http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-0...or-humans.html
Quote:
Radiation exposure levels are measured in millisieverts. Exposure totaling 100 millisieverts over a year is the lowest level at which any increase in cancer is evident, according to the World Nuclear Association in London. The cumulative maximum level for nuclear workers was increased to 250 millisieverts from 100 millisieverts by Japan’s health ministry on March 15.
Career Ending
“Once they have reached that limit, they can’t go in the plant anymore,” said John Price, a Melbourne-based consultant on industrial accidents and former safety policy staffer at the U.K.’s National Nuclear Corp. “You shouldn’t be doing that sort of work ever again,” Price said by phone yesterday.
One plant worker was exposed to 106.3 millisieverts, Japan’s Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency said in a website posting today.
“A worker receiving a dose of 100 millisieverts from these emergency operations will have a future risk of a serious cancer from this dose of less than 1 percent,” said Richard Wakeford, a professor of epidemiology at the University of Manchester’s Dalton Nuclear Institute in the U.K. That compares with a risk of dying from cancer in the absence of this radiation exposure of about 20 to 25 percent, Wakeford said in an e-mail today.
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This is remarkably
low given some of the numbers the press have been churning out. According to many other reports, it seems like workers might have gotten this kind of dose in a
shift, the way they were talking about workers making "existential decisions."
I'm not belittling their efforts, quite the contrary, but any reporters who majored in, say, journalism, and didn't take math, physics, biology, etc, should be edited by someone who has at least a couple clues to rub together (many reports use a dose RATE number instead of a rate as if they were the same, etc—you can be exposed to a HUGE dose rate, for a fraction of a second, for example, and get a minimal dose (this can happen in particle accelerators), press goons just glazed over reading that
).