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For the first time, seaborne radiation from Japan’s Fukushima nuclear disaster has been detected on the West Coast of the United States.
Cesium-134, the so-called fingerprint of Fukushima, was measured in seawater samples taken from Tillamook Bay and Gold Beach in Oregon, researchers from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution are reporting.
Because of its short half-life, cesium-134 can only have come from Fukushima.
Also for the first time, cesium-134 has been detected in a Canadian salmon, the Fukushima InFORM project, led by University of Victoria chemical oceanographer Jay Cullen, is reporting.
LINK
originally posted by: Bluntone22
a reply to: Profusion
Can you explain to the folks that don't know.
Cesium 134 was detected at 0.3 bq.
How does that exposure compare to a dental X-ray or a cross country flight?
The levels of cesium that have been detected off U.S. shores supposedly won't harm you because there's not a large enough quantity involved. That's good news, but what about the plutonium that the experts in the article linked above are not mentioning?
The chest x-ray looks right but there is no direct conversion between Sieverts and becquerels since the former represents an effect on human tissue and the latter is a raw form of radiation not considering any effect on tissue.
originally posted by: dogstar23
I know these are right:
10 mSv = 1 bq
1 chest x-ray = 0.1 msV
No, for reasons stated above, chest X-ray exposure isn't measured in becquerels but in Sieverts, and there's not any direct equivalence in all circumstances because they measure different things, and that's way, way off. First of all the Pacific ocean without any contamination from Fukushima is 1-2 Bq/m3, and there's no way swimming in the Pacific ocean before the Fukushima contamination is like getting 900-2000 X-rays, it's not like getting even 1 Chest X-ray, and even if you wanted to do a conversion you would need to specify the length of exposure time which you didn't specify. Is that one minute or one hour exposure to 0.3 Bq/m3 or what? It's wrong.
I think my math is right below, but it's early:
.3 bq = 300 chest x-rays
0.3bq/m3 is not that much, I wouldn't worry about it. I would worry about the levels off the coast of Japan and I wouldn't want to swim there or eat fish caught near the disaster site, but 0.3Bq/m3 isn't enough to make me worry very much. The 1-2 Bq/m3 of 137Cs already there before Fukushima don't make me worry either. Some of that is natural radiation and some is from the nuclear testing in the 1960s.
We expect samples from the surface waters of the western Pacific that have not been contaminated by the Fukushima source to have 137Cs activity of between 1 and 2 Bq/m3
So 0.2 Bq/m3 is the lowest amount that can be detected for 134Cs and 0.3 is barely above that..
Our current detection limit using this method is about 0.1 Bq/m3 for 137Cs and 0.2 Bq/m3 for 134Cs. Values below this are reported as “below detection,”