Radioactive dinner

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Here is a video of how visitors to chernobyl exclusion zone were perswaded to eat radioactive dinner by the local inhabitants of the zone: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1prYcs6W ... re=related

Some of the videos of Chernobyl residents show that the old women are doing just fine, but many of the men have had health problems like enlarged hearts, which might be accounted for by differences in alcohol drinking habits, obesity, etc. Remember, that "normal life" includes the usual maladies even in the absence of radiation, including cancer for those who live long enough to get cancer.

The main problem with the Chernobyl fallout now is Cesium which has a half life of about 30 years and decays with an energy of about 1.17 MeV. It would be interesting to know just what is the radiation count in the food. The radiation count, how much food is consumed, and the residence time of cesium in the body would all figure into the committed dose for someone who will eat the food regularly over a period of, say 30 years.

With enough cesium you can see your bones glow in the dark. Think of a dazzling smile, but all over and in the dark.

ruveyn

If that happens then I suppose one could say that I'm "boned".

Radioactive dinner!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_equivalent_dose

Leave it to a Nagasaki bomb survivor to put things into perspective. I've been told that even people who received a high dose and got sick in the Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear blasts generally went on to live a "normal life" if they survived the radiation sickness.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7MktwMxGe-U[/youtube]

(Thread moved from General Autism Discussion forum)

Radiation sickness is generally considered to start at around 1 Sievert of acute exposure. Highest acute dose anyone has had or will ever have off Fukushima was about a tenth of that, the guys who were working in radioactive water for several hours at the plant. Fukushima is a non-story of giant proportions.

True, and more specifically, one can say that radiation sickness starts at 1 Gray for whole body exposure, not 1 Sievert. 1 Gray ~ 1 Sievert for electrons and gamma/Xrays but the Sievert unit takes into account stochastic effects for calculating cancer risk, but it's not the appropriate unit if you want to measure someone's dose for burns and acute illness.

Radiation sickness as a deterministic effect that is concerned only with total energy absorbed per kg of tissue, where 1 Gray = 1 Joule per kg. Much higher doses can be absorbed by local tissues like the hands and feet, far in excess of what is fatal for whole body exposures. For example, skin reddening for maybe a day or two is seen at around 2-6 Gray of local exposure.

It was misleading to report that the Fukushima workers were burned, because the word "burned" implies skin reddening or other clinical symptoms, which would not be seen for doses in the neighborhood of 0.1 to 0.2 Gray/Sievert. Also, the doses received were mostly in their feet, which is not nearly as bad as whole body exposures of the same dose per kg of tissue.

wouldn't people shell out for a Geiger counter, and check if their food is contaminated?

I'll pass on that. I'd rather live.

Slightly off-topic but relevant, commonly used no-salt salt substitute is very mildly radioactive. Potasium is slightly radioactive and No-salt is potassium chloride, not sodium chloride (table salt) so it does register slightly on a geiger counter:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FEnKTmQ0bdA

I do have a gieger counter and have tried this- it does register but just slightly over the ambient 'background' radiation levels.

I wouldn't eat that rubbish anyway, it tastes awful.

Here's a concept photo of the new dome they're going to put over the melted reactor. They could paint it yellow, and write a slogan on it saying: "There's magic under the golden arches.". There could be a statue of Ronald McDonald tending the reactor core. Salt packet condiments at the McDonalds opened nearby will say "This salt supplies cesium, a necessary nutrient.".

Here's the start of an informative series on radiation. One shocking thing you might not know about Chernobyl is, that women were advised to have abortions and about 200,000 (sounds a bit high but might still be in the thousands if you count the rest of europe) of them had them. This was among populations exposed to something like 25 millisieverts or perhaps much less than that. Pregnancies far enough along in women who get a low dose will be OK as this one case in the video was. Doctors gave advice apparently without regard to how far along they were and without knowing their doses. About 56 people died as a direct result of the radiation, but 200,000 unnecessary abortions happened due to the overreaction to the event, a result which is about 4000 times worse than the event itself. Even if this figure is overexaggerated and it's really something like 2000 babies that were otherwise intended to be brought to full term, the overrreaction was still worse than the event itself. Even today, this overreaction impedes the expansion of nuclear power and so we're left with energy research being basically limited to infeasible and low yield schemes like batteries (where ya gonna get the electricity?), biofuels and wind. Meanwhile, more dangerous but affordable sources of energy like coal continue to raise the atmospheric CO2 levels and kill miners by the thousands each year.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z1HF_TnCkhg&feature=related[/youtube]