Essay by Eric Worrall
Both hotels were near nuclear medicine facilities. The first hotel (peak 0.14 µSv / hour) was a holiday rental in an apartment complex where lots of doctors live. The second was a popular hotel just over the road from a major Brisbane tourist attraction. Neither pose a risk to health.
The following is a fun video I captured at the first hotel, on the Queensland Sunshine Coast. The detector is sitting on a plastic coffee table in front of the sofa inside the hotel room. All the windows were closed. 12+ counts per second produces an impressive radiation detector video
Despite the impressive looking count rate in the video above, none of the radiation levels I measured are anywhere near to being a health hazard. Oregon State University gives the maximum safe exposure level as 0.02 mSV / hour – over 140x the maximum level I measured in those hotels. There are plenty of inhabited places where the natural radiation level is higher than what I measured in those hotel rooms (using a Radiocode Scintillometer).
The following is from a month ago, but as the nuclear debate just flared up again in Australia, I thought it worth mentioning.
NUCLEAR POWER STATIONS ARE NOT APPROPRIATE FOR AUSTRALIA – AND NEVER WILL BE
10.05.24 BY CLIMATE COUNCIL
The prospect of nuclear power in Australia has been a topic of public debate since the 1950s. While Australia has never had a nuclear power station, we do have 33% of the world’s uranium deposits and we are the world’s third largest producer of it. Periodically, as with the changing of the seasons, various individuals appear in the media singing the virtues of nuclear energy – claiming it is the only option for clean and reliable electricity in Australia.
In fact, over one third of Australia’s electricity is already powered by renewables, and new initiatives like the Capacity Investment Scheme are set to push us towards 82% renewable energy by the end of this decade. While the move to clean energy is still not happening fast enough, it is underway and starting to speed up. We do not need distractions like nuclear to derail our progress now, so let’s set the record straight.…
3. Nuclear power poses significant community, environmental, health and economic risks.
Radiation from major nuclear disasters, such as Chernobyl in 1986 and Fukushima in 2011, have impacted hundreds of thousands of people and contaminated vast areas that take decades to clean up. Even when a nuclear power station operates as intended, it creates a long-term and prohibitively expensive legacy of site remediation, fuel processing and radioactive waste storage.
4. Nuclear power is not renewable, and it is not safe.
Uranium is a finite resource just like coal, oil and gas. It needs to be mined and, just like mining coal, oil and gas, this carries serious safety concerns, including contaminating the environment with radioactive dust, radon gas, water-borne toxins, and increased levels of background radiation. On the other hand, energy generated from the sun and wind releases no pollutants into the air and is overwhelmingly considered to be safe.
…
Read more: https://www.climatecouncil.org.au/nuclear-power-stations-are-not-appropriate-for-australia-and-probably-never-will-be/
Critics are right that you can’t have nuclear power without a slight increase in radiation. My point is we already have non-health threatening radiation hotspots scattered around Australian cities, Australia is already part of the nuclear age.
The slight radiation hotspots I measured in those hotels, they could have been nuclear medicine patients staying at the hotels, shedding a few radioactive skin cells, or mildly irradiating the plumbing system when they use the bathroom. It could just be the granite facing on the local buildings, contributing a completely natural boost to local background radiation. Or it could be the soil in those locations happened to contain a little more natural radiation than the surrounding areas, the adjacency to the medical facilities could have all been a big coincidence.
I didn’t deliberately book hotels next to nuclear radiation medical facilities – the hotels just happened to be convenient for the events I was attending. I only noticed the medical facilities after I started trying to figure out why the radiation levels in the hotels were slightly higher than the background level I measured a few miles away.
I did walk inside one of the facilities, see if it got any hotter when I got closer, but I didn’t see any identifiable gradient – the radiation actually dropped a little when I walked inside the facility. So whatever it was, it was well dispersed. But the radiation did drop away significantly after I travelled more than a mile from the facilities – so while my evidence is far from conclusive, in my mind it still seems possible that nuclear medicine was the source of the slight uptick in radiation in the places I stayed.
There is a big difference between a slight uptick in background count, and a globally significant nuclear catastrophe.
