[ExI] How dangerous is radiation?

[John Clark]

On Sat, Jul 5, 2014 at 4:21 PM, Adrian Tymes <atymes at gmail.com> wrote:

>> Everybody agrees that huge amounts of radiation are harmful or fatal,
>> especially if received virtually instantaneously as in Hiroshima and
>> Nagasaki
>>
>
> > Most of the instant fatalities were due to heat and pressure.  Radiation
> was only a problem for the survivors.
>

The survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were unique in that they received
their radiation virtually instantaneously, it is probably far more
dangerous to receive radiation in that way because the cells have no time
to make repairs; even so the survivors didn't develop more solid cancers
than the average Japanese unless they received more than 100 millisieverts,
and they didn't have a larger chance of getting leukemia unless they got
more than 200 millisieverts. By comparison the average resident of this
planet receives 2.4 millisieverts from background radiation, but they
received that radiation over the course of a full year not in a fraction of
a second as the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki did.

  John K Clark
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