Question about background radiation versus internal emitters
One question keeps nagging me after reading documents published by Physicians for Social responsibility and Chris Busby (eg, http://www.nirs.org/reactorwatch/accidents/ecrrriskmodelandradiationfrom...) claiming a significant distinction between external exposure versus internal, and that therefore standard health policy dose comparisons between background exposure and the Fukushima fallout are apples and oranges.
Can't background radiation just as easily get into the body? Can't it be breathed into the lungs or eaten in the same way? What would give radionuclides in fallout the unique privilege of becoming internal emitters?
thanks
difficult
it is a little difficult to answer
Although some may use the
Although some may use the term differently, I believe most use "background radiation" to refer to the radiation that is present at a location due to all sources including any internal sources which are typically present. You can't inhale or ingest the Sun, but you can kick up and inhale or ingest naturally occurring Uranium if that is present in the soil.
There are many risks in the workplace. To simplify our job of keeping track of risks and making sure our workers aren't exposed to too much, we could analyze each one and apply a formula to come up with a Workplace Risk Units (WRU) figure for each. For example, paper pushing for one hour might be considered 1 WRU (you could get paper cuts, poke yourself in the eye, etc). Operating a drillpress for one hour might be considered 1000 WRU. Being exposed to a toxic chemical for one hour might be 10,000 WRU. If a worker asked about the risk from that toxic chemical, we could tell them that they would be exposed to 10,000 WRU. Which of course will make no sense to them. They've probably never heard of a WRU and they certainly don't understand how we arrived at our formula! So when they ask for more info, we could tell them that the risks are the same as paper pushing for 10,000 hours. Because paper pushing is familiar to them and not regarded as a serious threat, they'd probably be comforted and walk away thinking they understood the situation. However, did we tell them anything that was genuinely useful to them? Did we communicate anything about the actual consequences of being exposed to that toxic chemical? No! We just fed them a worthless comparison.
think about the 300
yes. .the 300 Spartans!
Consider that when something gamma decays it is emits a gamma radiation , an electromagnetic wave
that will hit something before being absorbed, or hit a cell wall or Dna strand to damage them.
And that this ray will go in a direct straight line to the target.
Say if 300 Spartans where the equivalent of eating something vs 100,000 Persians considered to be
the targets.
If the 300 Spartans each had one shot before they died use a tactic of spreading out and firing at all
100,000 persians at once they may hit some persians or not. This tactic is simiar to
just being background radiation. An External attack that may or may not hit their target.
Very ineffective strategy for same radiation dosage.
So a more effective strategy is to concentrate that same amount of Spartan power,
the same radiation dosage, and concentrate it in one place to do more damage. That is
what the 300 did. And they did way more damage than the "background radiation" tactic.
Similarly, ingesting iodine 131 uses the concentrated tactic of instead of attacing the entire
100,000 persans at once, the entire body, it focuses on attack the thyroid and thus
bottlenecks targets to a much closer distance (maybe micrometer distance) and thus
when the 300 expire their lives they will have a better chance of hitting something.
So there is a difference between the same radiation exposure.. It all depends on how
that decay beam is aimed and how close it is to target.
Taking something internally and concentrated in a thyroid has a muchhigher Spartanish attack
to hit a DNA and cause cancer.
earache my eye, the joker laughs at you...
yes. and on top of that these are different types of radiation being measured. i really don't understand this preoccupation with extremely faulty and misguided Talking Head explanations..
what i mean is that coming into direct contact or ingesting a dangerous radionuclide or any other toxic radioactive materials, or other buy-products of nuclear reactions is definitely dangerous to human health and should be of great concern. sitting in the sunlight or eating a banana is not the same as ingesting some dangerous, toxic radioactive heavy metal that are the products of nuclear fission.
calling chewy godzilla, where are you...
i would have to disagree with this rather absurd interpretation. sunlight can be measured as heat and light waves, it can be called background radiation and carelessly labelled as such. but... you can't live without it.
false dichotomy. or invalid comparison.
you are just double-thinking the issue, this is counterproductive. you just cannot compare office work to say, rollerskating on the freeway during rush hour while blindfolded. good grief.
i know that, and i know the
i know that, and i know the electomagnetic spectrum doesn't stop at visible light and UV radiation. i'm just pointing out that these 'X amount of bananas or plane rides' or whatever comparisons to ingesting and/or coming into direct contact with highly toxic radioactive substances and radionuclide are totally wrong, erroneous and extremely imprecise. these gradeschool comparisons are quite bogus and annoying, but as we all know the Talking Heads like to center their presentation and media distortion exactly around such ambiguous and downright incorrect misinformation.
and thank you for your contributions and hardwork joseph. i for one do appreciate what you are doing, while the mass media corporate outlets are silent on this one.
