Reply To: turn heat into electricity

[Alex Pollard]

Yes in the video the guy goes to various places with above-normal radiation levels. The doses he receives are pretty trivial but at one point near Fukushima he removes his face mask because it’s probably “overkill”. Well I think that marks him out as foolish. Because getting a particle of plutonium or uranium stuck in his lungs will probably give him cancer. The chance of that is quite low but why take the chance? The *average* radiation dose is low because not everyone gets a bit of highly radioactive material stuck in inside them. But if one unluckily ingests that particle (breathes it, eats it) and it remains there, then all the radiation charts in the world won’t help, cancer is very likely. That is, the risk is much higher even though the average radiation does is not hugely more than otherwise. So there is a qualitative difference between bits of radioactive fuel being released into the environment vs other ionizing radiation of various types.

Do the xkcd numbers for Fukushima come from Geiger Counters? Or from air filters? I can’t tell from the xkcd references such as http://www.mext.go.jp/component/a_menu/other/detail/__icsFiles/afieldfile/2011/03/18/1303727_1716.pdf

Numbers from Geiger Counters won’t tell us the risk of ingesting a radioactive particle. The exposure number for 3 mile island is external exposure, so I presume they are omitting what I am talking about. And there is nothing in the chart about bio-accumulation of radioisotopes in Pacific fish. If xkcd were trying to down play the risks of uranium they couldn’t have done a better job.