Slashdot Mirror
EPA Makes a Rad Decision
New submitter QuantumPion writes
"The Environmental Protection Agency released draft guidelines last month that could significantly relax radiation hazard standards in the case of a radiological event in the United States by using risk-based decisions. The goal is to have limits that make sense in an emergency that are different from the limits in day-to-day life. From the article: 'Currently, the only guidance are the extremely strict standards that apply for EPA Superfund sites and nuclear plant decommissioning, which are as low as 0.010–0.025 rem/year, far below the natural background levels in the U.S. of 0.300 rem/year, and even well below the average amount of radioactive materials that Americans eat each year. And these guidelines aren’t really different from the 1992 PAG, except in the area of long-term cleanup standards and, perhaps, standards for resettlement. What’s the big deal here? As radworkers, we’re allowed to get 5 rem/year. 2 rem/year doesn’t rate a second thought. ... No one has ever been harmed by 5 rem/year, so setting emergency levels at 2 rem/year is pretty mild and more than reasonable. ... Think of it this way. The situations covered by these new guidelines are similar to someone dying of thirst who has the chance to drink fresh water having 2,000 pCi per gallon of radium in it. While the safe drinking water levels are 20 pCi/gal for Ra, 2,000 pCi/gal is of no threat, especially if you’re going to die from imminent dehydration. Of course, a bag of potato chips has 3,500 picocuries, so go figure.'"
http://www.forbes.com/sites/christopherhelman/2012/03/10/fukushimas-refugees-are-victims-of-irrational-fear-not-radiation/
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
Of course, potatoes can't be produced from material free of radioisotopes..... http://www.livestrong.com/article/303878-a-list-of-the-most-radioactive-foods/
Potatoes contain gobs of potassium, which has a naturally occurring radioactive isotope (K40). Bananas have the same issue. Unlike C14, K40 is primordial, so everywhere you have potassium, you have essentially the same concentration of K40.
Well, it's not smart to eat a lot of curry, if it's your first time.
"We're changing the standards so you can't sue us immediately after the disaster. But if you get cancer 30 years down the line, we and our money will be long gone and no longer giving a darn in Pattaya Beach, Thailand."
Okay, I know you're trying to be funny, but let's be serious for a moment: Why shouldn't the EPA try to limit lawsuits? They cost you and me, the taxpayer, a lot of money. It slows down the entire judicial process, and increases the cost of excercising your rights in the judiciary. There's filing fees now, lawyers fees, and every motion and such you file also costs money. This is fine for corporations who can just pass the buck on to their customers, but for Joe Average, commencing or defending against a legal action can easily bankrupt him. Is that fair? Shouldn't he be able to sue people who have legitimately wronged him as well -- or should that be something reserved only for the wealthy? Conversely, if he is on the receiving end... should he be bankrupted defending against an action that ultimately failed? Any contact with the judicial process tends to be highly corrosive to the average person. It is often ruinous, irrespective of the merits of their position.
Given that, why shouldn't the government try to limit personal injury cases to those where the only evidence of harm won't surface for thirty years? Do you want a legal system that punishes people based on probability, or actuality? If so, thought crime suddenly becomes a lot more justifiable, as well as imprisoning people based on genetic markers, etc.
But I do acknowledge that statistically, we know that in a given group of say, 100 people, if exposed to X intensity of radiation over Y amount of time, Z of them will develop health problems. We can't say with any confidence which of them will develop health problems, but we can say with confidence how probable it is that at least Z of them will. In a case like this where you know harm has happened but the costs won't be known for a long time, a fine seems like a better way to deal with this than lawsuits, provided the fine is proportional to the actual harm caused, plus whatever punitive damages are justified (was it really an accident, or negligence?).
In this case, the government should be the plaintiff, not the individual. Conversely, the government should take the money gathered from these fines and put it into a general fund. If and when affected individuals develop health problems consistent with previously-documented radiation exposure, the government pays out of that fund.
I think this is the most fair method of enacting justice in such a situation -- the companies (or individuals) involved are penalized shortly after the actual accident occurs, so there is financial incentive to prevent it in the future, and no possibility of them profiting from it later, but at the same time recognizing that we may not know for a very long time who was actually harmed, or to what degree.
From the looks of it, this is more or less what the EPA is trying to do. Of course... such an elegant solution will never survive contact with Congress, but... it's the thought that counts.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
The only radioactive isotope of carbon is C14. The amount of C14 versus C12 is roughly 0.0000000001%. That is one part in one trillion. A human body has roughly 80 trillion cells.
Yes.
So 80 of your cells contain *ONE* atom of C14. Your whole body contains 80 C14 atoms ...
