Tuesday, July 12, 2011
"During April, The People In Seattle Could Have Just As Easily Been In Tokyo For The Amount Of Hot Particles That Were There"
Nuclear expert Arnie Gundersen said recently:
During April, the people in Seattle could have just as easily been in Tokyo for the amount of hot particles that were there.(For background on "hot particles", see this and this.)
Of course, radiation monitoring in Seattle may be kept secret. As that Washington Department of Health notes:
Indeed, the EPA has drastically reduced its radiation reporting to the public (which was never great), and has tried to raise acceptable radiation standards.A helicopter flying over some urban areas of King and Pierce counties will gather radiological readings July 11-28, 2011. [Seattle is in King County.] The U.S. Department of Energy’s Remote Sensing Laboratory Aerial Measurement System will collect baseline levels of radioactive materials.
**
Some of the data may be withheld for national security purposes.
But isn't the amount of radiation Seattle residents are being exposed to safe? No, say many top experts. See this, this, this, this, this and this.
As David J. Brenner, a professor of radiation biophysics and the director of the Center for Radiological Research at Columbia University Medical Center, wrote recently in The Bulletin of The Atomic Scientists:
Should this worry us? We know that the extra individual cancer risks from this long-term exposure will be very small indeed. Most of us have about a 40 percent chance of getting cancer at some point in our lives, and the radiation dose from the extra radioactive cesium in the food supply will not significantly increase our individual cancer risks.
But there’s another way we can and should think about the risk: not from the perspective of individuals, but from the perspective of the entire population. A tiny extra risk to a few people is one thing. But here we have a potential tiny extra risk to millions or even billions of people. Think of buying a lottery ticket — just like the millions of other people who buy a ticket, your chances of winning are miniscule. Yet among these millions of lottery players, a few people will certainly win; we just can’t predict who they will be. Likewise, will there be some extra cancers among the very large numbers of people exposed to extremely small radiation risks? It’s likely, but we really don’t know for sure.
Hat tip: ENE News and Forbes' Jeff McMahon, two of the best energy-related news sources on the web.
2 comments:
→ Thank you for contributing to the conversation by commenting. We try to read all of the comments (but don't always have the time).
→ If you write a long comment, please use paragraph breaks. Otherwise, no one will read it. Many people still won't read it, so shorter is usually better (but it's your choice).
→ The following types of comments will be deleted if we happen to see them:
-- Comments that criticize any class of people as a whole, especially when based on an attribute they don't have control over
-- Comments that explicitly call for violence
→ Because we do not read all of the comments, I am not responsible for any unlawful or distasteful comments.
Posts
Hi GW, thanks for the articles on Seattle radiation....I think. Seattle is my home town.
ReplyDeleteMaybe it's not such a bad thing that we're having a very wet summer here right now. The more radioactive dust particles washed down the sewer and into local lakes and Puget Sound, though not a good thing, will likely yield lower population exposure in the long run.
I usually comment on your ZH articles, but heard about this helicopter survey and thought I'd see if you had something to say. You did not disappoint. Thank you for your tireless work. Cheers!
"As David J. Brenner, a professor of radiation biophysics and the director of the Center for Radiological Research at Columbia University Medical Center, wrote recently in The Bulletin of The Atomic Scientists:
ReplyDeleteShould this worry us ? "
"Worry"?
All particles add! All!
And that, since March 11, 2011.