since 2109
Has anyone else been having a lot of trouble viewing anything from xkcd lately? In the past few weeks, comics have taken 5-10 minutes (seriously) to load, if they load at all. Some comics haven't loaded at all - I've even tried m.xkcd.com instead - given 5-10 minutes to load.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
... or they've been watching too much Deadwood. At a dollar a cuss, they could buy Japan a new power plant.
It's interesting, but only in a USAToday-kind-of-way. Radiation, like all toxic substances, is all about dosage and time combined, not dosage alone.
Even the statement that "one sievert (all at once) will make you sick" isn't very illustrative. A sievert over a year is also a huge dose, but does not necessarily mean you will get cancer, it means an elevated number of a large population would but not necessarily a particular individual.
A sievert in a minute ... well, we're talking fatal levels of radiation here. I think "sick" kind of understates it ... this a possible dose you might have received standing at the Chernobyl Reactor after meltdown. (The chart has absolute values, but the real world is not like that. The dose could vary by moving 20 feet).
A sievert is a huge dose of radiation ... 100 rem or 100,000 milirem. You can expect to get an average natural background dose of about 350 mRem a year just by being alive, but even so, each individual in the US will have a (relatively) huge variation there.
But, if you experienced a dose of 350mRem in a minute, you'd be right to worry ... if you didn't move and the source didn't lower, you'd take a sievert in five hours.
The greatest fear should be internal contamination. Many of the radioactive isotopes mimic their non-radioactive elements or have a similar biological uptake. (Strontium vs. Calcium), (normal Iodine 127 vs. radioactive Iodine 131).
For dosage calculations it is important to know if it is an alpha particle, beta particle, gamma ray or neutron. Each has different penetrating capabilities and different destructive potential.
If I had a choice between 1 Sievert of gamma radiation given externally or 10 milliSieverts of an internal dose of Iodine 131 (8 day half life) or Polonium 210 (138 day half-life) I would take the external dose.
Polonium is a wicked producer of alpha particles. When ingested or inhaled it is toxic in addition to giving you a constant source of radiation (rate decreasing by 1/2 every 138 days).
I had a thyroid disorder and I opted for the Iodine 131 treatment instead of surgery. It was an internal contaminant and my sweat and urine were radioactive and I emitted enough radiation that I was supposed to stay away from people for several days (there are biological half-lives for elements in the body that are quite different from isotope decay half-lives). The treatment essentially "killed" my thyroid on purpose since it was on it's own version of a nuclear meltdown.
Need to consider external vs. internal, particle types, radiological half-life and biological half-life on any sort of dosage calculation.
Tisha Hayes
Interesting... I would like to use a mod point to mod you up, but this discussion is so far off-topic I cannot bring myself to do so. Although OT, cursing/swearing is something I have paid attention to for some amount of time in my life and will instead provide my observations.
I have primarily noticed that most swear/curse words used in normal conversation are used as adjectives or adverbs to place emphasis. Not to say that they are not used as nouns, but usually when they are, it is in the context of a pejorative. I have noticed that those who use swearing in normal language, in many cases, hardly even notice that they are doing so.
I have been considered to be fairly well read and personally enjoy adding new words to my vocabulary in order to employ them in conversation and writing. I choose to avoid using swear words as a point of professionalism. But, in life, I have spent significant time amongst those who are not/do not. I am not sure if it is a cultural thing or not. I have been around and have found this swearing behavior prominent in the following societies: construction workers, factory workers, most enlisted military members, bikers, music/drug related cultures, proto-criminals (sorry, I don't hang out with real criminals, but have known people who, some time after I stopped hanging out with them, became so) and significantly less to nil with office workers, military officers and various professionals. When I mix with the first group and I talk in a manner that I prefer, I come across as "pompous and faggy" (to steal from Idiocracy) and with the second group as erudite and well spoken.
I tell my nieces that those who swear a lot just don't really know that many words or are uncomfortable using them. To me, it comes across as a distinct lack of elegant variation and an anti-intellectualistic mentality.
loose: not fitting closely or tightly != lose: to suffer the deprivation of
I don't see a single spelling error in that quotation. Tested at http://spellcheck.net/
- Chuq
To continue being off topic :) but certainly in the tradition of many /. threads I recently watched a Nova episode examining ape behavior.
One experiment with chimps involved two chimps in cages and bowls of treats. The subject chimp points to the bowl with the most treats and the experimenter gives that bowl to the second chimp and the bowl that was not pointed to (with less treats) to the subject. Repeatedly the subject chimp does not learn the 'game' and continues to point to the bowl with the most treats.
