The Fukushima Radiation Leak Is Equal To 76 Million Bananas  :D

There’s much screaming and shouting from the usual suspects about the new radiation leak discovered at Fukushima, the stricken nuclear power plants in Japan. What they’re not telling you is that the radiation leakage is around the same as 76 million bananas. A fact which should help to put it all into some perspective. Here’s Greenpeace:

Environmental group Greenpeace said Tepco had “anxiously hid the leaks” and urged Japan to seek international expertise.

“Greenpeace calls for the Japanese authorities to do all in their power to solve this situation, and that includes increased transparancy…and getting international expertise in to help find solutions,” Dr Rianne Teule of Greenpeace International said in an e-mailed statement.

Not that Greenpeace is ever going to say anything other than that nuclear power is the work of the very devil of course. And the headlines do indeed seem alarming:
dioactive Fukushima groundwater rises above barrier – Up to 40 trillion becquerels released into Pacific ocean so far – Storage for radioactive water running out.

Or:

Tepco admitted on Friday that a cumulative 20 trillion to 40 trillion becquerels of radioactive tritium may have leaked into the sea since the disaster.

Most of us haven’t a clue what that means of course. We don’t instinctively understand what a becquerel is in the same way that we do pound, pint or gallons, and certainly trillions of anything sounds hideous. But don’t forget that trillions of picogrammes of dihydrogen monoxide is also the major ingredient in a glass of beer. So what we really want to know is whether 20 trillion becquerels of radiation is actually an important number. To which the answer is no, it isn’t. This is actually around and about (perhaps a little over) the amount of radiation the plant was allowed to dump into the environment before the disaster. Now there are indeed those who insist that any amount of radiation kills us all stone dead while we sleep in our beds but I’m afraid that this is incorrect. We’re all exposed to radiation all the time and we all seem to survive long enough to be killed by something else so radiation isn’t as dangerous as all that.

At which point we can offer a comparison. Something to try and give us a sense of perspective about whether 20 trillion nasties of radiation is something to get all concerned about or not. That comparison being that the radiation leakage from Fukushima appears to be about the same as that from 76 million bananas. Which is a lot of bananas I agree, but again we can put that into some sort of perspective.

Let’s start from the beginning with the banana equivalent dose, the BED. Bananas contain potassium, some portion of potassium is always radioactive, thus bananas contain some radioactivity. This gets into the human body as we digest the lovely fruit (OK, bananas are an herb but still…):

Since a typical banana contains about half a gram of potassium, it will have an activity of roughly 15 Bq.

Excellent, we now have a unit that we can grasp, one that the human mind can use to give a sense of proportion to these claims about radioactivity. We know that bananas are good for us on balance, thus this amount of radioactivity isn’t all that much of a burden on us.

We also have that claim of 20 trillion becquerels of radiation having been dumped into the Pacific Ocean in the past couple of years. 20 trillion divided by two years by 365 days by 24 hours gives us an hourly rate of 1,141,552,511 becquerels per hour. Divide that by our 15 Bq per banana and we can see that the radiation spillage from Fukushima is running at 76 million bananas per hour.

Which is, as I say above, a lot of bananas. But it’s not actually that many bananas. World production of them is some 145 million tonnes a year. There’s a thousand kilos in a tonne, say a banana is 100 grammes (sounds about right, four bananas to the pound, ten to the kilo) or 1.45 trillion bananas a year eaten around the world. Divide again by 365 and 24 to get the hourly consumption rate and we get 165 million bananas consumed per hour.

We can do this slightly differently and say that the 1.45 trillion bananas consumed each year have those 15 Bq giving us around 22 trillion Bq each year. The Fukushima leak is 20 trillion Bq over two years: thus our two calculations agree. The current leak is just under half that exposure that we all get from the global consumption of bananas.

Except even that’s overstating it. For the banana consumption does indeed get into our bodies: the Fukushima leak is getting into the Pacific Ocean where it’s obviously far less dangerous. And don’t forget that all that radiation in the bananas ends up in the oceans as well, given that we do in fact urinate it out and no, it’s not something that the sewage treatment plants particularly keep out of the rivers.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2013/08/10/the-fukushima-radiation-leak-is-equal-to-76-million-bananas/

Bananas contain radioactive Potassium (K) 40 and C14, just as we do.

The author of the article is well informed.

Should we stop eating sea food for a few decades.....?????