No. An 80-kilogram person has about 14 or 15 kg of carbon atoms. This works out to trillions of carbon atoms per human cell. Therefore every cell has approximately one atom of C14, and the human body as a whole has almost a quadrillion C14 atoms.
Because "radioactive environment" actually has to be quantified before it's meaningful. You're sitting in a radioactive environment right now. This is what you and the vast majority of Americans who grew up with the X-Men don't understand. So you have to talk about exactly how much radiation you're sitting in.
So let's talk about it. Let's say you weigh 70kg. That means you are made of approximately 7.0 x 10^26 carbon atoms (among other things). Carbon 14, a naturally occurring unstable radioactive isotope of carbon, makes up about 1 in every trillion carbon atoms. That's 1 in 1 x 10^11. Which means there are somewhere around 7 x 10^15 carbon 14 atoms inside you right now. Carbon 14 has a half life of 5730 years, give or take 40 years. That means that several thousand atoms of carbon 14 undergo radioactive decay inside you every second. I'll spare you the math, since there are already too many scary numbers in this post. That means there are thousands of beta particles running around loose inside you, every second of the day. In short, you are radioactive.
And... so what. Those thousands of decay events per second add up to a millirem per year, so tiny it's not even measurable by a normal Geiger counter. You are unavoidably exposed to radiation simply by existing. And here's what matters to you: that radiation you expose yourself to by being made of carbon has no measurable affect on your lifespan, or anyone else's. Something else will kill you first, long before the radiation of yourself induces a cancer inside yourself. Most cancers are chemically induced, not radioactively induced.
Yes, there ARE safe levels of radiation. The numbers matter.
They weren't free of it. The mice had only one fifth of the carbon 14 normally in them.
That's quite an improvement and allowed tracking of tagged substances. But it's still a long way from free or near enough to do truly low radiation studies. It also doesn't address the other radio-isotopes.
It's extremely experimentally difficult to raise animals free of radionuclides. Everything they eat drink or breathe has to be isotopically free of multiple radionuclides. You have to do that for at least a couple generations so that mothers don't pass on so much of the radionuclides from their own blood and tissues to the developing fetuses inside them, or the eggs they lay.
It's been proposed to set up a laboratory to do this for the purpose of setting baselines for radiation standards by comparing what the effect of nearly zero radiation on life is.
The cost would be quite high and as yet there hasn't been a lot of support for it especially from the UN.
Radiation Chart
Unfortunately that chart doesn't work for any kind of ingested radioactive substance, and it's kind of disingenous for Randall to present it as if it's a meaningful comparison. There's plan radiation, and then there's radioactive contamination in dust, liquid or aerosol form, and the second one is the gift that keeps on giving.
IANAhealthphysicist, but I can read Wikipedia, and I'm pretty sure you get a lot more radiation damage to your cells if you eat or breathe in a radioactive particle than if you sit next to the same number of bequerels on the bench, because your body can incoporate the radioactive emitter directly into your cells for the entire rest of its (maximum of bioactive and radioactive) lifespan, and your skin won't screen out the alpha radiation like it does for an internal source. Iodine-equivalents are pretty nasty since although they have a half-life on the order of days, if they get inside you they dump all that radiation into your thyroid, which is not a good place to have it. Long-term, Radioactive strontium is the worst because it replaces calcium and so binds directly to your bone marrow, which is not good for leukemia. And potassium-equivalents are in the mid range, with a half-life on the order of months to years and they are bioavailable, but not permanently so. As far as we know.
Oh, and a lot of those last have been dumped into the ocean by Fukushima, and are now inside fish. Do they bioaccumulate up the food chain? We're not really sure, but we'll probably find out. It's a wonderful science experiment!
tldr: Don't eat, drink or breathe radioactive gunk. It's worse for you than it looks.
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
Incorrect. Sieverts are specifically designed to account for the differences between radiation types with regards to biological effects. 1 Sv has the same biological impact regardless of whether it was caused by alpha, beta or gamma radiation. If the radiation is given in Grays, then you need to apply correction factors depending on radiation type.
tldr: Don't eat, drink or breathe radioactive gunk. It's worse for you than it looks.
This advice is pretty much worthless, since no one is going to intentionally ingest radioactive gunk. So here is some useful advice:
1. Buy a shaker of "no-salt" (KCl) or "lite-salt" (mixture of NaCl and KCl).
2. Buy a bottle of water purification tablets (iodine).
3. Buy a bottle of calcium supplements.
You should do this now (or the next time you go shopping) because if you wait till after a radioactive event, they will be sold out. When there is a leak/detonation/whatever, you add these to your diet. The copious amounts of these elements will cause your body to expel the surplus in your urine, along with most of the radioactive isotopes of the same elements (or strontium in the case of calcium). This simple $10-$20 investment may save your life.