Timely chart about the relative levels of radiation dosage involved in every day living, medical procedures and exposure to nuclear power plants vs. what's harmful for you from XKCD:
http://www.boingboing.net/2011/03/19/graphic-chart-showin.ht...
http://www.boingboing.net/2011/03/19/graphic-chart-showin.ht...
Most of the dose values reported are referring to "effective dose", which attempts to sort of normalize all exposures in terms of full body exposures, e.g. comparing a hand exposure with a chest exposure. This has a number of issues, but as you can imagine, in radiation protection situations, the exact site of exposure is not always well defined.
Even factoring in the variation they mention, that's a 1000x difference. I know the dosage drops off exponentially, but first example must be a lot further away than 50km, which is no longer 'near' in my book. Perhaps the latter measurements were extreme cases caused by wind patterns.
In the green area, it says that doses where as high in some places, but much lower in other places. So presumably on average they were low, which doesn't help much if you accidentally live in one of the places where radiation is/was high.
People living 50km from the plant have not been exposed to high radiation. They have, in the very worst possible interpretation of the numbers we have now, been exposed to multiple cross-country flights worth of radiation. If you want to call that "high radiation", I think in all fairness you must also advocate for flight attendants to be issued lead-lined suits.
Yes, maybe the higher levels did not persist in one spot for for twenty days (we don't know). I don't find that very comforting, it still seems like a russian roulette style of living (there may be 20 days of higher exposure or not - you can not know unless you start carrying a radiation meter at all times).
Btw according to the chart, a cross country flight is only a 150th fraction of the radiation at those spots 50km from Fukushima. Few people fly that often.
If you want to call this "Russian Roulette", that's fine, as long as you're also never going to get into a car, never going to eat red meat, and never going to ride a bike down a city street. All three of those things are demonstrably more dangerous than standing at the gates of the Fukushima plant.
I want to point out that we are talking about you misunderstanding risks at two different points:
(1) You appear to perceive a spot outdoor measurement of 170usv as a significant amount of radiological exposure, when it is in fact a very minor exposure, equivalent to an amount of air travel common in western culture --- and this, despite a concomitant spent fuel pond fire at a nuclear reactor.
(2) You appear to perceive a cumulative 100msv (note unit) exposure as a significant carcinogenic risk, when it is in fact the lowest level of exposure you can endure at which there is any measurable impact on cancer; the behaviors (such as eating red meat) that I am hammering you with produce what appear to be much higher levels of carcinogenesis.
Well that is not what the XKCD chart says. I was merely counting blocks (not converting units). According to XKCD, one flight is two green blocks. So two round trips LA/NY would be 8 green blocks. According to XKCD the 50km radiation was 180 green blocks, or 22 times the round trip (in a shorter amount of time).
Blame XKCD if his chart is wrong, not me.
Also XKCD says "CLEARLY linked to increased risk in cancer". Again maybe blame XKCD if his chart is misleading.
If Fukushima is so harmless, why did they evacuate a 50km radius? Because of the media?
The funny thing about your logic is, it's how the people in charge of Chernobyl thought too. They couldn't simply work out the likely exposures and take action accordingly --- at least, not at first. So they spent zillions of dollars on cleanup and mitigation but didn't tell farmers not to pass unchecked milk on to children, who subsequently contracted thyroid cancer because of the uptake of radioactive iodine. You are illustrating the point. "If they evacuate", you think, "there must be some gigantic risk they aren't telling us about".
Your example shows one aspect of why people dislike nuclear power: it's easy to see how to avoid getting into a car accident, but apparently less easy to see how to react in case of a nuclear disaster. Normal people wouldn't know that they should check the milk.
Also I don't want to live in a world where I have to check everything for radiation before I consume it.
As for your other question: so now I am a troll, just because I disagree with you? Or because the comments are indented more than x levels? And yes, I have several issues with this discussion. Not the least I dislike emotional argumentation, and I think in this case it is the pro nuclear power people who are actually emotional: they feel that the other side is emotional, and react emotionally to that. I also dislike mindless herds "oh it is XKCD, so it must be cool. I want to be on the side of XKCD" (not that I accuse you of this, but if you remember, I merely took issue with the XKCD chart).
What I get from HN is that nuclear power is also a thing for elitist people, who look down on the stupid people who can't understand physics well enough.
If a particle happens to decay at your detector when it is detecting, you'll get a massive spike.
I would guess that wind patterns are responsible for the variability in measurements, not nuclear physics.
It's as the article said: we're looking at increase of a few percentage points risks and shitting ourselves without regard to the wide variety of things like cigarette smoke that cause four-fold increases in cancer rates.
