Airplane analogy is Improper use of ICRP Models According to ICRP
Dr. Jack Valentin, Scientific Secretary, International Commission of Radiological Protection (ICRP) states that the ICRP model use is for protection only, ie.: A personal monitor going off when the worker is too close or has received too much. NOT for exact calculations of individual risks. NOT for Epidemiological risk assesment. NOT for predicting the number of cancer deaths. Dr. Valentin states that using ICRP model for prediction is "An Unreasonable, unintended, incorrect use of collective effective dose.
Dr Chivers, The airplane model faq's states: "Total effective dose equivalent (TEDE) is a measure of the biological effects due to radiation exposure..." Is this not, in fact a measure of biological risk assesment? Is this not, in fact based on a prediction of the number of cancer deaths?
Dr Valentin ICRP specifically states that their model is NOT to be used in that manner, that it is NOT to be used for prediction. Is this, in fact not what the airplane model does. Therein the airplane model is an unreasonable, incorrect and ultimately invalid application of the ICRP model?
http://vimeo.com/15382750
Health Physics Society
Courtesy of the University of Michigan:
http://www.umich.edu/~radinfo/introduction/hprisk.htm
In accordance with current knowledge of radiation health risks, the Health Physics Society recommends against quantitative estimation of health risk below an individual dose of 5 rem(1) in one year, or a lifetime dose of 10 rem in addition to background radiation. Risk estimation in this dose range should be strictly qualitative accentuating a range of hypothetical health outcomes with an emphasis on the likely possibility of zero adverse health effects. The current philosophy of radiation protection is based on the assumption that any radiation dose, no matter how small, may result in human health effects, such as cancer and hereditary genetic damage. There is substantial and convincing scientific evidence for health risks at high dose. Below 10 rem (which includes occupational and environmental exposures) risks of health effects are either too small to be observed or are non-existent.
Current radiation protection standards and practices are based on the premise that any radiation dose, no matter how small, can result in detrimental health effects, such as cancer and genetic damage. Further, it is assumed that these effects are produced in direct proportion to the dose received, i. e., doubling the radiation dose results in a doubling of the effect. These two assumptions lead to a dose-response relationship, often referred to as the linear no-threshold model, for estimating health effects at doses of interest. There is, however, substantial scientific evidence that this model is an oversimplification of the dose-response relationship and results in an overestimation of health risks in the low dose range. Biological mechanisms including cellular repair of radiation injury, which are not accounted for by the linear, no-threshold model, reduce the likelihood of cancers and genetic effects.
(No subject)
Hi all, this is a side
Hi all, this is a side question.
I am planning to take an 15 hrs of fight with my baby. I will bring some baby food and cheese for him to be consumed at the place we will travel, since we don't trust the local food safety there much. I am wondering if any body knows if there is any harm once the food go through security screening by the TSA, and also by the exposure of the level of radiation on the flight? Is it better to just consume the local food?
Thank you.
Let's try doing this with a better objective in mind
What I hear in all applications of these strained uses of these various 'models' is 'This is the same as that. Sorta. Only different.' So I have to ask, if only rhetorically, Why simplify to the point of obfuscation ? Of course the response must be 'No I would never obfuscate, intentionally.'
Oh. Good. Then how about just the hard facts. Not facts about external radiation which, save particle beam medicine, bears only glancing comparison to emitters INSIDE living cells and possibly INCORPORATED into the components/mechanisms/chemical processes of the cell and therefore at distances approaching zero from the targets that can cause cell malfunction and death when involved in a ionizing event or subsequent chemical event.
Of particular interest to everyone will be any analogies that explain how this 'close in' and localized energy does that damage. Please do not leave out all the stages of decay and all the different types of cellular chemistry and function damage that each of these stages of decay might induce.
