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
And they want to irradiate (and probably already are) our food supply.
But that’s ok, because it’s “approved”.
Go figure.
sagi says:
Folks, I’d be careful with this. While it’s nice to browse with ads turned off, you’re also compromising revenue for sites like WUWT. I browse with NoScript and use that to control advertising, but I’m careful to use it only against advertisers who resort to what I think of as disruptive ads … those that make annoying noise or that block content unless closed. I’ve actually permanently allowed certain sources, like googlesyndication, because their ads tend to be non-obtrusive. I even sometimes click on an ad if it looks at all interesting to me, because I know that click is going to support sites I love and helping to keep them online.
I believe that, unfortunately, irrational fear of innovation is not a new thing. Heard in a cave a very long time ago:
“No! I’m telling you! I will not have any of that ‘fire’ in my cave. Never. Haven’t you seen the terrible forest fires that stuff causes! Huh?” … “Ehrrm, but we could have it so warm and cozy in here… we could put a ring of rocks around the fire so it doesn’t spread so easily.” … “Never in my life. The smoke pollutes and makes you cough. And think about the children! Do you want to hand over a burned out cave with sooty walls to future generations? We are just borrowing this place from them, you know. You can never be completely sure that fire does not spread. And how about security? Ever thought of that? What if that menace of a boy the neighbors have comes over here and messes around with that fire when we are outside, spreads it all around just to play pranks with us. And we will run out of fire wood one fine day also. Then, what do you do? And think about all the ashes we have take care of. It will be laying out there in front of the cave for ever, spreading dust all around. Just forget about that fire!”
But little by little we were eventually convinced…
To put it into perspective:
http://www.xs4all.nl/~stgvisie/VISIE/extremedeformities.html
http://www.seattlepi.com/national/95178_du12.shtml
http://www.truth-out.org/article/depleted-uranium-horror-america
Comparison on effects Chernobyl, Japan, New York State – http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=16726
Sheep farmers still stuck under a Chernobyl cloud UK -www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/dec/29/sheep-farmers-chernobyl-meat-restricted
German look at the health effects –
http://www.ippnw-students.org/chernobyl/IPPNWStudy.pdf
Turkey:
http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/n.php?n=the-haunting-memories-of-chernobyl-2011-03-18
Chernobyl, US, etc. http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=13349
So, who’s telling porkies?
Zedsdeadbed says:
March 20, 2011 at 5:08 am
Hello world, I live in Truro………thats in Cornwall don’t you know.
Well, well, well, so you’ve found your way here, have you? I normally read your utterances on the Daily Mail site (I normally disagree with what you say there, ho hum). I live in Cornwall too. I glow in the dark because of all the radon.
M White says:
>>
March 20, 2011 at 7:33 am
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.
>>
Yes, that would seem to be a true statement, though you seem to think this is sarcastic.
Just because a certain level is “naturally occurring” does not mean it cannot be harmful. Nature contains many poisons.
I would guess that there are other hazards to living in many countries that may mask a rise in the risk of cancer.
Well what did you expect? The MSM is dying, their credibility can not be recovered and the fresh out of school do not trust or use them. Our CBC is best described as the Constantly Biased Corporation, and they make no appologises for that. Save a billion/year defund CBC. Steady blather of false alarm and facetous opinion and its only those of us brought up trusting authority who are disturbed by the nonsense on these medias. I guess having CAWG a la Al Gore crammed down your throat in school does enhance critical thinking, my 14yr old grandniece called it way before the CRU emails, having a BS detector is a survival instinct. The message keeps getting the blame cause the messengers are way too thick to realise the actual message they have delivered.What the likes of wikipedia and google are about to learn is only honesty and openess have any chance of survival in this new medium, these kids are media savy and cynical as we never were at their age.
M.A.DeLuca says:
March 20, 2011 at 11:33 am
Yes I understand the importance of supporting worthwhile sites such as this one. So to do that, I simply send a donation. I don’t miss the annoying, flashing, blinking, talking, etc. etc. of the internet advertising phenomenon. In fact… good riddance.
