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Tracking radiation levels in Japan

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Re: Tracking radiation levels in Japan

#5

Radiation dose chart... http://xkcd.com/radiation/

According to that chart 100 millisieverts/year (or 0.01 per hour) is linked to increased cancer risk. The readings in cities near the reactor look like between 0.1 and 0.8. Not good if it doesn't go down.

Re: Tracking radiation levels in Japan

#7

Radiation dose chart... http://xkcd.com/radiation/

According to that chart 100 millisieverts/year (or 0.01 per hour) is linked to increased cancer risk. The readings in cities near the reactor look like between 0.1 and 0.8. Not good if it doesn't go down.

Right - Note, that those are rates per hour. Which means for the .8/Hour, you are seeing 19.2 mSv/Day. You hit that 100 mSv total in about a week. That's bad for two reasons, #1, it's exceeding the 100 mSv baseline, but also, I have to believe that getting that much radiation in a week, instead of a year, can't be good for you either.

Re: Tracking radiation levels in Japan

#10
Just a lurker here, but whoever is running this site is clueless.

It lists figures like "800Gy/h" which is far higher than the radiation level at Chernobyl, right after the accident, standing right beside the blown reactor.

If you check the sources, the units are in nano Gy/h. Their conversion to milliSievert is closer but still off by a factor of a 1000.

So the highest reading I can find is 700nGy/h at Hitatinaka: http://www.houshasen-pref-ibaraki.jp/present/result01.html

If you turn that into a yearly dose, using a weighting factor of 1 as the monitoring station website suggests, that's 6milliSievert/yr: the average yearly dose from background radiation. Exciting!

There's really no justification to make such a website.

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