Contrast the detailed decay of K-40 to Cs-137, 134 for the really curious among us if you would. Of course I am sure you will cover and contrast the essential characteristic difference in beta emissions of varying energy levels especially those differences in the area of penetrating power as it is “inversely” related to the “mass, charge, and energy” of the emission, so the higher energy means less likely to interact with matter and what that means in the world of cells.
Thanks.
In the context of the
In the context of the ongoing discussion of the airplane model, I would like to draw attention to a different aspect of flying in an airplane these days in the northern hemisphere, particularly in March/ April this year. The radioactive Fukushima plume forecasts were showing significantly higher levels of radioisotopes (modeled for I 131 and Cs 134 and 137) in the upper levels of the atmosphere--where airplanes travel--than in the lower levels, including ground deposition. This means that airplane travelers, flight attendants and pilots in the northern hemisphere have been (and continue to be) exposed to ADDITIONAL radiation to the "background" radiation on their long distance flights as a result of Fukushima.
Of course, no one in the industry has any interest in publicizing what the actual levels in the flight paths at 30+km elevation were/ are, as that could have a huge economic impact internationally--like most other information about the actual extent of Fukushima emissions.
Let's take geiger counters on the plane when we travel and determine and report what the actual radiation levels up there are. What worries me even more is what I found out from a veteran flight attendant recently: planes replenish approx. 25% or more cabin air (which is lost by leakage) by drawing ambient air from OUTSIDE into the plane when in flight. This means that air passengers in the northern hemisphere have likely breathed in quite a few of those toxic Fukushima isotopes than they did at sealevel....
The vast majority..
Let's take geiger counters on the plane when we travel and determine and report what the actual radiation levels up there are.
========================
The vast majority of the radiation levels that you will see in flight are due to cosmic rays and the radioisotopes that those cosmic rays produce via interactions with the air in your airliner cabin. Cosmic ray interactions and the particle "showers" they create interacting with Nitrogen is how we get Carbon-14, Tritium,...
You'll see the radiation, but hardly any will be due to Fukushima, if at all.
Can't you guys invent a
Can't you guys invent a reactor that runs on bananas and airplane rides? Seems like if you could do that it would make everybody happy.
Airplane flight dose comparison is consistent with ICRP
I finally took a look at that video and thought that this was worth a response even though this was nearly 2 months ago.
I'm afraid that the OP has the situation backwards — what the ICRP representative says is completely consistent with our use of the airplane flight dose comparison. Here are two points to explain this:
- The airplane comparison does not predict the number of cancers.
- The airplane comparison is for protection only.
Mark [BRAWM Team Member]We have not been using the calculated doses to make any epidemiological predictions. The ICRP representative discourages the use of dose to predict cancers in a population. One of the main reasons he gives is that the dose model is uncertain by "an order of magnitude" (i.e., a multiple of 10), so the ICRP handles this by erring on the very conservative side of the actual number. So according to the ICRP, their predicted number of cancers should always be a very conservative, worst-case upper limit (see discussion in video at 1:14:00–30).
This issue of protection versus cancer prediction appears to be a deep epistemological divide between the mainstream/ICRP and Busby/ECRR. One of Busby's and ECRR's main focuses in studying radiation dose is making exact predictions of the numbers of cancers in a population due radiation exposures (e.g., Chernobyl). The mainstream of epidemiology and health physics would say that their predictions are not properly supported by data; and moreover that we simply cannot know what happens at very low doses but at least we can set useful and conservative limits. A good point in the video to see the ICRP position is 57:30–59:15.
We could have just presented a conservative dose estimate for drinking a liter of milk or breathing a liter of air in nanosieverts per liter (nSv/L). We decided that wouldn't be helpful because it would require the extra step of having to look up how much a nanosievert is and how much is a level of concern. Instead we chose to compare the dose to a more comprehensible quantity, the dose from a cross-country airplane trip (5 mrem, or 50 microsieverts).