Next the researchers teach the chimp numbers and use bowls with numbers instead of treats. The chimp knows that the number represents the number of treats for that bowl. The subject chimp learns to point to the bowl with the smaller number thus giving that bowl to the secondary chimp and getting the bowl with more treats for themselves.
The researchers concluded that symbols allowed the chimp to separate instinct and emotion from decision making thus allowing the chimp to learn the 'game'.
Symbols play large part in what distinguishes human communication from the rest of the animal kingdom. Swearing comes from the same part of the brain as screaming. It may communicate an emotion but little else. Intelligence almost becomes defined by an ability to use symbols.
However, because swearing is rooted in our emotions and instincts I think it can have a place. Swearing is usually more acceptable around friends where emotions and instincts in general are more accepted. Literary works and art that appeal to our emotions and instincts might provide another place for it. Swearing may play a part in bonding. Could bonding play a part in the appearance that blue collar workers swear more than white collar workers?
With all of that said I agree that swearing has no place in the framework of a debate. In this context it is a burden on the mind for both the person that introduces it and the person that receives it.
"Profanity is the crutch of the ignorant, but every now and again you have to talk to one of those ignorant motherfuckers."
Could bonding play a part in the appearance that blue collar workers swear more than white collar workers?
I think you may have hit the nail right on the head. From my teens until my mid-20's, I worked back and forth between various construction and factory jobs (mason, carpenter, machinist and assembly line worker) until the late age of 26, I enlisted in the Navy and became an Electronics Technician and post-Navy I work as a Systems Analyst/Systems Integration Specialist, anyway, I install and troubleshoot various electro-mechanical systems that are usually connected to PC's/networks or other computing equipment that most people wouldn't think of as computers, most contract houses sell me as a "Multi-skilled technician," so I tend to be a striped collar worker and interface well between blue collar and white collar workers.
To quote Bill Cosby, "Now, I told you THAT story to tell you THIS one." I just figured a little background would lend more credence to the following:
It does seem that there is more camaraderie with blue collar workers where a workers position is very well defined and their advancement in position is primarily based on experience/skill level as opposed say non-professional office workers (the bulk of which seem to be fairly interchangeable document processors.) In the blue collar environment, there is a noticeable skill level difference between a tradesman with 2/5/10/20 years of experience so that there is less politicking needed for advancement in position, making for a more informal and less guarded-tongue environment, besides the addition of the common enemy syndrome (us workers vs. "THE MAN.") Where in white collar office workers there is little difference between someone who has been processing documents for 5 years or 20 years, so most advancement, say to management, requires verbal jousting and politics (not even counting those who interface with customers or children.) I would say the same goes with enlisted and commissioned service members.
Forgive me for being overly simplistic, I'm just trying to be as concise as I can make it. FAIL.
loose: not fitting closely or tightly != lose: to suffer the deprivation of
Ann Coulter has her own website. Why don't you link to directly to her, to attribute what she says, and not to the website of one of her political enemies.
It should be trivial for you to do that, because, well, you're supposedly citing her as an example of something. Not just trumped up nonsense. Right?
. . . it seems to me that people who swear a lot when trying to present an argument often miss or lack a lot of information even though the information they do have may be correct. Swearing can be telling as to which part of the brain is being used . . .
I have an anecdote to illustrate this. When I worked in the physical therapy department of a hospital a long time ago, I encountered a stroke patient who had severe language problems. He could understand what you said, but could not convert his own thoughts into words. The hospital did not have a speech therapy specialist (he eventually went to a rehabilitation center that did) but we tried to get him to talk. He managed to learn to say "good" in response to "How are you doing today?". But that became almost the only thing he could get out of his mouth, whatever the conversation was. This was frustrating to him, and he had no trouble swearing when he got frustrated or mad.
However, I don't think this applies to reading and writing, even for comments on Slashdot.
The journalists seem to notoriously confuse micro and milisieverts. So seems you do.
Minimal cancerous rate is 100mSv (measurably increasing risk, not causing cancer invariably as you seem to think)
The sites mentioned in the chart caused 3mSv/day for a short period of time. Even if you stayed there for a month, you wouldn't receive 100mSv because it persisted only for a short time.
I'm pretty sure the carrier received 300uSv/day which is a typical level for this kind of scenario (and would require almost a year to reach increased cancer risk dose) but they preferred to move to avoid panic and lawsuits.