8,000 people die in the US every year from the suns radiation, but they still lay on the beaches.
Exposure to radon in the home is responsible for an estimated 20,000 lung cancer deaths each year. A test kit can be purchased for $20.00 or less.
As with all things every persons systems are different. In the Chernobyl accident some people received massive doses of radiation and lived, others with mild exposure died.
Stronger more effective DNA repair systems? There is much to be learned.
Danger to the people on the west coast -> nill. Unless you are unlucky enough to inhale a spec or two of plutonium.
Danger of contamination to crop and pasture land?
Average expected result: Sv-mSv
0 – 0.25 Sv (0 – 250 mSv): None
0.25 – 1 Sv (250 – 1000 mSv): Some people feel nausea and loss of appetite; bone marrow, lymph nodes, spleen damaged.
1 – 3 Sv (1000 – 3000 mSv): Mild to severe nausea, loss of appetite, infection; more severe bone marrow, lymph node, spleen damage; recovery probable, not assured.
3 – 6 Sv (3000 – 6000 mSv): Severe nausea, loss of appetite; hemorrhaging, infection, diarrhea, peeling of skin, sterility; death if untreated.
6 – 10 Sv (6000 – 10000 mSv): Above symptoms plus central nervous system impairment; death expected.
Above 10 Sv (10000 mSv): Incapacitation and death.
Myrrh says:
March 20, 2011 at 11:56 am
As far as I can tell, all of the sources for which you identified links without telling anything about what all the articles you point to are supposed to signify.
The articles you identified make unsubstantiated assertions, and someone like Sebastian Pflugbeil, Gesellschaft für Strahlenschutz (Society for Protection against Nuclear Radiation) reads like James Hansen mutated into a nightmare.
Neither James Hansen nor Sebastian Pfugbeil produced solid and acceptable evidence that supports their alarmist allegations.
The perspective into which you try to put it is extremely alarmist. That works only if you throw all caution into the wind and discard the constitutional provision that an accused must be assumed to be innocent until proven guilty.
Another anomaly on the chart: a night next to someone in bed.
Taking for the sake of comparison the 390 uSv/yr auto-irradiation figure that’s a tad over 1 uSv /day or 0.33 for 8h kip. That’s all internal, my own personal K-40.
Now if I sleep next to someone rather than IN them how do I get irradiated?
Firstly the solid angle that my body cuts off from whatever is emanating from them will be a small proportion of their total “aura”. To grab a figure lets say 10%. So at 0.033 uSv per night we’re already below the 0.05 given in the png.
Now how much of the beta particles will escape from the body of my chosen source of nocturnal irradiation ? Well not much. We’ve already assumed each person is getting the full blast of their own auto-irradiation. And with the very limited penetration power of beta there is not going to be much of it flying around the bedroom!
Maybe I only get exposed to 0.05 when humping.
I apologise if I am stepping on anyone’s toes, as I admit to not reading all the comments above.
The major factor that the MSM have omitted in their ignorance and doom-mongering, is that spent fuel rods were the cause of all the local radiation, simply because the Japanese back-up cooling water pump supplies failed – no electricity – even though they are doing a sterling job of curtailment. Without constant water cooling, any spent fuel rods in storage continue to rise in temperature as low level nuclear reaction continues.
I have often wondered why the design engineers involved have never bothered to utilise this heat energy, e.g. as in second or third stage compound steam engines, or latterly in second stage turbo-charging on large 2-stroke engines.
So now I suppose we have to deal with the bananas.
The human body has a very limited tolerance of variations in blood potassium. Luckily it is pretty good a regulating it. It dumps about 2.5mg each days which is replaced from our diet. Beyond this it just gets flushed out. Eating one, or even ten, bananas is not going to send you into hyperkalemia and bring on cardiac arrest or ventricular fibrillation. Healthy kidney function will control it.
