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Well, at least the article explains later it was a mistake.
So we just had a bunch of cafeteria drones who didn’t stop to think bags of green onions, without even some dip, was a weird snack.

“Internal” exposure is exposure from radioactives inhaled/ingested/absorbed through the skin.

Measuring internal dose is done by a number of methods, including measuring the radioactivity of waste matter, blood, perspiration, etc. You can also use a whole-body counter to measure gamma ray activity inside the body.

Why did it take a month? They may have been too busy dealing with the reactors to stop and hang around inside a whole-body counter. Or, perhaps they wanted to evaluate how long the radioactives were hanging around in the body, the better to get an integrated dose.

Is that Klingon in your tagline?

Yup.

http://water.epa.gov/drink/contaminants/index.cfm#Radionuclides This does not mention I-131 but has standards for activity in general.

Been to that one. I-131 is a beta emitter, so it would be covered under "gross beta" where the limit is 4 mrem/year. Notice, this is not given in pCi or Bq, and the dose rate depends on the specific isotope involved. So where does the 3 pCu/L come from?

A radioactive isotope, such as iodine-131, is supposed to have a half-life of eight days. This is inferred to mean that it breaks down quickly, and it quickly dissipates in the environment. However, the 8 day half-life can be a misnomer because radioactive iodine can really persist in the environment for many months and has a 100 day biological half-life once inside the human body.

I'm seeing a lot of mixing of apples, oranges, and zebras here.

A radioactive isotope, such as iodine-131, is supposed to have a half-life of eight days.

No, this particular isotope has a half-life of eight days. (Actually 8.3, but who's counting?) It's been measured countless times. The burden of proof now lies with whoever wants to argue differently.

This is inferred to mean that it breaks down quickly, and it quickly dissipates in the environment.

Breaking down is one thing; dissipating in the environment is another. Iodine-131 breaks down into Xenon-131, which is a stable, nonreactive isotope. This has nothing to do with whether it disperses in the environment or falls to the ground in one concentrated slug.

However, the 8 day half-life can be a misnomer because radioactive iodine can really persist in the environment for many months...

OK, now you're shifting goal posts. Some radioactive iodine does persist in the environment for a long time. Iodine-125 has a half-life of 60.2 days; Iodine-129 has a half-life of 17 million years. But you started out talking about Iodine-131, which still has a half-life of 8.3 days.

...and has a 100 day biological half-life once inside the human body.

The biological half-life refers to the residence time time in the body of any chemical, regardless of whether it's radioactive or not. Iodine has a biological half-life of 70 days in the thyroid gland, and a couple of weeks in the rest of the body. (Treating the thyroid gland and the rest of the body as separate compartments.) But this applies to all iodine in those compartments. All that addresses is whether iodine is excreted before or after it decays. Other than that, there's nothing wrong with that paragraph.

I’ve been looking all over the EPA website trying to find that particular drinking water standard. The closest I can find is a standard for gross beta, at 4 mrem/year.

I’m starting to believe the standard is not an official one, perhaps even made up.

Tavis Smiley: More Christians Than Muslims Blow Up People Every Single Day So what now? Shoot them in self-defense?

And that's just the point.

Palin: I am strong I am invincible
So Cal Pagans: Not unless you agree with us on abortion, the Iraq war, same-sex marriage, and everything else we think is important!

I don't mind that they protest – that's their right. But in a contest over who's the strong woman, they paint themselves as losers.

Just as an illustration, when the Dow dropped below 12,000, I added DIA (the ETF that tracks the Dow Industrial Average) to my monthly purchases. I’ve been buying every month while the Dow has been in the 11,000 range. Last week’s automatic purchase hit on Tuesday, after the market had closed down 500 points.

I’m now starting to look at banks and financial institutions so I can pick through the survivors.

I find it most ironic that these people are bringing up "I Am Woman", a song about powerful women, to protest a powerful woman.

It would be interesting to see a respectful counter-demonstration at the site.

If the mother's body creates antibodies to the baby's blood, it can be very nasty.

Just so.

That notwithstanding, Mary's blood mixing with Jesus' blood is a moot point from a theological point of view, since she was free of original sin.

I'm not really up on Catholic theology, but ISTM Mary was free of original sin. If Jesus was the only human ever to live a sinless life, than Mary would have sinned at some point, and her blood would presumably be contaminated thereby.

IAE, all of this is a theological argument, and doesn't reflect anything that can be scientifically measured.

Which may or may not be a good thing.

If the universe is all that exists, and, according to the "Big Bang Theory", the universe is continually expanding, then what is the universe expanding into?

Hmmmm???

A very good question. Unfortunately, you seem to be asking it as if you honestly believe you're the first person ever to have asked it, and as if there can be no possible rebuttal to it.

Do you have any interest in reading the literature to see what proponents of the big bang theory think is happening, or are you satisfied with your pretensions of learning?

It is my understanding that, while nutrients and other components pass from the mother's blood to the child's, and waste products pass from the child's blood to the mother's, their actual blood does not intermingle.

Except when it does. Although mother and child don't have a common circulatory system, blood does tend to leak back and forth. This is why testing for Rh factor is important. If the mother's body creates antibodies to the baby's blood, it can be very nasty.

That reminds me of the notorious piece, "Bush's Resume" which can be found, among other places, at about.com. It is methodically shredded by Curt King in this PDF file.

Unfortunately, to those of the left, "truth" is defined as "whatever provokes the most pleasant emotion", and "I'm appalled!!!!!" is considered a reasoned, logical, and methodical refutation of any factual argument.

..............Karl

I've seen any number of articles about the interim Kay report. Does anyone know where I can find the declassified parts of the report itself? (Or are we relying on leaks for everything we know about it?)