The other kind of radiation leak, the kind of leak which forces people to abandon their homes, modern reactors have containment buildings which keep all the problems inside the plant. The only time I ever heard of this failing was Fukushima, but Fukushima’s plant clearly wasn’t pressure resistant the way modern US style containment buildings are. Chernobyl didn’t have a proper containment building – which is why they had to build the “sarcophagus” after the Chernobyl reactor blew its top.
Australia does not have fault zones capable of producing a Fukushima scale Earthquake disaster. Nuclear power, with a proper pressure tested containment facility, is as close to completely safe as anything can be.
My main objection to Aussie opposition leader Peter Dutton’s nuclear programme plan is I don’t think the proposal on the table makes economic sense. Australia has vast quantities of coal – we should keep burning cheap coal to keep power bills down. And Dutton’s plan for siting nuclear plants on top of coal seams potentially endangers the value of those coal resources, if a low level release ever makes its way into the coal bed. I do not have any problem with nuclear itself.
My family stayed in those hotels with me, so I was completely at ease with the safety issue. My kid thought the expression on mum’s face was hilarious when I showed my wife the Scintillometer buzzing away on the table, like a scene from the TV series “Chernobyl”, but everything was fine after I reassured my wife, and presented the yummy chocolate bar I’d been saving for marital emergencies. After the initial surprise, and showing everyone a few radiation hazard sheets, it was all a big joke – a funny Facebook post which got a few more “wows” than normal from my friends.
The small spike which I labelled “Big solar flare” was a gamma ray spike pretty much everyone on Earth likely experienced during the spectacular Auroras many of us saw a month ago. I’m too close to the Equator to experience the full effects of interesting space weather – near the equator the atmosphere is thicker, and the topography of the Earth’s magnetic field provides more effective shielding. But if anyone was playing with a radiation detector in Antarctica, Southern Chile or Northern Canada, Scandinavia, Greenland, Siberia or Alaska during the big aurora event, I’d love to know what the measured gamma ray excursion was during the solar flare. And if following your high latitude aurora gamma ray exposure you turn green, grow huge muscles, and become one of my favourite superheroes, more power to you.
Update(EW): MarkW pointed out coal fly ash is quite radioactive. Radioactive Fly ash is used as a concrete filler to improve the durability of the concrete, so radioactive concrete might be the explanation for the radiation anomaly I detected.
https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/pavement/recycling/fach03.cfm
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You savage! You just want to make it worse!
Yeah me bad 🙂
I think it still has to be proven that x amount of radiation causes x amount of …( fill in the blanks). The safety bar is set so low as to become meaningless. When we hear a Geiger counter we panic. Oh my god, radiation! The problem starts there and quite often finishes there also. Geiger goes off…panic. it’s like a trigger. Tsjernobyl is a good case in point. We know the cause and effect. And the effect is much smaller than anticipated.
You might make the case of coal over nuclear from an economic point of view but if you want to get off coal nuclear is the way. 1 near every major city will guerantee 50 years of steady supply..
I’ve read that there is more nuclear energy in the uranium that naturally collects in coal, then there is chemical energy in that coal.
Also, the fly ash from a coal plant is more radioactive than many of the items we dispose of as radioactive waste.
Absolutely – fly ash is nasty stuff. But they use it in building materials, which is another possible explanation for the radiation.
https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/pavement/recycling/fach03.cfm
Correct. Coal ash in the UK has has often been cited as a more significant source of [poorly defined] environmental radiation.
That aside, the bigger problem has always been, and continues to be, analytical sensitivity and the curse of improvements in analytical chemistry. Once you CAN detect something analytically then the envirotards will always find a way to describe that level as harmful at vanishingly small concentrations.
In many ways we are quite lucky that elucidation of biochemical pathways like the Krebs Cycle was done before & around WW2, before radioactive safety regulations made such activities so difficult and expensive. With the most sensitive technique, by miles, off the table, much biochemistry research today is done with one hand tied behind the back of researchers. Yes, it does still happen. But researchers often don’t use, train for, or even contemplate, many wonderful experiments. This is because of the overarching unreasonable fear of radioactivity and the associated cost and red-tape constraints on its use.
Michael,
Forget about regulatory descriptions of radiation harm, because the have lost connection to reality.