Following on from my auto-irradiation calcs : 55uSv/yr from my personal K stock of 2.65g x 80 = 212 g means a nominal 450mg in a banana will radiate about 1/500th of that amount, 0.11 uSv/yr . Note, per YEAR.
But the banana’s K will only be in my system for about a day, not a year. So the stated dose from a banana is exaggerated by a factor of about 350 times. Maybe Randy has a big banana 😉
0.1uSv from eating one banana ? What a load of fuku-shima.
I only hope the rest of the table in the chart is more accurate than the bits I took the time to research.
Randy’s mega banana dose :
xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx
xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx
xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx
xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx
xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx
xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx
xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx
xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx
xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx
xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx
xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx
xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx
xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx
xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx
xxxxx
Dose from a real banana:
x
Perhaps Randal could redo some of his calculations, recheck his sources and comment.
To be fair , Randal’s probably just propagating some inaccurate info spawned years ago by the author of a book on diet and nutrition who did not understand biology. This has been mindlessly repeated by endless nuclear proponents and has been going viral this week due to uSv being topic of the week down the pub.
So it looks like it’s not just MSM who don’t know about radiation. (And it’s true , they have not got the slightest idea).
P. Solar says:
“dose per kg body mass in one year:
17.5e-12 x 31.56e6 = 5.511 mJ/kg/year (=mrem/yr)
=5.5 mrem/yr
=55 uSv/yr
390/55=7.1
Now unless I’ve made a silly error or there is some biological subtlety I’m missing that is not even one seventh of that shown above.”
I did not see where you factored in the mean [lean] body mass. When you converted to mrem, you dropped the per kg. Perhaps “5.5 mrem/yr” should be 5.5 mrem/kg/yr.
Could someone please put MSM in the glossary?
thanks
Mike
Here’s a US EPA radiation dose calculator you can use to determine your average annual dose. I filled in my personal location and lifestyle stuff and it calculated 330 mRem/year. http://www.epa.gov/radiation/understand/calculate.html
According to the chart at two different sites 50 kilometers northwest from the reactors a person there would be exposed to 3.6mSv per day. Also according to the charts 100mSv is the “lowest one-year dose clearly linked to increased cancer risk”. So someone spending just one month at those locations gets a dose scientifically known to increase cancer incidence. Getting it all one month is also worse, according the chart again, than spreading it out over a year. So it’s worse than you thought.
A person spending one year at one of those sites, and God only knows how many sites are like it or worse, and how distant those sites might be, gets a dose of 1.3Sv which borders on severe and sometimes fatal radiation poisoning. (2.0Sv).
This is supposed to reassure us that there’s nothing to worry about? While the MSM may be overstating based upon worst case scenarios this is clearly causing severe health hazards tens and hundreds of kilometers distant. Just because your skin doesn’t blister up like a sunburn a few hours after exposure doesn’t mean you have nothing to fear – you just have nothing concrete to fear until you get diagnosed with small cell lung cancer 20 years later. Who’s writing this “don’t worry, it’s perfectly safe” crap anyway – unemployed big tobacco scientists?
Walter Schneider says:
March 20, 2011 at 1:17 pm
As far as I can tell, all of the sources for which you identified links without telling anything about what all the articles you point to are supposed to signify.
? Perspective. “To put it into perspective:”
And I thought the first was worth a thousand words of explanation for each picture..
Rather a lot is known of the effects from Chernobyl from all the countries affected regardless of the reluctance of some to come clean with the information, but because of this the full extent will now probably never be known. Your whitewash posting of 25 years later radiophobia claiming no fatalities saying “The worst possible nuclear plant accident produced no scientifically confirmed fatalities in the general population.”, is a disgrace. I’m surprised you don’t recognise lying Communist propaganda in this and the rest of the paragraph you posted..
