By Doug Small
The events in Japan are terrible. The death toll threatens to be horrendous. Thrown into the mix, as if it were needed, is the threat of nuclear meltdown.
Those with responsibilities in such matters are presumably so busy that the dissemination of information to the likes of us is low their list of things to do. However, in the light of this lack of information, I cannot but help ruminate on the level of scientific articulacy or otherwise emerging from our media outlets.
Each expert called into the BBC or Sky News studios seems to have to start by saying something along the lines of: “To be clear, we are not facing a Hiroshima-type explosion.”
This, to my mind – and I write as a career physicist – is like Jeremy Clarkson starting a piece on the new BMW with: “Now although this car is propelled by igniting petrol vapour, fear not – there is no chance it will explode in a hideous fireball.”
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Or an arts correspondent starting a piece on some new production of King Lear with: “William Shakespeare was a man who lived in Elizabethan England and who wrote plays and sonnets, some of which are still performed to this day.” Let’s be clear: it took the best minds of a generation and billions of dollars to produce uncontrollable fission, so nuclear power stations aren’t about to become bombs. So having established that whatever bad thing is going on at Fukushima Daiichi won’t give us a mushroom cloud, what can we actually expect? Again, details are few and those we have been fed are obfuscating. Take this BBC report from yesterday: “At one point [radiation] rose to a level similar to that one is exposed to during an X-ray, our correspondent says.” Presumably this is meant to reassure. We have all had X-rays, after all. But would you make up your bed on the examination table bathed in such radiation for eight hours? An X-ray is a one-off event lasting milliseconds. Otherwise, the image would blur. So is the radiation from the Japanese nuclear plant of a similar intensity, as seems to be suggested in the report? If so, it would be very worrying. Then there is this, from yesterday’s Evening Times (the same story also appeared in the Scotsman but has since been adjusted and the figures removed): “Tokyo Electric Power Co said radiation levels at Unit 3 were 10.65 microsieverts, significantly under the 500 microsieverts at which a nuclear operator must file a report to the government.” Again, this sounds reassuring. But again we have a problem with concepts. Sieverts tell you the total exposure to radiation that has happened – in other words, once it is over. Presumably what we have at Fukushima Daiichi is ongoing exposure to radiation. So how long did it take to accumulate the 10.65 microsieverts? If it was a day, then it wouldn’t be too bad – in fact, that would be barely above the background level of 2.4 millisieverts per year. If, however, it was a minute – then run for the hills. What is my point in all of this? Well, hopefully not trying to be a smartass. There must be some figures out there as to what radiation levels exist at present in north-eastern Japan. But these are being paraphrased for us by people with no actual understanding. The examples I have given are just two among many, and the level of scientific illiteracy is astounding. I fully admit to having had trouble myself, sifting my rads from my rems and röntgens, even though it is my job to know the difference between such things. I once had to read a paper entitled How many rads per Paterson-Parker röntgen?, after all. But nothing as complex and advanced as that is the problem here: it is basic secondary school physics that the media don’t seem to have. Fission bombs are difficult to make. Doses of radiation cited in sieverts need an exposure time to make sense. Meltdown does not mean a reactor plunging to the earth’s core as if in some latter-day Jules Verne novel. We are bathed in radiation all the time from cosmic rays and radon, and it doesn’t kill us unless it gets out of hand. Finally, after a certain amount of searching, I found a report on CNN with some sensible data: “[chief cabinet secretary Yukio] Edano said readings at the gate at 3:30pm Tuesday (2:30am ET) were 596.4 microsieverts per hour – compared to a high reading of 11,930 microsieverts per hour at 9am (8pm ET Monday).” The first of these figures means that if standing at the gates of the plant, one would achieve an annual background dose in four hours. The latter figure would provide it in 20 minutes – which would be a worry. So congratulations to whoever it was at CNN who wrote that report. It makes sense, and they should be given some kind of Plain Physics award along the lines of the Plain English Campaign. Would it be too much to ask that someone on each newsdesk be sent out to acquire Higher Physics before the next such event? – Doug Small is a physicist working in the NHS.Donate to us: support independent, intelligent, in-depth Scottish journalism from just 3p a day
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