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 Radioactive Factories Awareness Map & Site 
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Joined: Mon Jan 28, 2013 7:40 pm
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Location: Illinois
I have no time to answer these right now but I did read them. Maybe someone else can. You asked many questions.

_________________
MY OUTSIDE RADIATION MONITORING STATION:
South Beloit, Illinois - GMC200 Outside on HEPA air purifier, ground level, facing West.
http://netc.com/chart/view.php?n=1%3AEB5A139C


Sat Jul 26, 2014 8:22 pm
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Joined: Sat Dec 14, 2013 1:11 am
Posts: 119
Just going to address this as pragmatically as a layperson can. :)

Grayling Skies wrote:
I'm still trying to get up to speed on the monitoring methodology being used here. There's much to learn and little time to waste.

> This is incorrect, we have all the time in the world to waste. Generations upon generations will feel our legacy, and I'm sure our species will survive. If something else should happen - some severe natural disasters and breakouts of disease while our method of procreation is threatened by radionuclides.. Well, only the strong survive, right? Break out your stone carving tools.

What is the logic behind redefining the meanings of norm, normal and nominal in discussing readouts of beta and gamma radiation? Are historical averages more important to map out than where radiation levels exceed the thresholds of safety? Glancing at the NETC map of Japan, everything looks rosy over there. Is this what people need to see? Those people are being told to leave Toyko... not for a couple of weeks, but forever! Someday soon it will be California.

>Normal radiation is a fallacy to begin with, and the studies of our contributions to it are only 50 years old at best. It causes mutation. When cells are exposed to it at slowly increasing doses versus a single dose they fare better. Also, I'm glad you mentioned beta radiation, because when measuring background how am I to tell if I'm getting gamma hits from some extraterrestrial source on my Inspector Alert? The Sun could be splashing us with a CME, a quasar in some distant galaxy could have one of it's poles facing us as it slurps up another quasar.. Sources of radiation are endless, but alpha and beta sources are likely terrestrial. As for "Someday soon it will be California", well, check out the wiki page for the Farallon Islands. The pacific off the California coast has been a dumping ground for shittily contained nuclear waste way before Fukushima. The San Francisco Bay Area also has a startlingly high occurrence of breast cancer. California is just getting a dose of new rads with shorter halflives.

What levels of various types of radiation are dangerous to human health, as well as to all other forms of life? Does a reference table exist or should we start working on creating one?

>All types of radiation that could interrupt cell division and cause cancer are dangerous. You could also argue that life would not have evolved to this point without the mutations it caused. You're after short term, in our lifetime sort of data though, so.. The tables should be relative to real world exposures of the public to radiation. Specifically, cancer clusters. Unfortunately, medical data is confidential. Go fig. Rads released by nuclear power plants and weapons are more dangerous to us though because we could breathe or consume them in food or water. Then they get taken up into our bodies and continue to emit radiation at the cells nearby as they decay.

Mentioned elsewhere were 9 detectable Kev bands of gamma ray radiation as opposed to all-inclusive summaries. Are we talking about spectrum analysis? San Diego was specifically singled out, and an example made for total readouts of 7000 cpm of gamma, but considered not important. I was wondering why. NETC concentrates on level 5, which I assume is 600-800 kev.

>We are talking about spectrum analysis, yes. NETC gathers data from external government sources as well as several private geiger counters. What you see on the map is a relative increase or decrease in energy levels that are pretty much all over the place. All of the private geiger counters are probably calibrated to cesium, which is great for news reporting and easy to detect, but we live in a sea of distributed radionuclides that are harder to detect but pose a problem for bodies, like tritium and deuterium that the simple map display doesn't adequately portray. To be honest though, it is hard for most people to do the prerequisite research into nuclear physics to understand a more complex map, and the fully realized biological implications of "all-inclusive" summaries could probably net you a PHD and Nobel prize should you publish something meaningful. We are in a bit of a glut, in that it's not generally interesting to study and report. It's easier to latch onto the visceral reality of war between civilizations than it is to describe particle physics, yet the long term implications of both have a large impact on our continued survival.

Are other Kev levels harmless to living organisms?
>Yes.

Why was San Diego's summary data irrelevant?
>NETC is useful in that it describes a relative increase in radionuclides. If a release happened, and airborne particles detectable by the devices NETC is monitoring settled in an area, it would be useful to see a jump in the data across several sites. Sometimes though, a jump in cpm could indicate something far more localized. Say for instance, the ducting under my house is crappy and I turned on my heater after a long summer, and some radon was sent into my room above the detector. Good to know for me, not really indicative of a wider release.

600-800 Kev is what the EPA has focused on. Why?

>Likely just what their detectors are calibrated to. Calibration simply determines what energy level counts as a hit to register.

They aren't telling us anything, so in essence who is the Environmental Protection Agency really protecting?

>They are telling us stuff, like not to worry, everything is fine. We don't even need to really go out and take measurements because the risk is insignificant. Personally I'm a fan of gathering as much data as possible to get a better picture of what is going on, so at least we can get some data from NETC.

Solid state liquid nitrogen cooled gamma ray spectrum analyzers. Very expensive. Must be a few located at universities around the country we can borrow along with a couple of grad students.

>Gamma specs and liquid scintillators are actually somewhat affordable to own, though I'm not sure what nitrogen cooling would do for a gamma ray spec. What you really want is thick lead shielding to block out background radiation so the measurements of your sample are more accurate. The holy grail though is mass spectroscopy, the sort that is sensitive enough to carbon date samples. If you want to know for sure if there are transuranic atoms in food or water, that'd let you know. I have a friend that works at Stanford, can't get access unless I am pursuing a degree. ;)


Sun Aug 03, 2014 12:11 pm
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Joined: Fri Jul 11, 2014 10:36 am
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Wherever we attempted to harness or unleash nuclear fission, we've left behind spent fuel, abandoned sites and poisoned land and water that will be unfit for all forms of life for hundreds of years or more. That may not be of immediate concern to some of you. Chernobyl should have made us realize we needed to stop and reevaluate this method of power generation before we lost all control. Now it appears we have done just that in Fukushima.

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

I wrote to Senator Angus King (Ind. ME) again last week and received a long and detailed response from him. It told me he's kept himself well informed on Fukushima and the EPA and also on the Maine Yankee decommissioned site. Give him your support. We need to encourage as many politicians as we can if we are to build a consensus for real transparency.

As for rads, I believe this fellow Michaël Van Broekhoven's blog has been mentioned here on NETC before:

http://allegedlyapparent.wordpress.com/ ... ion_units/

and

http://allegedlyapparent.wordpress.com/ ... e_effects/

To summarize, various sources of radiation can expose us to easily comparable and quantifiable amounts of radiation, but our bodies don't absorb the same quantities of radiation given exposure to the various types of radiation. Different varieties of tissues, organs and bone absorb and accumulate alpha, beta particles and gamma rays at different rates.

The gist of it was that if ingested, a rad of alpha radiation is 20 times more likely to be absorbed by our bodies than a rad of beta particles or a rad of gamma rays. So the variables are - how we are exposed (irradiated, breathe or ingest), and how likely we are to absorb the different types and various isotopes of the elements in the periodic table.

Establishing a set of benchmarks that anyone can understand has also been complicated by the rapid changes in terminology and various levels of safety (probably should be levels of danger) espoused by the many organizations involved in maintaining oversight. This has helped the nuclear industry to obscure what's been going on.

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


Mon Aug 04, 2014 12:48 pm
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Joined: Thu Mar 06, 2014 1:25 pm
Posts: 182
Yah, needs a bit more work...
rc


Thu Aug 07, 2014 6:00 pm
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