Posted on 08/26/2013 7:34:30 PM PDT by Errant
The only good part about lutefisk is that your hands will never be cleaner than after making a batch
No they don't. The effects of radiation on every possible subject were done in the immediate aftermath of WWII and continuing on into the current day. The effects of radiation are known probably better than any other physical effect.
This is just like the die-off of Spanish Moss down in Louisiana during the mid-1960's. That was blamed on air pollution. Turned out to be a virus. The susceptible moss died and the immune moss re-grew. But the eco-jackasses in the meanwhile used the idle speculation to foster their agenda.
It should be, but it won't. The eco-nuts will blather and obfuscate about the "possible" dire effects, all the while churning out articles just like this with zero actual measurement information so folks can reliably make up their own minds. You don't actually think the news media would publish something detrimental to the agenda of the left, do you??
The way this government wastes funny money, a few hundred thousand dollar grants to several diverse groups, isn't going to hurt our credit rating any worse.
Radiological contamination from atomic weapons is certainly different from a reactor meltdown. I'm no expert, but would imagine the actual containments, their quantity, and dispersal vary greatly.
Let's get some trustworthy experts on scene and so they can determine the extinct of what we're facing, then let the world know!
Becquerels are NOT meaningless...they are just one of the
measures of dose that are used. They are interchangeable with Curies. One Bq is basically nuclear disintegration
per second. A Curie is 37 GigaBq, just another standard
for measuring “how much radiation this lump of material
has” as opposed to how much dose a person may or may not
be receiving.
People are panicking over numbers they don’t understand.
Low salmon runs long predate Fukushima. I now live in Washington state, and this is discussed FREQUENTLY up here.
"The way this government wastes funny money, a few hundred thousand dollar grants to several diverse groups, isn't going to hurt our credit rating any worse.
Un-needed. There are agencies of all sorts that have lab facilities capable of these kinds of measurements. Or, the interested party could simply take some samples to the nearest university.....virtually every university has capability to do nuclear measurements.
Or simply buy a Geiger-Mueller counter. The stuff most often mentioned is Cs-137, which emits gamma rays....which just happen to be what GM tubes detect most easily. They are NOT that expensive..a quick check shows Edmunds Scientifics selling a portable GM unit for $390. Get a calibration source for Cs-137 for a few more bucks, and have at it.
"Radiological contamination from atomic weapons is certainly different from a reactor meltdown. I'm no expert, but would imagine the actual containments, their quantity, and dispersal vary greatly."
True. The biggest difference is that stuff from weapons depends on where the weapon was detonated (air burst, underground, or under water).
"Let's get some trustworthy experts on scene and so they can determine the extinct of what we're facing, then let the world know!"
So, tell me which experts are "trustworthy"?? Most gov't departments these days have been largely taken over by the "green agenda" (especially so during this current administration). "I" certainly wouldn't put much credence in their output. Look at global warming.
“Your choice of units seems iffy - particularly since nuke apologists like to bray that beqs are “completely meaningless’ when talking about dosimetry.”
The measurement is for the amount of radioactivity present. What units would you prefer?
A 100% certainty...
We were just up in SE Alaska near Sitka, and the fisheries folks (in that area, including the ops in Chatham Straight) had postings of what the commercial fishing ops and canneries need to be mindful and watchful for...
I never gave it much thought till I saw this thread...
So I believe the right people are watching this closely, and I consider their observations way more credible than a journalists...
I understand that beqs are not meaningless, it’s just I got tired of nuke apologists shrieking that “people don’t understand the numbers” and “beqs are meaningless” in order to silence all conversation.
I haven’t seen anyone panicking. I’ve seen discussion and concern.
I was simply marveling that prior threads I’ve been on discussing radioactive beef fed to school Japanese school children, radioactive playgrounds, radioactive rice, tea etc. that nuke apologists would “LOL! bequerel’s are meaningless - you people don’t even know what you’re talking about! HAHAHAHAHAHA!”
Now, someone posts an article and the tactic is, “don’t even bother reading it if it’s not in beqs.”
Doubtful, they now use lead cans.
lead cans - that can’t be good - is that why there’s the white liners now?
I have observed some sites using a graphic showing ominous feathery red and orange plumes spreading across the entire Pacific basin when discussing Fukushima.
However, that plot is of the tsunami wave height, and its scale is in centimeters. I don’t know if they’re stupid or being deliberately deceptive.
Does anyone actually have a graph showing above-background radiation levels in the Pacific? I’d be interested to see it.
Bq is sort of meaningless if you are considering absorbed dose, it’s how much radiation is there.
Absorbed dose is RADS material or REM in humans (probably OK for animals too). So at a playground, I’d want to know how many Sieverts/hour there are, Becquerels is nice but that alone does not say what the threat is.
I agree with the concept of rejecting scare articles that do not provide numbers. I read one where they were ballisticating over “radiation found in San Francisco Bay!” When I got to real data sources, the levels were about 1/10 that found in a banana. A credible article should mention the isotope and Bq, so that we can do our own risk/benefit. Bq is appropriate when discussing the amount of contamination but not that good for determining dose. (I can calculate human exposure if I know how much was ingested, but I’d need a while with a whiteboard to figure out the body dose for a fish swimming in a given concentration of contaminated water.)
I could scare people by stating, accurately, that the soil where they live has a large amount of radioisotope contamination! OMG!!! But if I say that there is 600 Bq/Kg of Potassium 40 in most US topsoil, it’s a different story.
“Doubtful, they now use lead cans. “
No they don’t!
“Seriously, I wonder where I could get a geiger counter “
A GMT is not sensitive enough, you want a scintillator. And to get it right and compensate for background, you hook that up to a multichannel analyzer.
One of these will do:
http://www.ortec-online.com/download/Trans-SPEC-DX-100T.pdf
Easy, I was making a joke about the Geiger counter in the tuna isle. Nobody uses lead cans anymore. That can kill ya!
According to the scary stories I have read, the reason we are all supposed to be concerned is that bone-seeking strontium-90 has been detected in the contaminated water. The level has been reported as “thirty times” the drinking water standard.Unfortunately, most “news” sources these days have a very low opinion of their readers and seem to think that using internationally accepted scientific units will confuse them. In my opinion, attempting to avoid using standard units is what confuses people.
Here is my attempt at helping you understand why I yawn when someone thinks we should all be frightened by the news that 300 tons of water contaminated with Sr-90 at 30 times the drinking water standard might have leaked out of a storage tank and might soon reach the Pacific Ocean.
If someone drank two liters per day of the water that we are supposed to be afraid of for an entire year, their committed effective dose would be just 3 mSv; it would slightly more than double their annual background dose.
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