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Politics : Politics of Energy -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: LLCF who wrote (32639)	6/24/2012 9:40:45 PM
From: Bilow	1 Recommendation Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 86356

Hi LLCF; Re: "I fail to see how this is relevant... so is sunlight, so lie in it all day every day??" In my regular life, I get perhaps 2 minutes of sunlight per day on a limited portion of my body. If I lay in the sunlight all day I'd get huge amounts. You're comparing this relationship (which would lead me to receiving perhaps a thousand times as much solar radiation), to the relationship between our natural exposure to radiation (around 8000 counts per second from our own bodies), to my exposure to radiation from Japan (around 0 counts per second). Numerically there's no comparison at all. It's hard to figure out exactly how much radiation was released from the reactors because the units used, but wikipedia says that one of the more worrisome contaminants amounts to 30 grams of radioactive iodine. Since it has a half-life of 8 days it's now been reduced to 30grams x 2^ (-400 days/8 days) = 3 x 10^-14 grams, which is to say it's all gone now. Okay, let's look at the water release. The worst seems to be Caesium-137 where 8.4kg was released. This went into the Pacific Ocean which is around 622 million cubic kilometers or 6.22x10^17 cubic meters. Thus a cubic meter of the ocean now has, on average, 1.3x10^-17 kg of Caesium-137, or about 60 million atoms of Caesium-137. To most readers, this should seem like a scary amount. What you're not taking into account is that atoms are very very small. Continuing with the calculation, that cubic meter will have about 0.06 decays per second (I left off a factor of ln(2) = 0.7 in these calculations cause I'm sloppy). Now a cubic meter of water weighs around 2000 pounds so it's about 10x as large as a human. So a more realistic radioactivity rate is around 0.006 per second. Compared to the 8000 decays you already have, the contribution from Fukushima is zero per second. You can go down to the hardware store and buy components that will allow you to measure the radiation from your own body. (It's useful to know that wood is highly radioactive so you should be careful to build your equipment out of plastic which usually has none.) The technology was discovered most of 100 years ago. To measure the radiation from Japan will require millions of dollars worth of equipment. It's a tour de force, an amazing demonstration of technology, not an indication that anyone is at risk. The vast majority of the radiation scare from Japan has been nothing more than news organization selling soap to consumers by getting them to watch (scary) news reports. The news media reports on global warming for the same reason. People pay good money to watch scary movies, scary news reports are made for the same reason. It's all about entertainment and money. -- Carl