Almost anyone who has spent any time on the internet in blogs or chat rooms has run into this famous cartoon from XKCD:
Well now, the cartoonist has taken on a new subject – showing how wrong some the MSM radiation claims have been by trying to show the radiation issue as a matter of scale. This may help some people overcome their worst fears of radiation by helping them understand how much a part of normal everyday life it is.
Source: http://xkcd.com/radiation/
The story behind the chart here: http://blog.xkcd.com/2011/03/19/radiation-chart/
h/t to Ric Werme
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Text too small to read: can’t be important….
In another geological life, I collected a series of drill samples through the uranium ore body at Honeymoon Well in South Australia. Being a dutiful Senior Research Scientist at CSIRO Division of Exploration and Mining, I reported my bag of samples to the Site Safety Officer. He brought his geiger counter and checked me out. It’s OK he said, no problem, then passed the counter over the bricks outside my office. The bricks were more radioactive than my uranium samples.
There’s a complete lack of perspective in the media regarding reporting this sort of stuff (as well as other such as CO2 levels etc). For instance, they’re currently blaring that “radiation from Fukushima reached the US West Coast!”.
Digging just a little (LA Times), a single monitoring station detected an augmentation in Xe-133 to the total level of 1/10⁶ of the background radiation, which can be from Fukushima. Xe-133 has an half-life of 5.3 days and is used in medicine.
The funny thing is that the MSM somehowe figure that the medical effects of radiation are unknown or mysterious. Or that the dose effect ratio is not known. We use radiation daily in the medical community not just in radiology were new modalities are also increasing the radiation dose like high resolution CT (radiation dose equal to around 2000 chest x-rays), but for treatment and conditioning in cancer patients where we give large doses like 2 Grey total body irradiation. The long and short term effects of this are well studied. But I guess that the MSM are as usual more interested in confusing and scaring than in explaining and educating.
Background radiation is a fact of life.
If you live in parts of Cornwall, Dartmoor in Devon, Cumbria, parts of Scotland etc, you will be subject to relatively high dosages and if you live in a house made of granitic rock, you are also more exposed to background radiation.
In Britain, now that they teach not a lot about b*****r all, scaring people is quite easy.
Radiation can cause cancer, it can kill, it is not a joke but the MSM + BBC hype and ‘upping’ the fear factor [Fukushima disaster] – is sheer skin crawling shock horror journalism of the most base ethos, now, they all trawl the depths with the National Enquirer.
We all live with radiation.
Get real……………. and remember, in the end, who can you sue? – God?
I built these graphs from radiation data posted by the Nuclear Energy Institute and various other sources.
Daiichi Site Interior
Daiichi Site Perimeter
The highly active isotopes will decay rapidly but my concern is that 1) some chemicals will be taken up in the food-chain and 2) the reactors will remain difficult to decommission for many years.
I vaguely remember only one reactor at 3 Mile Island costing over 900 million dollars. Some local high radiation spikes are the least of Japans worries.
Thnks for the post. It’s good to have some perspective.
I hope this accident makes design engineers sharper and causes the retirement of all Boiling Water Reactors. I’m amazed they were still running them. Like vinyl record hi-fi systems of the early 70s they should have been replaced long ago with something vastly superior.
So eating one banana is equivalent to sleeping with two people. Life is full of tough choices.
The Ann Coulter column of March 16, 2011 may have been the first public voice on this topic: http://www.anncoulter.com/cgi-local/printer_friendly.cgi?article=414 (printer friendly version; the standard version is presently at her home page before it moves to archives on March 22, 2011): http://ww.anncoulter.com/
There are areas with hundreds of mS/year natural background radiation, and no ill health effects have been observed on local population. So that 100 mSv/year limit “clearly linked to cancer” is dubious at least.
Or it is so, that local people subjected to high natural doses produce some kind of resistance and the same dose forced on someone else in short period of time makes harm, but we learned that it does not matter on time and intensity, but on total sum. Perhaps not.
Of all the hypes i’ve seen, the nuke failure of Japan beats them all. Another bit of perspective:
The things survived a major earthquake, a tsunami, multiple chemical explosions and still there’s no real danger.
In the world hundreds of nuclear reactors (quite a lot of them of very iffy design) active for decades producing of terawatts of reliable green energy and all that happened were 3 major incidents, of only 1 was a real catastrophe.
Pretty good odds in my risk-analysis
Sounds like someone needs some new web browsing tools. Firefox and the Quick Page Zoom brought the chart up to a size even my old eyes could read.
