While I'm pretty sure I can pick out the columns for 137Cs and 134Cs activity, is there an English translation so I have a better idea of what all the measurements are from exactly?
Assuming the values are Bq/kg these values don't seem that scary.
For a personal frame of reference I pulled...
Oh I thought it was odd that U was given as ND while most others are reported as <X. The analsyis here is evidently a relatively rough chemical analysis as only the major ions of sea water are given values (Na, Ca, Cl etc) as even expected minor ions like Si are only given <X. From my own...
I'd like to hear an expert on this too,
My non-expert thinking is the I and Cs isotopes are more volatile and more readily escape the fuel than Sr so the increased Sr in # 2 and 3 likely means much greater damage to fuel and containment for those units.
The U, Pu and Ru are below detection limits as the are all reported as < X.
While there certainly is Radioactive Sr present in large amounts (3rd table), most of the Sr in table 2 (by mass) will be stable Sr from sea water.
Sea water will also contain trace amounts of U, though that leads me...
No problem.
I'm sure I haven't been following the situation as closely as many on this forum have been, but I to have not been impressed with how TEPCO appears to have been responding to the situation and the amount of information that is readily available leaves many un-answered questions and...
So let's think about this a bit, 0.30 microSv/ hr or 7.2 microSv/ day works out to 2.63 milli Sv/yr or the extra exposure an Englishmen would get from moving to and living in France for a year.
Fred has gone over much of your other text already but I thought you might like to know something further about what actually might be considered a "unsafe" exposure to radiation, as in one that we actually have reason to believe there could be health effects down the road.
From the 3rd table...
Actually if you read the whole slide show the average US citizen receives 620 mrem / year and a whole body CT scan is 1000 mrem so I don't know where your safe limit of 100 mrem/year is coming from but I'll guess pretty much no one on this planet doesn't exceed your suposed safe annual limit...
Looking at the slides, daily deposition is in Bq/m2 or decays per second per m2 for 131I (slide 4) and 137Cs (slide 5) which are two fission products that are both produced in abundance by U fission and easy to measure via Gamma ray spectrometry. These and other radioactive isotopes (natural and...
As 134I has a gamma emission at 847.0 kev (95.4% yield) and 56Co 846.7 kev (100% yield) I could see it being very easy for an operator / software error getting them mixed up.
Assuming gamma spectrometry is the analysis being done of course...
Looking at several of the fixed monitoring stations for the west coast including Alaska and Hawiia that have a record extending several days prior to the quake (so we can get an idea of normal background) I see no sign of elevation in total gamma or beta counts in the days following events in...
Looking at the story it gives 163 000 becquerels/kg soil, which from the article I think they took from the top 5cm of the soil profile. The story also gives that 100 becquerels/kg is the upper limit of normal. Normal would be normal left over from 1960s global bomb test fallout I presume, (this...
Becquerel is a measure of activity or decay events per second. As in 10 Bq 137Cs /m3 air would indicate that in an air sample of 1m3 volume of air ten atoms of 137Cs disintegrated or underwent decay per second (and in doing so each of the ten 137Cs atoms that decayed released a beta particle...