Even if the chart were clear, it doesn't even address all the health issues. How much does measuring sieverts tell you about the risks of ingesting or inhaling fission products?
Pretty much everything. Sievert is an universal unit that takes into account various types of sources, their energy and so on. Alpha particle sources, that cause harm when ingested, have about 35 times the weight of gamma radiation in computation of the final measurements. That is, by ingesting/absorbing an alpha source of n counts per minute you cause some 35 times more harm than keeping a beta radiation source of n counts per minute near your body and will result in a 35 times higher sievert value. It even takes into account influence on various types of tissue.
I disagree. When a source gets to be more than a certain amount wrong, I start just ignoring it completely.
OTOH, I do agree that this means I ignore almost all media news. Even on local events they are so wrong that it should be embarassing. (I know, because I've been present at the site of a few stories, and have visited afterwards the site of several others.) At some point the noise level is so high that you introduce too much error trying to correct it. ... And we passed that a few decades ago. (I don't know just when, as by the time I thought to check, it was already too high to enable one to figure out the truth. Which I used to believe I could do.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Cool. The chart's origin is from the Reed Research Reactor staff.
Fun fact: the research reactor at Reed College is the only nuclear reactor in a private college in the US.
I'm a Reedie alumnus and proud of it!
That's good, but does the chart address this? If a typical town near the reactor is getting only a few extra micro sieverts per day, does that mean for people just walking around, or for people ingesting the food grown in the area, of which there is quite a bit. What's the dosage for guy working the fields covered in dirt all day?
Play Command HQ online
You don't need a conspiracy for this kind of secrecy, you just need corporations that want to make money, lax regulators, and the general tendency for folks to want to just get by and hope nothing bad happens on their watch. This is a serious problem in the nuclear industry, and it boggles the mind that proponents don't feel troubled by it, especially considering the success of that other hyper safety conscious industry, the airlines, at being open and aggressive about dealing with safety issues.
Play Command HQ online
100 mSv / year is known to be cancerous, it doesn't therefore follow that exposure to the same or higher rate for less time is not cancerous.
Play Command HQ online
"nuclear proponents"
actually, I don't really LIKE nuclear energy, much less propose it. however, I dislike mass hysteria and media blitzes more. I don't enjoy seeing people played like a piano.
so no, saying "it's not what people wide eyedly believe it is" does NOT equal "Nothing to see here, folks, don't worry your pretty little head", at least not for me. and it's ironic of to mock imaginary elitist smart people in reply to "here's some more knowledge than you had before", which you can't deny this chart represents. YES, it's nowhere near the full picture, NO, it's not really saying anything, it's just making a graphic out of numbers. the rest is your interpretation. and seeing how this cartoon stands against news media and a public who do anything BUT seeking the facts first, well, it is ironic to me. this chart is WORLDS better than anything than what many, if not most newspapers publish or tv stations reurgitate (e.g. just "radiation" without ANY quantification - that's basically the norm, with lots of scary adjectives which aren't technically a lie thrown in).. and it's a web cartoon ffs.
if that, to you, is the mouth piece of "nuclear proponents" and this chart their effort to educate people, while at the same time you can only imagine "nuclear proponents" to be against FUD -- well, that's two separate you got there, but they're just yours. "And it doesn't even begin to address the issues of poor planning, mismanagement, cost cutting and secretiveness of the nuclear industry and the governments that are supposed to regulate them." so? neither does the apple you might have eaten earlier. will you dismiss anything that doesn't solve all problems at once? again, the irony, considering you talk about shooting oneself in the foot...
"well, that's two separate * you got there"
* issues
(and sorry for the formatting :/)
Since living within 50 miles is about 2 blue boxes, how about living within 50 miles of 50 nuclear reactors? (check INEL in wikipedia). Do they still rate two boxes, or is it multiplied out?
Oh, for extra credit, one of them (SL-1) blew up, and killed 3 people. Does that earn me more blue boxes?
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
Seeing as I live on the eastern outskirts of Koriyama city, Fukushima, and my house is 54km (33.5 miles) from the nuclear power stations, I thought it would be prudent to print out that chart and laminate it and keep it in my living room for my wife and son to view.
It certainly puts the whole OH NOES RADIATION! mem into perspective, and has reassured them both that the slightly elevated radiation levels around our area really won't cause much problems.
I'm British, and have decided to "bug-in" at the house for the time being, and hoping they'll eventually get the power stations under formal control. It looks increasingly like my hopes are being realised, as power has now been restored to reactors 5 & 6, power has been restored to reactor 2 and 1, and they plan on getting power to reactors 3 & 4 Real Soon Now.