And yes, the press are immensely fond of presenting dangers in such a way as to maximise sales and minimise clarity of information.
The thing that drives me crazy is the inability of the media to distinguish between “radiation”, “radioactivity” and “radioactive contamination”. They seem to be either stupid or lazy (or both). You would think over 50 years they would have learned something. Apparently not.
NPR employs a reporter with a PhD in Physics. He is currently covering ” … the global economy for NPR’s multimedia project Planet Money.”
http://www.npr.org/people/2100747/david-kestenbaum
Radiation safety is complicated and difficult to explain. Saying that the dose received is “less than that from a chest x-ray” or “less than that received on a New York to LA airplane flight” may be factual but when used over and over again to calm fears in the face of screaming headlines, a reasonable person becomes skeptical. This is seldom a case of one dose fits all and the public wants and deserves a clear explanation.
This New York Times article appears to be factually correct …
Several Plant Workers Are Ill, but Radiation Risk in Japan Is Seen as Low for Now
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/14/world/asia/14health.html?scp=8&sq=radiation&st=cse
… but is headed by a photo of obviously sick people lying in a jumble of sheets on the floor of a hospital with the caption, “Patients evacuated from a hospital near the Fukushima Daiichi plant were treated on Sunday for possible radiation exposure.”
The body of the article includes the statement, “The sorts of numbers I’m seeing are not the sort that could be linked with radiological symptoms,” which is not the message we get from the picture and caption. Confusion ensues.
There are thousands of people dead from the quake and tsunami, and there are media making comparisons to 3 mile island. I seem to remember the death toll was quite small at 3 mile island, from radiation anyway. The biggest outcome was a shutdown in nuclear energy growth for 3 decades. How many people have died in the oil and gas fields in threee decades? I bet more people die in cars on their way to anti-nuke protests than have ever been killed in the nuke industry. People have no notion of scale, our local anti- nuke, clean air groups have meetings about vague ( imagined) health threats from nearby industries. The highlight of these meetings for me are the regularly scheduled ” ciggy” breaks so both sides can go outside and worry about their health over a ” butt”.
Two different commentators on FoxNews referred to “a radiation plume” and “a cloud of radiation” coming towards America. They also interviewed a person who was from a company that sold geiger counters. Such nonsense.
Hello world, I live in Truro………thats in Cornwall don’t you know.
Radiation created all the species on this planet. Therefore, radiation is God.
Worship the Alpha and the Gamma.
Well, Japan just got saved by Gaddafi.
The BBC couldn’t push enough of their, “we’re all going to die” stories about Fukushima. They had us on the edges of our seats, just waiting for the inevitable meltdown.
Then Libya came along, and there hasn’t been a peep about Fukushima in the last two to three days.
That graph may be accurate but it’s useless. Entirely too much information and too many numbers in one place, and those green squares don’t convey meaning, even to me as a graph-loving nerd.
It’s certainly not going to teach anything to a layman. And the “science correspondents” of the media, who might be able to cook it into digestible narrative form, aren’t interested in providing actual facts.
TomTurner in SF says: March 20, 2011 at 4:20 am That is an interesting concept. I have wondered if the descendants of the northern European population have lower lung cancer rates from smoking tobacco relative to African descendants because of the smokey cave dwelling. Perhaps it is due to the cave dwelling, but the inherent radiation rather than the smoke.
On Fox News last night (Saturday 3/19), they had an interview with a proponent of nuclear power and someone from a “Physicians for Social Responsibility” or some such organization. The latter began his contribution with the claim that “(t)here is no safe level of exposure to radiation”. I muted the TV at that point. Utter nonsense has no place in a discussion of important policy issues like nuclear power.
If I did my math correctly, you would have to be at a town near the Fukushima plant for 1715 days, or 4 years and 255 days, before you would get the radioactive does of one CT scan.
“producing of terawatts of reliable green energy”
What the fukushima is green about an ever growing mountain of toxic waste that we still have not worked out what to do with?
“and still there’s no real danger”
so I guess the poor sods trying to stabalise three nukes threatening a totoal melt-down and hundreds of tons of overheating spent fuel are wasting there time then.
silly sods.
@ur momisugly TFN Johnson: click on the image. That brings up the source image which is clearly legible. If it still isn’t, your browser has probably resized it and if you have a cursor over it it should look like a small magnifying glass with a + on it. Click once. The image will nowe overrun your browser windows causing some scrollbars to appear but that shouldn’t be a problem – and you should now have a perfectly legible image.
Hope this helps!