Their methodology seems sound, John. I cannot vet their dose conversion
factors without digging up some information and doing the subsequent
calculations. I did not bother checking their arithmetic, therefore.
Just the activity levels seemed benign to me. Background radiation as
determined by most G-M detectors is usually at least a few becquerels.
Most people have no feel for the significance of radiation data. Except
for radiation workers (power, NDT, medical, etc.) background radiation
is usually the vast majority of one's radiation exposure. When I was
operating nuclear powered submarines my wife's exposure to radiation was
greater than mine! She was exposed to cosmic radiation that I was
shielded from by the ocean and the ships' hulls. The total radiation
released by all of the nuclear powered vessels in the US Navy each year
that I served was exceeded by the natural radiation occurring in the
volume of sea water displaced by one submarine.
Jim
--
James R. Frysinger
632 Stony Point Mountain Road
Doyle, TN 38559-3030
(C) 931.212.0267
(H) 931.657.3107
(F) 931.657.3108
On 2013-04-08 13:36, John M. Steele wrote:
Jim:
Two proposed tests for whether they are crying wolf:
*(Serious one): Take a look at the FAO link I posted (FAO is UN's Food
& Agriculture Organization). They outline two approaches which I think
may sense but I am not very familiar with radiological calculations. By
either of FAO's approaches, the food looks OK by about two orders of
magnitude. The water looks bad by an order of magnitude. Since you are
more familiar with radiological calculations, do the FAO recommendations
make sense to you?
*(Frivilous one): Go to the home page of the original article. Look at
the titles of some of their other articles or skim them. 'Nuff said?
------------------------------------------------------------------------
*From:* James Frysinger <[email protected]>
*To:* U.S. Metric Association <[email protected]>
*Sent:* Mon, April 8, 2013 12:47:59 PM
*Subject:* [USMA:52630] Re: Unclear use of radiation units
The article is useless and poorly written, as many here have pointed
out. I have significant experience in radiological controls for human
exposure and nothing here provides me with sufficient data to estimate
resulting exposures.
It does serve one sole purpose, perhaps its only intended one -- scaring
the public. But it might be crying "wolf" for all that I can tell.
Jim
--
James R. Frysinger
632 Stony Point Mountain Road
Doyle, TN 38559-3030
(C) 931.212.0267
(H) 931.657.3107
(F) 931.657.3108
On 2013-04-08 00:49, Pierre Abbat wrote:
> http://www.naturalnews.com/039828_Fukushima_radiation_media_blackout.html
>
> He gives a distance in only miles and messes up the capitalization,
but that's
> not the point.
>
> The amount of radiation in food is given in becquerels per kilogram. Two
> paragraphs later, the maximum exposure is given in millisieverts per
year. A
> becquerel is one random event per second; I can imagine putting a
kilogram of
> tangerines in a Geiger counter and hearing about four clicks a second. A
> sievert is a joule per kilogram, adjusted for how much damage it does
to a
> body.
>
> The amount of damage done by a particle emitted by a radioactive atom
depends
> on the kind of particle and the energy with which it's thrown out.
Not being a
> nuclear scientist, I have no idea how much this is for any nuclide,
and the
> author doesn't state it.
>
> Also submitted on the web form.
>
> Pierre
>