The British Govt. said to evacuate the area if you're within 80km of the power plants, as a precaution. Absolutely no point in doing this whatsoever in my view. 54km is a reasonable enough distance and if a reactor were to go POFF, we have plans to bail out and GTF away very quickly. One of our cars and a full tank of gas awaits this plan.
Since we seem to have experts in this thread, can I ask what the dosage from a bombed-out Iranian or North Korean reactor would be?
We (or the US Gov't) were seriously discussing doing that recently, after all.
...when comparing Chernobyl to Fukushima.
1) Comparing radiation somewhere inside a 50 mile radius around Fukushima I to the radiation next to the exploded reactor at Chernobyl is useless. Radiation next to a dry spent fuel basin will be quite high as well but it is not dangerous for the general population until it explodes some more.
2) We are also comparing a sparsely populated region to one of the most densely populated ones on the planet, smaller amounts of radiation will do more damage here. And by damage I'm not only referring to the damage the radiation may do to humans directly but also to damage like e.g. the inability to use certain food sources - that will become unavailable even when they would likely not be very dangerous on their own.
3) On a technical level, at Chernobyl, one reactor exploded. At Fukushima, we saw several explosions, some of which apparently harmed the other nearby reactors. This is a first. Previous accidents always only involved one reactor.
How was his writing?
As a supporting anecdote, my grandmother was an occasional drinker and during her later life suffered from Alzheimer's. Now most of the time growing up, I had never heard her swear, unless she had a couple of drinks in her. Later in life, as her Alzheimer's progressed (I would say it started about age 70 and progressed until she died at age 81), she became more and more prone to cursing rages and/or mumbling cursing, like a one sided argument, where every other word was a curse, over some perceived slight from, say, 30 years prior. Admittedly, she was not always the most stable minded person, she probably would have been classified as a hypochondriac, she loved the sympathy, to illustrate this: in her late 50's she broke her ankle, years later, when anyone was around she would go on about the pain and difficulty it caused her, but on several occasions when no one was home she had rearranged much of the heavy furniture in the house. Until my sister took charge of her medication and doctors, she at one point was taking something like 19 different medications from 6-7 different doctors and if allowed would take 20+ aspirin a day. She was also prone to sending money to religious evangelists for blessed crosses, bottles of water, plastic saints icons and the like. Additionally, some time after the age of 60, she started cutting herself out of all the family pictures she could lay her hands on.
loose: not fitting closely or tightly != lose: to suffer the deprivation of
Do you really believe that the news channels do anything other than bloviate?
Japan nuclear threat: The tsunami is the bigger tragedy
"And we're definitely not in the situation where we're going to see another Chernobyl - that possibility has long gone."
Both fairly balanced. To say there are problems with Fukishima is an understatement, however from a brief 5 minutes of watching an ABC program the other night, I can see why a bigger risk to Japan is the American media.
and wonder if he read the recent research on how neurons can use weak rf like signals to communicate with nearby but not directly connected neurons.
So you're saying my brain can somehow link with my phone via bluetooth? Sweet. Got a howto?
But where did you get the "exposure to same or higher rate"? If you mean higher levels than 10mSv/year, that is more than 11.4uSv/hour, then no.
11uSv/hour for a year is much more likely to cause cancer than a hourly exposure of of 1mSv/h and then just typical background for remainder of the year.
The rate isn't all that important in increasing danger of cancer. It's the total dose absorbed, time notwithstanding.
A particle (alpha, beta, gamma) gets ejected in a fission reaction from a radiation source. It will stop when it hits a random object.
With minimal probability, the random object may be a DNA chain in a cell of your body.
With minimal probability, the hit will damage the chain by modifying the code and not making it "unreadable".
With minimal probability the damage will be specifically in code responsible for limiting growth/multiplication of the cell.
If this series of coincidences happens, you get cancer.
The chance for this exists with every particle emitted. No matter where it comes from, a broken reactor, a CT scan, a banana. Only the total number of radiation particles entering your body matters here. Whether that happens over 10 years living over a field of uranium ore, or over 1s in a nuclear flash, it's just the particle count that changes cancer probability.