Calculating someone's exposure and comparing it to an acceptable dose level is exactly what protection means. We have not presented the airplane flight dose for the prediction of individual cancer risk but as a way for people to decide whether to take protective measures. We in the team decided it was not worth taking protective measures for ourselves because the doses have been so tiny compared to small doses that we routinely accept.
So in some sense, the airplane flight is analogous to a personal radiation monitor — it is a standard against which someone can compare his or her own exposure. That is all that it means, and no more.
Hours per year in an airplane
I know this has been pointed out repeatedly, but it doesn't discourage your use of the airplane model, so I continue to be puzzled.
If I were to spend 8,760 hours per year being exposed to Fukushima radiation at the rate of 50/6 hours = 8 microSieverts per hour, that would be a total dose of 70,080 microsieverts in a year, or 70 millisieverts. That's a lot of radiation.
The fact that I can choose not to fly in the airplane every hour of every day in the year, or not to fly at all for that matter ... makes it an utterly useless analog for the radiation exposure I receive on a continual basis with no escape in my daily life.
What subtle scientific or mathematical point am I missing here?
Thanks.
You are correct...if you fly
You are correct...if you fly in a plane for the entire year constantly without landing, you will get a very large dose of radiation. That is why airlines limit the number of flight time for their pilots and flight attendants.
You can safely assume 5 microSieverts per hour in a plane at altitude...which is a bit lower than your number, but close.
Let us take the most conservative (highest dose) water sample we measured which was on 3/23 rainwater results showing 19.85 Bq/L of I131. We estimated, using the correct dose conversion factors from ICRP for I131 exposure (dominated by thyroid dose), that one would have to consume 140 liters of that water to be equivalent to the dose from a round-trip cross country flight (50 uSv = 10 hrs flight time). The average consumption is ~2 liters per day, so it would take the average person 70 days to reach this dose. Over the course of the year, this same person would consume 730 liters which would be equivalent to 5.21 cross-country plane flights (730 L / 140 L) or around 261 microSieverts total.
Now, this is a conservative estimate assuming one drinks the rainwater directly and that the highest measurement of radionuclides are present the entire year, which we can safely say is not true. When we measured corresponding creek water to rain water, we computed 10% of the activity remained in the creek water and tap water was <1%, so unless you drink rain water directly all of the time, this dose is very conservative on the high side. But...even with this built in conservative estimate, the context of 5 cross-country flights per year should at least provide some measure of understanding in terms of magnitude of exposure.
Dosimetry
Mark,
I think you should distinguish between a dose received from external exposure and external/internal contamination. From a point of view of physics, external exposure is relatively straightforward. The very applicability of the dose concept for external/internal contamination is a lot more disputable. Please read http://www.isotopics.nl/wp-content/uploads/Isotopics-Note-2011-05.pdf for more info.
The comparison of exposure due to a nuclear accident and exposure due to an airplane flight, CT scan or terrestrial radiation is not allowed. The problem is justification; cosmic radiation, that causes the dose from a flight, and terrestrial radiation are a natural fact of life and therefore beyond justification. Human nuclear practices have to be justified. All medical applcations (diagnosis and therapy) have been by definition. Exposure due to nuclear accidents can never be justified: there is no benefit from an accident, so any benefit to harm weighing (i.e. justification) is pointless. Dose from accidents are therefore not excluded from dose limits. Please read http://www.isotopics.nl/wp-content/uploads/Isotopics-Note-2011-031.pdf for more info.
You are doing a lot of good work. Could you give a liitle more info on the gamma spectrometers you are using? Are they coaxial or well-type? Is the shielding "old lead"? Which software for spectral deconvolution do you use? I used to measure in a 4-pi old-lead shielded well-type Ge detector, with automatic sample changer (robot) and powered by Canberra Genie 2K software. Amazing characteristics. Background 8e-5 Counts/s at 1500 keV, absolute effcicency 16% for 661 keV of Cs-137.
Thanks,
Joost
Our setup
Hi Joost,
Thanks for joining in the discussion here. I was hoping to write back earlier but hope that you still see this message.
