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
Bill Garland says:
March 20, 2011 at 6:27 pm
>>
FYI. I wrote up a few paragraphs on comparative risk – nuclear is one of the least risky ways to make electricity.
>>
It’s not because “only” 70% of the core melted in one of the reactors and the hydrogen explosions that ripped No.3 to bits and that no one expected did not end up with the spent fuel on fire, that there is less “risk”.
Without wishing to pre-empt how it works out, it seems like they may just, after a week of total panic, just maybe got things a bit more stable.
That does not reduce the risk.
Like hitting an empty chamber is russian roulette, it does not reduce 1 in 5 risk you just ran of getting you head blown off. The risk is exactly the same you just got lucky this time.
Don’t confuse how well something worked out with the risk being run in doing it.
With nukes the RISK is enormous.
The hysteria isn’t coming from me..
Nope, it wasn’t ranked. But the first was deliberate choice to set the scene for both drama and cover up as the subject of my posts was perspective, both in terms of the effects radiation actually has and to the cover up of these effects by all the nations utilising it to mass destruction, whether by design or by accident. The choice of building these kinds of nuclear reactors was in the first place deliberately to produce weapons grade by products.
The Polish/Science/Communist connection I worked out as I investigated, on the hoof. Jaworowski reads like any programmed/educated warmer on AGW. Perhaps because I have more background info into the politics of Communism and its methods it jumps out at me. They were experts at manipulation, Beria organised. The Goebbels to Hitler, he was to Stalin. Who himself was incredibly impressed by the power of advertising he discovered America had – these are sharp minds. Blunted emotions, but sharp minds.
All of AGW is built on this disinformation technique and divide and conquer, as I touched on by giving a bit of the Thatcher history of involvement.
So shrug, it’s a well known AGW meme to keep saying that scientific facts haven’t been given, when they have. Are you using this? Or have you merely not bothered to read any of the articles I posted?
Whatever, and see my follow up post, the history of the manipulation to dismiss Chernobyl as having no disastrous health effects continues, with the same people co-ordinating. I find it really hard to believe that anyone reading the links I posted could not understand what I was meaning, and/or wouldn’t immediately stop and wonder if the information they had was correct if pushing a line of benevolent radiation.. Perhaps the machinations of political entities in our history, especially in the 20th century, isn’t your ‘bag’.
P.S. – I do hope you understand now that I wasn’t accusing you of being a Communist agent..?
P.Solar
Thanks for de-fogging my vision(and brain), I can clearly see the J/kg now!
@Walter Schneider says:
March 20, 2011 at 9:22 am
When I stated that “I don’t think that this can be stressed enough,” I was referring to the difference between inhaling radioactive particles and being exposed to them on the surface of your clothes, shoes, etc. I was not referring to surgical masks in particular. Please don’t misquote me.
The point I thought I was making was that, instead of inducing panic by trying to use the word “Chernobyl” as many times as possible in a news story or broadcast, it would be much more helpful and practical to suggest that people who are concerned about radiation wear respirators. I think that respirators are more effective at filtering out small particulates than surgical masks.
You made the accusation:
Here are some sources supporting the statement that fallout is not uniform:
From Scottish sheep farms finally free of Chernobyl fallout
A further reference is here. What is surprising is that the restricted area with a measurement greater than 4000 bequerels per square meter is on the west coast of Great Britain, which is further from Chernobyl than the east coast is.
Another source that seemed to show to me that fallout was “splotchy” was http://users.owt.com/smsrpm/Chernobyl/glbrad.html. If you scroll down there are two diagrams that seem to show the “splotchiness” of the fallout. The first is labeled “The Impossible Happens, Chernobyl, 1986” and is the second diagram from the top. The second one is labelled “Figure 32 Radiation Hotspots Resulting From the Chornobyl’ Nuclear Power Plant Accident, April 1986.” It also shows IMHO “splotchiness.” The second diagram I believe is the same one that is shown on page 13 of Dr. Jaworowski’s paper and is labeled as “Figure 6 Surface Ground Map of Cesium-137 Release in the Chernobyl Accident.”
