Great Work Folks

Thanks very much for tracking this and posting data with understandable, real world explanations - and your patience in responding to some skeptical inquiries. An (officially) thankless task but a necessary one nonetheless.

I'd like to pose a question that may be a useful comparison for the radiation releases from Japan: can you provide a rough comparison between the nuclear releases in Japan with the release of radionuclides from a 1000 MWe coal fired power plant over some interval (day, month, year, etc.)? My intent here is not to knock coal or minimize the significance of the Japan releases - but I think it could provide a useful comparison to an accepted radiological risk.

One other comment relevant to some of the prior discussion of biological lifetimes of radionuclides in the body and radon. It's entirely true that the short lifetime of radon in the body makes the likely exposure to radon decays pretty low; however, an often misunderstood aspect of the radon threat is that it's not the radon that is the risk, it's the inhalation of particulate radon daughter products, that lodge in the lung and subsequently decay through a multiple chain of alpha and beta discharge, that poses the greater threat.

Again, thanks very much for taking on this task.