But then, how many know what the US and Britain and Nato have done to the populations they’ve bombed with depleted Uranium? Kosovo? Now has the largest US base in the world. Look at the pictures of the babies in Iraq, you don’t really expect the truth from the perpetrators of these atrocities, do you? Any more than you’d expect it from those still parrotting the party line from science when under the decades of Communism in Poland. These are real babies in Iraq, not the silly dismissal of ‘doctored’ pictures of abnormal chickens Jaworowski says of Chernobyl.
Your paragraph ended with a typical tried and tested Beria created propaganda format. In fact, you couldn’t have picked a better example of the disinformation genre in the short paragraph you chose. Excellent.
So that’s the level of Science and Technology we’re to expect our lot in the 21st Century? http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2007/06/page/2/
Interesting. Jaworowski is pretty good on the ice-core data. Interesting choice for Larouche, to take someone steeped in Communist hide-it science on Chernobyl to publish in a mag extolling such wonders as genetically engineered crops which are already forced on Iraqi farmers, now illegal for them to save their own ungenetically engineered crop seeds in the Monsanto takeover.. http://www.cropchoice.com/leadstrygmo112804.html See 5.
The really clever move that Maggie Thatcher made was to get the Greens on board her anti-coal campaign. (She destroyed the unions, you only have to look back to the BA strike to see how biased the media was against workers daring to claim dignity at the workplace..,) destroyed cheap fuel for the masses by destroying the coal industry, and then sold off other fuel assets to private industry; the French now own British water iirc. With this move she managed to silence them Greens about nuclear, distracted them, and now, what’s his name Greenpeace has very recently come out and said he thinks he was wrong about nuclear energy.
And of course all the sleight of hand from the AGW puppets pointing to oil interests as backers for the skeptics, while all the time the oil interests were in on creating AGW from the beginning at UEA, Maggie and Hadley Centre, etc.
Convoluted. You’ll have to dig a bit deeper to discover who’s actually saying what.
The Beeb saying 100 mSv/year produces bad health effects, this appears to be saying the same thing, but says less than 200 not a problem if a one-off dose. I think that’s what it’s saying: http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/the-staggers/2011/03/msv-radiation-chart-japan
So, 5,000 one-off dose would kill around half the people in a month. The radiation levels at Fukushima have reached 400 mSv per hour. So, does half a day at 400 mSv/hour count as one 5,000 dose?
The articles you identified make unsubstantiated assertions,
Bull. Read them.
and someone like Sebastian Pflugbeil, Gesellschaft fur Strahlenschutz (Society for Protection against Nuclear Radiation) reads like James Hansen mutated into a nightmare.
http://www.ippnw-students.org/chernobyl/research.html
As I said, some of it has been recorded. Much has been swept under the carpet. Regardless of the personalities, the Communist propaganda from the era of brainwashed Polish science contradicts what is known. And what makes reasonable sense knowing levels and effects. People in Europe and Turkey as well as in the Ukraine are still dying from that explosion. That someone is off the wall on one subject, doesn’t mean they haven’t a clue about another..
http://www.ippnw-students.org/chernobyl/research.html
http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/nuclear-nightmares/#
Does the paragraph you quoted still make sense?
Engchamp says:
March 20, 2011 at 2:27 pm
“I have often wondered why the design engineers involved have never bothered to utilise this heat energy, e.g. as in second or third stage compound steam engines, or latterly in second stage turbo-charging on large 2-stroke engines.”
Because you need 1000F dry steam and lots of it to get much work done. While spent fuel rods can cause a stagnant pool to start boiling after a few days they can’t crank out enough dry steam to justify the cost of safe extraction.
M.A.DeLuca says:
March 20, 2011 at 11:33 am
re; ad blocking
Easy enough to do with MS Internet Explorer. Change security setting to “high”, apply it, then select “custom level” and go through the option list to re-enable file downloads and allow already installed active-x controls to run. Most websites run just fine this way except for annoying advertising. For those sites with something you want that needs java script what I do is I have Firefox installed with all the standard settings and I just copy & paste the URL from Internet Explorer to Firefox and/or for sites I visit a lot that require javascript enabled I bookmark them in Firefox and enter them using Firefox.
