Soldato
- Joined
- 22 Sep 2008
- Posts
- 10,139
- Location
- Burscough
I hardly think that cleaning up Fukushima would have been simple! We have enough trouble in this country with just ordinary undamaged plants!
Radiation, media and the public
- Thread starter Dolph
- Start date
Keyword was 'simpler'. It needn't have been the mess it became.
Deleted member 66701
Deleted member 66701
I hope that's sarcasm and you're not being serious.
![[TW]Fox](/data/man-of-honor/2009.png){kind=avatar}
I got a detection unit from uRADMonitor which is a global project as I was interested in the general levels which never seem to fluctuate since I got it.
check here http://www.uradmonitor.com
My detector is in Aberdeen and been running for around a year and a half.
check here http://www.uradmonitor.com
My detector is in Aberdeen and been running for around a year and a half.
It's about one banana per year.
It's a sort of real unit devised to make the extent of radiation exposure more readily understandable - the banana equivalent dose. It's approximately the amount of radiation exposure you'd get from eating one average-sized banana. Since bananas contain a fair bit of potassium and a small proportion of potassium is radioactive, bananas are radioactive.
Hardly anyone knows how much ionising radiation a sievert is. Or, come to think of it, what ionising radiation is. So they freak out at any mention of any radiation because they have no idea what it is or how much of it is being referred to. Giving the equivalent number of bananas gets an important point across, albeit simplified because it ignores how quickly a person gets rid of the radioactive material and therefore how cumulative it is. One BED per week from iodine, for example, would be worse than one BED from potassium (i.e. an actual banana).
You'd get a thousand times as much extra exposure by having a job on a plane.
Marie Curie's office chair is still detectably (though not dangerously) radioactive, as is the door handle. Those were usually the first things she touched when she came in from the lab. The logbooks she and Pierre kept in their lab are classed as hazardous materials.
The Curies are a very different case, though, as their exposure was huge. They routinely carried quite highly radioactive samples in their pockets, for example. They were suffering from radiation sickness during their research and were too ill to collect their Nobel prize. It's a bit odd that neither of them made the connection to the "Bequerel rays" they were studying, but obviously they didn't.
Even so, the plant itself wasn't the directly the problem. The plant itself, despite being an obsolete design and running for decades and being hammered by a very strong earthquake, wasn't damaged and executed a controlled shutdown. The problem was the sea wall wasn't high enough and the cooling system was flooded and couldn't be replaced quickly enough in the circumstances. They should have put as much care into disaster-proofing the cooling system as they did into disaster-proofing the plant itself, but they didn't.
Mighty interesting this, you're the 0.15 sample I take it? It's all that damn granite, poisoning us!
I want one.
That site is terrible, keeps spawning tabs and I'm finding it impossible to find out how to buy a unit and how much they are. It's the sort of geeky thing I'd love to install here and forget about but they're not making it easy.
Associate
- Joined
- 22 Sep 2007
- Posts
- 2,184
- Location
- Abingdon
A bit of radiation never hurt anybody.
Last edited:
Soldato
- Joined
- 26 Jan 2003
- Posts
- 6,996
- Location
- Surrey
When you know a little more about it it's certainly far less scary - I've had to have a few dental x-rays lately and I didn't even bat an eyelid at the thought.
Am flying to Iceland soon and was in Peru a few years back which would've been a much bigger dose.
Certainly all blown out of proportion by the media - anything to make a story!
Am flying to Iceland soon and was in Peru a few years back which would've been a much bigger dose.
Certainly all blown out of proportion by the media - anything to make a story!
Wasn't it not even the cooling system, but the power for it?
As the multiple power grid connections were lost due to the tsunami, and the generators flooded, but the batteries (sealed and I think in the main building) kept going.
I'm fairly sure I read that the cooling system ran right up until the time (something like 12 hours later) that the battery backup failed, and that happened right on schedule as they'd specified X run time for the batteries and that's what they got.
Which if true means in virtually any other emergency they would have had time to get portable generators onsite to keep those systems running.
Yes, that's what I meant. I was thinking of the power for it as being part of the system, since the main point of failure was the on-site generators being flooded.
Presumably it seemed good enough to have multiple grid connections plus generators onsite as backup and batteries as backup for the backup, but diesel generators below ground level on the shoreline was not a good idea.
Mighty interesting this, you're the 0.15 sample I take it? It's all that damn granite, poisoning us!
I want one.
Yes damn it
sometimes I see area's go up above 20 to 25 and I go
.
.
.
.
.
.
it will average out in the data.
But if get a big accident of that nature just a monitor to look at.
