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
Less cancer or congenital heart malformations after being exposed to low dose radiation a must read, real life data: http://bit.ly/gbUu2I
ABSTRACT
An extraordinary incident occurred 20 years ago in Taiwan.
Recycled steel, accidentally contaminated with cobalt-60 (half-life:
5.3 y), was formed into construction steel for more than 180
buildings, which 10,000 persons occupied for 9 to 20 years. They
unknowingly received radiation doses that averaged 0.4 Sva
collective dose of 4,000 person-Sv.
Based on the observed seven cancer deaths, the cancer
mortality rate for this population was assessed to be 3.5 per
100,000 person-years. Three children were born with congenital
heart malformations, indicating a prevalence rate of 1.5 cases per
1,000 children under age 19.
The average spontaneous cancer death rate in the general
population of Taiwan over these 20 years is 116 persons per
100,000 person-years. Based upon partial official statistics and
hospital experience, the prevalence rate of congenital
malformation is 23 cases per 1,000 children. Assuming the age and
income distributions of these persons are the same as for the
general population, it appears that significant beneficial health
effects may be associated with this chronic radiation exposure.
How ironic is it that the google ad says not to eat bananas? Funny how the google ads are always telling us what to do… Never asking, always making demands. Sound like children? You bet. Arrested development.
Dead at 8 Sv? Not necessarily. Some liquidators received as much as 16, and some at over 10 survived, at last years.
I’m working from memory. This is the closest reference I can find at the moment.
http://www.oecd-nea.org/rp/chernobyl/c04.html
At Fermilab they had (may still have) a display set up in the lobby with a Geiger counter mounted next to a turntable that contained various items. I don’t remember them all, but I do remember a brick and peanut butter. The brick made some noise, but the peanut butter set that Geiger counter off like crazy.
Also see the table I compiled on “Health Effects of Ionizing Radiation.” This table shows the health risks posed by different levels of radiation by bringing together information from several reliable sources.
The table can be viewed/downloaded from, “Science Et Cetera” (under Radioactivity): http://scienceetcetera.blogspot.com/
Studying and measuring nuclear radiation is an avocation of mine and I own radiation detection equipment.
It should be noted that even though the levels of radiation on the west coast are no cause for concern, inhalation of radioactive particles (e.g., Radon, fallout) does increases the health risk by many times over simple ingestion. That’s why comparisons to eating a banana are, so to speak, apples to oranges!
In most issues that involve fear, the media is simply cutting and pasting, or reading scripts on the air, provided by friendly fear mongers the particular media happens to approve of.
The days of most media organs having someone on staff who would take the time to actually critically review a particular issue are long gone.
Look at the NYT, for example: Has Revkin ever actually critically reviewed an issue involving CO2, the environment or population?
No. He is Malthusian on population, orthodox Greenpeace on environment, and unless he changed his mind in the past few days, still has not read any of the excellent reviews on climategate.
He is left with repeating provably wrong claims on population, cutting and pasting crap from WWF and Greenpeace marketers, and echoing the hype of the AGW promoters.
Whether out of ignorance or intent, it looks like the main stream media, including those champions of sophistication CNN and Fox News, have descended to the level of the ‘Penny Bloods’ of the mid-1800’s.
Truth always being trumped by ‘shock horror!’.
The industry we collectively refer to as “the media” is just that. An industry. It is a profit driven industry. The product being sold is advertising or more precisely, the number of eyes watching or reading. Bringing more eyes to the story brings more advertising dollars. While many in this industry are probably good people who would like to be responsible, etc., that is not the purpose of their work. Their work is done to sell soap. Nothing more and nothing less. And we should not give them extra credibility by being surprised when they do just that. They sell more soap by being spectacular. I am only surprised by the media when they manage to report something accurately. I am rarely surprised by the media.
PBS, The BBC, CBC radio (Canada) etc., are also reliant on bringing eyes to the message. Their ability to get rent from others is dependent on whether they are seen as relevant, which means they need viewers.
Radiation schmadiation! The scar on my lip from the removal of a cancer was NOT caused by nuclear energy radiation. It was caused by the Sun.
If all these media people are truly worried about fall-out, they need to put their panic into perspective in terms of their coverage of solar-caused cancers, WHICH is nonexistent coverage in my opinion.
My gawdamighty, I can’t whistle anymore after I had that spot removed! AND! When I put lipstick on, that spot shows up even more! Where is the media coverage over that???? Where is the outcry over solar cancer I want to know! Media bias is what that is.
They don’t care a rat’s hind-end about my lips or that the Sun is far more powerful than Japan’s reactors regarding my lips. That’s the liberal media for you. My lip just doesn’t matter.
Vote the Sun OUT I tellya!!!!!!!! And anyone who wants to disagree with me can kiss my scarred lip. She said facetiously.
Thank you for sharing the most useful graphic I’ve seen in many years.
Actually just ate a banana before reading this, I am so screwed. What is missing in the discussion of doses is radioisotopes in water, food or air. All the doses shown in the chart assume that you can get the dose and leave the area. But if your water contains radioisotopes that you ingest, then those could stick around in your body and cause various problems. The most well known one is isotopes of iodine since they travel to the thyroid.
An important counter to that is that there is plenty of radioactive material in our bodies that dates from the formation of the earth, e.g. potassium 40. We are accustomed to those radiation sources and can repair almost any genetic damage that they cause. Also it has been shown that a small amount of radiation is better than no radiation due to stimulation of the immune system.
To P. Solar:
You said:
“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.