People love bubble-style
People love bubble-style charts for visualizing relative measures (ask any corporate manager). It's why someone asked for an interpretation in the line of your Earth:bacteria analogy.
For example, I like this one. Provides some perspective on everyday worries too.
What is important to the
What is important to the affected? Some "dose" number or the potential consequences and probabilities of said resulting from that "dose"? I think it is the later. IOW, if someone is (going to be) exposed to something they want to know with some specificity what might happen to them and what the odds are. Medical professionals tackle the tough job of trying to explain complex outcomes with many variables each and every day. They make an effort and do their best. At least the good ones do, I'm sure there are plenty that try to avoid the somewhat time consuming and difficult task.
I would politely encourage you to break out of the "its the best we can do" mentality and figure out a way to communicate useful information. Does Exposure X increase one's chance of lung cancer by Y? If so, say that. If you want to add that their baseline chance of lunch cancer is Z, say that. Point is, communicate something informative as best as can be done. Simply describing dose A in terms of dose B is not informative at all.
Let me guess, you are one of
Let me guess, you are one of those corporate managers who love bubble charts, right? Definitely got the disrespectful tone right.
Well you guys are only
Well you guys are only measuring activity. You must make assumptions about actual exposures/doses. Lets say you pick a generously high figure for consumption of one of your samples by a pregnant mother (worst case starting point) and you really can't find sufficient evidence to back up an estimate of consequences. Simply saying that is communicating something useful.
Of course, it being known that these substances have an innate ability to harm the human body and it being more a question of whether they will do enough of the right kind of damage, it would be appropriate to explicitly mention that insufficient evidence doesn't guarantee no harm. As someone else mentioned in another thread I lost track of, there is too the larger question of the total additional exposures that we will get from not just one vector (spinach say) but everything.
Anyway, this wasn't meant to be a "please redo you're existing presentation" request. It was meant to be a yes, we (as in society) CAN do better (over time) by moving away from simplistic comparisons and moving towards more focused communication of the details that matter.
> Simply describing dose A
> Simply describing dose A in terms of dose B is not informative at all.
It can put it in perspective for you. But the comparisons maybe are not such good ones because they are such different doses. Like equating a thyroid dose with a lung dose with a whole body dose that just makes confusions.
Joseph, thank you for your
Joseph, thank you for your replies to my original post. That does make sense. You mentioned that "Most of your natural background comes from radon in the air, which you then breathe in." Are radon and the other radionuclides typically found in background comparable in their effects on health to I-131, strontium and cesium?
> standard health policy
> standard health policy dose comparisons between background exposure and the Fukushima fallout are apples and oranges.
They are comparing different doses based on a MODEL. The model is a kind of linear approximation so of course people can argue about how well it FITS.
That does not answer my
That does not answer my question, but THANKS anyway
no actually he makes a very
no actually he makes a very valid point. when you keep changing standards to suit the actual numbers either the models are not valid or are very imprecise. in some fashion.
now you see it, now you don't...
background radiation can by natural or it can come from menmade sources like pollution of radionuclide source, uranium mining, fallout from reactors, etc.
so that distinction is critical, background radiation sounds safe, but probably isn't. it's made up of different things. duh.
there are different types of radiation, but ingesting and coming into contact with toxic, radioactive, heavy metals and materials, and in particular the radioisotopes that are a buy-product of nuclear reactions, in this case nuclear fission, used in nuclear reactors, is very dangerous and very harmful to human health.
chernobyl is a good place to start..
The answer to your quest is,
The answer to your quest is, NO. Background radiation cannot be breathed into lungs or eaten in the same way.
"Can't background radiation
"Can't background radiation just as easily get into the body?"
Stand by the brick wall= background radiation
Pulverize and inhale the brick wall= internal radiation
Cesium
Joseph,
On another subject, I had a question about Cesium. I know it has a long half life and can stay in the soil for a long time. What about in the air? I notice in your data in air levels that Cesium is decreasing. How does Cesium disperse in the air which such a long half life?
Thanks.
Thanks for the quick and
Thanks for the quick and helpful response. If the smaller particulates get caught up in the weather, does that mean it lingers in the air until the weather changes? Or do parts of it just stay airborne long-term?
Thanks, that makes a lot of
Thanks, that makes a lot of sense....