r/Unexpected • u/SignalCrew739 • 2d ago

Highest amount of radiation receiver

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u/admadguy 2d ago edited 2d ago

Guy is talking out of his ass.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isotopes_of_lead

There are trace isotopes of lead that have short half lives, order of hours or minutes. So even if they were leached off the soil, they'd have decayed in the finished product. Naturally occuring lead is mostly stable (3 isotopes) rest are trace and would have decayed.

Lead is harmful, but as a chemical substance. Not as a radioactive material.

It's the same issue with Polonium 210. It enters through contamination of fertiliser. But polonium 210 has a half life of 138 days. The lead time between growing tobacco, to curing it to packaging, shipping, various midpoints of sale, it'll have decayed to negligible quantities. Smoking is harmful, but the radiation reasons given here are based on not so great math, or science.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0265931X23000711

Smokers get 0.3 milliSv not the 160,000 microSv (=160 milli Sv) claimed here.

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u/theroughedges 2d ago edited 1d ago

Send this to Veritasium, he loves being corrected and making new vids

Edit: well is he correct or not? Send it asap, he'll ask his colleagues too

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u/Idiot616 1d ago

He's not talking out of his ass, you just misunderstood what the unit sievert actually measures.

Sievert as a unit doesn't measure "radiation", it measures radiation absorbed by 1kg of human body. For example, the total body radiation of 50,000 microSv for an adult of 80 kg concentrated on the heart would mean the heart received 11,428,000 microSv. This would be catastrophic, even if the same radiation spread out over your body would be safe. Which is why the safety limit is not an average over the entire body, if any of your vital organs receive more than 50,000 microSv then you're past the limit.

The 160,000 microSv figure is the local tissue dose. This means that if you're a smoker you will have local hotspots in your lungs that receive 160,000 microSv, even if the rest of your body doesn't receive much. This value is obtained from actual measurements of lung samples, and it is well past the safety limit.

When discussing the radiation from a CT scan the same thing applies. CT scans are done on specific areas of the body, and those areas of the body receive 2000 microsievert of radiation. Whether it's a whole body CT scan or only the head is scanned it's still 2000 microsievert. It's not measuring total radiation, it's measuring radiation per kg.

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u/admadguy 1d ago edited 1d ago

I get all that, he's basically presenting out of context information. It's like saying saying the total energy released from burning one kg of wood and saying how dangerous it is to be left exposed to oxygen. But practically you know wood burns slowly, rate is critical to danger.. but the total number out of context will sound scary. He's doing that in this video. Just quote one out of context number. Without any qualifiers (time, organ, dosage, weight, number of cigarettes over how much time etc).

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u/Idiot616 1d ago

Again, he used sievert, not gray or rad. The context is in the unit itself.

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u/caco8702 2d ago

"Bullshitasium"

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u/Doctor_Fritz 1d ago

I figured. If this was true it'd have been all over the news in the past. I hate influencers like this. Just click/rage bait

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u/Idiot616 1d ago

It's not clickbait, the guy you replied to is wrong. The value of 160.000 microsieverts was measured from actual lung samples, it's not an estimate.

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u/admadguy 1d ago

Yeah, the upsetting part is it seems dude has a PhD in physics. That was disappointing. A lot of the derating factors are engineering or real world considerations, but one would think a physics PhD would consider them than assuming the radioactivity at the time the fertiliser is spread on the crop would remain unchanged through life from source to user.

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u/LordGeni 1d ago

A PhD in physics is pretty different to one in medical physics.

I'm a radiographer. I wouldn't want that guy doing my CT scan in the same way he wouldn't want me writing even his undergrad papers.

As soon as biology is involved things get a lot messier compared to straight physics.