You are right. IFF those people stopped working, there would be some real danger. Not sure of your source that there would be a “total melt-down”. Does that term even have a meaning? Fortunately, they seem intent on doing their jobs.
That being said, I am thinking that terrorists around the world are taking note of this. They are taking nuclear power plants off their list of juicy targets. What I get from all this is it is extremely hard to cataclysmically damage a nuclear facility. Bombing, flying planes into them etc., will not likely cause anything worse than some excited news readers at CNN. Until the weather gets bad or something else distracts them.
Many in the media quickly changed the headlines on Fukushima from crisis to catastrophe with comparisons to Chernobyl and TMI. Much of the media reporting has focused on Fukushima at the expense of reporting on the tsunami related 20,000 dead and missing, 340,000 homeless, and millions without heat, electricity, or running water. The people of Japan need our help and the media should facilitate aid to our friends in Japan as was done after the 2004 Asian tsunami. The FCC has a web form for reporting this type of inaccurate and alarmist reporting. Search for FCC and complaints. The form comes up. You have to fill in specific incidents by media outlet and date/time. The Congressional Energy and Commerce communications subcommittee might like to hear from the public on this issue. A few thousand complaints to the FCC might cause the FCC to stir, a hundred thousand might encourage them to say something. A few hundred complaints to the Energy and Commerce Committee communications subcommittee about the FCC allowing this to continue might result in something being done.
“We can now say, there cannot be a safe dose of radiation. There is no safe threshold.”
http://www.ratical.org/radiation/CNR/synapse.html
“Steve Keohane says:
March 20, 2011 at 5:20 am”
Nope! It IS due to smoke, more so the real pollution from burning carbon based fuels, charcoal/wood etc, carbon particulates, ie, soot. CO2 and methane released in the burning process is completely irrelevant.
@Polistra
All the little blue squares combine to make everything on the blue side = 60 microsievert.
Which carries to the green side (top left on green), which adds to the green.
All the green squares, plus the blue squares combine to 75 millisieverts and carry down to the brown squares.
Etc……..
Anyway, gotta go….a banana is waiting to be eaten followed by a few brazil nuts….which will add to the already-inhaled thorium……not to mention the asbestos (currently killing some three thousand a year in the UK)…..I won’t even mention the CT scan and the three ordinary chest X-rays…..nor will I mention that I’m about three million times more likely to be killed on the road than by radiation (3200 deaths on UK roads per year….average)
Newspapers, what are they like ?
AND they don’t even make good toilet paper anymore….too glossy !
“John Eggert says:
March 20, 2011 at 6:48 am”
More likely they would use a “dirty” bomb and not target something that would not be affected by a fuel-laden 767 etc. Plenty of highly radioactive sources available in hospitals, Universities etc.
In one episode of the TV drama, “House,” the puzzling illness of the show was the radiation sickness a patient was suffering from due to unknowingly carrying the hot source from a beta gauge around. Toward the end of the show, in a reversal of the usual calming comparison with x-rays, the doctors explained his dosage as the equivalent getting 50,000 chest x-rays. (Or for WUWT readers, ten million bananas. : )
Great graphic! I was able to enlarge it in MS Explorer by first clicking on it, and then clicking randomly on the ensuing image. (Usually there is a transitory “enlarge me” icon when the image is automatically reduced, but for some reason that didn’t come up. Also, View said the image was already 100% even though that was not true.)
However, the fully legible enlargement credits it to an otherwise unidentified “Randall Munroe”, with help from a senior reactor operator are Reed Research Reactor identified only as “Ellen.” The disclaimer says “It’s for general education only. If you’re basing radiation safety procedures on an internet PNG image and things go wrong, you have no one to blame but yourself.”
So while this graphic puts things in perspective and shows which questions to ask, government agencies and Congressional investigators should not be staking our lives on it.
That illustration would be best presented as a sort video, something like this one that you have probably seen before on the scale of planets and suns:
I wrote a small article for friends and acquaintances who were worried by media reports of a cloud of radiation sweeping across the Pacific, on its way to decimate the West coast of America:
http://thoughtsoftheguru.com/2011/03/fallout/
BTW: I find it interesting that when it really matters, people don’t trust the government at all. I wonder why that might be?
And as for “Experts” … well, there is another short article on the same site as the fallout article on that topic.
“Several places are known in Iran, India and Europe where natural background radiation gives an annual dose of more than 50 mSv and up to 260 mSv (at Ramsar in Iran). Lifetime doses from natural radiation range up to several thousand millisievert. However, there is no evidence of increased cancers or other health problems arising from these high natural levels”
http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf05.html
Please specify milli or micro, this seems to have confused the media. To me mSv means millisievert. The link uses millisievert.
“Since the sievert is a relatively large value, dose to humans is normally measured in millisieverts (mSv), one-thousandth of a sievert.”
Why bother with hospitals and/or universities ?
Just wander into a nuclear plant in the US and then out…..loads missing…
http://www.allgov.com/Controversies/ViewNews/427000_Pounds_of_Uranium_Missing__And_Some_Plutonium_Too_90224
Hey! Someone put me in a cartoon!
From the BBC – 100 mSv/yr, Lowest level at which any increase in cancer is clearly evident
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-12722435
So Ramsar in Iran is a dangerous place to live at 260 mSv/yr.
On further reading, Randall Munroe is the famous cartoonist of http://xkcd.com/. His friend Ellen is a student at Reed College, and senior reactor operator at Reed Research Reactor.