[ RadSafe ] Some Australian Articles.

[Stabin, Michael]

>One has to have a sneaky admiration for the clever and ingenious verbal
tricks used by some anti-nuclear activists to advance there arguments.

A fun exercise Carol Marcus and I had a few years back:

If Americans consume approximately 2.04 x 10^10 bananas per year (a
reasonable figure), this represents a release to the public of:

(440 mg K/banana) x (1.18 x 10^-4 g K-40/g K) x (7 x 10^-6 Ci/g K-40
)x(2.04 x 10^10 bananas/year)x(1 g/1000 mg)

or around 7.4 CURIES of activity per year. Potassium-40 decays by
electron capture and beta minus decay. Its most significant emissions
are a 0.585 MILLION electron-volt beta particle and a 1.46 MILLION
electron-volt gamma ray.  The specific gamma ray constant for K-40 is
about 0.78 R-cm^2/mCi-hr, implying that the dose rate near (1 cm) this
amount of K-40, without shielding, would be 5800 R/hr, which would be
lethal in about 4 minutes. To shield this amount of activity to 5% of
its initial value, which would still produce death in a little over an
hour, one would need over 20 cm of concrete. This material is decaying
only with a half-life of 1.3 x 10^9  year, meaning that its activity
will be with us for generations untold, irradiating our children, and
their children, forever. The annual effective dose from K-40 in the body
is around 16 mrem for adults and 18 mrem for children, according to the
UNSCEAR 1993 report, accounting for an annual population dose of 4.6 x
10^6 person-rem*, assuming a population of 270 x 10^6 people.

(*LNT'ers care to tell us how many deaths by cancer we can expect each
year from this?)


Mike

Michael G. Stabin, PhD, CHP
Assistant Professor of Radiology and Radiological Sciences 
Department of Radiology and Radiological Sciences 
Vanderbilt University 
1161 21st Avenue South
Nashville, TN 37232-2675 
Phone (615) 343-0068
Fax   (615) 322-3764
Pager (615) 835-5153
e-mail     michael.g.stabin at vanderbilt.edu 
internet   www.doseinfo-radar.com