It appears there has already been a discussion about dose and justification, so I would still like to tell you what setups we are using. At the height of our efforts we were using three ORTEC coaxial germanium detectors. Liquid and solid samples were placed in cylindrical Marinelli beakers that fit around the detectors. Air filters were cylindrical in shape and fit around our 50% relative efficiency coaxial HPGe.
Our lead caves were constructed from 5 cm × 10 cm × 20 cm lead blocks. The lead is not old lead as far as we know. In fact, there is a small but detectable background of Cs-137 and Co-60 from them. These are of course subtracted out from our measurements.
We improvised all of this after we heard of the releases from Fukushima, and we did not have the ability to set up a true low-background setup at the time, but this ended up working out just fine. We recently moved our remaining test station to a low-background room in our building, and that has decreased our K-40 and other background lines. Our backgrounds have been around 4e-2 at 1460 keV, and our efficiency at 662 keV is approximately 2%.
Also, we use ORTEC's Maestro software for data acquisition. However, all of the spectral analysis we did using custom Python scripts that used ROOT for the peak fitting. I have tried Canberra's Genie software before and really liked it; we are just more used to Maestro/GammaVision.
Your detector setup was quite good indeed! What were you involved in testing with them?
Here are some links to a picture and description of one of our setups, which was used for testing liquids and solids:
Liquid/solid sampling system
Groetjes,
Mark [BRAWM Team Member]
Hi Joost, >> Exposure due to
Hi Joost,
>> Exposure due to nuclear accidents can never be justified: there is no benefit from an accident, so any benefit to harm weighing (i.e. justification) is pointless.
With respect, I would argue, as others have, that the benefit is the production of energy. The question I would ask is what is the risk to human health per MW-hr of energy production? All energy production systems have risks to human health For example: CdTe and poly-silicon solar panels produce toxicity in waste streams in the production and end-of-life phases, wind and hydro energy effect migratory patterns of birds and fish, respectively, propagating through food-webs to the human population, coal plants distribute toxicity over wide areas effecting human health, not to mention global warming. All energy systems have a footprint on environmental impact and energy/environmental policy should aim to minimize this impact relative to the benefit of the unit of energy it produces. Saying a nuclear plant benefit to harm is pointless is a bit biased, to say the least. However, it is a valid argument to state that the benefit of energy production is not worth the cost to human health...but this must be put in context with other alternatives and their respective environmental impact.
Example of solar panel
Example of solar panel production environmental impact: China closes solar-panel plant after protests
Benefit of accidents
Hi D,
Thanks for your reaction.
What you refer to, if I understand it well, is the benefit of nuclear energy. You could argue, that the mere production of electricity is a benefit. Personally, I think it would be more precise to define the actual situation in the US and EU to be the possibility of citizens to buy electricity under free energy market conditions. That is definitely a benefit for the industry. It might also be seen as such from an energy policy point of view by politicians or economists. Whether either the right to buy or the mere production should judged as a benefit for the citizen in a justification procedure by radiation protection experts, is in my view at least disputable. I would say, their (ICRP's) main worry is protection, not economic benefits, but they base their protection system already on a benefit versus detriment weighing. In my view, that is not correct. Whatever ones opinion on this issue may be, the "normal situation" is where the justification principle is applicable.
What I meant to refer to in my respons to Mark, is that in the present situation, people are exposed to radiation caused by a nuclear accident. That can never be legally justified or be the starting point of some benefit versus harm weighing procedure and is therefore explicitely excluded by ICRP. As far as I am concerned, the above is true for any large scale economic practice, including the ones you refer to. But I will be the first to agree that I am biased as far as nuclear power is concerned. I like to believe that I might have some reason for it and I also like to believe that my opinions are reasonably well substantiated. That does absolutely not mean that I do deny the hazards from large scale coal firing, oiol combustion etc. On the contrary. But I happen to know a little bit more from the nuclear arena than from other technologies, because I have been there the last 30+ years.