Let me be blunt. There has been a very large explosion at Fukushima Unit #3. At the same time, it appears that the spent fuel pool at Unit #3 may have lost enough water to expose the fuel rods. The explosion at Unit #3 appears to contain large amounts of particulates (i.e. unlike the explosion at Unit #1 which showed an initial clear air burst). It has now been admitted that Unit #4 also had a “hydrogen explosion.” The spent fuel pool at Unit #4 also may have lost enough water to expose the fuel rods. Wearing a respirator in a zone where you may be exposed to particulates from these explosions, I would submit is not being gripped by “fear.” It is a precaution and a reasonable one at that. It is still early in this event. A full assessment of the situation within and without the Fukushima power plant has not been done. I would also submit that there is a fundamental difference in the fallout from steam vented from a reactor vessel that remains intact and that from an uncontained spent fuel pool accident involving multiple explosions.
Finally, I once again would respectfully ask you, sir, not to misquote or otherwise try to change the meaning of my words. I did not say that “any of you” were endangered, based on the assumption that you and/or “any of us” are not presently located near the Fukushima power plant. If you are at present close to the Fukushima power plant, by all means, dear sir, please inhale as many particles of actinide oxides as you wish. It is your choice. If it were me, I would be wearing a respirator until I could get a better assessment of risk.
P.S. I would consider myself mostly, but not unconditionally, pro-nuclear. I believe everything has risk, but that risk can be managed if it is recognized and addressed. If it is ignored, then it will come back at you.
Highest reading I got in Mesa all day ~30counts per minute occasionally when a Gama ray comes in from somewhere. Usually reads ~12-25 C/M or ~18uSv
http://twitpic.com/4b6tbp
Thanks for that. The take home message for me is not to sleep with bananna eaters.
New radiation measurements for points outside Fukushima Dai-ichi can be found at http://www.mext.go.jp/component/english/__icsFiles/afieldfile/2011/03/21/1303972_2110.pdf as of March 21, 2011
I have made a scatter plot of the radiation measurements by distance from Fukushima Dai-ichi. The units are µSv/hr/km. I divided each radiation measurement by the distance from the power plant. Here is the chart. As can be seen, the fallout varies widely by distance. The stations showing the highest fallout are #32, #33 and #31, respectively, which are about 30 km from the power plant. Splotchy.
I might be wrong, but it seems to me that news articles report people’s fearful ideas, as opposed to originating the ideas. For example, I read an article which quoted an ordinary Japanese woman as saying that she was fearful and that the authorities might be lying, and then, later on, stated some claims by Japanese authorities to the effect that there was very little to be worried about. I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect the media not to report what many people think and feel, because it is news. If they did not publish it as news, they would be propaganda organs. (Consider a hypothetical case – e.g., global warming! – in which the many were right, and the authorities wrong.) So perhaps the news media are not remiss as news media, and complaints about them amount to being complaints that they are not something other than news media. Of course, I might be wrong, since I haven’t made a comprehensive study of what the media say.
P. Solar says:
March 20, 2011 at 7:22 pm
Sorry Mr Solar, you have no idea.
In the whole area of “Risk Management” there are two aspects to be mindful of and you are confusing them.
In assessing the “Risk” of anything you have to take into account two things.
1) Likelihood of an event happening
2) Consequences of that event
You just jumble everything together and say the risk is the same for “nuclear” regardless of how likely an event may be.
An example:
Playing Russian roulette with one bullet in a 1 shot chamber gives you deadly consequences and unacceptable risk of a bad event happening (unless you’re a hopeless shot)
Playing Russian roulette with one bullet in a 6 shot chamber still gives you deadly consequences and lower possibility of that event happening, therefore lower risk.
Playing Russian roulette with one bullet in a 1,000,000 shot chamber gives you deadly consequences and a miniscule likelihood of that event happening, therefore, very low or negligible risk.
Nothing is without risk in this world. It is the combination of likelihood and consequences that determine risk.
Working in a nuclear power plant has much less risk than working in a coal mine.
For those interested, here are some benefits of radiation that you may like to pass on to freinds and family.
[Warning – Graphic Content ~ ac]
http://tinyurl.com/zvxkd
http://tinyurl.com/ygabga
http://tinyurl.com/4srg7m4
TrevorG says:
In assessing the “Risk” of anything you have to take into account two things.
