

Remember That Nuclear Dump Site That 'Was Never Supposed to Leak'? - wolfgke
https://www.commondreams.org/headline/2014/02/25-3

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gus_massa
It's strange that in neither the article nor the DOE report, there is any
information about what is leaking and causing the radiation in the air. Is it
Radom? Are there any plausible alternatives?

The article cites an expert that says that "[This] Radioactive material is
attracted to your lung tissue." If the dump is leaking Radom, this sentence
doesn't make sense.

Another problem is how much radiation is leaking.

From the article:

> _In their statement released Monday, the DOE sought to downplay the danger
> from airborne radiation, claiming that the "concentrations remain well below
> a level of public or environmental hazard" with a "potential dose of less
> than one millirem." They compared this to the typical chest x-ray, in which
> the patient is exposed to approximately 10 millirems._

From the DOE report:

> _Dose assessment modeling, which calculates potential radioactivity exposure
> to people, from the release data showed a potential dose of less than one
> millirem at each of the environmental sampling locations. A person receives
> about 10 millirems from a single chest x-ray procedure. The average person
> living in the United States receives an annual dose of about 620 millirem
> from exposure to naturally occurring and other sources of radiation._

The articles drop the 620 millirem/year. Most of the people don't know that
there are a lot of natural radiation sources.

In all the sources I could found, the radiation of a chest x-ray is
approximately 2 millirem (not 10 millirems) (The equivalence is 1 Sv = 100
rem.) (A chest CT is much bigger, 800 millirem.)

And it's not clear if the radiation is 1 millirem/day or 1 millirem/year. In
banana equivalent doses it's 100 bananas/day or 100 bananas/year.

From the redaction of the text, I guess it's 1 millirem/year = 100
bananas/year, so it's negligible, I probably eat 100 bananas/year.

(If I'm wrong and it's 1 millirem/day = 100 bananas/day, then it's more
worrying. It's more than the EPA recommended yearly dose public, but it's
still much less than a CT or the maximal yearly dose for radiation workers.)