Joost
Hi Joost, Well said. I
Hi Joost,
Well said. I would agree that as a society, right or wrong, we currently do not accept any risk related to nuclear accidents. The benefit for persons of free-will, as you correctly state, is the ability to purchase electricity on the market from a wide range of producers. Any regulation of that free market will produce higher prices and thus reduce the benefit to the consumer by increasing cost of resources. This cost relates the tradeoff between cost of energy and public safety, the latter historically represented by governments acting as our proxy against strong industrial forces to the contrary. It is important to realize that both under-regulation and over-regulation produces a net negative to consumers and we continually must evaluate risk and benefit, using real data and reason, to achieve the correct balance and maximize return to the benefit of all people.
Thanks for the civilized discussion.
Nuclear and the law
Hi D.,
Thanks for your remark on the civilized discussion. I value that high. In the EU, it is the European law (EU guideline 96/29) that relates nuclear practices to human detriment. This law as such is beyond political debate, at least untill Fukushima occurred. ICRP recommendations are the basis of the guideline. A nuclear reactor operator's license is dependent on compliance with this law. The problem is the legal ambiguity in case of nuclear accidents. Accidents are formaly not supposed to happen in the guideline, as a peoples protection law can never pass approval, when it inculdes some probable accident scenario. On the other hand, already in 1960, the Paris Treaty deals with national and international liability in case of nuclear accidents. Futhermore, the IAEA uses the International Nuclear Event Scale (INES), that categorises nuclear events into incidents and accidents of increasing seriousness. So from the human protection point of view, the law is ineffective with regard to accidents, but from the liability (i.e. money) point of view, things are very effective. As far as I know, this legal situation is absent for any other large scale energy production technology. The reason for that is, that nuclear accidents have serious border-crossing consequences, even in the eyes of the 1960 policy makers. Although CO2 and fine dust are also border crossing, I am not aware of any international liability legislation on these issues.
Against this background, I do not agree with you on the under-over regulating arguement in case of nuclear energy. In Europe, the EU legislation sets the limits. As I think, that the ICRP recommendations are not adequate for doses from internal contamination, this legislation is (by far) not strict enough. On top of that, the law is based on the "as low as reasonably achievable" principle, however without defining what "reasonably" is in a human, legal or even economic sense. Unfortunately, the somewhat troublesome relation between governement, regulators and industry in Japan has demonstrated where this can potentially lead to. I think that radiation protection legislation for nuclear industry (that excludes e.g. air flights) should be drastically reformed.
Please accept my apologies for my English; it is not my native language.
Joost
>>However, it is a valid
>>However, it is a valid argument to state that the benefit of energy production is not worth the cost to human health...but this must be put in context with other alternatives and their respective environmental impact.
Here Here! Thanks for a dose of common sense Dchivers and to the rest of BRAWM.
Thank you Mark
Thank you Mark. I agree that the analogy is NOT misleading.
The problem comes when attempting to correlate a dose with a risk of death. But the airline analogy doesn't do that. Certainly one can compare the dose from one source to the dose from another source. Comparing dose to dose is comparing apples to apples and oranges to oranges; and there isn't anything wrong with that. That's what the airliner analogy is doing. The exposure in an airliner is just another unit of dose.
The airliner analogy gives a context. I may tell someone that my daily jog is 10 furlongs long. Unless that person is an equestrian, they probably don't have a good feel for how long a furlong is. If I say the furlong is approximately 2 football fields in length, that gives a context. The fact that a furlong is not precisely 2 football fields in length doesn't make the comparison invalid.
The problem is that anti-nukes don't want people to have a context. They want to tell you that you get some amount of radiation exposure from nuclear power, and that all radiation is bad for you and leave it there.
That conveys information but no understanding. When one is attempting to peddle propaganda, understanding and truth is the enemy. They want the victim of their propaganda to imagine the worse.
