

Banana equivalent dose - soyelmango
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_equivalent_dose

======
jharsman
A number of years ago there was an incident in Sweden where a tiny crack was
discovered in a container that had been used to transport nuclear waste from
one of Sweden's reactors.

This caused a lot of media attention and some politicians made statements
about how this was unacceptable and that they would look into it.

One reporter interviewed an older physicist that worked with radiation
protection for the government and asked him if a substantial amount of
radiation had been released. He said something along the lines of:

"Well, yes there was a fairly significant amount of radiation, about the same
level as you would be exposed to when standing next to several crates of
bananas."

This made the media hype seem somewhat exaggerated...

~~~
soyelmango
I think the media's exaggerated response to tiny nuclear leaks is, however,
one case where I'd prefer media hype to put the pressure on the industry to
over-engineer their containers.

The consequences of breaking open (not just a tiny crack) a crate of bananas
and a container of industrial nuclear material are probably many many
multitudes apart.

~~~
anamax
I'll bet that more people have been killed in the last 10 years by falling
crates of bananas than have been killed by leaking nuke containers.

Yes, there are far more crates of bananas. My point is that we should make
these decisions with cost-benefit analysis, not hype.

~~~
whyenot
Six months ago you could have made the same claim about blowout preventers.
Extremely rare catastrophic failures can cost a bundle. In many cases you may
not even be aware of the risks or the potential costs before you first
encounter them.

More nuclear power is the future, at least in the near term, but we should
have the humility to admit we don't really understand all the risks and all
the costs.

~~~
daten
We also don't have enough resources to protect against every imaginable risk,
which six-months ago, is all the current oil disaster could have been:
imagined.

It still makes more sense to spend attention and resources protecting us from
falling crates of bananas if those are more harmful in reality.

But fear normally wins these battles, like with terrorism. Automobile
accidents kill about 36,000 people[1] per year in the United States. That's 12
times the number[2] of people killed in the 9/11 attacks. Which one of those
do you think we're spending hundreds of billions on?

1\. <http://www-fars.nhtsa.dot.gov/Main/index.aspx>

2\. <http://nymag.com/news/articles/wtc/1year/numbers.htm>

~~~
lidmith
I don't know, how much goes into transportation in the US? I mean, aside from
the vehicles, including researching new tech for safety, advertising those
features, law enforcement of safe driving laws, DMV money, roadwork, and
whatever else goes into it. It seems like a lot to me.

Another thing to think about is that maybe we're hitting the safety cap in
automobiles. Maybe the cost of making things more safe nowadays is just way
too high. It could be that the cost of going after some terrorists is even
higher, but we might not have been so sure at the time.

Also, the problem with ignoring people who set out to murder you is that it
shows an unwillingness to do so. It might prompt other would be killers to
attack. A car, on the other hand, isn't going to notice all the accidents
happening, and choose to crash because of them.

~~~
sprout
>Also, the problem with ignoring people who set out to murder you is that it
shows an unwillingness to do so.

Terrorism is not about murdering people. It's about pushing people like
yourself to overreact.

~~~
lidmith
Terrorism is pretty much about murdering people. If you're talking about the
motive for terrorism though, I didn't mention it, so I don't know why you
would try to contradict me on something I never mentioned.

Also, what are people like me? And what is a proper reaction to an organized
attempt to kill civilians in your country? I do not suggest that the US took
the proper course of action, btw.

~~~
Tuna-Fish
> Terrorism is pretty much about murdering people.

No. Terrorism is, by definition, about using fear as a weapon to further your
goals. Terrorism can be perfectly successful even if nobody dies -- it's all
about playing your opponent's need to react against him. That's why even a
fake bomb, or pre-announced bomb attacks IRA style are terrorism -- because
there has to be a reaction to a bomb threat, at a relatively small cost a
terrorist can force the opponent to do huge evacuations and bomb sweeps.

Completely ignoring the 9/11 would have been a better reaction that what the
USA took -- but as usually with well planned terrorism, completely ignoring
the attack would have been politically impossible.

> And what is a proper reaction to an organized attempt to kill civilians in
> your country?

A proportioned response against the attackers, instead of some of their
various allies or complete third parties.

