In light of radiation fears, I offer this repost

Amino Acids in Meteorites, “Gosh, nuclear energy is so much fun. Hey, would you like to catch a flight to Fukushima and drag some water hoses to the #3 reactor, #4 reactor, and those cooling ponds? They’d probably take a volunteer. Apparently no one has volunteered for the fun yet. They must not know the fun they’re missing out on.”
Who wouldn’t want to reduce their chance of getting cancer with some low doses of radiation as was found among Russian emergency workers from Chernobyl?

crosspatch: You may want to thing about that last comment, in particular think about how much nuclear material is in a nuclear weapon compared to how much is in a typical power reactor. The Hiroshima bomb contained 65kg of material (only a small volume of that material archived fission later weapons contain little more but the fission percentage has been improved.
A typical nuclear reactor has ~75 tons on material.
While the first may create a lot of destruction the second has far far more material, the fact that such a small amount of material spread out by a nuclear blast is a problem should also tell you what sort of problem (although it will be slower) more than 100x the material might cause if this does get to a full melt down and further explosions.

Wonders of Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_equivalent_dose
note that 70μSv over an hour is equivalent to smoking a cigarette in terms of increased risk of dying (assuming radiation hormesis – the cancer reducing effects of small doses of radiation – doesn’t exist) = 0.7 micromorts (millionths increase in chance of dying).
So convert those figures from in the plant into cigarettes:
17 March, 4.00pm
0.64 millisieverts per hour = 9 cigarettes an hour
17 March, 9.00am
1.47 millisieverts per hour = 21 cigarettes an hour
16 March, 7.00pm
1.93 millisieverts per hour = 28 cigarettes an hour
16 March, 12.30pm
3.39 millisieverts per hour = 48 cigarettes an hour
Note that workers are undoubtably wearing respirators and clothing to reduce their effective exposure, and their dosages will be being monitored carefully, with restricted working periods to reduce doses.

Never mind bananas, those walkers who love the mountains will get far more radiation from the ever present granite and of course the sun since you have less protective atmosphere above in the mountains. Frequent flyers get more radiation as well.
Do Not Worry! It is all below the permitted dose per day when doing those activities.

“crosspatch: You may want to thing about that last comment, in particular think about how much nuclear material is in a nuclear weapon compared to how much is in a typical power reactor. ”
There is a big difference. The material in a bomb is designed to spew material all over the place and it picks up material from the ground and that becomes radioactive, too. A reactor is designed exactly the opposite, it is designed to contain the material.
Another important thing people seem to ignore in this incident … the reactor was not running when the incident happened. That is a huge difference. 3mi had a hydrogen explosion and exposed fuel elements in a critical reactor, one that was running. This one wasn’t. Most of the initial decay heat had already been extracted.
Even in a worst case scenario, if the material should melt through the core pressure vessel, it will simply hit the concrete floor, spread out, and cool. It won’t burn its way through the walls and into the earth.
It is very likely that even in three worst case scenarios, nobody will be injured and possible that nobody will experience a toxic radiation dose. 3mi had a 85% core melt. These reactors so far have at worse 5% melt according to some expert numbers I have heard bandied about. They have been injected with boron to further enhance neutron absorption.
What actually concerns me the most at this point is the putting of water on those hot spent fuel rods. That could actually make things WORSE. If those rods shatter and release their material and if they don’t get enough water into those pools to cover it, it is going to make for even more gamma radiation than we have now AND increase the potential for environmental contamination. Spraying cold water on brittle Zircaloy clad fuel rods (they get brittle due to hydrogen exposure in the reactor) could actually make a bigger mess than simply allowing them to melt.

TMI tripped at the onset of the event. The event at TMI started with a loss of main feedwater which caused a trip. Just as the earthquake caused these plants to trip.

****
Amino Acids in Meteorites says:
March 17, 2011 at 10:23 pm
Hey, would you like to catch a flight to Fukushima and drag some water hoses to the #3 reactor, #4 reactor, and those cooling ponds?
****
Definitely, if I had a good working team, Geiger counters, radiation badges, coveralls & filter masks, and the right pay. Hourly hazard pay for nuke-work sufficient to get me to go would prb’ly only be 10% of what Algore gets hourly for speaking engagements….

There was a story yesterday about the development of Ex Rad as an agent to prevent and treat high radiation exposure. The U.S. Department of Defense medicine research along with several other international organizations, including the Radiation Effects Research Foundation Hiroshima developed it….the firm Onconova is conducting the clinical trials. Hopefully, they can rush some product to Japan for use in the highly exposed workers.
http://www.onconova.com/exrad.shtml
Ex-RAD® for Protection from Radiation Injury
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19267542
Radiation protection by a new chemical entity, Ex-Rad: efficacy and mechanisms.
Ghosh SP, Perkins MW, Hieber K, Kulkarni S, Kao TC, Reddy EP, Reddy MV, Maniar M, Seed T, Kumar KS.
Armed Forces Radiobiology Research Institute, USUHS, Bethesda, Maryland 20889-5603, USA. ghosh@afrri.usuhs.mil
http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2011/03/16/ex-rad-militarys-radiation-wonder-drug/
Ex-Rad, the U.S. Military’s Radiation Wonder Drug
By Van Hipp
Published March 16, 2011
| FoxNews.com

