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Comment by ithkuil | Hacker News Reader

The intent here is not to show how harmful eating a banana is but instead showing how harmless living nearby a nuclear powerplant.

If eating one banana only is comparable to living 50km from a nuclear powerplant for one entire year, then clearly the radiation you get from the powerplant is ridiculously small.

That fact that all this is only 1% of the radiation dose you'd otherwise get due to background radiation should only help bringing the point home.

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Mostly it is an example of failing at science communication, as highlighting the radioactivity of a banana basically just serves to make bananas seem more scary. Because radioactivity is scary: it can lethally damage without you feeling anything before your start puking.

Saying living next to a reactor is safe because even bananas contains a bit of radioactivity is somewhat like saying living next to a Ebola lab is safe because there are viruses in bananas... it's not really speaking to the fear of getting caught up in the fallout when bad things happen at the reactor.

yeah, as always it really depends who are you communicating something to

Fruit are scary! The brits used to give lessons (1970's) on defending yourself against a variety of fruit attacks, here is a clip (https://youtu.be/MlroOdP8p2Y)

> speaking to the fear of getting caught up in the fallout when bad things happen at the reactor.

The comparison focuses on the normal amount of background radiation from living near a nuclear plant, so fear of fallout "when bad things happen" is a separate issue and irrelevant to the banana example. The Ebola lab comparison is a good one though.

Unfortunately this 'explanation' turned meme has had unintended consequences. I've seen this used by the uninformed online as a counter argument to dismiss legitimately dangerous sources of radiation on more than one occasion, likening radiation exposure to just being around a large amount of bananas. Sometimes only partially understanding something can be worse than not understanding it at all, especially when someone confidently misunderstands it.

In the exact example you provide I agree that “bananas for scale” can make sense, but I still claim that it scales very badly when talking about larger amounts of radiation.

But the whole point is to discuss small amounts of radiation.

So you’re saying “The maximum permitted radiation leakage for a nuclear power plant” in my example is not a small amount?

It's pretty small, but it's not bananas small. The maximum plausible exposure a person could expect to encounter from a nuclear plant leaking that maximum amount of radiation is.

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