161–170 of 545 posts
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Ultimately, yes; he will die no matter what.
As you get older this pedantry gets really tiring.
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I care enough that I would trust assessment of their health and condition only to qualified professionals with access to the relevant information, just like anyone else that I care about
300 CPM in hair after decontamination is a massive red flag. If this is from systemic circulation, could be GBq-level total body activity. The non-emergency classification is bureaucratic nonsense. This is an internal contamination event with unknown but potentially severe consequences.
A CPM value means nothing without additional context. Counts vary based on detector type and size, radiation type, energy, distance and geometry, all sorts of things. They're not comparable except in identical contexts. This is why the Sievert exists as a unit. As a general rule, falling into a reactor pool is probably fine, as long as you don't reach the bottom. (But please don't try it.) There's even an XKCD "What…
> On August 31st, 2010, a diver was servicing the spent fuel pool at the Leibstadt nuclear reactor in Switzerland. He spotted an unidentified length of tubing on the bottom of the pool and radioed his supervisor to ask what to do. He was told to put it in his tool basket, which he did. Due to bubble noise in the pool, he didn’t hear his radiation alarm.
When the tool basket was lifted from the water, the room’s radiation alarms went off. The basket was dropped back in the water and the diver left the pool. The diver’s dosimeter badges showed that he’d received a higher-than-normal whole-body dose, and the dose in his right hand was extremely high.
The object turned out to be protective tubing from a radiation monitor in the reactor core, made highly radioactive by neutron flux. It had been accidentally sheared off while a capsule was being closed in 2006. It sank to a remote corner of the pool floor, where it sat unnoticed for four years.
The tubing was so radioactive that if he’d tucked it into a tool belt or shoulder bag, where it sat close to his body, he could’ve been killed. As it was, the water protected him, and only his hand—a body part more resistant to radiation than the delicate internal organs—received a heavy dose
I love this book. Randall is such a gifted artist
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I care enough that I would trust assessment of their health and condition only to qualified professionals with access to the relevant information, just like anyone else that I care about
Do the people who have control of the information have an incentive to lie?
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That's what I was thinking, but it does look like 300 cpm for a few hours is essentially nothing, or it looks real bad, I can't tell. I found this: Days to receive chronic dose for increase cancer risk of 1 in a 1,000 432 (at 100 CPM) 86 (at 500 CPM) Ok so 300 for an hour (we'll assume the hair is cut off and the exposure either stops or 90% reduces) means no problem. Don't do that every day that's all. But it's from…
The report doesn't read like something involving 500 rem and potential death in 3 weeks. It says "Non Emergency". Can you link to this converter? It seems to be a rather key step that got handwaved. Wiki says [0] there isn't a standard on what a "count" counts. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counts_per_minute
Assuming this website was used, it looks like it does a naive multiplication by 5/3, which seems... simplistic? The rest of the page doesn't exactly fill me with confidence either. No indication of how the conversion factor was derived and there's a bunch of links to other CPM -> calculators. On top of that, the landing page for the root domain boasts about AI capabilities and their AI page prominently features "Elevate Your Content Creation" and "Generate high-quality AI content with ease!"
[0]: https://www.inayam.co/unit-converter/radioactivity/counts_pe...
300 CPM in hair after decontamination is a massive red flag. If this is from systemic circulation, could be GBq-level total body activity. The non-emergency classification is bureaucratic nonsense. This is an internal contamination event with unknown but potentially severe consequences.
A CPM value means nothing without additional context. Counts vary based on detector type and size, radiation type, energy, distance and geometry, all sorts of things. They're not comparable except in identical contexts. This is why the Sievert exists as a unit. As a general rule, falling into a reactor pool is probably fine, as long as you don't reach the bottom. (But please don't try it.) There's even an XKCD "What…
> A CPM value means nothing without additional context
For CPM, what matters is "CPM of "
CPM just tells you the number of particle detection. It does not tell you the particle type (e.g. alpha, beta, gamma) nor the energy level (i.e. eV). Without context, it is meaningless.
As an example, I can confidently say you are getting over 100bn CPM right now. The reason it doesn't matter is that this is neutrinos and they're not interacting with you[0]. 1CPM or 1e20CPM, who cares. Conversely, 1 CPM can be deadly. You definitely don't want to be hit by a single ReV (10^27) proton (good luck producing that though). Context matters.
> This is why the Sievert exists as a unit.
Sievert is joule per kilogram. So energy divided per mass, much like pressure is force over area. But determining biological impact still takes interpretation. You have weight factors by particle types (e.g. alpha = 2x beta) and there is also weighting factor for internal/external dose and locations like soft tissue (e.g. higher weighting for dose at throat vs dose at hands).
This is why it is incredibly important to use caution when interpreting radiation values. If you don't have training in this it is incredibly easy to unknowingly make major errors. The little details can dramatically change the outcome. Context is critical.
I'm not here to tell you how to actually do the calculation (you'll need a lot more info), I'm here to tell you that it's not easy and you're likely doing it wrong. The experts are not dumb. You're just missing context and a first order approximation is nowhere near enough for an accurate conclusion. It's nuclear physics lol
It shouldn't need be said, but nuclear physics is, in fact, complicated.
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I'm sorry you feel that way, but I actually feel like I shared fairly demure commentary and then presented my background with full transparency. I care mostly about the health of this worker, and less about the opinions of a 1 minute old account.
Everyone is wrong sometimes. When you realize you’re wrong, do you update your beliefs to be correct, or do you double down?