@Robert L
“16 March, 12.30pm
3.39 millisieverts per hour = 48 cigarettes an hour”
Using cigarette equivalent dose is an interesting touch and as valid as using banana equivalent dose. Neither of which ought to be used, IMO.
According to MIT NSE,

Normally nuclear workers are allowed to receive a dose of 20 millisieverts per year, although in practice they often receive very much less. If that limit is exceeded in any year, the worker cannot undertake nuclear duties for the remainder.
In emergency circumstances safety regulators allow workers to receive up to 100 millisieverts with the same conditions applying, that they must leave the site should that limit be reached. The 100 millisievert level is roughly the point at which health effects from radiation become more likely. Below this it is statistically difficult to connect radiation dose to cancer rates, but above this the relationship starts to become apparent.
Under a special allowance from the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, workers at Fukushima were permitted doses of up to 250 millisieverts. Managers must be careful to make the best use of those experienced workers with the most detailed knowledge and experience of the plant.
http://mitnse.com/2011/03/17/progress-update-at-fukushima-daiichi-31711-330-pm-est/

So even with the ‘special allowance’, at 3.39 millisievert per hour, a worker ought not stay in the vicinity of the plant any longer than 10o hours (334 millisievert).
At the moment the greatest fear is not so much for the safety of the workers at the plant but for the people living in the vicinity, but 1- The Japanese government is under-reporting the figures in order not cause further panic and, 2- the incident will get out of control all together and very high radiation doses will spread over much wider area.
Personally, if I were in the vicinity, getting cancer would be only one of my worries. I’d be worried whether I’d ever be able to go back home and live in a high radiation area. I’d be more worried whether I could have normal healthy children and whether my children would grow up to have healthy children of their own.
Yes in this instance somebody must think about children. Though bananas may be good for their health, smoking is not.
@Larry Plume Silen
Sir, I salute your selflessness. If I were as qualified as you and past the age of reproduction, I too would have volunteered for the effort to bring this nuclear incident under control.

sHx says:
“At the moment the greatest fear is not so much for the safety of the workers at the plant but for the people living in the vicinity, but 1- The Japanese government is under-reporting the figures in order not cause further panic and, 2- the incident will get out of control all together and very high radiation doses will spread over much wider area.”
If you are simply going to assume that the info provided isn’t accurate you may just as well write your own press releases on a blank piece of paper. For my part, I will wait for evidence that we have been misled.
“I’d be worried whether I’d ever be able to go back home and live in a high radiation area.”
While the doses reported off site do not present a significant danger of acute radiation sickness at only a few mrem/hr, they are higher than I would want to live in continuously. This concern of yours is the only one I consider valid.
genomega1 says:
March 18, 2011 at 10:49 am
“One spec of plutonium in the lungs turns one into a walking dead man.
As for the 50 workers per shift at the reactors they are dead and they are well aware of it.
Comparing x-rays to radiation is not logical, x-ray split second exposure, radiation 24/7.”
You don’t know what you are talking about. If your first assertion were true we would all have been dead many decades ago when atmospheric bomb testing was occurring. The workers are being limited to 25 Rem total exposure. This will not cause acute radiation poisoning beyond some temporary changes in blood chemistry although it may cause some increase in cancer risk. The highest exposure I am aware of is 10.6 Rem at the site. That may be old info though. Your last statement is nonsensicle both exposures last as long as you are in the radiation field. X-rays ARE radiation, you are attempting to turn 100 years of science on its head.

So, how many microsiverts in a banana?? (one banana being a unit of measure)
If radiation doses were conveyed to the public in terms of bananas perhaps we’d all have a greater understanding of the risk.

I find it hard to understand how people can still be defending nuclear power after this conclusive proof of its inherent non-safety. If all it takes – ALL IT TAKES – to destabilize these nuclear power reactors, it an event as commonplace as a force 9.0 earthquake combined a 30 m high tsunami which innundates the reactor complex itself , with resultant complete loss of system electrical power – then this is shockingly unstable. This is a technology far too fragile for it to be acceptable to expose the public to this level of danger. As we all know – force 9.0 earthquakes followed by 30 m high tsunamis are commonplace everywhere in the world – in Belgium where I live there was a force 9.3 just off Ostend only last week, wiped out half the city plus a good part of the coast down to Dunkirk, but it hardly even reached the newspapers, everyone is so accustomed to such events. In the UK for instance some of you may have heard of the force 8.9 quake and tsunami in the North sea last December just off the coast of Edinburgh and Fife – only 20,000 or so dead Scots, but who in England cares about them?
This is the really shocking thing – an event SO COMMONPLACE as a force 9 earthquake and 30m tsunami within a few km of a nuclear power station should cause it structural problems. This is not a robust technology but is far too fragile and dangerous. How then could a nuclear reactor expect to withstand a more serious threat, such as a direct hit from a 100km wide asteroid which also wipes out all life on earth forever? Clearly nuclear stations must be able to survive such extreme events also, let alone trivial challenges such as this Japan earthquake, in order to be acceptable to the profoundly discerning, knowledgeable and rational public that we have in Western Europe.