But Blake, the OP never mentioned a single nucleus - you did. It’s perfectly fair to point out that the OP is correct, that a dust mote containing plutonium lodging in your lungs will give you cancer in short order, but that there’s been no such release from the plant in Japan. That’s a direct answer to the OP’s question.
He wasn’t responding to the OP, he was quoting me and responding to me. I was talking about a single nucleus, he quoted where I wrote single nucleus. He said that my post concerning a single nucleus was not correct, and that such a particle would continuously emit radiation.
That claim is bullshit. That claim is bullshit. When we are discussing a single nucleus of plutonium it is nonsense to describe it as " a ferocious emitter" of anything.
If he wants to address the OP, that;s fantastic. But if he wants to quote me and go on to post incorrect information about single nuclei, that is another issue altogether. What I[posted was not incorrect. A single nucleus does not continually emit radiation. His claims to the contrary are ignorant nonsense.
Blake, you’re being obtuse. Everyone else following this thread understood that CalMeacham was referring to dusts-sized particles, particularly after the clarification in post 11.
Sometimes people use a quote as a launching off point for a tangent. You mentioned single nuclei. CalMeacham quoted you, and started talking about dust-sized particles (admittedly without making it explicit right away). Quoted posts are not automatically taken as axiomatic truth for all future conversation.
This is what Blake was responding to. **Cal ** was specifically stating that Blake’s statement that one nucleus doesn’t represent a threat was incorrect - and that, in fact, such a particle was a ferocious emitter of fast neutrons.
I see, so when he specifically said that I was incorrect in my comments about single nucleii, he was referring to dusts-sized particles? :rolleyes:
And when i asked if he has read the post he quoted, and he said yes twice, was he also reading another post? So what, do all statements about dust sized particles also apply to single nuclei? Or was I not incorrect, in which case his statement that I was incorrect is ignorant bullshit?
No matter how you slice this, he was talking shit.
Either he was claiming that single nuclei continuously emit radiation. Which is shit.
Or he was claiming that that a single nucleus pose the same health risk as dusts-sized particles. Which is horseshit.
No matter how you slice it, when someone says that single nucleus is not a significant health risk, and a second poster says flat out. “That is incorrect”, the second poster is full of shit. A single nucleus does not pose a health risk, and at this juncture CalMeacham needs to acknowledge that, and acknowledge that he was wrong to say otherwise.
This is supposed to be a forum for factual answers, not nonsense that he made up.
That being the case, maybe you should stop expending so much energy arguing about who’s right/wrong (and whether they should admit it :rolleyes:), and just put out factual answers about the hazards from individual atoms, and the hazards from multiple-atom particles.
They are detecting radiation here, what form is it in then?
In Chicago trace amounts of Iodine-131 have been detected according to the Sun-Times. It’s been detected as far East as Baltimore according to the Washington Post.
It is supposedly one tenth of what you’d get flying from DC to Tokyo and “far less” (whatever that means) than you’d get going through the security detector at the airport.
[Note: To paper why can’t you just put in approx levels rather than use percents of figures we don’t know or ambiguous phrases like “far less” :)]
The Chicago Sun-Times article mentions that not only is Chicago getting the radiation from the air but it’s being brought in on planes from Tokyo as well. Again both levels are said to be too small for any risk.
To be clear, are they comparing the iodine-131 to the iodine-131 you’re exposed to on a plane flight, or are they ambiguously comparing the radiation dosage you’re currently experiencing in Baltimore to radiation dosage you get on a plane?
Neither, the way I read it.
What they’re probably doing is extrapolating an amount of Iodine-131 that’s in the air in Chicago, based on their samples, and calculating the dose from that amount, and then saying that dose is less than you’d get on the plane flight or the x-ray machine at the airport.
The bit about Baltimore was talking about how far afield the radioactive iodine atoms have been found.
The amount you’d get on a plane flight is a fixed quantity. The amount you’d get from breathing the air in Chicago would depend on how long you were breathing that air. Unless they’re assuming an equal length of time (14-hour flight, or 14 hours of breathing in Chicago), we don’t have a radioactive-bananas-to-radioactive-bananas comparison.
Something is not adding up in the latest scare running around in the alarmist blogosphere.
Some claim that Iodine-131 in rainwater sample near San Francisco was 18,100% above federal drinking standards.
However when one goes to the cite from UC berkeley there is this in the article:
http://www.nuc.berkeley.edu/RainWaterSampling
Nowhere one sees the scary “18,100% above federal drinking standards” line, but it seems that is coming from here:
They do claim that they are using a converter and the federal standard for the limit allowed, unfortunately the limit they are talking about is not very clear IMHO other places that are acting like chicken littles report that they got it from this EPA PDF:
http://www.epa.gov/superfund/health/contaminants/radiation/pdfs/iodine.pdf
3 picocuries per liter (pCi/l), but if you notice, they are talking about the average concentration of the stuff, not the levels where it is dangerous; so, can anyone with more experience check if what I think what is happening is correct? It seems some authority in Pennsylvania mentioned that average and it came out as a “dangerous limit” and then [del]penis[/del] panic ensued.
Think of radiation damage as someone shooting at you. You care about two things: What are they shooting, and how far away are they–i.e., how likely are they to make a damaging hit?
When the press gets hold of a radiation story of some kind, they lump radioactive iodine carried by wind into the same broad category as a couple kilos of critical plutonium sitting next to you on the table. It’s like saying, “Someone is shooting at you!” without mentioning whether it’s a kid with a pellet gun 10 miles away or an assassin with a 50 caliber machine gun 6" from your head.
Radiation damage is a numbers game, and that’s what permits this confusion. The world around us shoots pellet guns at us all day long, and sometimes it makes a lucky hit. The chance of a lucky hit is proportionate to the number and type of shots being taken, so in some technical sense the addition of a single extra shot increases the radiation “danger.” But without specifiying the baseline number of shots being taken or the caliber of the weapon, that’s a meaningless statement.
An individual “particle” is a not a demon core of plutonium. Even inhaled radioactive plutonium particles don’t have that great a chance of getting lucky (at killing you) with their radioactive shot at the cellular machinery that keeps you alive. I’m not sure there are any known deaths from plutonium ingestion (or inhalation), for example, even in Hiroshima survivors or nuclear facility workers.
We are not good at assessing risk in our lives. So when we hear the local milk has “increased” levels of radioactive iodine from the Japan disaster, we smoke a cigarette to calm our nerves and drive an extra 5 miles to get milk imported from another state. Both of those are probably riskier endeavors.
Fascinating chart. One missing piece (unless I just missed it) was the radiation from an airport x-ray scanner.
FWIW, here is my offhand answer to the OP. Let us imagine, for argument’s sake, that the probability of one radioactive particle (whatever is meant by “particle”) lodging in the lungs and causing cancer is one in a trillion. It is essentially the probability of one cell mutating in such a way that the DNA repair mechanisms don’t work or somehow mess up AND that the cell doesn’t just die. So you get a million particles today. The chances of your getting cancer from today’s dose is one in a million (not quite precisely, but close enough). The chance it will happen tomorrow is similarly one in a million. And the next day. Eventually, the ONE will get you and then you are toast. That’s (one of the reasons) why the longer you live, the more likely it is you will get cancer. The other reasons have to do with the gradual breakdown of repair mechanisms. And for all I know, that is also due to radiation.