------
m0th87
Radioactive output of Chernobyl = 140e6 curies [1]

Output in picocuries = 140e6 * 1e12 = 1.4e20

Picocuries per kg of bananas = 3520

Radioactive output of Chernobyl in kg of bananas = 1.4e20 / 3520 ~= 4e16

(for reference, the weight of the Earth ~= 6e24 kg [2])

1:
[http://archive.greenpeace.org/comms/nukes/chernob/read25.htm...](http://archive.greenpeace.org/comms/nukes/chernob/read25.html)

2:
[http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=weight+of+the+earth+in+...](http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=weight+of+the+earth+in+kg)

~~~
cwp
Neat, but misses the point.

~~~
jcl
Not really. One thing missing from the article is the banana equivalent level
for more serious radiation concerns, such as the banana-equivalent of a chest
x-ray or radiation poisoning. Otherwise, when someone hears, for example, that
living within 10 miles of a certain nuclear plant is equivalent to eating a
banana a day, they may well conclude that both the plant _and bananas_ are
serious health risks.

~~~
cwp
Ah, good point.

I was thinking more along these lines: the purpose of talking about "banana
equivalent doses" is to make otherwise meaningless numbers easier to
understand by relating them to everyday experience. The comment by m0th87
doesn't really do that. "40000000000000000 kilograms of bananas" is just as
difficult to comprehend as "140000000 curies".

So to relate serious radiation back to bananas, let's say that Chernobyl
released as much radiation as worldwide banana production[1] for the next
55,000 years.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bannana#Trade>

~~~
rbanffy
> 140000000 curies

I gather 140000000 curies means something like "how many is the least of your
problems"

------
pingswept
This seems like a useful way to _decrease_ concern about radiation exposure,
but I think it causes the reverse problem. There is no size of banana-pile
that I would consider dangerous. I would never think, "Well, that's as
dangerous as a pile of 5 million bananas! Holy shit! Break out the lead suits
and the iodine pills!"

Edit: if you believe the Wikipedia page on röntgen equivalents in man, it
would seem that 100 rems "will cause illness," which, if I did my math
("maths" in the UK) correctly, is equivalent to eating around 10,000 bananas.
It's not clear how much safer it is if you're not eating the bananas, but
merely sitting near them, juggling them, or bathing in their puree.

~~~
Dove
> 100 rems "will cause illness," . . . equivalent to eating around 10,000
> bananas

Well, those numbers are for acute exposure, so you would have to eat them all
at once. In which case, I'd think the 1.2 million calories would also be a
concern.

~~~
gacba
I'm thinking that 10,000 bananas in your stomach at the same time would be an
even GREATER concern.

------
jimfl
When I worked at Brookhaven National Lab, the sewer system had radiation
detectors in it, to ensure there was no improper disposal of radioactive
stuff. It was said that it was sensitive enough to detect someone flushing a
banana down the toilet.

The Assistant Director of the lab at the time, had had a radionuclide
angiography, and I guess the radio marker is emitted in the urine, because he
claimed to have set the alarms off after coming back to the lab post-
procedure.

~~~
jballanc
This reminds me of a story about my wife. She worked in a hot-lab at the time,
using P-32, and she was extremely fastidious about using the Geiger counter to
ensure she never spilled any material on the bench or equipment.

Then, one day she calls me to her lab, and I can tell she's very frantic. I
rush up the 3 flights of stairs and into her lab and ask what's wrong. She was
worried that she had spilled the raido-isotopes because the Geiger counter was
picking up counts all over! The lab bench, the pipettes, the Eppendorf tubes,
everything seemed to be hot. I paused for a moment, then took the Geiger
counter from her and pointed the probe at _her_. The needle _JUMPED_ to the
max and she turned flush white...

...the day before she had undergone a stress test with a Technetium tracer.

------
frankus
One thing to keep in mind vis-a-vis radioactive iodine is that it tends to
concentrate in the thyroid, whereas potassium is distributed pretty evenly and
excreted quickly.

~~~
delackner
I'm really surprised no one else is discussing this point. The article says
that potassium stays mostly in solution in the body, which means that
regardless of how many bananas you ate (or anything else with high levels of
potassium) your body is just going to excrete most of it.

So there is no real comparison to make between bananas and any dose of
gamma+beta radiation, making the whole "banana equivalent dose" at best
mistaken and at worst willfully misleading.

~~~
ramchip
> So there is no real comparison to make between bananas and any dose of
> gamma+beta radiation

Why is that? Let's say you receive a millirem by standing close to a nuclear
power plant core. Then you eat a banana, which spends one day in your body
before the potassium is excreted, giving your body one millirem of radiation
in the process. What's the difference?

I'll agree for iodine ingestion however. They could consider the radiation
emitted over a human lifetime to be fairer.

