Have you seen the actual numbers of this, and seen them put into perspective? I'd strongly recommend looking at http://xkcd.org/radiation/ -- he puts the data into an easy to relate to format.
The biggest problem with that chart is that it mixes different time scales, which it only indicates in the text, not in the visual comparisons.
Take one of the ones that measures an hour's exposure and multiply it by 24. Or a day and multiply it by 365. Suddenly the visual comparisons look much, much different.
As mentioned in the BBC article though, doing that kind of math does not lead to an accurate result, due to the fact that your body is constantly healing. It's the bursts of radiation that are most damaging.
Yeah, this was one of my big complaints with that. However, it's not prevalent enough to disregard it. It's by no means scientific, but I think it gives a good high level orders-of-magnitude view, largely.
Yes, I mostly understand the scale of radiation we're currently dealing with in Japan, and it's mostly on the "safer" side. However, my issue is with taking an accident that deformed countless children, caused countless cases of cancer, and in general completely devastated the lives of (hundreds of) thousands of people - and essentially using it in a "How I Stopped Worrying and Love the Bomb" argument to get people to calm down. Yes, there is a level of overreaction any time a nuclear accident takes place (Japan, TMI come to mind), but I wish people wouldn't gloss over the suffering of so many people in order to make their point.
It was a great tragedy. But neither was the the number of deformed children nor the number of cases of cancer "countless". There have been put numbers on it [1].
- UNSCEAR claims 6000 cases of cancer.
- IAEA claims 4000 deaths
- Greenpeace claims 200,000 deaths
- IPPNW claims 10,000 - 50,000 cases of cancer
- New York Academy of Sciences claims 985,000 deaths
I would hardly count xkcd as a scientifically factual comic. Besides, as waterlesscloud said, he mixes up timescales (or in some cases uses simply uSv's, which, I hear, makes no sense without a timescale. Ie 5 uSv = wrong, 5 uSv/hour = ok).
In that case, what were you referring to when posting the chart: Fukushima or Chernobyl?
If Chernobyl, the article mentions only a small number of fatalities, but I've read in many places over the years that thousands of people (especially in Belarus, who got the worst of it) have since died from cancer and other radiation induced diseases. I've also seen documentaries about the many sick and deformed children that were born since, because of their parents high exposure to radiation.
Finally, when I was growing up, I saw many affected children first hand, as a lot of families in my school at the time would host children affected by the accident during the summer.
If you were referring to Fukushima, I agree that it doesn't come close to Chernobyl (that we know of, at least), but the linked article makes Chernobyl sound "not that bad" too, which I cannot agree with.
