Missouri citizen confirms extremely high Iodine 123 in rain in her own measurements
The source I found here is Saint Louis had a half life of less than around 18 hours; so the threat mode you calculated does not fit. Three threat modes to consider. (1) it was a very small source, just a few drops of rain wiped off my SUV. (2) the threat increases the closer one is to the source, you can’t have much greater threat than ingesting this fallout. (3) Assuming that the fallout was I123 with a half life of 13 hours, and that rate of change dosage is proportional to the half life, and that 4 days ago this fallout was over California. Then, these few drops of fallout when they were over California would have had a reading of roughly 44.000mR/hr .I would hate to think a reading that high would get unnoticed in California, so lets pray there is another explanation http://pissinontheroses.blogspot.com/2011/03/video-radioactive-rain-and....
Thought this was
Thought this was well-answered by " the raim contained radon daighters". Seeing the same thing here in Colorado from wipes from the solar panels and at first it seems alarming. Surprised to hear this is a normal common thing and not associated with Fukushima.
The rainwater contained radon daughters
It is clearly not I-123 as
It is clearly not I-123 as this is not produced in nuclear reactors.
His hypothesis of "spallation of Cs133 from solar protons" is also unfounded.
The isotope is unimportant, however.
From the video, I couldn't tell see the scale on his counter, so it's possible he simply had the wrong scale and the reading is much lower than 0.2 mR/h.
Assuming this is not the case, the reading is not terribly surprising. According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roentgen_(unit), a normal background is 23 microR/h. This reading is only 10x background, which is consistent with rainwater results seen here in Berkeley. Our typical rainwater readings have been ~Bq/L, with minimum detectable activity ~0.1 Bq/L.
This is yet another instance: just because you can see it, doesn't mean it's a dangerous level.
Please no evasive answer here thank you
Joseph:
I would be curious to know what element it could be then? I think the post of this reader was not to prove that it is iodine 123 but rather that the radiation level was high. So assuming that her assumption it was I123 was wrong, what kind of particle could it be in your expert opinion?
I am sure we all really would like to know what it COULD be?
I-123 doesn't appear to be
I-123 doesn't appear to be in the decay chain of fission products produced by a nuclear reactor and is created by proton bombardment of natural Iodine in a cyclotron.
It would be interesting if this was I-123 because it wouldn't have come from Fukushima.
did' they report neutron
did' they report neutron beams in Japan? could that have something to do with it?
Where did I-123 come from
Where did I-123 come from other then the OP's error. The post in the video states, "This sample of radioactive drizzle maxed out and stabilized at 0.228 millirems per hour. Unfortunately, I am unable to identify if the source is Cesium 137, Iodine 131, Iodine 129, Plutonium, or any number of radionuclides the can easily be absorbed through the skin,lungs or stomach. The risk is not so much being exposed to 0.228 mR/Hr in passing, it is eating, inhaling, absorbing, or ingesting the radioactive source of that radiation."
This is a serious video and again, it would be nice to hear Berkley's assessment on it.
That should be proton
That should be proton bombardment of Xenon-124, not natural Iodine, sorry.
Did you read the comments?
Did you read the comments? She is reading incidental radiation from the granite countertop below the sample.
Yea the comments are from
Yea the comments are from some panicked lady with Granite countertops and is not related to the video.
The video shows a guy wiping off his car with a paper towel, placing said paper towel on a paper plate and then taking a reading with an Inspector radiation detector.
He is getting a reading of .220 millirem. This would be equal to a 2.28 ?Sv/hr. Examples of similar exposures:
•Dental x-ray: 5 microsieverts
•Chest x-ray: 20 microsieverts
•Airplane flight NY-LA: 40 ?Sv/hr
So just standing next to this for 2 hours you would get the equivilent dose of a dental X-Ray. I would not be catching raindrops on my tongue.
Without knowing which isotope is causing this, we can not know the true threat.
Maybe you should go back and read the comments again.
The person that posted the video is Ms. X in the comments section, who is trying to relieve the anxiety of someone else that is using a different detector and is getting a reading from a granite countertop in the home.
If you view the video you will see there is no granite countertop.
It would however be interesting to hear Berkley's assessment of this video.
It looks like it was being
It looks like it was being measured on the hood the the SUV from the previous part of the video.
One thing to wonder is (since I'm not in the mid-west right now), is that any salt that has been applied to the roads (and hits the car as spray) will be slightly radioactive from potassium-40, a naturally occurring isotope of potassium.
potassium-40 content in the
potassium-40 content in the body is constant, with an adult male having about 0.1 microcurie or 100,000 pCi. Each year this isotope delivers doses of about 18 millirem (mrem) to soft tissues of the body and 14 mrem to bone.
Potassium-40 can present both an external and an internal health hazard. The strong gamma radiation associated with the electron-capture decay process (which occurs 11% of the time) makes external exposure to this isotope a concern. While in the body, potassium-40 poses a health hazard from both the beta particles and gamma rays. Potassium-40 behaves the same as ordinary potassium, both in the environment and within the human body – it is an essential element for both. Hence, what is taken in is readily absorbed into the bloodstream and distributed throughout the body, with homeostatic controls regulating how much is retained or cleared. The health hazard of potassium-40 is associated with cell damage caused by the ionizing radiation that results from radioactive decay, with the general potential for subsequent cancer induction.
Lifetime cancer mortality risk coefficients have been calculated for nearly all radionuclides, including potassium-40. While ingestion is generally the most common type of exposure, the risk coefficients for this route are lower than those for inhalation. As for other radionuclides, the risk coefficient for tap water is about 70% of that for dietary ingestion. In addition to risks from internal exposures, an external gamma exposure risk also exists for potassium-40. To estimate a lifetime cancer mortality risk, if it is assumed that 100,000 people were continuously exposed to a thick layer of soil with an initial average concentration of 1 pCi/g potassium-40, then 4 of these 100,000 people would be predicted to incur a fatal cancer over their lifetime. (This is in comparison to the 20,000 people from the group predicted to die of cancer from all other causes per the U.S. average.)
For comparison a banana a day for a year gives you roughly 36 microsieverts. At the rate detected, if this was K-40, that water would be equal to consuming 554 bananas per hour. Ha Ha Ha.
I doubt she is detecting K-40.
The readings could be wrong.
The readings could be wrong. These devices need proper calibration.
You never know, maybe there
You never know, maybe there is a case of bananas in the trunk. ;)
Other fallout too, could
Other fallout too, could have accumulated on the road and been sprayed onto the car following another on a rainy day.
Was the vehicle only outside and rained on, or did he do the test after a drive somewhere?