Of course the situation is different for acute radiation disease symptoms. The particles may hit any other part of the cell and simply damage or kill it. And the likehood for that is vastly higher. Of course cells will be rebuilt over time, so with slower irradiation the body will keep up with replacing dead cells as they are killed, while a rapid irradiation will kill many of them at once, and as result, there will be not enough left to support life functions. But that has very little in common with increasing cancer risk - dead cells will not multiply, won't cause cancer.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
"When I want my men to remember something important, to really make it stick, I give it to them double dirty. It may not sound nice to some bunch of little old ladies at an afternoon tea party, but it helps my soldiers to remember. You can't run an army without profanity; and it has to be eloquent profanity. An army without profanity couldn't fight it's way out of a piss-soaked paper bag."
"Lack of speed can be overcome. In the worst case by patience." --Znork
Chernobyl was ranked 7, Fukushima is ranked 5.
Chernobyl was kept secret during several days, opaque after.
Fukushima data is available (but obfuscated by news media)
Many workers in Chernobyl were knowingly sent to sure death.
Radiation taken by Fukushima workers is monitored and they are not allowed to take more than 250mSv.
Chernobyl radioactive fallout are very dangerous locally, and affected most part of Europe.
Fukushima radioactive fallout, even locally, don't cause much health concern. (Of course food production in the area will have to be monitored.)
Fukushima is still a severe accident, but nowhere near the case of Chernobyl.
The BBC has a helpful guide - not sure it the numbers are the same as XKCD http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-12722435
/usr/bin/loonie
The BBC does have some slightly bipolar reporting though. In amongst the many articles with experts explaining what is happening and what the risks are in a rational and balanced way there's a couple of gems like the one about an Irish guy living 150 miles from Tokyo (in the good direction - he's 400 miles from Fukushima) who is concerned that his unborn child will be damaged by the radiation and is flying home (might even get more radiation doing that than staying put). There's also the occasional piece of 'spokesperson from Greenpeace says the world will end because of this' which always grates because it gets given the same kind of authority as quotes from experts who may actually have the first clue what they're talking about. Overall it's been pretty reasonable so long as you read most of the articles and not just the more inflammatory ones.
Exactly, Thing as proper noun, should have been capitalized.
How many times does the village idiot have to give you bad advice before you stop listening to him?
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
Gee, why didn't I have this while playing Fallout?
I realized xkcd is the master of sarcasm and irony, and fear over nuclear radiation is great target, but he's way overstating his case. It's nice to throw in the bananna, I did it too in my analysis. There are definite medical estimates of cancer causing from smaller amounts of radiation than 100mSieverts. This is radically oversimplified and optimistic. I have some different figures, from different wikipedia articles (CT scan) and papers in medical journals (no cites handy at this location, sorry) For an adult, estimated increased risk of cancer from an abdominal CT scan: +0.018% Estimated lifetime risk of cancer to a 1 year old from a single abdominal CT-scan: +0.1% head scan: +0.07% Given that there are hotspots 19 miles away reported in the times (can't find the interactive NY Times map. at 171uSievert/hour, it's not that many days before you have a CT-scan worth. So any babies at that location, outside the evacuation radius, have a growing, and measurable risk. Down's syndrome spiked to double the incidence in Europe from babies conceived around the time the cloud from Chernobyl passed over, so obviously genetic damage is measurable, and that implies many deaths, even if we're not so good at measuring it. Estimates vary from thousands (International Health Organization, which seems biased by a relationship with IAE) to hundreds of thousands (various Russian and Ukranian doctor's groups). Anecdotal evidence from visitors to Ukraine reports a LOT of people with cancers in their 40s and 50s, and with severe genetic damage, which is certainly going to shorten their lives. How do you quantify someone who dies at 50 instead of 70 because of radiation? I would say, you define the number of person-years of life lost as a result of an accident, and on that basis, Fukushima is not a joke. I'm going to go out on a limb, and guess this will end up as a minimum of 1 million person-years, and it could easily be far higher when the cancers are all in 50-60 years from now. Just because it's a slow-motion disaster doesn't mean it's less serious than the tsunami, it's just a lot less obvious. The New York Times had an article on dosages: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/14/world/asia/14health.html?scp=5&sq=japan%20dosage%20map&st=cse The worst complacency of this graph is that it implies that these are the dosages from Fukushima when in fact the accident is anything but contained. And the more radioactive the site gets, the harder it gets to do any work on it at all. This isn't three mile island. It may not be Chernobyl either , but there's a lot more material there to be dispersed. We can only hope that work to contain the situation is successful.
A zooming presentation of the same material, showing the doses to scale:
http://prezi.com/ocl7xignbv5l/radiation-from-various-sources/
Opinions stated are mine and do not reflect those of the Illuminati