The cigarette comparison is extremely silly, as most people actually choose to not smoke cigarettes out of concern for their health.
Neither did I.
Don't get me wrong, I want to believe you, and I am actually hopeful that no lasting damage has been done at Fukushima. But somehow all the optimism does not seem to add up 100%.
Next question?
Your attempt to swat away the cigarette point isn't going to succeed. Radiation simply isn't as significant a cancer risk as you're portraying it to be.
Btw some people actually worry about the stuff they eat.
Any other questions, I'm happy to take a crack at!
The evacuation was in case something unpredictable happened and things went very, very bad. The cancer risk for the firefighters is probably similar to if a cigarette factory had caught fire. The hydrogen explosions have always been the primary danger, though, both to the people and to the containment.
If containment had failed explosively (i.e. if they had not deliberately allowed some hydrogen explosions via venting, causing the containment to fail in one giant kaboom instead of the slight damage they think it might have), then we would be looking at troubling amounts of contamination over a moderately sized area.
We would never be in any danger in the USA, though. We just wouldn't. Also, the "kaboom" I was talking about was an ordinary explosive (hydrogen), not a nuclear one. You just can't hit criticality and get a nuclear explosion. The designers make sure it's impossible. Even back when we knew nothing and a few people died from criticality accidents (which were seriously scary in retrospect), they didn't cause a nuclear explosion. It's not that easy. You have to try pretty hard, or Iran would have managed one by now.
Second, the measurement you're referring to (170usv, btw, not 208msv) was taken outdoors.
Third, the leaked fission products likely to have produced those measurements have short half lives. We're not talking about the Pripyat Zone of Alienation. The area hasn't been rendered unsafe for habitation.
Fourth, you're talking about a spot measurement heavily dependent on the weather; it's not as if an entire 50km radius of the plant is irradiated (though I believe they evacuated the entire area).
Fifth, while consumption of hundreds of bananas an hour is linked to a measurable increase in cancer, it is a microsopic increase observed across large populations.
You are in effect talking about standing outdoors in the worst possible location 50km away from the plant, maximally exposing yourself to radiation leaked at a continuous level sufficient to maintain that exposure despite the half life of the fission products causing it, for TWENTY STRAIGHT DAYS, 24/7, to achieve an increase in cancer that is very probably significantly lower than consumption of red meat, consumption of refined flour, failure to consume enough green leafy vegetables, eating more than one serving of dairy daily, OR eating anything fried in polyunsaturated oil.
Likewise with the "link to cancer risk" - the XKCD chart does not say anything about eating bananas or whatever. It says "dosis x was linked to increased cancer risk" and "50km away the radiation was a twentieth of that dosis".
Outdoors/indoors - yeah, so what if I talk a walk with my dog every day? I don't see your point? It isn't so bad because we can always find ways around it? If mushrooms are poisoned, we just don't eat mushrooms? If radiation is outside, we just don't go outside? If water is poisoned, we just buy bottled water from elsewhere? I don't want to live like that - I strive to live in a relatively carefree environment, thank you very much.
Where I live, I don't run danger to accidentally run into a highly toxic spot on the map. Maybe we have chemical plants, but there are fences and warning signals around them. There are no warning signals for leaked poison from a nuclear accident.
You should read more (than XKCD) about the Japanese nuclear event and radiological exposure in general. I think you may be unduly alarmed.
Simply setting foot outdoors with your dog doesn't instantly expose you to an hour's worth of radiation. If you walk your dog for an hour every day, then it will take 480 days for you to achieve the 100msv exposure you're concerned about.
But that's also vanishingly unlikely, because the fission products that produced the 170usv (note units) measurement you are fretting about are short-lived. The few radioactive nuclides produced by the reactor that aren't that short lived aren't simply aspirated out of the air. For 480 days of dog walking to produce this cancer risk you're concerned about (which, again, appears to be significantly lower than the risk you get from eating steaks), the reactor would have to continue leaking radiation at a level comparable to that produced by a spent fuel pond fire, which is the most likely proximate cause of that measurement.
I'm criticizing you for not reasoning through this stuff. It's not a huge mystery. It works in fairly predictable ways. You can measure it and count it and add the risks up. The risks are very, very low.
I did not even say that I was alarmed, so I criticize you for lumping me in with an imaginary enemy you seem to perceive (the anti-nuclear, global warming warming kind presumably). I just said the XKCD chart is not as comforting as it seems. I don't know what a spent fuel pond is, btw. How did they even measure the increased cancer risk of radiation anyway, if any other daily activity seems to increase the cancer risk much more? I mean how did they isolate the radiation effect among the noise of all the cancer causing things? And what if you eat steaks AND are exposed to radiation? Does the effect of the steak cancel out the radiation effects? I think not.
