Horace Heffner quoted WaPost:
"The level of radiation at the plant surged to 1,000 millisieverts
early Wednesday before coming down to 800-600 millisieverts. Still,
that was far more than the average"
1,000 millisieverts = 1 sv. But that was a mistake. Edano said that but
he meant microsieverts. The engineer who came out after he did made the
correction. The correct values yesterday were 1 to 8 millisieverts;
~0.001 sv. That's bad enough!
After Edano's report yesterday, I made a mistake here, also getting the
units wrong. I meant to say:
"Radiation levels reached 4 to 8 milli-sieverts but are now subsiding."
Getting units wrong is forgivable. Especially when I do it. Or when
Edano does it because he is exhausted. There is an twitter movement to
tell Edano to get some rest. See:
http://blogs.wsj.com/japanrealtime/2011/03/14/tireless-edano-earns-twitter-respect/
A unit error is okay, there have been many reports ranging from
innumerate to the downright in the Japanese news lately. People there
get a lot of math in school so you'd think they would know better. For
example, a chirpy young woman on NHK was describing the exposure in
Tokyo as "only about half as much as a chest x-ray, so it is nothing to
worry about." If the level remains that high it will be the equivalent
of 12 chest x-rays a day, which darn well is something to worry about!
They should post graphs of the readings, and the integrated values,
instead of reporting peak values only.
- Jed
