You may have heard the term "sieverts" in conjunction with the radiation leak from the nuclear power plants in Japan. If you remember your science classes from years back, the terms rad, roentgen, rem, curie, gray, or bequerel may be more familiar.
There's an interactive Radiation Dose Chart on the American Nuclear Society's web site that you can use to calculate a normal yearly dosage. It asks you questions about exposure such as how often you travel, what kind of house you live in, how often you have x-rays and such.
My expected radiation dose was: 3.24 millisieverts per year. Average is around 6.2 ms per year. Let's go with that amount in our calculations. International standards allow as much as 50 millisieverts per year for those who work with radioactive material.
Look up at the paragraph above. This water has 1000 millisieverts per hour. Times 24 hours per day, times 365 days per year, that's 8,760,000 millisieverts per year.
So compared that's 1,412,900 times greater than the with "average" annual dose one would expect. And 175,200 times the amount International Standards allow.
What I need to do next in this piece is---analyze the effects of that much radiation. Stay tuned.
Whatever the terms, it comes down to: how much radiation are people being exposed to? What does it mean to me? More importantly, what does it mean to the people directly affected by radiation exposure?
First, some terms: "Roentgen," is the measure of gamma radiation in a cubic centimeter of air. "Rad" (Radiation Absorbed Dose) and "Rem" (Radiation Equivalent Man) are for all intents the same thing. Essentially it's radiation intensity (time) vs absorption (strength) vs dosage/effectiveness. Look here for a more detailed explanation. There's also a good explanation here.
A "sievert", a measure of radiation absorbed by a person, is 100 Rem. 1 "Gray" is 100 rad. For a chart to translate between various units, visit the civil defense musem site.
Workers also discovered radioactive water in the deep trenches outside three units, with the airborne radiation levels outside Unit 2 exceeding 1,000 millisieverts per hour -- more than four times the amount that the government considers safe for workers, TEPCO said Monday.What does that mean to the people nearby? What's considered safe and what's a normal dose?
There's an interactive Radiation Dose Chart on the American Nuclear Society's web site that you can use to calculate a normal yearly dosage. It asks you questions about exposure such as how often you travel, what kind of house you live in, how often you have x-rays and such.
My expected radiation dose was: 3.24 millisieverts per year. Average is around 6.2 ms per year. Let's go with that amount in our calculations. International standards allow as much as 50 millisieverts per year for those who work with radioactive material.
Look up at the paragraph above. This water has 1000 millisieverts per hour. Times 24 hours per day, times 365 days per year, that's 8,760,000 millisieverts per year.
So compared that's 1,412,900 times greater than the with "average" annual dose one would expect. And 175,200 times the amount International Standards allow.
What I need to do next in this piece is---analyze the effects of that much radiation. Stay tuned.