Do you have a chart about the cancer risk induced by steaks, preferably drawn by XKCD because he makes it so pretty and soothing? And he is a geek, so I must believe hime?
I could point out that I don't eat steaks, but it is not really relevant...
I've read the "Fukushima is a triumph for nuclear power" articles, and I HOPE they are right. I don't think we have all the information yet, though. We don't know what things have leaked exactly. Those articles tend to not mention the cooling pools that don't have enclosings. They say Chernobyl was a cloud of ash that spread very far, but why shouldn't other clouds also spread far? In any case, if those articles are right, the media should be blamed for unnecessarily causing a panic.
If at one measurement point there was 20th of radiation for increased cancer, who says that was even the highest concentration to be found? What if by random chance there are dirt particles from the explosion that radiate more, and I swallow them while I walk my dog?
Btw. I don't like having to breathe the pollution of cars and fossile fuel plants every day either, so it doesn't really comfort me if they are also toxic. I think most cars are superfluous, but that is for another discussion.
Could you link to the source for the nature of the fission products that were being measured?
The reason "other clouds of ash" (presumably you mean Fukushima's) won't be as damaging as Chernobyl is that Chernobyl was an unshielded graphite fire that raged, producing a gigantic plume of radioactive ash, while Chernobyl was still critical and fissioning. Chernobyl was like a gigantic generator of radioactive contamination; it would have taken engineering effort to make it more damaging.
The things that have caught fire at Fukushima are 100x less radioactive than fissioning reactor fuel, and the fires themselves were much smaller (because, unlike Chernobyl, they aren't essentially being fed by a fuel source almost as flammable as anthracite coal).
I don't think Fukushima was a triumph for nuclear power, by the way (and, because for whatever reason you brought it up, I believe in global warming and support policy initiatives to curb it). There are (more expensive) plant designs that handle loss of cooling power better. Fukushima is a disaster, and it may end up killing many volunteers at the plant itself. But that doesn't mean it's giving everybody --- or even anybody --- within a 50km radius cancer.
No, just the twentieth of an increased risk for cancer.
As for the isotopes, I thought I heard that Cesium was released, which lasts several years? (no time for watching movies sorry). Some reactors apparently also used Plutonium, though maybe not in the blocks that exploded.
The fact that the reactors use MOX fuel doesn't mean plutonium is getting into the atmosphere! That's not how it works. The reactors also don't use cesium as fuel.
Finally, please stop waving the words "increased risk of cancer" around like a voodoo totem. Everything increases your risk of cancer in some way. The notion of cancer risk is only meaningful in relation to something else. More cancer than what? The risk to the general population that you are referring to is, according the published evidence, so low as to be unmeasurable.
Because, you're talking about this situation as if the alternative was "simply not using nuclear power". The cost to human health of not using nuclear power is higher than using it, in two ways. First, the fossil fuel sources which are the only scalable alternative cause demonstrably more harm, both to the environment and to carcinogenesis, than xenon radionuclides detected 50km from Fukushima. Secondly, the malaria and dysentery pathogens that ride alongside lack of electrical power infrastructure reliably kill 1.7 million people every year.
I thought it would be obvious from the context in this thread that the relation is to "not being exposed to radiation".
"as if the alternative was "simply not using nuclear power"."
I never said anything about what I imagine the alternative to be. I don't think I even said nuclear power should be abandoned (although I would like to see it go, true). Just signs for me that you use me as "the imaginary enemy" and don't even look at what I say.
"First, the fossil fuel sources which are the only scalable alternative"
Now you start to make very broad claims. Obviously a lot would have to change, but I heard that humans actually survived for millenia without any electricity at all (no idea how, but still). Not saying we should abandon electricity, but a lot of things could be changed. For example I would not miss cars - I think abandoning the majority of cars would actually enhance our quality of life, not reduce it. Just one example - but I don't claim to have "the" or even "a" solution. One aspect, though: I think fossile fuels and nuclear power are both limited resources (or is nuclear power a perpeteum mobile?). Even if we take it as a "free gift of capital from earth", perhaps we should use that energy to prepare for a time when it is not available anymore, rather than blow it on entertainment. That is, use it to build infrastructure that is less power hungry.
As for the malaria, sorry, but that is bullshit. I know it used to be a problem in areas where it is not now, but I don't think every area without electricity gets a malaria problem. Is there malaria at the north pole??
Isn't malaria far more likely to be caused by politics (and/or population growth), namely groups of people being left in poverty and forced to move into unhealthy regions (swamps) because of that?
I agree with your overall point, but I think that if you make it in such a non-credible fashion, it makes it harder for the rest of us who agree with you.