~~~
delackner
The article says the banana equivalent dose concept was intended to ridicule
people who were afraid of nuclear power plant accidents. Such accidents would
expose people to radioactive iodine, which, in the article itself says: "The
combination of bioaccumulation and the greater penetrating power of ionizing
Gamma radiation makes radioactive Iodine significantly more hazardous to
humans than equivalent amounts of Potassium-40".

So no, being in the vicinity of a nuclear accident at dose X of Gamma + Beta
radiation in the form of iodine that is going to be absorbed into the thyroid
(leading to continued further exposure) cannot be meaningfully compared to the
same dose of just Beta radiation from potassium that is passed through the
body and excreted.

~~~
ramchip
My point is that gamma/beta radiation is not "in the form of iodine". Iodine
releases radiation; this radiation is the same, wherever it came from.

Gamma and beta radiations can in fact be meaningfully compared on their effect
on the body. The nature of the rays is taken into account when calculating the
rem dose. See the radiation quality factors:
<http://www.nuclear.utah.edu/class_notes/5700/sup_9.doc>

------
Dove
The BED cited by wikipedia (3.6 millirems for eating one banana a day for a
year) is equal to .000036 Sv. Will you get chronic radiation sickness from
that? Not even close. Chronic exposure to radiation in the 0.4 Sv range--over
10,000 bananas per day--is not enough to cause harm, and actually appears to
be beneficial.

<http://cerrie.org/committee_papers/INFO_14-C.pdf>

------
MikeCapone
For those wanting to learn more about nuclear power, from uranium mining to
how power plants work and how they are operated (the logistics of them), I
recommend:

 _Power to Save the World: The Truth About Nuclear Energy_ by Gwyneth Cravens.

She spent almost a decade doing the research for this book with lots of help
from a physicist who works on nuclear safety at a US lab (forgot which one).
She used to be an anti-nuclear activist, but gradually changed her mind during
the process of writing this book.

------
by
I propose a larger unit of measure: the Chernobyl Sheep Equivalent Dose. This
is based on a 50kg sheep at the upper allowable limit of 1000 Becquerels per
kg.
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster_effects#Food...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster_effects#Food_restrictions)

Converting our Banana Equivalent Dose of 520 picocuries. 1 Bq (Becquerel) =
one radioactive decay per second. 1 Ci (Curie) = 3.7 * 10^10 Bq. 520
picocuries = 520 * 10^-12 Ci = 19.2 Bq. Our 50kg sheep = 50 * 1000 = 50000 Bq.

1 Chernobyl Sheep Equivalent Dose = 2600 Banana Equivalent Doses.

Hopefully I got my sums right.

~~~
mcherm
But that undermines the main point, which is to allow non-experts to evaluate
the risks by using units they can understand. The general public does not
understand Chernobyl Sheep; they DO understand bananas. If you say a leak was
the equivalent of 200 bananas, then people can tell whether that's a
reasonably size to be seriously concerned about.

~~~
soyelmango
And depending on how it's reported, it might also be possible that instead of
reassuring the general public, reporting radioactivity in banana units might
decimate sales of bananas.

~~~
Dove
Indeed. If people on Hacker News are responding to this news with a newfound
fear of bananas (which several comments in this thread seem to indicate), I
can only imagine how the general public would react.

------
presidentender
Smugglers: hide your uranium in shipments of Brazil nuts.

~~~
hackermom
The worrying part of this joke is that it seems (at least to me) quite
possible that this method could allow someone to smuggle enough of some
radioactive waste product to make a not insignificant "dirty bomb".

~~~
khafra
Or possibly to make a dirty bomb by refining brazil nuts.

------
njharman
Ok. Exposure equiv to 1 banana. Sounds innocuous. But, is that 1 banana per
day, hour, minute, per walk by the contaminated creak? And, for folks living
near/in contaminated area with say 2 beqs a day. Has there been any studies of
radiological health effects of "eating" 2beqs a day for 365 days over 10
years.

This measurement unit swings too far in the other direction of making
radiation sound safe and tasty.