None of which makes nuclear power either necessary or desirable.
...
Social license is acceptance by the community, stakeholders and society at large that the development under consideration has the right to be built and operate.  There is no social license for nuclear in the very large majority of jurisdictions world wide, and there is overwhelming majority support in poll after poll for wind in both rural and urban areas, so wind energy can actually be built, and nuclear can’t.This is frustrating for people who understand that the fears related to nuclear energy are for the most part baseless, especially when the statistics are assessed with open eyes.  Nuclear’s deaths per TWh are much, much lower than fossil fuel generation by any analysis, and are in the same ballpark as wind, solar and other renewables. It’s benign, but it is tightly coupled to radiation and nuclear weapons in people’s minds. Accidents such as Fukushima and Three Mile Island receive enormous world wide press, but don’t kill anyone.
...
It may not be fair to nuclear, but it’s true. Attempting to change the world’s mind about the dangers of nuclear energy in the face of 70 years of dramatization by Hollywood and the enormous negative press that the small handful of major accidents received is a mug’s game.  That’s why jurisdictions such as Japan and Germany are getting out of nuclear. Their citizens just don’t accept it anymore.
...
The skills required to build and operate nuclear reactors safely are not basic skilled trades, and even the basic skilled trades have to be held to an extraordinary quality standard due to the nature of the built object.  The human resources required to ramp up a significant nuclear build out include a large number of nuclear engineers who don’t exist and can’t be created from existing trained personnel without 5-15 years of re-education. People are not opting into nuclear engineering or even pre-cursor education programs in schools because they realize that there are no jobs in the field and because of the negative associations nuclear energy has. It might be possible to build five to ten nuclear plants at a time and guarantee that they will be safely constructed and operated with the skilled resources available. And as nuclear plants take a decade to build and certify for operation, it’s very difficult to shift the limited resources between projects with any safety. The majority of skilled resources today are only skilled in 40 year old technologies at that, so even the nuclear engineers that exist are not capable of shifting to new nuclear build out without substantial retraining and certification.
...
The history of nuclear energy is a history of cost overruns, schedule overruns and underperforming capital assets. Financing the $7-10 billion USD megaprojects is extremely difficult as a result, and when they do manage to get financed the debt rating agencies typically downgrade them at the first hiccup — understandably — changing the economics of the deal for the worse. To even be eligible for bond issues, governments have to specifically enact legislation waiving liability of the nuclear operator for damages over a certain point, typically in the $750M-$1B USD range. These numbers are large, but the potential for a nuclear plant to make a large area uninhabitable for decades however statistically unlikely has enormous costs associated with it.
...
The current cost of regulatory oversight and approval for a single nuclear reactor is approaching $1 billion USD by itself.  This is understandable given the lethal cargo that reactors contain and the challenge of safe interim storage of dangerously radioactive waste, along with the more spectacular challenges of Fukushima, Two Mile Island and Chernobyl and the terrorism problem (see the next point). ...

Nuclear plants contain terrorist gold, whether they want to build a dirty bomb or fly a hijacked jet into a reactor. Plants have to be hardened massively from a physical and intrusion security perspective, with enormous numbers of overlapping, carefully maintained security measures including large numbers of armed guards. A typical suggestion is to build them in existing military bases; ...

... When nuclear reactors reach end-of-life, massive amounts of deeply contaminated material is created which has to sit on the site in perpetuity or be shipped at extraordinary expense extraordinary distances to safe containment facilities.  The land isn’t useful for anything else for generations at least.
...
More at the above link.

Ajax wrote on Oct 27^th, 2013 at 11:45am:

Should we stop eating sea food for a few decades.....?????

Yes. Definitely stop eating seafood. Pass on the word.

Maybe then there will be more fish around for us recreational fishermen.

...K40 is in equilibrium within the human body...

in any case the amount of K40 in one banana is negligibly small

I would be far more concerned with smoking or even passive smoking

Alcohol related diseases cause about 24,000 deaths in AUstralia each, whilst smoking causes another 17,000

The cost to the Health budget of these two habits is about 50% of the total national health budget (ie about 30 billion dollars per year)

Yes ladies and gentlemen lets focus on bananas and their K40 the beta emitter scoundrel 

Chimp_Logic wrote on Oct 28^th, 2013 at 10:57pm:

...K40 is in equilibrium within the human body... in any case the amount of K40 in one banana is negligibly small I would be far more concerned with smoking or even passive smoking Alcohol related diseases cause about 24,000 deaths in AUstralia each, whilst smoking causes another 17,000 The cost to the Health budget of these two habits is about 50% of the total national health budget (ie about 30 billion dollars per year) Yes ladies and gentlemen lets focus on bananas and their K40 the beta emitter scoundrel

I agree.

# wrote on Oct 28^th, 2013 at 7:59pm:

Social license is acceptance by the community, stakeholders and society at large that the development under consideration has the right to be built and operate.  There is no social license for nuclear in the very large majority of jurisdictions world wide, and there is overwhelming majority support in poll after poll for wind in both rural and urban areas, so wind energy can actually be built, and nuclear can’t.This is frustrating for people who understand that the fears related to nuclear energy are for the most part baseless, especially when the statistics are assessed with open eyes.  Nuclear’s deaths per TWh are much, much lower than fossil fuel generation by any analysis, and are in the same ballpark as wind, solar and other renewables. It’s benign, but it is tightly coupled to radiation and nuclear weapons in people’s minds. Accidents such as Fukushima and Three Mile Island receive enormous world wide press, but don’t kill anyone. ...

Good summary. I don't believe that Nuclear Power Stations (except perhaps fusion) will ever become viable in Australia.