However, let us give a little context to the discussion. In a typical flight from Los Angeles to New York, one gets about 4 mrem.
Courtesy of the Health Physics Society at the University of Michigan:
http://www.umich.edu/~radinfo/introduction/radrus.htm
the average person's radiation exposure is about 360 mrem. The above airline flight represents 4 mrem / 360 mrem or 1.1% of the typical annual radiation exposure.
From the above link also; the radiation exposure from the nuclear fuel cycle is <0.03% of what one normally receives in terms of background radiation. Therefore, the exposure due to nuclear power represents an exposure that is 37 times less than the airline flight.
Now the person has some understanding along with the data. They can draw conclusions. The person knows that the airline flight involves some exposure to radiation, but they accept that. They now find that the exposure due to nuclear power is 37 times lower than something they accept.
Perhaps the person makes a couple such flights a month for their job. That would be 24 flights a year. In that case, the annual radiation exposure due to nuclear power would be 889 times less than what they routinely accept in additional radiation exposure above background.
The comparison is useful to prevent people from doing things that are counter-productive. One Seattle resident posting here wanted to fly to Dallas to escape the radiation from Fukushima. However, the radiation she would receive on the flight would be many, many times greater than what she was fleeing from in Seattle.
The exposure in airliners is due to cosmic rays. Cosmic rays can deposit energy directly into you like gamma rays. Cosmic rays also give rise to a whole shower of charged particles, similar to alpha and beta particles.
Additionally, cosmic rays create radioisotopes. Carbon-14 and Tritium are naturally occurring radioisotopes found in Nature. They are created by the interaction of cosmic rays and their byproducts with the atmosphere. So cosmic rays are creating radioisotopes like Carbon-14 and Tritium right inside your airliner for you to intake.
Anonymous (not verified) ============
Why, your number, <0.03% of what one normally receives in terms of background radiation, sounds like such a little amount UNTIL one of the nuclear reactors goes KABOOM and deposits 60 bq/meter2 of Cs-134 & Cs-137 (half-life 3/30 years, respectively; full-life 30/300 years, respectively)in all our front & back yards in Berkeley and the surrounding areas and on the West Coast.
Fallout levels in Berkeley CA in bq/m2
www.nuc.berkeley.edu/node/5449
More in some areas - i.e. Alaska & Canada - if the deposition maps are accurate.
Atmospheric Dispersion of Radionuclides from the Fukushima-Daichii Nuclear Power Plant (Cs-137 only)
http://cerea.enpc.fr/fr/fukushima.html
Actually, make that multiple KABOOMS in Fukushima. And there are more leaks lately, in France and the Eastern/Southern part of the US. Oh, and don't forget about the forest fires that almost consumed Los Alamos and sent all of that nuclear material airborne.
Oh, yes,I almost forgot the most pertinent FACT about Fukushima: It isn't over yet.
Japanese Researcher: Recriticality in July and August?
http://ex-skf.blogspot.com/2011/09/japanese-researcher-recriticality-in....
Fukushima...is this the China Syndrome? [Beyond Nuclear & Thom Hartmann]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=baya8-agPs4&feature=player_embedded
No, it isn't over yet. As they say in opera, "It isn't over until the fat lady sings." Oh wait, the fat lady refuses to go to Japan to sing!!!
#Radiation in Japan: 1/4 of Germany's Bayerische Staatsoper Refuse to Come and Perform in Japan For Radiation Contamination Fear
Germany's Bayerische Staatsoper was scheduled to come to Japan to perform some Wagnerian operas, but 100 members including top singers and orchestra members, or one-quarter of the entire members at the theater who were scheduled to come, have refused to come to Japan for the fear of radiation contamination.
http://ex-skf.blogspot.com/2011/09/radiation-in-japan-14-of-germanys.html
Your "<0.03% of what one normally receives in terms of background radiation" argument flies out the window when we are doused with radiation, most of which won't dissipate for at least 60 years (2 half-lives of Cs-137). Not to mention that we are ingesting more of these radionuclides in all that we eat: Dairy, fruits & vegetables, meats, grains, etc.
