Wednesday, August 3, 2011

10,000 millisieverts per hour


GeoEye

Workers at the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant have discovered a radioactive hot spot far more lethal than anything previously recorded at the damaged facility, the plant's owner reported Tuesday.The reading at the base of a ventilation tower between the No. 1 and No. 2 reactors Monday afternoon was 10,000 millisieverts per hour, the Tokyo Electric Power Company announced -- high enough that a 60-minute exposure could kill a man or woman within weeks. A U.S. expert told CNN that radioactive particles most likely concentrated in that area in the first days of the disaster, as plant operators tried to vent the damaged reactors.By comparison, the average resident of an industrialized country receives 3 millisieverts of background radiation per year, while the highest level reported in the days following the disaster was about 400 millisieverts.
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Though it is not in Reactor number 3 like I had expected, 10,000 milisieverts per hour is very scary if not fatal to anything that lives in that area that could be exposed to this high of a radiation source. Hopefully this radiation can be contained somehow to this site so it can't move around anymore.

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