Radiation exposure is cumulative, every bit damages dna/cells even if only a
little. I stopped eating Brazil nuts as a kid due to radiation amount. Now
considering limiting banana to 1-2week instead of 1-2 day I eat now.

~~~
Dove
Actually, there has been a study done, and a fairly statistically robust one
at that. There appears to be no cause for concern if you do the math.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1430003>

~~~
RK
The radiation hormesis effect:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_hormesis>

------
miri
And I just can't help but thinking... "Aha. So that's where the Bananaphone
song got its superpowers from!" ><

On a more serious note, I do love everyday comparisons that everyone can
understand. For example, science books for kids measuring things in elephants
or houses. It's a comparison they can understand. It's like scaling things
down for your brain. They're good tools to detect nonsense, too. Take
antivaccinationists. For example, they do talk a lot about "toxins" in
vaccines - like formaldehyde. Sounds dangerous, doesn't it? Except... That the
average pear has about fifty times the formaldehyde in it, and formaldehyde is
naturally present in your body in the first place. Then there's the mercury
preservative mostly gone from vaccines anyway - gone in a matter of days,
since ethyl mercury is easily passed. The methyl mercury from that tuna salad
you ate a month ago is still in your body. But when a non-scientific person
just hears "mercury" or "formaldehyde"...

------
surlyadopter
Speaking of having fun with radiation. I've never had the opportunity to point
a geiger counter at the stomach of someone who has just eaten a banana, but I
have "tracked" through walls and around the corner a co-worker who had just
taken radioactive iodine(to destroy his thyroid). Good times.

~~~
Gormo
Wait, why would someone deliberately take radioactive iodine to destroy their
thyroid?

------
surlyadopter
Ahh, this reminds me of when wikipedia used to have a "list of ridiculous
measurements" page.

~~~
soyelmango
I'll have to see if I can find this page in google's cache - I'd be curious to
see how many of those 'ridiculous measurements' were really ridiculous, or
whether they served a similar purpose to the BED; to allow the average person
to understand unfamiliar things in everyday terms.

~~~
surlyadopter
Found a copy!

[http://www.indopedia.org/index.php?title=List_of_strange_uni...](http://www.indopedia.org/index.php?title=List_of_strange_units_of_measurement)

~~~
cschneid
It always makes me happy that Smoot ended up being the ISO president.

~~~
jacobolus
He retired from the ANSI in 2005, and did an NPR interview
<http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5043041>; I made sure to
wander across town and across the Harvard Bridge the next day, in honor. It’s
great that they still repaint the numbers from time to time (annually?).

------
tjmaxal
A better idea might be more education on how radiation works and what kind of
radiation is coming from the leak/crack/banana etc. At least in the US people
are extremely ignorant of how radiation works and how it can make you sick.

------
Monkeyget
"Chernobyl's radiation was detectable across Western Europe. Average doses
received ranged from 0.02 mrem (Portugal) to 38 mrem (portions of Germany).[2]
For comparison sake, the dose received from eating one banana per day for one
year is roughly 3.3 mrem."
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_compared_to_other_rad...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_compared_to_other_radioactivity_releases)

------
grnknight
Wow... Who knew that eating one banana a day for a year could give a false
alarm on a radioactivity detector?

------
hackermom
However much science and practical use the radioactive bananas have behind
them, this really made my day.

------
dnsworks
"Banana equivalent dose (wikipedia.org) 420 points by soyelmango 19 hours ago
| 74 comments"

I wonder if I'm the only one who saw that, didn't read the article, and
thought "Did some stoner just hack HN?"

------
borism
how dense should banana jam be to start a chain reaction?

------
kilowatt
Donkey Kong's origins explained!
<http://x93.xanga.com/6f5f9254c2234259950277/z207033998.png>

------
reader5000
Whoa I just ate one. Shouldn't I be getting super powers soon?

------
jarin
Yet another reason why bananas are the Athiest's Nightmare

~~~
theBobMcCormick
? What do you mean? I'm not sure how that makes sense, Particularly
considering that the modern banana is largely a product of human bio-
engineering and has _very_ little resemblance to a wild banana.

~~~
jarin
It was a reference to Ray Comfort:
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4yBvvGi_2A>

I forgot to use sarcasm tags

------
DannoHung
Note to self: smuggle nuclear weapons underneath a pile of bananas.

Or at least draw a picture of it because of how hilarious the premise is.