1) Likelihood of an event happening
2) Consequences of that event
I agree. My point is (like the bullet) the fact that we appear to have avoided the worst this time does not somehow reduce the risk, neither in the sense of 1) or 2).
Exactly. If anything the last 4 decades have proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that nuclear energy is the cleanest, safest, most reliable, configurable form of energy production to date.
With the untold terawatts of energy produced, it has resulted in only a few casualties, no more then 3 major incidents, of which only one serious incident.
All the questimating of various illnesses which are claimed to be linked to radiation are just that: wild guesses without a proven causal link.
As such it beats anything out there in cost/benefit ratio.
My riff on the *real* dangerous Radiation
Bill Garland says:
March 20, 2011 at 6:27 pm
“FYI. I wrote up a few paragraphs on comparative risk – nuclear is one of the least risky ways to make electricity.”
Did you take into account the health hazards of uranium mining and refinement? Those fuel rods don’t exactly grow on trees. While rooftop solar may be more dangerous to the installation and maintenance personal when compared to the equivalent jobs in the nuclear industry no one has to mine the sunlight that fuels the solar panels and no one has to eventually cart away toxic spent solar fuel. If you’re going to compare dangers you have to be far more inclusive of end-to-end activities required for nuclear energy and it isn’t such a rosy picture in that case. And it only takes one bad nuclear accident in a high population center for the casualty count and adverse economic consequences to skyrocket into billions in damages and hundreds of thousands or millions of people subjected to increased incidence of fatal cancers and even worse for young children including those still in the womb. The risk of such an accident might be small but the damages are commensurately large. Compare to solar power where the worst possible accident is the typical accident – one person dies falling off a roof and that’s as bad as it gets.
In short your analysis doesn’t compare apples to apples and amounts to no more than seriously flawed propaganda no different in that regard from ecoloon propaganda.
Smoking one pack of cigarettes exposes you to 20 uSv, or one little green square.
A pack a day habit for a full year would be 365 of those squares, about 3/4 of one orange square, about 7 mSv.
“And they want to irradiate (and probably already are) our food supply.
But that’s ok, because it’s “approved”.
Go figure.”
I could not let this comment be ignored. I work in the food industry in quality assurance and my plant as started experimenting with irradiating food. It has nothing to do with this subject. By “irradiate” we mean “shine a UV light on it.” We use “irradiate” because all light is radiation, whether it’s in the visible spectrum, ultraviolet, infrared, or even the gamma spectrum.
And if you’re worried about us using UV light, you might want to see about convincing farmers to grow lettuce in the shade.
The fact that the nuclear proponents always forget is, that risk from nuclear energy is calculated in a purely statistical manner. For a modern western reactor model and an uptime of 40 years there is a probability of 0.1% of catastrophic failure (ines7).
But lets use the brushed figures of the IAEA:
http://www.iaea.org/Publications/Magazines/Bulletin/Bull225_6/225_604792333.pdf
(yes I know there are complaints about the study in the article, but at least you can call this “data”).
They use probabilities of about 0.001% per year per plant. Lets call this the far optimistic end. The studier reactors of that time are the ones that are still in most widespread use.
There are a gazillion studies inbetween or somewhere close.
In practice however, inside of 50 years we have seen 1 category 7, 1 cat.6, 3 cat. 5 (counting Fukushima as one reactor, because I’m a nice guy) and that’s just published reactor incidents. I haven’t mentioned the accidents during transport of radioactive materials or the ones covered up by the SU.
Ines is actually cool source:
http://www.iaea.org/Publications/Magazines/Bulletin/Bull225_6/225_604792333.pdf
So all this blah blah about statistical safety is total bs. Humans (of which a certain percentile are morons and or greedy and or terrorists) operate them.
The fact is that chernobyl could be measured world wide. Every other major incident will be world wide. A tin of spinach anyone?
Even if you can somehow disregard this chasm between theory and reality:
Currently, since there are no final storage plants for depleted rods, every nuclear plant is gathering danger potential in form of hundreds radioactive rods which have to be actively cooled. We reap the benefits of a cheap energy source and leave the problems and dangers of its residue to later generations.
Very enlightened.
