Fukushima Nuclear Reactor radiation at extraordinary levels! Unimaginable levels even!
...the radiation levels - as high as 530 sieverts per hour - are now the highest they've been since 2011 when a tsunami hit the coastal reactor. "To put this in very simple terms. Four sieverts can kill a handful of people," he explained. "The worry is with 300 tons of radioactive water going into the Pacific every day, what is that doing to the Pacific Ocean?"
We are doomed! Or maybe not so much
TEPCO and the Japanese government carefully measure the radioactivity in the water being released, and report it regularly. Their
[/url]February 1 report
records only one significant radionuclide in the water: tritium, the third hydrogen isotope. The radioactivity level is between 780 and 820 Bq per liter of water. What does this mean? Well, the
U.S. EPA safety standard for tritium in drinking water
sets an upper limit of 740 Bq/liter. Basically, you wouldn't want to drink it, right there at the outflow into the Pacific, for any extended length of time -- although it probably wouldn't hurt you.
The take-away line:
The third thing we learned -- and I think probably the most important thing -- is to never trust a journalist writing about anything involving radiation, the metric system, or any arithmetic more challenging than long division.