Question about comparison of Cs-137 ingestion to airplane travel
I have a question about Cs-137 ingestion. The ingestion of contaminated strawberries is compared in the latest update to hours of airline travel. For I-131 (iodine) such a comparison seems at least somewhat sensible, however I don't understand how it would work for Caesium since that will accumulate in the body and stay there for many months, as opposed to the airplane travel which is only associate with exposure to radiation during the duration of the trip. Could somebody explain?
Sure.
Caesium since that will accumulate in the body and stay there for many months, as opposed to the airplane travel which is only associate with exposure to radiation during the duration of the trip. Could somebody explain?
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You compare the total radiation dose that the cesium can deliver; which because of the 30 half-life of Cs-137; this dose will be received over the course of decades, i.e. for the rest of your life.
That is compared with the radiation dose received in an airliner which is received over the course of a few hours.
That's how you make the comparison. Because there is temporal component to the dose response; that is the time RATE that you receive the dose has a lot to do with how badly it affects you, the higher the dose rate the worse it affects you.
This skews the comparison into making the airline dose much worse than the equivalent dose delivered over many years.
It's like asking the difference in taking an entire bottle of aspirin (200 tablets) all at once, which is analogous to the airline flight; vis-a-vis taking 2 tablets every couple days for a few months, which is analogous to the internal dose.
The entire bottle at once, and the airline flight have the greater effect.
Comparing internal cesium exposure to external exposure
the answer: Pure propaganda. Comparing an airline flight that is for a limited duration and limited, external exposure. Not at all like internal 'exposure' of Cesium 137. Internal exposure is the consumption of a radioactive partical that imbeds itself into your brain, your heart or other muscles or your lungs, or your guts and radiates 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 52 weeks a year - or 8,760 hours/year - until the day you die, which is likely to be sooner. And the radiation, because components of the decay process turns into other 'daughter' isotopes that are also radioactive or lead, say, continues for the rest of your life! A "half-life" of 30 years works out to 120-300 years of radioactive irradiation. Even talking about 'half-lives' appears to me to be another piece of propaganda! You may even still been radioactive one hundred years after death, and even incineration of your remains will not destroy the radioactivity - although it could still harm someone else.
Anti-nukes don't study science.
Even talking about 'half-lives' appears to me to be another piece of propaganda!
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It's not propaganda to talk about half-lives. Radioactive decay is exponential. That means for any given time period, the radioactivity decays by a given factor.
If after the first day, the radioactivity has been reduced by a factor of "r", then it will decay another factor of "r" from second day to third day. It will decay another factor of "r" from day 3 to day 4, and so on....
Or for a given reduction factor, it takes the same amount of time to get the same reduction factor again. That's just the property of exponential decay.
So if we take the reduction factor to be a factor of 2, then the time period to get this reduction is called the "half-life".
The rate of decay is given by the radioactive decay constant for that particular radionuclide. There is a relationship between the decay constant and the half life. Courtesy of the Physics Dept. at Georgia State University:
http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/nuclear/halfli2.html
shows the relationship between the decay constant, the half-life, and the mean lifetime.
It's all very well grounded mathematics, and not propaganda.
Why do the anti-nukes always attempt to portray good science as something sinister, like propaganda. That's more along what they do, so they think that everyone else, including the opposition is doing it.
Why are the anti-nukes always trumpeting their manifest ignorance? Nuclear technology is clearly not your field, otherwise you wouldn't be opposed to it. So before making a fool of yourself, when there is something that you think is propaganda and not correct science, do yourself a favor and do some homework to check and see if it is propaganda or just good science.
Just because you don't have the brains to understand it, doesn't mean other more intelligent and more educated people that actually work in the field understand the scientific concepts a lot better than you do.
WRONG here too.
because components of the decay process turns into other 'daughter' isotopes that are also radioactive or lead, say, continues for the rest of your life!
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WRONG here too. Radioisotopes that have these long decay chains are radioisotopes like the actinides, Uranium, Plutonium.... and are alpha emitters.
However, most of the radioactive species that we are talking about here are beta emitters that emit a beta ( electron ) and decay to a stable species.
For example, Cesium-137 emits a beta and turns into stable Barium-137
Not that stable
Barium-137 is only meta-stable with a half life of 153 seconds hence giving off gamma radiation, this is only one of the reasons Cs-137 is of persistent concern.
WRONG again!!!
I really get tired of having to explain basic physics to idiot anti-nukes.
Look, you don't have to take my word for it. Go to the Chart of the Nuclides courtesy of Brookhaven National Lab:
http://www.nndc.bnl.gov/chart/
Ground state Ba-137 is STABLE!!
What has got you confused is an isomer called Ba-137m, which is a short-lived state that is part of the Cesium-137 decay process. As another poster stated, the gamma that is part of the decay process is delayed by a couple minutes instead of being nearly instantaneous.
However, the final state of the decay is not Ba-137m but Ba-137.
Contrary to your ill-considered statement above, Ba-137 is STABLE.
It is only the short-lived isomer Ba-137m that is metastable, dummy.
That gamma radiation from
That gamma radiation from Barium is generally attributed to cesium decay. That is how we attribute radiation. The cesium beta decays and then essentially emits a 661 kev gamma, it emits the gamma after 153 seconds instead of the usual nanosecond. There is zero worry about Ba-137 since it is stable.
WRONG
Comparing an airline flight that is for a limited duration and limited, external exposure. Not at all like internal 'exposure' of Cesium 137. Internal exposure is the consumption of a radioactive partical that imbeds itself into your brain, your heart or other muscles or your lungs,
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Another anti-nuke that didn't study Physics, I see. Think about it.
Suppose you have a bit of radioactive material lodged in you. Now the material itself emits radiation. When you compute dose, you tally the amount of energy deposited, and therefore it is just like external radiation that is flowing through you.
Obviously you also don't understand that as the radioisotope decays, there are fewer atoms emitting radiation.
When you compute the dose, you tally up ALL the radiation that the radioisotope will deliver.
The poster above had a good analogy with aspirin, evidently you couldn't follow it. Let's try again.
Suppose you take one aspirin tablet per day for 200 days. You could say that you have aspirin in your system for 200 days = 4800 hours = 17280000 seconds.
Now 17 million seconds sounds like a long time; but in all that time, you still got a total of 200 aspirin tablets.
Now if someone downs the whole bottle of aspirin, they get that same amount of 200 tablets in a few minutes.
Evidently, you have confused total amount of dose, and the rate of dose.
For a given radiation dose; that is a given amount of energy deposited in you; it is actually better for you to have that dose spread out over time than to take it in one lump sum.
You get an F in my class
-Professor of Physics
It is not propaganda. One
It is not propaganda. One compares doses. That takes into account length of irradiation. A dose of 4 mrem (total body) from Cs137 ingestion is equivalent to dose of 4 mrem (total body) from a plane ride. It doesn't irradiate you until you die. Cs-137 has a 70 day bio half life. That is significantly shorter than its true half life. The daughter of Cs-137 is Ba-137 which is stable.
Some of that has been covered in the links below:
http://www.nuc.berkeley.edu/node/1926
http://www.nuc.berkeley.edu/node/2085
Thank you. I didn't see much
Thank you. I didn't see much information about the Cesium there.