A milli-sievert is a unit of radiation dose. (whole body)

.04 airplane flight NY to LA
.07 living in a stone building for a year
.08 average total dose living near the TMI accident
.10 2 week dose at Fukushima town hall

.40 mammogram
.40 yearly dose from potassium in the body
1.0 maximum total dose from TMI
1.0 maximum yearly EPA dose permitted for member of the public
4.0 normal yearly background dose

50 maximum yearly permitted dose for radiation workers
40 total accident dose at edge of Fukushima exclusion zone
50 10 minutes next to Chernobyl reactor after explosion

100 lowest year dose clearly linked to increased cancer risk
180 dose received by 2 Fukushima workers
250 EPA emergency dose permitted to save someones life
400 radiation poisoning

Radiation

Japan

Earthquake/tsunami -- 25,000 deaths

Fukishima 3 meltdowns -- zero deaths

March 12,2011 -- a few days after the earthquake:

"no member of the public has been hurt, and I doubt anybody will be."
Ron Ballinger, a nuclear expert at MIT, speaks about Fukushima


http://www.traders-talk.com/mb2/index.php?...=128820&hl=

A Live Concert Is More Dangerous Than a Nuclear Meltdown

Fairgrounds Stage Collapse --- 6 deaths

Fukishima 3 meltdowns --- zero deaths

Fukushima -- The Triumph of Fear and Ignorance

Nuclear power plants are not nuclear bombs

(Fiona Fox, the Director of the Science Media Center in the UK.) Fiona has written and spoken about her experiences in answering media requests following the Sendai earthquake and tsunami. She describes how dismayed she became as the requests turned almost immediately from the normal stories expected after a major natural disaster to stories purposely aimed at capitalizing on what she describes as the unique fear of radiation.

In the video, Ms. Fox tells how many of the journalists that she regularly serves from the Science Media Center were being told by their editors to find more sensational ways to frame the Fukushima story. She even mentions that several respected reporters were actually pulled off of the story because they continued filing reports that were measured, balanced and not sensational enough.

She describes how hurtful and insulting it was to her experts, nearly all of whom are professional academics, to be referred to as “apologists” for the nuclear industry merely because they refused to blow the story out of proportion. She tells how one of her experts is a radiation health specialist who has worked with patients undergoing radiation treatments for many years and has never had any association with the “nuclear industry.” That expert knows a great deal about the effects of radiation on the human body, both from study and personal experience. She also talked about how often radiation is used to save lives and how she cannot understand why the media believes that it is the basis for unique levels of fear.

Fear and Ignorance

An example of fear-mongering BS from Forbes:

Risk of Nuclear Catastrophe Escalates in Japan - 'Worse than Chernobyl'
3/11/2011

Fear-mongering

More fear-mongering BS:

China Syndrome!
(reactor core melts through the earth)

Worse than Hiroshima!

Greatest Disaster in History!

What the "fear-mongers of media" won't tell you:

Cosmic rays are energetic charged subatomic particles, originating from outer space (although it is currently unknown which objects have produced them).

Airline flight crews are currently classified as "radiation workers," a federal designation that means they are consistently exposed to radiation. Flight crews on high-latitude routes, in fact, are exposed to more radiation on an annual basis than nuclear plant workers.

Nobel prize winner lied about radiation danger and created a poisonous legacy of blind, ignorant fear

University of Massachusetts Amherst environmental toxicologist Edward Calabrese, whose career research shows that low doses of some chemicals and radiation are benign or even helpful, says he has uncovered evidence that one of the fathers of radiation genetics, Nobel Prize winner Hermann Muller, knowingly lied when he claimed in 1946 that there is no safe level of radiation exposure.

Muller’s intentions were good, Calabrese points out, but his decision not to mention key scientific evidence against his position has had a far-reaching impact on our approach to regulating radiation and chemical exposure.

“the regulatory research community needs to hear about this. The implications of my findings are that we should revisit our exposure regulations because our regulatory history is founded on a deception. We have seen literally hundreds of thousands of cleanup decisions based on a model that was fraudulently derived. I think we should probably have drastically different exposure standards today, and far less fear.”

Rad Fear


Edward Calabrese, a professor in the School of Public Health and Health Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, has been awarded the Marie Curie Prize for “outstanding achievements in research on the effects of low and very low doses of ionizing radiation on human health and biotopes.”

it’s unfortunate that most research on ionizing radiation conducted since nuclear weapons were developed has focused on its harmfulness. This has prevented valuable work on possible beneficial low-dose effects, including adaption and repair mechanisms, he feels. Further, anti-hormesis prejudice has deprived the scientific community of fundamental knowledge which might be uncovered, and which is needed to pursue the fight against the different forms of cancer, Maisseu adds.

He therefore salutes Calabrese’s “courageous opposition to this indefensible position with regard to scientific research.” Recalling the famous statement by the 15th century toxicologist, Paracelsus, that all substances are poison and only dose makes a poison, Maisseu adds, “Calabrese dared to undertake work making it possible to correctly appreciate the relationship between dose and effect in many areas of toxicology and biology, and to highlight numerous examples of the hormesis phenomenon.”

Calabrese