Hi, all. A few quick things to follow up from yesterday. First, I took a quick look at the web page that Jerry posted. I haven't had a chance to take a close look yet, but I can at least share a few impressions with you and I'll post more when I get a chance to take a closer read.
The bottom line is that it's a bit of a grab bag of stuff. There are a number of articles that seem to have some fairly solid facts in them, and there are some that seem a little less plausible. But the biggest thing that I noticed was the interpretation and explanation that was given, and this was all over the place. As one example, it is factually true to say that levels of I-131 were hundreds of thousands higher than what we normally find in nature. But that statement is misleading - we normally don't find I-131 in nature, so even a trivial amount (as in less than what we give to a nuclear medicine patient to diagnose disease) would show up as being hundreds of thousands times higher than normal. So one person could look at the underlying fact and conclude that we're all going to die while another person can look at the same fact and point out that we give this much iodine to tens of thousands of people every day.
Another story notes that they found 1400 Becquerels of radioactivity per cubic meter of ocean water in the vicinity of Fukushima I agree that this is a high level - especially since there's normally virtually no Cs-137 in seawater, and there's no doubt that it came from Fukushima. There's been a lot of study of the impact of ingesting Cs-137 and we know more about the dose from this nuclide than we do from virtually any other - ingesting 3.7 million Bq will give you a whole-body radiation exposure of 5 rem. So drinking about 2600 cubic meters of seawater (about 570,000 gallons) of this seawater will give a person a radiation dose of 5 rem - which will increase your lifetime cancer risk by about 1/4%. Again - the facts (the nuclide concentrations) in this story seem to be reasonable; what makes the difference is whether they're interpreted as "Oh my god we're all going to die" or "That's a lot higher than it ought to be, we need to stop it from getting any worse, but at least it's not enough to be a danger."
So my first impression is that this is a mixture of good and bad with regards to both the quality of the information presented and the manner in which it's interpreted. I agree that the numbers are higher than they usually are in nature and I agree that the numbers are higher than they ought to be - where I disagree is in feeling that the situation is not as dire as many make it out to be. Let me give one quick analogy and then I'll sign off until I've had a chance to take a closer look at more of the articles. I know that crashing my car into a brick wall at 1o0 mph is almost 100% fatal. Does this mean that I have a 10% of dying in a 10 mph crash? Or a 1% chance of death in a 1 mph accident? How upset should I be if I catch my kids driving at 20 mph if I assume that an accident at that speed was 20% likely to cause their death? The math seems pretty straightforward - but at the same time we know that the reality is more complex. Anyhow - enough for now and more later!
The bottom line is that it's a bit of a grab bag of stuff. There are a number of articles that seem to have some fairly solid facts in them, and there are some that seem a little less plausible. But the biggest thing that I noticed was the interpretation and explanation that was given, and this was all over the place. As one example, it is factually true to say that levels of I-131 were hundreds of thousands higher than what we normally find in nature. But that statement is misleading - we normally don't find I-131 in nature, so even a trivial amount (as in less than what we give to a nuclear medicine patient to diagnose disease) would show up as being hundreds of thousands times higher than normal. So one person could look at the underlying fact and conclude that we're all going to die while another person can look at the same fact and point out that we give this much iodine to tens of thousands of people every day.
Another story notes that they found 1400 Becquerels of radioactivity per cubic meter of ocean water in the vicinity of Fukushima I agree that this is a high level - especially since there's normally virtually no Cs-137 in seawater, and there's no doubt that it came from Fukushima. There's been a lot of study of the impact of ingesting Cs-137 and we know more about the dose from this nuclide than we do from virtually any other - ingesting 3.7 million Bq will give you a whole-body radiation exposure of 5 rem. So drinking about 2600 cubic meters of seawater (about 570,000 gallons) of this seawater will give a person a radiation dose of 5 rem - which will increase your lifetime cancer risk by about 1/4%. Again - the facts (the nuclide concentrations) in this story seem to be reasonable; what makes the difference is whether they're interpreted as "Oh my god we're all going to die" or "That's a lot higher than it ought to be, we need to stop it from getting any worse, but at least it's not enough to be a danger."
So my first impression is that this is a mixture of good and bad with regards to both the quality of the information presented and the manner in which it's interpreted. I agree that the numbers are higher than they usually are in nature and I agree that the numbers are higher than they ought to be - where I disagree is in feeling that the situation is not as dire as many make it out to be. Let me give one quick analogy and then I'll sign off until I've had a chance to take a closer look at more of the articles. I know that crashing my car into a brick wall at 1o0 mph is almost 100% fatal. Does this mean that I have a 10% of dying in a 10 mph crash? Or a 1% chance of death in a 1 mph accident? How upset should I be if I catch my kids driving at 20 mph if I assume that an accident at that speed was 20% likely to cause their death? The math seems pretty straightforward - but at the same time we know that the reality is more complex. Anyhow - enough for now and more later!
