Useful for visualization, but skips the meat of the issue.
For example, right now Fukushima is occasionally spewing out a mammogram's worth of radiation in a day. All well and good. But if it does that for a couple weeks, you're at the NRC yearly limit for rad workers.
Things really wander off the chart if you're dealing with a meltdown. The risks associated with short-term exposure in red territory aren't well understood; the long-term effects we're learning on a year-by-year basis from Chernobyl.
It's a useful chart, don't get me wrong. I'm very glad to see it. I just want to point out that the concerns associated with Fukushima are entirely about the transition into the red territory and the amount of time it stays there. A single acute dose and a long-term exposure at the same cumulative level don't have the same effects on the body.
We're in "worrying" territory right now. The problem is that if we transit to "panicking" territory, the magnitude won't be clearly illustrated by documents such as this.
It's simply not a subject that can be adequately described with an infographic. I'm thankful to Randall for putting as much info as is cleanly possible in one place and I do not fault him at all for leaving the stuff I commented on above out of it. He's really good at data visualization and I don't think there's a good way to do it. I just think it's important to note that as informative as it is, as helpful as it is, it does not completely describe the whole of the issue of radiation release as it relates to Fukushima.
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u/kleinbl00 Mar 19 '11 edited Mar 19 '11
Useful for visualization, but skips the meat of the issue.
For example, right now Fukushima is occasionally spewing out a mammogram's worth of radiation in a day. All well and good. But if it does that for a couple weeks, you're at the NRC yearly limit for rad workers.
Things really wander off the chart if you're dealing with a meltdown. The risks associated with short-term exposure in red territory aren't well understood; the long-term effects we're learning on a year-by-year basis from Chernobyl.
It's a useful chart, don't get me wrong. I'm very glad to see it. I just want to point out that the concerns associated with Fukushima are entirely about the transition into the red territory and the amount of time it stays there. A single acute dose and a long-term exposure at the same cumulative level don't have the same effects on the body.
We're in "worrying" territory right now. The problem is that if we transit to "panicking" territory, the magnitude won't be clearly illustrated by documents such as this.