Saturday, March 26, 2011

Wall Street Journal interactive on radiation in Japan

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704517404576224563960070934.html#project%3DJRADIATIONMAP
1103%26articleTabs%3Dinteractive

The above address should take you to the WSJ interactive on radiation in Japan. For example at the Fukushima Nuclear Plant Gate it is now 202.5 per hour as of March 25th at 4:30 JST which means that an hour there is more than 4 times the legally allowable dose of radiation allowed for a U.S. nuclear worker to receive and keep working.

I find it more useful to know how much dose a person will receive if they are outside in a 24 hour period and also in a 30 day period. (But remember you would have to be living outside like a homeless person to actually receive this dose.) However, this is the actual amount of radiation on the ground, roofs of buildings, porches etc. on roads, trees, all plants and literally everything outside including animals, birds etc. in this area. So, if your dog or cat is outside in a high radiation area you might want to wash them off while wearing a mask to keep the radiation particles out of your mouth and lungs before you pet them unless you are wearing gloves that are washable. Gloves while touching anything outside that you then can wash might be the best idea of all. Also, if you have to work outside in a higher radiation area be sure to wash those clothes as soon as you take them off while you are wearing gloves to avoid contaminating yourself or your home with unnecessary radiation.

So the formula to know this information (daily or monthly doses in your area) is to multiply the hourly dose by 24 for one day and then multiply that by 30 for the month. However, since radiation is constantly going up and down all over this can only be a sort of average for any area calibrated in this way.

I hope this is useful.

For me personally, the single most distressing thing about all this is the fact that it only takes one particle of radioactive dust lodged in a person's lungs to kill a person over 20 to 30 years. For me, this is the single most upsetting thing  about this whole situation. This might be true for all creatures even though most things don't live as long as humans tend to.

Near Tokyo I noticed that there is an outside dose of .142 per hour which would mean a daily outside dose of 3.408 and a monthly average dose of 81.792
Of course, this is a theoretical average because radiation could spike either up or down until the whole plant is cemented in or there is some other outcome.

No comments: