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Michael Penn / Juneau Empire / AP
Gus van Vliet of the Air Quality Division of the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation works on a radiation detection monitor that is on the roof of the Floyd Dryden Middle School in Juneau, Alaska.
Last updated 9:30 p.m. ET:
Americans are being exposed to almost twice as much radiation as they used to get — but not because of fallout from nuclear accidents in Japan or elsewhere. Medical tests, not nuclear accidents, account for the dramatic rise in our radiation exposure. Based on today's readings, the radiation coming from the troubled Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear complex rates barely a blip.
The Environmental Protection Agency said the readings from its nationwide network of atmospheric air-sniffing sensors showed "typical fluctuations in background radiation levels" that were "far below levels of concern." (You can check the updates on this Web page.) The initial U.N. radiation counts from California were "about a billion times beneath levels that would be health-threatening," one diplomat told The Associated Press.
In a later statement, the EPA and the U.S. Department of Energy said none of their detectors picked up "any radiation levels of concern."
The agencies also provided more details on the U.N. count, which was detected by a radiation-sniffing station in Sacramento and fed into the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty Organization's monitoring network. For the geeks out there, the level was 0.0002 disintegrations per second per cubic meter of air, with radioactive isotopes of iodine, tellurium and cesium represented in the mix.
A similar reading was reported by the Department of Energy in Washington state: 0.1 disintegrations per second per cubic meter of air, attributed to xenon-133.
"The doses received by people per day from natural sources of radiation — such as rocks, bricks, the sun and other background sources — are 100,000 times the dose rates from the particles and gas detected in California or Washington state," the agencies said in their joint statement.
That would imply that the fallout packed a punch on the order of 0.00003 millisieverts a year. In comparison, a dental X-ray amounts to 0.01 millisieverts, and a full-body CT scan can deliver 10 millisieverts. It used to be that our average exposure was 3 millisieverts a year from natural sources and 0.6 millisieverts from extra sources (such as X-rays). Today, the average is more like 3 plus 3 or more.
Researchers have found that increased cancer risk is associated with extra radiation exposures ranging from 10 to 100 millisieverts, depending on how spread out the doses are and who's conducting the study. When you're exposed to a 1,000-millisievert dose over a short period of time, you're likely to experience the symptoms of radiation sickness. And 10,000 millisieverts is lethal.
At one point this week, the readings at Fukushima rose to 400 millisieverts per hour. Two and a half hours of that would make you sick. A day would kill you.
All this makes 0.00003 millisieverts sound pretty puny. It's true that these are merely the first U.S. readings to be announced, and if significantly more radiation is released in Japan, those numbers might go up. But they won't go up by a factor of a million or a billion — which is why even those who have sounded grave warnings about the radiation threat say that U.S. residents needn't fear the winds coming from the west.
"I don't think the people in California need to be overly concerned with it, other than the fact that the people in Japan are facing disaster," said David Lochbaum, director of the Nuclear Safety Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, a watchdog group.
For the Japanese, the situation could get more dire. Here are some of the factoids from the UCS briefing, as well as from my talks with other experts:
- If the nuclear fuel rods stored at the Fukushima complex were to break down and catch fire, it would take just hours for a cloud containing radioactive fallout to rise from the site, Lochbaum said. "Cesium would be the worst, but there's an awful lot of other radioisotopes that would follow along. You have krypton. There's just a whole litany of things that are in that spent fuel that are posing the risk," he said.
- Aerial readings suggest that the worst hazardous contamination has not spread beyond the 19-mile-radius (30-kilometer-radius) zone established by the Japanese government. A fuel-rod fire would spread significant fallout farther, but not all the way to America, said Edwin Lyman, a senior staff scientist at UCS. "It's still my judgment that most of the fallout would be within several hundred miles of the site," he said. "There would be hot spots, you know, potentially further away, like we did see in Chernobyl, but still, the dilution over the course of thousands of miles would be significant."
- Even with today's upgrade in Fukushima's danger level, Chernobyl still ranks as the world's worst nuclear accident. But in terms of its fallout effect for the United States, the nuclear weapons tests from a half-century ago loom even larger. "What most people don't realize is that only 6 percent of the cesium floating around out there is from Chernobyl," said Fred Mettler, a professor emeritus of radiology at the University of New Mexico who has studied the effects of the 1986 disaster. More than 90 percent of the cesium contamination has been traced to weapons testing, he said.
Update for 8:10 p.m. ET: Researchers from the University of Maryland are drawing up computerized projections showing how radiation from the Fukushima nuclear site should be transported through the atmosphere. Check out this Web page for the latest projections, and this news release for an explanation of the projections.
Update for 9:30 p.m. ET: The figures from the EPA and the Department of Energy have been updated to reflect the latest radiation readings.
More on the disaster in Japan:
- Robot scouts en route to Japan
- Radiation risk can be hard to assess
- Is it time for the Chernobyl option?
- U.S. military detects more radiation
- What is Japan doing to fix reactors?
- If there's a meltdown, then what?
- Q&A: Clearing up nuclear questions
- Cosmic Log archive on the Japan crisis
- Special report on the disaster in Japan
Join the Cosmic Log community by clicking the "like" button on our Facebook page or by following msnbc.com science editor Alan Boyle as b0yle on Twitter. To learn more about Alan Boyle's book on Pluto and the search for planets, check out the website for "The Case for Pluto."
Leave a Comment:
Calm down!!!! I grew up in 50's. We were testing in NV, the French in the Pacific and the Russians in Siberia. It wasn't until 1962 that we stopped nuclear testing in the atmosphere. Maybe it time to calm down and start doing some smart things like building safe nuclear power plants. Duh!!!! As my business partner and best friend used to say "what did you think was going to happen?". This is getting to be Jackass (Congress and the Administration) 4!
This article should have been titled:
Stupidity outweighs the fallout in America
What do liberals and southerners have in common? When the word “snow” is mentioned, southerners clean out the grocery stores. When the words “nuclear accident” are mentioned, liberals clean out the potassium iodide shelves. Both arise from irrational fear and defies common sense. I really don't understand the fear of nuclear energy. As my liberal pot smoking friends always tell me, uranium exists naturally, so how can it possibly heard you? Of course it's not that simple because exposure to high level radiation will kill you quickly while smoking pot will kill you slowly. As poster #1 said, you just need to build safety into all nuclear plants, learning from Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima. We know the Fukushima plant was structurally sound because the 9.0 quake did not damage it. It was the failure of the backup generator fuel system that started the problem. Future designs of new plants and modifications of existing plants will easily fixed that.
Here in the U. S., only a complete hysteric would worry about fallout from the tragedy across the ocean in Japan.
This Liberal Commie Traitor Ex-Republican is enjoying the California sunset with doors and windows open, about a mile inland from the coast. The microwave in the kitchen is probably the greatest clear and present danger in terms of radiation. There's no pot or potassium iodide in this house, and no kneejerk hatred of nuclear energy, as long as it's backed up with sound engineering.
Sorry to shatter the stereotype, but we Communists come in all sizes, shapes, and colors, and even argue and make fun of each other. Right now, my little cell of Commies overwhelmingly feels only terrible sadness for the people of Japan.
road warrior. all you have to say around republicans is the word "muslim" and they go into a panic. don't act like you guys are fearless.
Yeah because we all know how calm and rational those conservatives are..
LOL... Seriously made me laugh at work saying liberals, the group more likely to be educated and critical thinking are who is panicking about this, as opposed to the 'god fearing' we don't need no lernin or science conservatives. The I'd sell my mom for $2 conservatives. The I'm going to impeach Obama for being black conservatives.
Lest we should forget...pot isn't going to kill you...
It's less harmful than cigarettes and alcohol.
You can't even overdose on marajuana...
Funny, this liberal traitor has stockpiled KI for years in his bomb shelter. The bomb shelter he built after getting out of the military. The bomb shelter in the house 20 miles from the old nuclear power plant that he was in favor of building.
Oh well. As my old father used to say: "I swore on a Bible to defend the Constitution, and from the looks of things I failed miserably."
Whatever it is you're smokin', Road Warrior, it sure looks like it produces some mighty interesting euphoric delusions...or are they paranoid delusions?
Don't forget about the newest source of exposure to radiation for American citizens, Body scanners. Didn't they just find out that the X-Ray ones give a dose 10 times as high as the TSA has claimed? Even with that it may not be much per scan, but every bit gets you that much closer to terminal cancer.
Sorry, but the body scanners don't even register when it comes to radiation. It's the CT, PET and Liver scans that AMericans have done every day by their physicians. There was a huge article about this is the newspapers last week.
Like the Japanese lady who survived the Nagasaki bomb said, people today are too sensitive, hysterical, irrational.
wvoutpost.com
For more info on Japan.
This is the best article I've seen to date on this event. Cudos
weapons testing: 90% of the cesium contamination in the world .....
"For the geeks out there, the level was 0.0002 disintegrations per second"
Geeks? So anyone who understands a number now is a geek?
Has this country been dumbed down to this extreme?!?!
Yeah over-sensationalized news headlines to get people to read articles outweigh the fear that outweighs the fallout in America. Most people are quietly going about their business so I and the rest of America (and I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that probably includes "most people" in the country) would appreciate it if journalists would NOT label those irrational, fearful people as "America".
http://xkcd.com/radiation/
I guess the krypton is why we haven't seen Superman come to the rescue. How come we haven't seen the big green lizard coming out of the ocean headed for Tokyo?
Krypton was the planet, kryptonite was what repelled Superman.
The big green lizard has been forever repelled by "MOTHRA"( whom I enjoyed immensely; especially the little twins or triplets who sang to Mothra)...Why don't they ever show those movies anymore. Great fun!