This doesn't even take into consideration all the I-131 that we inhaled and ingested after the big KABOOMS that will lead to thyroid damage in susceptible individuals.
..and deposits 60 bq/m2..
and deposits 60 bq/meter2 of Cs-134 & Cs-137 (half-life 3/30 years, respectively; full-life 30/300 years, respectively)in all our front & back yards in Berkeley and the surrounding areas and on the West Coast.
Fallout levels in Berkeley CA in bq/m2
www.nuc.berkeley.edu/node/5449
-----------------------------------------
Read on in the same thread you cite. Mark calculates the natural radiation in the first few inches of topsoil as 10,000 bq/m2.
That's a lot greater than the 60 bq/m2 the West Coast got from Fukushima.
Try to keep it in perspective.
Reductionism
Reductionism will lead you AWAY from the truth.
K-40, your primary 'natural' source has a different toxicity profile then the amazingly toxic Cs-137, 134.
They do not equate. They behave and effect the cell DIFFERENTLY once absorbed by and into biological processes, which is the only thing that matters.
Any further equivocations on the subject of K-40 vs Cs-137 in biological systems could result in a severe sheet pulling and resulting public pillory. All in good fun I am sure.
Happy Bioaccumulation Everyone. Do try to eat low on the food chain.
Fukudai's 60 bq/m2 plus atmospheric testing's contribution of 30 bq/m2 means 50,000 more cancer cases on the West Coast. Is that the perspective we should be concerned with ?
Happy Bioaccumulation Everyone. Do try to eat low on the food chain.
60 bq/m2 of Cesium IN ADDITION TO NATURAL BACKGROUND
Read on in the same thread you cite. Mark calculates the natural radiation in the first few inches of topsoil as 10,000 bq/m2.
That's a lot greater than the 60 bq/m2 the West Coast got from Fukushima.
_____________________________________________________________________________
NO, that is IN ADDITION TO the natural radiation that Mark calculates in the topsoil!
Big Deal!!
Big Deal!!! So it's 10,060 and not 10,000!
Does the 0.6% mean that much to you? Really???
Sheesh - you could swamp that with a single airline flight, or just living a couple stories higher in your apartment building.
It's amazing how people get so bent out of shape by an effect that is down in the noise.
cancer, bioaccumulation and internal emitters
Fun new exciting chemistry experiment everyone!!
Gotta love those novel, bio analog, bio accumulating radioisotopes, huh?
Of course that nice potato salad you had for lunch just so happened to have a few items that came from a hot spot so your pancreas absorbed a really nice dose of Cs-137 and Cs-134. Again. For the third time this month. So now that nice energetic Cs as displaced a fair bit of Potassium creating your very own personal internal hot spot. While you won't glow in the dark, you are now a more special person. Hope pancreatic enzyme problems and cancer treatment is covered under your health insurance as some of those critical cells are now going to get localized, continual and eventual MEGADOSES of beta radiation. Enjoy your health problems and eventual cancer.
And have a nice day.
Anonymous (not verified) ======= <0.03%
<0.03%: Tell that to the people of Japan. Oh wait, that is the line of propaganda that their sociopathic leaders are feeding them, figuratively & LITERALLY.
9/9/2011,Yokohama city government announced that (at least) 6 nursery schools served cesium beef for lunch.
Breaking News: Nursery School Toddlers Ate Cesium Beef 8 Times
http://fukushima-diary.com/
Better yet, why don't you join the babies for lunch if manmade nuclear energy is soooo safe!
Thanks for link, I hope
Thanks for link, I hope BRAWM stops using this analogy. It is misleading and confusing.
who let the dog out
obviously the bananas/airplanes/speedboats model is severely flawed and unscientific.
pick a bale of cotton, pick a bale of hay.
bump
bump
bump
lump