I believe bill-2261 was referring to the fact that people staying near the plant received very small amounts of radiation exposure, while anyone who flew commercially to get away from the plant would have received larger exposures due to solar radiation.
When you fly at high altitudes, there is less atmosphere shielding you from the sun. As a result, you are exposed to more dangerous solar radiation on a commercial plane than you are on the ground.
The average member of the public who was within 10 miles of TMI-2 received a dose of 8 mrem from the plant, and the maximum public exposure was 100 mrem.
For comparison, a person receives an extra dose of 0.5 mrem for every mile they travel while flying commercially. So anyone who flew 16 miles that day got more of a dose than the average member of the public near the plant, and anyone who flew 200 miles received a larger dose than the maximum. Anyone who flew from NYC to LA got a dose of radiation 15 times larger than the maximum received near the TMI accident.
Anti-nukes often forget (or just never realize) that there are lots of natural sources of ionizing radiation. In addition to that, there are plenty of man-made sources that cause far more exposure than nuclear power, yet the public considers them perfectly safe.
An average American is exposed to about 360 mrem of ionizing radiation a year, with most of it naturally coming from the sun, the ground, our food, and our water. The rest comes from man made sources, and only a trace amount is linked to commercial nuclear power.
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15 years ago
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pvt1863
15 years ago
The effect of ionizing radiation in small doses is unknown. It is difficult to study since we receive small doses all the time, so it is impossible to generate a control. Furthermore, the effects are subtle and/or long term, making in depth studies problematic.
For a long time, it has been assumed that all radiation exposure is bad and that the negative effect is linearly proportional to the exposure. There is no scientific basis for this. It started simply as a conservative assumption when nuclear science started. It still remains as an assumption, even though few nuclear scientists believe it to be true. The idea is simply that if we treat radiation as if it were this dangerous, then any engineering decisions make based on that idea will have an extra factor of safety built into them.
There have been a few studies that have attempted to address the risk of low radiation doses. Many of these have come to the conclusion that small doses of ionizing radiation could actually be good for you. This conclusion makes sense when one considers that the Earth environment we evolved in is a radioactive one.
But the science is far from settled in either way. However, even if the assumed linear relationship between exposure and health risk is true, the exposure we get from things like commercial air travel and nuclear power have a far smaller impact on our health than many other things that we readily accept in our lives. For example, even in a worst case scenario where cancer risk scales linearly with exposure, you are still more likely to die in a car crash driving to a destination than you are from cancer if you flew there.
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