On a spring day in 1986 the US conducted a full-scale test of a new design of a safe reactor in Nevada. The design worked very well--- if the cooling shut down and the fuel rods heated up the rods would automatically expand up and out and the control rods would drop in. A totally safe design. And it did not make the news. Chernobyl happened on the same day as the test. Ironic.
On the same day in 1986 we were working on an experimental liquid-sodium nuclear reactor developed by Mitsubishi, and being tested at Sta Susana Lab in Los Angeles, located right over an earthquake fault. The Northridge Earthquake was so devastating to the facility, that Rocketdyne scrubbed all records of the experimental nuke, built without permits, exposing 5 million Angelinos to plutonium gamma death. I still had the installation plans for about ten years until we moved, but nobody cared. Radiation schmadiation. Even with their radiation spill, Sta Susana kept experimenting with MTTW reactors for decades afterward. Besides, cancer is good for business!
I had a doctor tell me that if I wasn't injured or had a medical emergency to refuse CT scans. She said that the amount of radiation put out by a CT scan was 300 times higher than an Xray. So if you ever need a CT scan, dont sit on a rock on the same day. :)
Gee, thanks for the info. on CT scans being as I've had a few with a bout with cancer from some years back. Has anyone ever heard of Chemtrails? These things are supposed to carry aluminum, barium, strontium, thorium, known cancer causing agents and we are being inundated almost on daily basis here in this country with our so-called leaders calling them Contrails, yeah. There is a difference in one being a spray and the other being ice crystals, (condensation). Check out dvds "What In The World Are They Spraying", and "Chemtrails; The Story No One Is Telling". On the other side of spectrum check out dvd "Holes In Heaven; Advances In Tesla Technology" where supposedly we are being inundated with electromagnetic frequency waves in the upper spheres with this experimentation so-called research we being the guinea pigs and earth, great huh? For further research or reading check out "Angels Don't Play This HAARP". This acronym stands for high active auroral research program, great huh........... It seems like we are always told to look at the evil people worldwide with evil here in our own backyard with deceitful acts shoved down our throats and that of our loved ones blinding the majority of us with this deceit.
Dom if it helps you sleep at night, I've seen the original Tesla mechanism used by the military, I can even tell you where it's located, and you have nothing to worry about. The sensationalism is 'Area 51' stuff. There are no space aliens, there is no other life outside this planet, and there is no HAARP earthquake or any other kind of quake. Chemtrails I don't know for sure, there are some research reports about using high-altitude nano crystals to cool the earth and offset the impact of carbon dioxide and solar cycle, but what you're probably noticing is the huge increase in air contrails over the US.
What you DO need to be worried about is your country is owned by War Mercs and International Usurists, we are -$15 TRILLION in debt and burning out at -$2.54 TRILLION a year now. Thanks to this new war in Libya, we will be completely OWNED by 2014, everything we have in hock, 1/6th of Americans 50,000,000 of US, permanently jobless and homeless as internally displaced refugees, the largest refugee population on Earth, right here, invisibly stealthed, in our own country!
That's gonna hurt a whole lot more than some alien probing your chemtrail with his HAARP.
I beg to differ.
I always figured the chemtrails were full of estrogen so that men would act like little girls by allowing our society to get beaten over the head by the letter of the law as opposed to using good judgment and following the intent of the law. Just a conspiracy theory of course.
The earthquake in Japan, as well as Hurricane Katrina and the tsunami in Indonesia in 2004 point to one thing that is really dangerous: living within 1 to 3 miles of the ocean and at an elevation of less than 100 feet. Nearly 300,000 people were killed by the rising flood waters from these three events alone. The focus on nuclear safety and radiaion monitoring is causing people to ignore the true dangers of living near an ocean. The tsunami from the Japanese earthquake caused millions of dollars in damage to harbors in California! One person was killed when he was swept out to sea by the receeding tsunami because he ignored the warnings to stay away from the ocean. To really save lives then, all low lying land in areas where hurricanes and tsunamis occur should be abandoned.
Ditto building cities on bottomland farmland near rivers and streams, literally destroying our food supply. Future paleontologists will stop in shock when they find a city buried under prime bottomland farmland, and scratch their heads, wondering what kind of environmental poison would destroy human rationality. The environmental poison of fiat paper and a little green ink with an Eye of Mordor pyramid on the back.
Millisieverts? What happened to Roentgens?
They went to something more scalable, I suppose.
I understand that if my hair falls out, my teeth fall out and my skin gets blotchy it means I have radiation poisoning. But that has been going on since I turned 50. So how the hell do I know now? lol
So I woke up this morning and I freaked the hell out because everything in my room was glowing from all the radiation exposure, then when I was fully awake I realized it was all just a reflection of the light cast by my light lite refracting off of the sleepy film on my eyes......
The only radiation I have ever experienced is the radiation that eminates from my brain the day after I have consumed a bottle of Captn Morgan....seriously it is a melt down that no amount of water can cool off.
Here in Japan, we have seen almost no evidence of panic about radiation, even from those people coming out of the evacuation zone.