Human radiation doses per event

Tim

Tim

Creative Writer
Xkcd have produced an interesting and perhaps reasonably accurate chart giving some interesting reading into radiation doses in the wake of the Japanese situation. This is in no means making light of the situation and some of the doses from environments we believe are safe help to build up a bigger picture of what emergency workers and those in prior leak zones have had to put up with.

Interesting looking at this graph that one hour spent standing in the grounds of Chernobyl in 2010 is equivalent to a CT scan I had (although mine was of my head, not chest)

radiation.png
 
http://nuclearfissionary.com/2011/03/15/qa-on-japans-fukushima-nuclear-power-plant/


There are some Q&A's here with a nuclear engineer

on the 15th March he wrote:

The maximum detected dose rate in the area of Unit 4 has been reported to have spiked to 400 milliseverts/hour (40 Rem/hour). While this is a serious dose rate, the most exposure any employee at the plant has received thus far is reported to be 10 REM, which can make a man temporarily sick, but is not enough to cause death. The average person receives about 1/4 REM from natural radiation sources in a year.
Click to expand...

400msv is in the red blocks area of the chart, where there are 40 blocks together
 
Tim said:
http://nuclearfissionary.com/2011/03/15/qa-on-japans-fukushima-nuclear-power-plant/


There are some Q&A's here with a nuclear engineer

on the 15th March he wrote:



400msv is in the red blocks area of the chart, where there are 40 blocks together
Click to expand...

I just read some of the Q&A of this nuclear engineer an to be honest the guy seems to be a public relations officer for a nuclear power plant. Nearly all the stuff he says is contradictory to what I have been taught when doing my environmental technician course. Here's an example:

Water insulates against radiation and also cools the rods decreasing the likelihood of damage to the rods that could spread contamination. After a few years of cooling in the pool, those fuel rods can be transferred to dry casks which don’t require cooling other than the air around them. Those casks are steel and concrete, not lead. Also, after a few hundred years, those fuel rods aren’t much more radioactive than the Uranium Ore was when it was dug out of the ground, and 96% of it is recyclable.
Click to expand...

"After a few hundred years" were did the guy go to school, I always learnt that radioactive waste gives off high radiation for a few thousand years. I don't know but I think the guy is not a reliable source of information because he too pro nuclear. He actually mentions that the guys who are fighting to control the nuclear reactor from exploding are not getting leathal doses of radiation, who is he trying to fool.
 
After reading the chart I've got a question. How much radiation have the children living around chernobyl received after the accident and why are they suffering from mutations or cancer?
 
We have personal friends who are ex British Army working with one of the charities here to bring Chernobyl kids over for a holiday. If you google "chernobyl children holiday england" You'll find several results coming up. I think they state with medical evidence that by bringing the kids over for a few weeks or a month, being out of the radiation zone for that time is enough to bring the large percentage chance of early death from a variety of cancers down considerably. It's an amazing charity that really does save peoples lives. Always leaves me wondering why they have to go back home and why their nation can't relocate them out of the zone and seal it off.
 
I saw a report yesterday about the same thing here in Portugal and I agree that they should relocate the population of that area altogether especially if we consider the size of Russia itself (I say even though I know that Chernobyl is in the Ucraine).

I found a site on nuclear waste concerning the half life of the waste that isn't a few hundred years like the nuclear engineer said.

http://library.thinkquest.org/3471/nuclear_waste_body.html
 
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