Specific Activities

When interested in relatively low-level radioactive material, the picocurie, or pCi (one-trillionth of a curie, remember?), is used. In Table 6, the activity is in pCi per liter and in Bq per liter. [You will also run across Bq per cubic meter (Bq/m3) in some radon studies. Multiply Bq/l by 1,000.]

Table 6 – Specific Activities of Common Substances
Material	Picocuries/liter	Becquerels/liter
Normal air	2	0.074
Typical radon level in homes	3	0.111
EPA limit: Ra-226 in drinking water	5	0.185
Nuclear power plant leak	15	0.555
“Contaminated” milk at TMI*	22	0.814
Rainwater **	360	13.3
Whiskey	1,200	44.4
Salad oil	4,900	181.5
Spa waters of Bad Gastein	16,200	599
Drinking water in Maine***	53,700	1,987
*The increase in radioactive iodine in Harrisburg after the Three Mile Island “disaster” was 1/20 that caused by Chinese A-bomb tests in 1976. You remember how Jane Fonda and Ralph Nader protested those, don’t you?
**Measured at Santa Fe, 5/11/1986. (Probably atmospheric carbon 14 and wind-blown potassium 40 salts.)
***Based on an average of 226 samples. Radiation Controversy, Ralph Lapp, Reddy Communications, 1979.

Since most Americans have no idea what danger might lurk in a glass of water having 200 picocuries per liter, we are at the mercy of those who might use this lack of knowledge to their political advantage. Professor Petr Beckmann pointed out that activity in a well-publicized reactor leak at Indian Point power plant outside New York City was equivalent to that in a pint bottle of salad oil. Without this knowledge, an interested citizen would be led to believe (a) nuclear power was unreliable, and (b) such technology was a danger to life and limb - exactly what anti-techologists Nader, Commoner, Ehrlich and their fellow primitivists would have us believe. Exactly the opposite of the truth.

You might want to bookmark this page, for easy reference to Table 6 as you read on.

In answer to the question posed in the chapter title, 100 picocuries is the approximate activity in a handful of average soil produced by the disintegration of potassium 40. (I always knew there was something dangerous about working out in the yard.)

Next we'll take a look at how the effect of ionizing radiation on the human body is measured.

Waste 'n' Time

Uh, oh. I'm afraid I've kind of painted myself into a corner here by minimizing the "problem" of nuclear wastes. If I give it short shrift, it will appear that I'm avoiding the subject. On the other hand, while the matter of nuclear wastes is somewhat afield from our general topic, there is a connection that might be of interest.

The only danger even attributed to nuclear wastes is that of causing cancer in future generations that are too stupid not to bit into a glassified chunk of power-plant waste. As we shall see, there is a threshold below which - even for those future glass munchers - there is no fear of increased cancer risk. But even if there weren't such a threshold, there are a number of issues regarding nuclear wastes that have been ignored in the media's misreporting of the subject that you should know about.

• More than 95% of the long half-life "waste" in nuclear fuel is not waste at all, but uranium and plutonium that may be reprocessed into fresh fuel assemblies. Most other industrialized nations do just this, as our government promised the utilities, but the Carter administration reneged on the agreement. (More about this later.)
• Among the "wastes" that anti-nuclear activists are eager to bury are valuable medical radionuclides that are produced at high cost in specialty reactors. As in the case of the reprocessable fuel, the baby is being thrown out with the bath water.
• The most sensible way to eliminate the unusable wastes from reprocessed fuel (which about to about 1% of their volume) is to dilute it a few millionfold and pour it down the drain, or to dump it into ocean abysses where there is no biological activity. Man's puny efforts at creating radionuclide wastes are dwarfed by the enormous amounts existing in nature. There are, for example, 36 billion curies of rubidium 87 and 380 billion curies of potassium 40 in the oceans, almost all of which will still be there when the few million curies of man's wastes have long since decayed to undetectable amounts. 

Why then, you may ask, are there hundreds or thousands of government- (read "taxpayer-") supported scientists busy writing reports on Yucca Mountain? I suggest there may be three reasons: (1) they don't know - or, more than likely, don't care - that low-level radiation is not harmful; (2) it beats having to get a real job; or (3) grants to study the mating habits of the Zambian sweat bee have already been taken.