Another is the poor track record of spontaneous mutation in producing positive benefits for the host organism.

In that case, the Ames test can't possibly work. You see, it depends on beneficial mutations to work.

I guess the millions of successful uses of the test have all been one grand illusion...

How would such a shell avoid a Raleigh-Taylor instability?

Mit Thor is alles moeglich!

If you had a solid canopy of ice, with full integrity, it would function as a bubble would it not

I don't think it would have the tensile strength to hold together.

Not to mention that without support, the ice shell would begin to drift after the first perturbation, and very soon thereafter be pulled into the earth to shatter into bits.

OK, after a very busy day, I've read through the paper.

We have one fact which is observed: samples from coal seams, and other sampes of very old carbon of a biological origin, seem to contain a nonzero amount of ¹⁴C. This fact can't be chalked up to instrument error; elaborate steps are taken to account for systematic error, and the statistics render the random error smaller than the quantities detected.

That being said, we have to examine possible explanations. These are:

1. The radiocarbon ages measured are the actual ages of the samples.
2. Carbon-14 has somehow been added to the sample . (Or subtracted, but that's not the direction of change we're interested in.)
3. One or more of the assumptions underlying radiocarbon dating is flawed.
4. Something else.

There are a number of dating methods which can be applied to coal seams and other sources of ancient carbon. Comparison with overlying and underlying strata of igneous rock, for example, can "pinch" the age of the carbon deposit between ages that can be determined by the use of other radiometric clocks. The ages yielded for coal seams, for example, are incompatible with the radiocarbon ages. Explanation 1 is seriously downgraded, if not rejected altogether.

Extra ¹⁴C could be added by a number of possible methods. Modern water seeping through a coal seam could conceivably exchange dissolved carbon with carbon from the seam. Since dissolved CO₂ makes the water slightly acid, this is not too unreasonable.

Another possibility involves the presence of uranium and other radioactive materials which synthesize ¹⁴C in situ. And indeed, a report I saw mentioned in the talk.origins newsgroup mentions that the background ¹⁴C correlates better with concentrations of uranium than anything else.

Is it surprising that uranium would show up in and around carbon of biological origin? Not terribly. When I was learning health physics in college, one of the things I studied was the tendency for living organisms to concentrate particular elements from the environment. Phosphorus, for example, was found in fish at concentrations up to 30,000 times higher than in the surrounding water. If you want to assess the fraction of phosphorus that is ³²P, rather than filtering 30,000 gallons of sea water, you could process one gallon of native fish. Uranium and other radioactive metals are also taken up by living things. Indeed, this is one of the concerns of radioactive contamination -- radioactive elements often follow the same pathways non-radioactive elements do.

I suppose it's even possible some evil force is creating small amounts of ¹⁴C in situ to fool us all. Maybe that's what Screwtape was demoted to after that miserable failure of a nephew he produced. :-)

The paper does postulate one assumption in radiometric dating the authors believe to be faulty -- that rates of decay have been constant.

At the bottom of page 11, the authors speculate that all radioactive elements might, during the Flood, have undergone accelerated decay, and this acceleration would have been proportional to the half life.

...if ⁴⁰K, for example, underwent 400 Ma of decay during the Flood relative to a present half-life of 1250 Ma, then ¹⁴C would have undergone (400/1250)*5730 years = 1834 years of decay during the Flood.

(Note: if you do the algebra, you'll find this implies 20% of all radionuclides disappeared during the Flood. The half-life terms cancel out.)

We're starting to get into cafeteria science here. While nuclides are decaying, they're also releasing energy. Most, if not all, of the heat in the interior of the earth comes from radioactive decay. U-238, with a half-life of 4*10⁹ years is a significant contributor. What is the effect on the planet of cramming 1.44 billion years' energy release into a little over one year? How about Thorium with a half-life of 14.4 billion years? That crams 4.5 billion years of energy release into a little over a year.

Shall I look up the natural abundances and calculate how much energy that is to infuse into the planet?

Another side-effect, which should be readily calculable, has to do with nuclear decay series. One of the nuclides in the decay series of U-238 is U-234. It has a half-life of some 247,000 years, and is found in nature in secular equilibrium with U-238.

If there had an event which had perturbed radioactive decay rates as suggested in the article you cite, we should see considerably more U-234 in nature -- about a billion times more than we see now.

With a little more work, I could come up with countless examples, without even addressing the effects we should expect to see when we try to date rock samples by radiometric methods.

Certainly, this aspect of the authors' model is falsified.

I think for the time being, it looks like radioactive elements behave just the way the "uniformitarian model" holds they do.

This is extremely interesting. Even if you are not a creationist, as I readily admit I am, you should at least read the abstract. Bottom line is there is evidence to suggest that carbon dating (done using Carbon 14) casts doubt on the conventionally accepted dates for certain fossils. So much so, in fact, that a pattern appears to emerge that indicates a whole lot of stuff was snuffed out at the same time. Certainly should give one pause to eflect eiethre on the theories or on the dating methods at least. Please recall that dating of fossils is often done by reference to an assumed model for where the fossils should be found (it is circular logic, but that's just slant-foreheaded dumb old creationist me speaking).

Right now, it seems there's a certain amount of background carbon-14 in many samples, particularly in coal. Functionally, this means samples older than a certain age will have C-14 levels that can't be distinguished from the background noise within experimental error. (Recall, because radioactive decay is random, there's always some statistical error in a count. And since any sample, no matter how large, is a finite sample, there will be a certain variation in concentrations of various constituents due to sampling theory.)

The ICR seems to be advocating the theory that carbon dating is unreliable. I'm curious to see how they explain the very good correspondence between radiocarbon dates and actual ages in wood of known age (determined by counting tree rings).