I’ve been using the above method for at least the last 5 or 6 years with no problems. Using Internet Explorer with high security as your preferred browser will keep a lot of unwanted stealthy crap off your computer in addition to silencing Google Ads which can be hideously annoying especially when they highlight keywords and pop ads up when your mouse cursor accidently passes over it.
Hal Dall, MD says: I did not see where you factored in the mean [lean] body mass. When you converted to mrem, you dropped the per kg. Perhaps “5.5 mrem/yr” should be 5.5 mrem/kg/yr.
rem is a J/kg measurement. Like a measure of how much damage the energy can do to tissue. Since the first credible looking source I got expressed their results in mmol/kg in “fat free” subjects, I used that approach, so the total body mass does not come into it. If it did , it would be divided out again in converting to rem.
Thanks for checking.
FYI. I wrote up a few paragraphs on comparative risk – nuclear is one of the least risky ways to make electricity.
Under section 2.
“It is a scandal for the IAEA Summary to be treated respectfully by the press as a scientifically valid study of radiation health effects from Chernobyl. The IAEA study was pre-destined to find no provable health differences between the study’s so-called exposed and so called unexposed groups — and hence no provable radiation-induced health effects — because the IAEA used two groups which experienced only a negligible dose-difference.” http://www.ratical.org/radiation/CNR/HoloVsNoProb.html
Sounds familiar – “On May 21, 1991, the IAEA released a 60-page summary of the conclusions reached by these travelling experts (IAEA 1991-a). The report itself was withheld and not made available for examination by the press or by independent analysts. The press release and summary resulted in newspaper headlines such as:
. etc.”
They think they’re it’s stress, more psychological than biological.
The above from a link on http://ibis-birthdefects.org/start/chornobyl.htm
From which also, http://www.ratical.org/radiation/Chernobyl/ChernobylCoSS.html
Background history 1991 publication “Chernobyl: Insight from the Inside” by Vladimir Chernousenko, the Ukrainian nuclear physicist tasked to “liquidate the consequences” of the accident.
“Chernousenko offers the first set of figures available on the great wave of morbidity that has seized the Soviet population after 1986. At first mainly concentrated in the the three Soviet REpulbics of Byelorrussia, the Ukraine and Russia, where the bulk of the emissions settled on more than 100,000 square kilometers, the refusal of the Soviet authorities to recognize the true extent of the contamination of farmland has since spread radiation illness to all the former Soviet republics.
He asserts that in Byelorrusia, which was the hardest hit, there is hardly a child today not suffering from some immune deficiency disease, either cardiovascular, lymphoid or oncological, and in the three biggest provinces of the Ukraine a medical investigation of the public health, conducted in 1989, indicated that the health of every second resident was damaged.”
Chernobyl and the Collapse of the Soviet Society by Jay M. Gould – posits this disaster the true reason for the collapse of the Communist Soviet Union.
Myrrh says:
March 20, 2011 at 5:02 pm
Oh! Were those eight links ranked in order of importance to you? I did not realize that, but what the point is of the first, and what all of those pictures worth so many thousand words signify you do not tell. Is that because words fail you, even though not to an extent that would prevent you from uttering a vicious rant while safely hiding behind your anonymity?
So, just to make sure I have got it right. I am a communist agent who whitewashes hype and hysteria with Beria propaganda, and in your eyes Zbigniew “Jaworowski is pretty good on the ice-core data” when he produces information that you like to agree with. However, when he writes in his capacity as one of the foremost radiation experts in the world, his alter-ego comes to the fore and he becomes in your ‘steamed’ opinion someone “steeped in Communist hide-it science on Chernobyl.”
All right, that, your anonymity and the price of a cup of coffee get me a coffee. I’ll have to pay extra to get a doughnut.
Give me scientific facts on a science blog, not unsubstantiated, hysterical rants.