I won’t go into the other problems, but if you don’t like bananas as a comparison, what about Brazil nuts? They’re more radioactive than bananas (some batches up to 3X more so, depending where grown), and because the radiosource in this case is radium, rather than potassium, its not under homeostatic control.

There are countless other foods that are radioactive. The “Banana Equivalent Dose” concept isn’t about bananas; its about understanding that radiation is extremely prevalent around us, and our ability to detect it far, far exceeds its ability to harm us.

It gets even worse though – notice how the tobacco grown in the US is radioactive because of the choice of fertilizer according to even the EPA. Note how the EPA and other Government entities are helping to control the risk: measures dedicated to reducing smoking. Why aren’t there laws passed to restrict the type of fertilizer used in tobacco growing to ones that don’t involve radioactive compounds?

What’s worse is that the US has higher lung cancer rates of smoking than other nations, even nations where smoking is more prevalent. See http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15723657 and http://cebp.aacrjournals.org/content/10/11/1193.full

Smoking is not good for you but if we are going to argue that it needs to be controlled because it causes lung cancer perhaps we should investigate the case that it is such a nasty carcinogen as a byproduct of the manufacturing process and one that can be resolved at that. Of course the Government likes taxes (what does the Federal government do with the tax money anyway? Does it go to help private health care?), people hate the smell of smoking, and smokers are in the minority, so those two groups nicely gang up against the smokers.

http://www.nndc.bnl.gov/chart/decaysearchdirect.jsp?nuc=40K&unc=nds

Hold on here, it sounds like you’ve just agreed with the #35, yet are leaping to a conclusion that is the precise opposite of the actual discussion. Which was quite intelligent, and largely free of political spin, might I add.

A banana equivalent Dose is measured in microsieverts (μSv), an actual unit of ‘dose’. As discussed, the important thing is to realize that sieverts (and rem) represent a relative quantification of the physiological effects of radiation, based on a number of physical factors (e.g. type of decay particle).

Recapping: 0.1 μSv is the dose you receive from bananas.* 0.34 μSv/hr is the average background dose for Americans. As of right now, the dose in Tokyo is approximately 0.2 μSv/hr. (http://park30.wakwak.com/~weather/geiger_index.html – 100 CPM = 1 μSv/hr).

While saying that simply living for a year is the radioactive equivalent of eating 30,000 bananas is indeed a rather meaningless, arbitrary, and pretty stupid comparison, that’s actually the entire point. A banana represents an utterly insignificant, vanishingly tiny amount of radiation. But guess what: for the majority of people in Japan, so does Fukushima.

Your odd snap conclusion about pro-nuclear propagandists seems to indicate that you believe that radiation from nuclear power represents a threat to public safety. And yet, given that the hourly dose in Tokyo right now is just over half that of the average dose in America in the midst of what is absolutely an extremely serious nuclear calamity – the 2nd most serious in history, and by a large margin! – brought on by truly extraordinary circumstances, wouldn’t you say that the facts seem to indicate no widespread threat whatsoever?

*I’m assuming this dose takes into account the homeostatic properties of potassium-40, but maybe it doesn’t – for a more apt comparison, feel free to use any of the other ‘radioactive’ foods out there, like Brazil nuts. Or maybe the dose from radon gas you receive in your basement due to the concrete cinderblocks.

People can openly say something like “radioactivity is dangerous, that’s all I need to know”, without anyone realizing that this is bogus. Because this only makes sense exactly until you run into the next activity that is in any way dangerous.

How about going to war? That’s something the US does about twice a decade. Hunting Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein alone cost a lot more lives than all nuclear accidents that happened so far ever will, even if you ask Greenpeace. (A reliable source for collecting and adding up only the scariest numbers they can find, regardless of serious and objective criticism. – Their number is 200,000 in this case.)

Criticism on the openly admitted basis of purposeful ignorance and unwillingness to learn (and only that kind!) should finally get a well deserved, sharply focussed(!), treatment of ridicule.

There can be no trust on the basis of ignorance.

The knowledge is out there, it’s not hidden, it’s not new science and it’s in fact a lot less complicated than epidemiology, economics, let alone politics.

wouldn’t it be possible to apply a correction factor to the b.e.q. to account for differences of the first kind (half-life, radiative rays) to make the b.e.q. more useful?

If I read the article correctly, no. The problem is that the banana has no net effect on the body at all. As Maggie’s article says, “The net dose of a banana is zero”. So there’s no amount of bananas a person could eat that would result in an equivalent dose of radiation from other sources (except for sources that also add no radiation at all).

However, I think all of these examples are fairly useless. Telling me that changing a HEPA filter is equivalent to 10 chest x-rays simply makes me ask “Well, how much danger is presented by a chest x-ray?” How many cells are mutated by the ionizing radiation? How many of those are likely to be cancerous? Without that information, the contextualization is useless (it’s even worse with bananas which have associated idea of good health).

The article says “The net dose of a banana is zero”, but this is no more true for potassium-40 than it is for carbon-14.

Even if it passes on through the body, you’re exposed to whatever amount of radiation it emits for that amount of time.

I wouldn’t worry a lot, though. Potassium-40 has a half-life on the order of 10e9 years, as opposed to Cabon-14′s 40 years.

I’d love to hear more about your job lasttide. This year the Waste Treatment Plant construction site is off limits but I’ve seen it a few times during past Hanford tours.

“Well, how much danger is presented by a chest x-ray?”

More than six in a year is believed to represent an unnecessarily high risk.