The first guideline for a nation is the number of deaths each year recorded by coroners as caused by nuclear radiation (which type, alpha, beta, etc?). The second is the incidence of injury or illness. If both of these are currently low, there should be no need to set regulatory levels. As is well known, the current regulations on dose were ministered out of reality in the post-wad era by the power and money of the Rockefeller Foundation. I wrote this up on WUWT.
Geoff S
I read a story from a nuclear industry source about some maintenance works at a coal burning plant on the same site as a nuclear plant. They were assigned to do a job in the nuclear plant, but their tools, contaminated with fly ash, could not be brought into the nuclear side because they set off the radiation monitors at the plant entrance.
Small Modular Reactors have a correspondingly small footprint. Place a half dozen around every major city, plus a few more for industrial process heat. Add in a GE-Hitachi PRISM reactor to burn 90% of the fission waste products.
24x7x365 reliable power, for much longer than we will need to solve the engineering of fusion power plants.
Nice Eric. The people against nuclear will not be persuaded with facts. That is why I don’t care what they think or say. They rely on the precautionary principle and the notion of linear no threshold (LNT). Both of these are nonsense and are not a satisfactory argument against nuclear power.
Correct, Bob.
And notable that the Precautionary Principle is invariably missing when plans to rely only on intermittent, weather dependent, enormously expensive Ruinable Energy is promoted.
Not even a back of fagpacket cost benefit analysis is forthcoming.
Fagpacket! Good one. Been 50 years since I’ve heard old ladies sitting around drinking coffee talk about having a fag. I presume that word is no longer politically correct to use for cigarettes.
Why does anybody care if an energy source is renewable when we have hundreds of years of cheap nonrenewable energy and if breeder reactors are included, thousands of years?
The cost of replacing fossil fuels is astronomical, about $US36,000 per year per household in the developed world additional.
The cost of stopping warming by CO2 by 2050 is estimated at $US200 trillion by Bloomberg’s Green Energy Research Team.
There are 2 billion households in the world so that is $US100,000 per household.
Ninety percent of the households can’t afford anything additional so the others will have to pay $US1 million per household to make up the difference.
That is about $US38,000 per household in the developed world per year or about $US3,000 per month additional in electric bills or taxes.
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-07-05/-200-trillion-is-needed-to-stop-global-warming-that-s-a-bargain
“Why does anybody care if an energy source is renewable…”
Good point!
If you are detecting gamma rays, then you are missing out on the good stuff. real damage occurs with alpha particles, thankfully they don’t travel very far, even the air stops them. Beta particles pack a lot less punch, travel a bit further but a couple of metres of air will stop them too.
If this were taught in schools then the public wouldn’t be so alarmed. If an accident ever happens, you can avoid most of the risk by not standing in the debris and avoiding breathing any emitted dust.
Another point not often taught, the longest lived radioactive elements are the ones that emit the least often. I’d much rather be holding a kg lump of something with a half life of billions of years than a kg of something with a half life of hours.
It would have been good if you had gone to a shop selling bananas. They emit beta particles which ultimately combine with electrons to produce gamma rays, what would the count have been then. And the Potassium has a half life of 1.25 Billion years…. should we stop selling them near schools?
I did think about that, but I went for the gamma only detector because it also tells you the isotope and the energy spectrum, and because that device was recommended by someone I respect. They keep promising an isotope breakdown but haven’t quite delivered it yet.
Some of the devices out there are actually fake, so it’s important to check – we live in a sad world.
Gamma rays can have a very high energy spectrum, it’s not possible to tell the isotope from the gamma ray. A positron/electron annihilation emits a specific amount of energy, eg frequency of gamma ray but even that can be adjusted upwards based on the initial kinetic energy of the particles.
Alpha particle detectors CAN tell the isotope because almost all alpha particle emissions have specific energies.
I must beg to differ with you on this point. Gamma rays have specific energies and each radiative element has a spectrum that can be detected with lithium-drifted germanium crystals. Those instruments are used to determine the elements and their amounts in samples.
Exactly, that’s how gamma ray spectroscopy works in mineral exploration.
I believe you mean using x-rays to raise the electron energy in an atom. As the electron falls back it emits a specific frequency, no where near to the gamma ray range.
Look up XRF and compare to gamma rays. Miles apart in technology.
Or to put it another way. You can’t use an x-ray ionising ray to create a gamma ray.
