Recent content by chironex

You have the right basic idea, but you're missing a factor of log(2), I think. Bq is the number of decays per second. So to get number of atoms that produces x decays per second, you take x Bq and divide by the decay constant (the probability of decay of 1 atom per second). The Cs-137...

Further to the radiological situation, here is a very informative slide show, showing the 1 year radiation dose (commencing on March 16, 2011) expected for a hypothetical person who never evacuated the zone around Fukushima Dai-ichi, and who spends the entire time outdoors. It includes the...

Oh, and reactor design is GE, of course ... siting, architect/engineer, other safety regulations and operation as well as decisions what to upgrade at the plant are Japanese regulatory responsibilities ... US is not getting much of the fallout! In Chernobyl winds blew Northeast for some time...

The answer is: I'ld do it with far more care than I'm able to devote to the issue at the moment. It's far too dependent on temperature histories of the containment and the damaged fuel to do easy back of the envelope calculations. Nevertheless, above, I already made such an estimate for I-131...

The prmary containment can only contain fission products if: (1) It is not breached. (2) It is continuously cooled, so as to condense steam that is produced as a result of decay heat in the reactor, as well as heat produced due to chemical reactions between metals in the reactor core and...

Indeed, you are right, but the situation is not like this at all. What you should first try doing is to convert the total activity of iodine-131 that is reported into a number of iodine atoms. That's easy to do, you just divide the activity in Bq by the decay constant for I-131, which is...

I'm very much looking forward to the quantitative results from NUCENG. I'ld love to get hold of ORIGEN2 personally, and run it myself, but I've found that it takes a couple of days to register and download this code and it would be a while after that before I could get up to speed :) In the...

Thanks for the data on Fukushima ... I managed to find data on the Chernobyl radiological release. For conversions: 1 Becquerel is an activity of 1 decay per second, while 1 Curie is 37 GBq, or 37 x 10^9 decays per second. The curie was defined as the activity of 1 gram of radium-226. See...

I think I've seen 50 million curies quoted for the I-131 at Chernobyl, which would make the release 1/20 of Chernobyl. But never mind, it's the right order of magnitude. The small discrepancy in Cs-137 and I-131 seems odd, but then, what are the cumulative yields? But most of all: This has...