"Elevated levels?" How elevated? Last night on ABC news, of all places, they had a segment where some guy was standing in Central Park or whatever, and his Geiger-Muller counter was showing five millisieverts of background. He walked over to some granite and metal monument, and the level increased to about 10 or 15. he walked into Grand Central Station, and the meter pegged.
The good thing (as if there is a good thing!) is that the atomic numbers of the nasty stuff are all high, which makes dispersal difficult. I'm sure whatever hits the US will be detectable, but the problem is we are damn good at detecting radioactivity.
Hopefully this fiasco will kill nuclear development in the US. Note we really do need to get the nuclear waste to a safe location such as Texas.
The sievert is a unit of dose, not rate. Radiation levels are measured in sieverts per unit time. Normal background radiation is single-digits millisieverts per year, or a few tenths of a microsievert per hour.
5mSv/year would be reasonable for background.
Fukushima had a spike of 400mSv/hr a couple of days ago. When it's not spiking, it's a few mSv/hr (the Japanese legal limit for nuclear industry workers is 100mSv/yr but that's just been raised to 250mSv/yr because most of the workers at Fukushima have already exceeded their 100mSv for this year).
On a sunny day (Wed, 16 Mar 2011 22:29:35 -0700 (PDT)) it happened " snipped-for-privacy@sushi.com" wrote in :
In an other newsgruoup I wrote that more people are killed in coal mining every year then evenr heve been killed in nuclear power. Many were burned in gas fires caused by this earthquake, nobody demonstrates againts using gas. Get the perspective right. More radiaton, more mutations, maybe a exceptionally clever person will result, and we will all benefit. I mean we have enough zombies as is, one clever mutation can save them all. Was that not a movie some time ago? The guy is put to sleep for hundreds of years and awakes in a world where Americans have become cola drinking zombies.. he becomes president eventually, because he is the only one with an IQ above 10. Was a fun movie.
Apparently people are missing that this reactor is a totally different design, with a viable containment system, as compared to Chernobyl, which had, for all intents and purposes, no containment system.
If this was an old Russian designed reactor, I'd panic too, but it is not.
If we weren't so good a measuring low levels of almost everything, society would have a lot less to fear and we would be just as safe. We used to worry about parts per million, now it's parts per billion, won't be long and it will be parts per trillion. At that point all water will be contaminated and not fit for human consumption. And while I'm on the subject of, not fit for human consumption, please be aware of the dangers of Dihydrogen Monoxide
This deal is three orders of magnitude less than the mess that was Chernobyl, minimum. Hell it could be even less than that.
We would see a quarter of a chest x-ray exposure.
That mess could still be gurgling. All they did essentially was cap it off in concrete after killing a huge number of men getting some of it doused and removed.
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