As yes, the Banana Equivalent Dose. With ~ 5 atoms of radioactive Potassium per banana, I may have consumed a couple micro-Sieverts this month.
358mg in 100g of banana.
120 ppm of Potassium is radioactive.
39g is one molar amount.
Number of atoms in a mole = 6.02214076×1023
I’m thinking that the maths escapes you.
I have a BSEE with a minor in mathematics. This level of math is easy.
The BED is just an informal way of explaining very small doses of radiation. 0.0117% of the naturally occurring potassium is the unstable isotope potassium-40. With ~ 0.1 micro-Sieverts per banana, and if I consume 20 bananas a month, it is reasonable to guesstimate that I have been exposed to a couple of micro-Sieverts.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_equivalent_dose. Yes, it’s Wikipedia, but for this topic, it’s not bad.
As a trained radiation worker, who works inside Radioactive Controlled Areas in a Navy shipyard several times a year, I have some idea of what we’re working with. I would have to consume a ton of bananas for it to be concerning.
It’s not concerning, it’s just more than 5 atoms. As you’d be aware.
I think you also need to consider the time that the potassium stays resident to be in full awareness of the dose. Some will not be taken up by the body. If it all was, then we’d be just potassium, so some exchange must occur.
Or, the dose could be determined just by the mass of potassium in the body, wikipedia can help here too.
I’ve had a banana/day every day for the past 70 years! Should I worry about it? 🙂
And yet you still don’t realise why your hair has probably become grey and started to fall out…
Edward Teller once remarked that (and I paraphrase) “sleeping with one woman raises one’s radiation exposure slightly, but sleeping with two women at once is very risky.”
hmmm… a fantasy of mine, not yet realized- my dad told me that in his younger days (before marriage) he slept with twin sisters at the same time….
But gamma rays have the known effect of turning people big, green and cranky.
Living in Denver exceeds the maximum safe radiation dose limits that Oregon State University recommends.
Do not even think about climbing Mt. Hood in Oregon or flying in any jet aircraft to get there.
Roll-out of nuclear risks turning off the taxpayer subsidies taps for renewables.
THAT’S the main risk factor from nuclear.
That bit I’m happy with 🙂
Three points about EW’s post on irrational radiation (nuc generation) fears.
The big baddie was Chernobyl, and we have even managed to finally get that under radiation control, while the again thriving wildlife in the abandoned vicinity proves yet again the linear no threshold model radiation fear is very wrong.
Fukushima was a failure because of siting, not because of the reactor design. To put a reactor on a coastline known for typhoons was criminal negligence at best.
It wasn’t the typoon, it was a tsunami. And it was a known risk.
Had the emergency generator been placed in a water tight room, nobody would have ever heard of the reactor at Fukushima.
Nothing wrong with placing reactors on coastlines.
Radiation from major nuclear disasters, such as Chernobyl in 1986 and Fukushima in 2011 …
Chernobyl: Incompetent and corrupt government operators.
Fukushima: Someone thought it would be a good idea to build emergency generators in a flood zone.
These are things that educated cultivated humans won’t do again. We learn from our mistakes.
We learn from our mistakes.
And then we make new ones. I find it useful to warn my elementary students: “Don’t copy your neighbor’s mistakes. Make your own! Be creative!” They probably will do both, no matter what I say. But they can’t say they weren’t warned… :>)
re: “Fukushima: Someone thought it would be a good idea to build emergency generators in a flood zone.”
Specific point or issue thought to be in error; flooding caused by a tsunami not typically identified as a “flood zone”.
People living at higher elevations are exposed to higher levels of radiation.
They also have slightly longer lifespans.
“Exposure to a high background radiation displays clear beneficial health effects in humans. These hormetic effects provide clear indications for re-considering the linear no-threshold paradigm, at least within the natural range of low-dose radiation.”
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33479810/
Wait until “Climate Council” discovers how much radioactive material is zooming around the world under the guise of Nuclear Medicine and Imaging …
https://www.cdc.gov/radiation-health/data-research/facts-stats/imaging-procedures.html
Shhh – oh dang, the cat’s out of the bag 🙂
How to worry a member of the public – at one time we were using phosphorus 32 as an experimental tracer. One of the staff had a Seiko divers watch which gave a much more impressive reading than the whole container of P32 solution
Has anyone here (not) seen the Bionerd23 channel on YouTube?