P. Solar,
Regarding your calculation for the radiation from the natural potassium in the body, I was checking your math and I think that there may be an error that affects the outcome. At the end, you multiplied the radiation energy (J/kg/s) by the number of seconds in a year to get the total exposure: (17.5*10^-12)(31.56*10^6)=0.0005523 J/kg/yr. That should be .5523 mJ/kg/yr, not 5.523 mJ/kg/yr. (mJ=milli Joules, not micro Joules, thus 3 places to the right, not 4)
If mJ/kg/yr=m/rem/yr, then it should be .5523 mrem, which then equals 5.5 uSv/yr, not 55 uSv/yr.
Then you get 390/5.5=70.90
Interestingly, 70.90 kg=156.31 lbs, which falls right in the middle for the ideal weight of a 5’7″ human male according to this chart (http://www.rush.edu/rumc/page-1108048103230.html). Therefore, it seems that Randall found the radiation energy per kilogram, and then multiplied the radiation by a chosen weight (70.9 kg in this case) to get a total for the entire body. That is why he has 390 uSv for natural radiation from potassium, rather than a lower number.
Ruben
“”””” C.M. Carmichael says:
March 20, 2011 at 5:04 am
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 death toll at 3-mile Island (from anything Nuclear related) is very easy to remember. The body count was exactly one less than the death toll at Chappaquiddick.
P. Solar and Ruben taken together are correct; the confusion arises when trying to state *total* activity in the body in units of radiation per kg (Sv). The 390 uSv is in fact high by the factor typical body mass, and is incorrect. The Sievert as a unit indicates the dose to _each_kg_ of the body and has to be left that way (5.5uSv/yr). The bigger you are the more total activity, but the dose/kg is the same as for a smaller person. It is an error present elsewhere in the literature, by the way.
Dave Springer,
“If you’re going to compare dangers you have to be far more inclusive of end-to-end activities required for nuclear energy and it isn’t such a rosy picture in that case.”
Agreed. I only wish the environmentalists would apply the same rules when auditing their pet technologies, including the strip mining that goes on for rare earth elements in China. Listening to the propaganda by the likes of Jonathan Porritt, one could be forgiven for thinking that a wind turbine appears out of nowhere by an act of divine creation.
Dave,
There are 2 tables provided. One was end-to-end stats for that power source. The other was accidents only. So yes, they do take into account the health hazards of uranium mining and refinement?
Bill
“Dave Springer says:
March 21, 2011 at 5:40 am
Bill Garland says:
March 20, 2011 at 6:27 pm
“FYI. I wrote up a few paragraphs on comparative risk – nuclear is one of the least risky ways to make electricity.”
Did you take into account the health hazards of uranium mining and refinement? “
It’s becoming clear that proponents of (or rather anti-nuclear) alternative energy can’t do their math right.
If the worst that can happen with solar energy is falling of a roof, it has to be put against the gains.
The gains of alternative energy are so poor that even the lack of accidents makes it already unfeasible. There’s no need for tragedy, the tragedy is in the stubborn belief that this kind of energy production can hold up against the massive energy potential per unit of matter in matter/energy conversion.
That is what counts, how much energy can you produce using the least effort so the energy doesn’t becomes so expensive it ruins your economy.
In that all forms other then matter/energy conversion don’t stand a chance. So whilst we are waiting for fusion to come to fruition we’ll use fission. That’ll last long enough to bridge the cap.
Stop wasting money, resources and manpower on pipedreams. There’s no free lunch, each form of energy production comes with it’s own set of problems.
Nuclear giving the biggest result per dollar even when calculating the risks.
The risk is not necessarily enourmous, the consequences are potentially enourmous. The risk is a product of how badly things can go wrong and how likely they are to go wrong in just that manner. The visceral reaction is to the outcome when we finally roll “snake eyes”. To the best of my knowledge, no one has yet died of direct radiation exposure. In New Jersey, 122 people have died in automobile accidents since Jan. 1. No one is looking to ban cars in NJ as far as I know. The simple reason is that everyone who gets behind the wheel of a car firmly believes (however wrongly) that they control their own fate. Since we can’t “drive” the local nuclear power plant, our anxiety levels are higher since we don’t have that illusory control of our own fate.