Dose Correlation (rads to watts per second) -Geologicalsciences link -Reply

[Charles Willis <CAW@nrc.gov>]

Stew,

You are right, of course.  The earth is complex and I doubt that you or I could have
designed it any better.  The heating by subterranean radioisotopes is a part of the
complexity.  I believe this phenomenon has been pretty well accepted since the
work of Kropotkin in 1948.  The radioactive decay heating accounts for the earth's
net loss of  some 1 E 21 joules/yr.  Of course, that is only the energy equivalent of
about 200,000 one-megaton bombs annually, but over the millennia, it adds up.

This heating constitutes an average dose rate of about 13 mrad/year= 1.5
microrad/hour.

Charlie Willis
caw@nrc.gov
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