"I blame 1950s B-movies: sixty years later, it appears that most of what journalists know about radioactivity came from watching Godzilla.
On February 8, Adam Housley of Fox News reported a story with a terrifying headline: "Radiation at Japan's Fukushima Reactor Is Now at 'Unimaginable' Levels."
Let's just pick up the most exciting paragraphs:
The radiation levels at Japan's crippled Fukushima nuclear power plant are now at "unimaginable" levels.
[Housley] said the radiation levels -- as high as 530 sieverts per hour -- are now the highest they've been since 2011 when a tsunami hit the coastal reactor."To put this in very simple terms. Four sieverts can kill a handful of people," he explained.
The degree to which this story is misleading is amazing, but to explain it, we need a little bit of a tutorial.
...While we're here, let's look at Housley's other attempt at a factual statement:
"The worry is with 300 tons of radioactive water going into the Pacific every day, what is that doing to the Pacific Ocean?" said Housley.
This, at least, is something we can evaluate.
...What does this mean?
Well, the U.S. EPA safety standard for tritium in drinking water sets an upper limit of 740 Bq/liter.
Basically, you wouldn't want to drink it, right there at the outflow into the Pacific, for any extended length of time -- although it probably wouldn't hurt you.
You could swim in it, though.
So what have we learned today?
We learned that inside the reactor containment at Fukushima Daini, site of the post-tsunami reactor accident, it's very very radioactive.
How radioactive?
We don't know, because the dose rate has been reported in inappropriate units -- Sieverts are only meaningful if someone is inside the reactor to get dosed.
Then we learned that the Fukushima accident is leaking 300 tons of radioactive water -- but until we dig into primary sources, we didn't learn the radioactive water is very nearly clean enough to be drinking water.
So what effect does this have on the ocean, as Housley asks?
None.
The third thing we learned -- and I think probably the most important thing -- is to never trust a journalist writing about anything involving radiation, the metric system, or any arithmetic more challenging than long division."
Read it all!
1 comment:
You see, Jim, I am a retired cfw (common foundry worker) and I even knew that this was totally misleading. I was listening to a radio show last night, called Ground Zero with Clyde Lewis. I sometimes listen to it for fun. He was talking about this, all doom and gloom. He is a conspiracy theorist type, and I recognized that he was full of it. The readings by themselves were totally bogus, and misleading. So thank you for this post. And keep up the job, it is important.
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