.
To the uninitiated: She covers ALL things nuclear, and on a personal 1:1 level (total immersion).
10 Common Naturally Radioactive Foods (thoughtco.com)
Eat your veggies and then you can have a few chocolate-covered Brazil Nuts. Brazil Nut, Anderson’s Candy Shop – Gourmet chocolate candies, caramels, fudges, truffles and gifts (andersonscandyshop.com)
“On the other hand, energy generated from the sun and wind releases no pollutants into the air and is overwhelmingly considered to be safe.”
Wait they they get a load of what those things are made of.
Of course, and not if you are a bird, or a whale.
I’m really hoping someone posts the near polar solar flare gamma ray readings 🙂
Solar flares? Being out in the noonday sun without appropriate protections, can kill you..
I should add one of my all time favorites:
Ah bless – a video from the days when comedians were allowed to be funny 🙂
“While the move to clean energy is still not happening fast enough….”
What the hell is the dam hurry, you climate whack jobs?
We are surrounded by threats all the time- most of which are far higher than a very low dose of radiation from a nuclear reactor. Tens of thousands of Americans die every year in car accidents- and from murder. Much of the food people eat is bad for your health. (along with all the booze and drugs people take). If you live a perfectly healthy life you’re gonna die anyway- maybe last a few years longer. The value of dependable energy is great. We need it to earn a living- keep our food fresh in the frig, cook food, keep from freezing, etc.
In 1970 or so I started work in the front end of the global nuclear fuel cycle, throughbeing invited to join the exploration group Geopeko soon after it had discovered the then-important, large, Ranger Uranium Mines 250 km east of Darwin. I got to know a bit about nuclear for Australia, hands on.
Since that time, 55 years or so ago, Australia has had a national policy that directly or indirectly prevented nuclear power stations in Australia. For those 55 years I have tried to find how and why this ban happened.
I have not found the answer. It is unusual for the reasons for significant policy to be concealed. For example, there are provisions for release of Cabinet Minutes at various decades after they were written, but I have found no mention of any value. The exceptionally tight silence around this matter forces me to one “most likely” conclusion, which is that way back in the 70s or 80s, a very senior public person with status near or at Prime Minister level, did something bad or unlawful that was hushed up, but then became known to a person or persons who started a massive blackmail. This is purely speculative and without evidence. I mention it only because I have eliminated most other causes of the ban that I can imagine.
It would be a gross failure of public administration if Australia’s energy future was handicapped for decades because of a bity of dirty conduct in politics.
Can any reader clarify why we got the ban and France got the reactors?
Geoff S
Hadn’t thought about blackmail issues. I just blame Whitlam, Hawke and Greenpeace for changing the mindset of Australians, “past, present and emerging”!
Also Geoff, you will no doubt remember the Fox report…
Put your detector against a bunch of bananas, or near a bare concrete wall….. Or better still, take it on a plane at 40,000 feet. Natural radioactivity abounds. (both bananas and concrete have a naturally radioactive isotope of potassium, and at flight levels there is far less atmosphere between you and the high radiation of space) And of course there are smoke detectors which have a very hot little piece of americium as the ion source.
https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-radioactive-products-we-use-every-day
Guacamoles are right up there with Bananas.
Brazil 2012: the secret of the radioactive [beach] sand (Bionerd23 channel)
Chernobyl wild zone: wolves of the northern radioactive track & other animals (Bionerd23 channel)
Chernobyl exclusion zone wildlife: Przewalski’s horses, june 2013 (Bionerd23 channel)
Chernobyl 2012 II: [Finding] yet another hot particle of nuclear reactor fuel (deja vu) (Bionerd23)
Experiment: “filmed multiple radioactive sources (see video for details) with my webcamera. i took the camera apart to expose the CCD, removing the glass that covers it – thus allowing even the alpha particles to strike the photo chip… with outstanding results!” -Bionerd23
Radiation exposure during an intercontinental flight (Bionerd23 channel)
Fun with radiation!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilbert_U-238_Atomic_Energy_Laboratory
PS If I recall correctly, the Gilbert Toy company also produced Erector Sets.