We’ve at least had a spot of good news. My wife’s 85 year old great aunt lives in Sendai and had been missing since the quake. We just found out this morning that somehow she made it out of her house and turned up in a nearby senior center with adequate power and food. One fewer missing person on the list.
Maeglin, that’s wonderful news! It must have been hellish to have been waiting all this time.
Maeglin, very happy for you and your family!
That’s excellent news, Maeglin.
Radiation dosage chart Radiation Dosage Chart — Information is Beautiful
Something I despise about simplistic charts like that, is they don’t include distance, or the difference between inhaling some radioactive dust, or absorbing it from food and having it in your bones or glands.
Like the 50,000 Sv figure for ‘next to Chernobyl for ten minutes’.
At 50 meters from the open pile you would only get 187mSv, a Kilometer away you won’t get any measurable dose.
And while walking around a village 25 miles from the leaking plant might be only a 3.6 mSv does, every hour, if you inhale some dust the effect on your lung tissue is a completely different matter.
These charts all seem to be designed for one purpose, and that is to deceive people about risk and damage that is possible.
It’s why NONE of them include any data about eating, drinking or breathing any type of radioactive material from a leaking reactor.
Give the first chart some credit: It came from a webcomic and included a disclaimer that you shouldn’t make life-or-death decisions based on what a graphic you found on the internet said. 
Due to my bias (I love xkcd) I actually have gone easy on that chart.
Well, the chart DOES do a better job than the crap the US media shoveled out when “the cloud of radiation” was making its way to California.
Have you seen the video with the weatherman getting into an argument with Nancy Grace about that?:rolleyes:
Is that more or less than a banana?
Unless your banana has been near the leaking reactors, it’s probably not radio-activated.
My kid eats enough bananas in a year to match the plane flight from L.A. to New York.
No, they don’t. But unlike you, I don’t attribute that to any form of conspiracy theory. “Eating, drinking or breathing any type of radioactive material from a leaking reactor” isn’t as clearcut to analyse as direct radiation exposure. The type of material (iodine, cesium, plutonium or others) affects the radioactive and the biological half-life of the radionuclides. It also affects which parts of the body are exposed, for example will iodine be concentrated in the thyroid gland. The elemental composition of the environment also affects the biological half-life of the radionuclides, and e.g. radioactive iodine can be “washed out” by taking large enough doses of non-radioactive iodine.
The central parts of Sweden and Norway were quite heavily affected by the Chernobyl disaster, I’ve given a PDF cite earlier (in Swedish, but figures and graphs - from p.7 and outwards - are with legends in English as well). Sheep and reindeer farmers (especially traditional Sami people who base a lot of their food on reindeer meat) were particularly affected, since these animals are farmed free range and feed on lichens and herbs, and they had to take countermeasures to reduce the amount of Cs-137 in their products. But even so there has AFAIK not been reported one single case of cancer in Scandinavia attributable to Cs-137 from Chernobyl. Cite (in Norwegian, but with references in English)
Are you seriously quoting a Chinese news source as a source of trustworthy information?
Hmm … clearly my hatred of the media hasn’t come across as I had hoped …
Bananas are radioactive; see Banana Equivalent Dose.
Oh no, not again.
Please, educate yourself before you ever type anything again.