Your leader is dramatically decreasing the amount of radiation you will be receiving. This is a double-plus-good day!

So it will still be fresh in the public’s mind when dubya lands on the fucking aircraft carrier to announce “Cleanup Accomplished”.

When Bush said there would be no ceremonies on a battleship, it was b/c you can’t land a jet on one!

Maybe the administration heard about the low dose radiation folks and figured it’d be a health boon.

Department of Homeland Security… beginning to sound more and more like Ministry of Truth.

Your leader is dramatically decreasing the amount of radiation you will be receiving. This is a double-plus-good day!

It been seeming like you guys down in the States have more to fear from your government than from terrorists.

I don’t know what the safety limit for radiation is, and I hazard to think that neither Les nor the other commenters do either.

I do know that people get funny at the idea of radiation beyond what is demonstrably physically harmful.

People in Japan are much more nonchalant about it, though: you can go to the public bath, for instance, and get in a blue radon bath. Hmmm…Relaxing.

Zak, no one knows what the “safety limit” for radiation is, because there is no such thing.  All that we know is that increasing exposure leads to increased rates of cancer.  What is “demonstrably harmful” is not demonstrable at the present, because we cannot distinguish between “naturally” occuring cancer and radiation-induced cancer.  All we have is statistics.

But the statistics show that we should probably err on the cautious side of exposure, and 2500 times the EPA recommendation is not very cautious.

Sure, the Japanese are nonchalant about radiation.  They were nonchalant about mercury poisoning too, until Minimata.  Not a good example to follow.

Aha!  I DO have some radiation numbers to use.  As follows:

(rem = roentgen equivalent man [or woman – grin]) is a measure of effect

Normal background radiation is about 300 millirems per year.

Chest X-ray is about 6 mrem

Yucca Mountain estimates 15 mrem/year

Guidelines from the experts:
EPA for workers in uranium mine inhalation from dust:  10 mrem/y
(I used this measurement because inhalation of radioactive material from a dirty bomb is a valid means of body entry.)

Health Physics Society (HPS 100-500) mrem/year

500 mrem is about 1 cancer for every 80 people exposed

I hope these numbers will be of use when (or if) the Homeland Security guidelines come up for public comment.

SG

A supplement to SG’s information.

The gender neutral Sievert (Sv) wasn’t a unit in use when I had to be concerned with radiation monitoring. The conversion is mercifully simple -  1 Sv = 100 rem. There are some other unit conversions in this page from a Radiation Manual maintained by Stanford. This particular page leaves out some information covered in detail elsewhere in the manual. Curies and becquerels are measures of counts (decay rates) while rems and rads are measures of how much energy is deposited in soft tissue. So there is a question of what is the radiation source and what is the distance.

The US Government has two standards for Maximum Permissable Dose (MPD). One for the general public and another for radiation workers. International standards are the same as ours for the general public and 40% of ours for radiation workers.

General Public 1 mSv per year

Radiation Workers
Annual MPD 50 mSv
Lifetime 10 mSv x Age
MPD during pregnancy 5 Msv (No international standards)

I suspect the Navy still imposes a weekly limit on exposure to control the rate of accumulation. (The limit during pregnancy is new business.)

On the higher standards for radiation workers, “The rationale is that ‘radiation workers’ presumably accept the increased risk by informed consent as a trade-off in exchange for the benefits of employment.“

Finally, here is some more information  about exposure from a various x-ray procedures.

This only reinforces the theory that Bush didn’t just want to be the President—he wanted to be the LAST president. You know, before the impending apocalypse and all. If it’s any consolation, we’ll all see him in Hell. (Figure of speech, for all you atheists out there)

Well, perhaps a higher death toll would give more justification for a counter-attack on the ‘suspected’ terrorist group that set off a dirty bomb.

More dead Americans = more dead ‘terrorists’