Wellness

[ForestMaven]

As the plume reaches us this afternoon, this piece puts it into perspective. (See especially the last section!)

Banana equivalent dose

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A banana equivalent dose (BED) is a concept to place in scale the dangers of radiation by comparing exposures to the radiation generated by a common banana.

Many foods are naturally radioactive, and bananas are particularly so, due to the radioactive potassium-40, or K they contain. Bananas are radioactive enough to regularly cause false alarms on radiation sen... smuggling of nuclear material at U.S. ports. A medium-sized banana contains about 450 mg of potassium.

A radiation dose equivalent of 100 µSv (10 mrem, or 1,000 BED) increases an average adult human's ri... micromort – the same risk as eating 40 tablespoons of peanut butter, or of smoking 1.4 cigarettes. (WOW - for you smokers!)

Comparison to Three Mile Island and Chernobyl

After the 1979 Three Mile Island accident, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) detected radioactive iodine in local milk at levels of 0.74 Bq/l (20 pCi/l), much less than an equivalent quantity of normal banana.

Following the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, levels of caesium-137 increased by more than tenfold throughout Europe, and wild mushrooms in the area contained radiation with up to an effective dose of 20 µSv/kg.^[8] Thus, eating 1 kg of t...

Other foods

Nearly all foods are slightly radioactive. All food sources combined expose a person to around 0.4 m...

Some other foods that have above-average levels are potatoes, kidney beans, nuts, and sunflower seeds. Among the most naturally radioactive foods known are Brazil nuts, with activity levels that can exceed 444 Bq/kg (12 nCi/kg).