Keep in mind, though, that the guideline is trying to balance likelihood of finding a dangerous condition (lung cancer, broken sternum, collapsed lung) against likelihood of causing disease (lung, skin or bone cancer, blood diseases, etc.) It’s understood that properly administered chest Xrays can be extremely beneficial, and that having a chest Xray every day is unlikely to provide a doctor’s ability to diagnose your problems.

So, while chest Xray equivalents are better than bananna equivalents, it’s still a pretty lame measure. Your random exposure in the lab is not going to ever result in a beneficial medical image.

40 tablespoons of peanut butter (20 sandwiches) is equivalent to 0.01 Rem, equals smoking 1.4 cigarettes, equals driving 40mi, equals 6min in a canoe, equals chest x-rays.

Cross country airline travel exposes us to quite a bit of radiation. Cancer risk from each hour of flying is equivalent to eating 1.4 PBJs, or 30mi of highway driving.

We aren’t paid, nor do we pay anybody, for Submitterator items. The site, itself, is sponsored by AmEx, but that just means they supplied the funds we needed to set the site up in exchange for having their name on it.

The actual submissions come from readers who have made or found something cool they think we need to know about. It’s no different than “Submit an Idea”, just in a different format that’s easier for us and you to use.

Uh… okay, but what if you like to smush up bananas and spread them all over your skin and roll around in banana mush and plastic sheeting? Like… um… say four or five nights a week? Would that be, uh, very dangerous? PLEASE RESPOND IMMEDIATELY!

#35 sums it up well. the K-40 will have a very small but finite effect because it is inside the body for about 24h. Even though it is not assimilated.

However, this effect will be many orders of magnitude smaller than what is being quoted by the banana bunch who seem to have 2c worth of knowlege about physics and absolutely zero in biology.

Interesting to see how eagerly this sort of crap is applauded and repeated by pro-nuke propagandists.

[Reading the link in #35 it is clear that there is NO alpha from K-40 . That is 20x more dangerous than beta or gamma so just as well.]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sievert

As, apparently, does rem.

The evidence for hormesis (that the dose response follows a j-shaped curve that for low doses dips below the risk posed at zero dose before rising back up) seems pretty strong. For instance there is a correlation between natural radon emissions and lung cancer rates – and that correlation is negative. See http://radiationhormesis.com/charts/ for a collection of charts of radiation vs. mortality from many studies.

A review of the literature is here:
http://radiationhormesis.com/extensive-evidence-suggesting-hormesis/

Some highlights:
According to UNSCEAR report (1994), among A-bomb survivors from Hiroshimaand Nagazaki who received doses lower than 200 mSv, there was no increase in the number of total cancer death. Mortality caused by leukemia was evenlower in this population at doses below 100 mSv than age-matched controlcohorts.

Mifune (1992) (Mifune et al. 1992) and his co-workers indicated that in a spa area (Misasa), with an average indoor radon level of 35 Bq/m3, the lung cancer incidence was about 50% of that in a low-level radon region. Their results also showed that in the above mentioned high background radiation area, the mortality rate caused by all types of cancer was 37% lower

In a very large scale study in U.S.A, it was found that the mortality rate due to all malignancies was lower in states with higher annual radiation dose (Frigerio 1976).

In a large scale Chinese study, it was showed that the mortality rate due to cancer was lower in an area with a relatively high background radiation (74,000 people), while the control group (78,000 people) who lived in an area with low background radiation had a higher rate of mortality (Wei L 1990).

From Wikipedia:

“The becquerel (symbol Bq) is the SI derived unit of radioactivity. One Bq is defined as the activity of a quantity of radioactive material in which one nucleus decays per second. The Bq unit is therefore equivalent to s−1. The becquerel is named for Henri Becquerel, who shared a Nobel Prize with Pierre and Marie Curie for their work in discovering radioactivity.”

We know lots of dose is bad. Ask Louis Slotin.

We know moderate amounts of dose is bad. Ask Russian Emergency Response Workers.

But where does “bad” start for low dose? Is every dose bad? That is the assumption of the linear / no threshold model. Take data points of risk of effect plotted against dose and force fit that line back to zero. There has not been enough study to determine if low dose has no effect (ie, the dose intercept is not 0.) There has not been enough study to determine if low dose is good (“priming the immune system” argument). There’s a lot to think about.

Making radiation fun with goofy “banana metrics” is probably not the best idea. Keeping radiation as the bogeyman of the modern age it’s been for the last 70 years is also probably not the smartest thing in the world.

There is a huge difference between radiation and radioactive materials. You can suffer a lethal dose of radiation (especially gamma rays) with actually coming into contact with a single radionuclide. You take a good dose of radation flying in a plane or getting an X-ray, but you are not exposed to any radioactive materials.

On the other hand, you could come into contact with radioactive material not get enough of a dose to couple any problem what so ever. I worked my way through college packaging nuclear medicine. People (including myself on one occasion) would sometimes get something on their hands and have to be decontaminated (which for me simple involved a thorough washing on my hands and checking to makes sure I did not have it anywhere else on my body or clothing).

The banana equivalent dose is just that – the equivalent to a dose of radiation. Not the equivalent to ingesting an equal amount of some other isotope. It is not a way of saying that K-40 is the same as I-131 or Cs-137. It was invented as way of saying two things: 1) you are exposed to radiation and radioactive materials in everday life and 2) here is a way to measure it using a common object.

I think it is excellent for that purpose so long as you explain what you are comparing.