#radiophobia — Public Fediverse posts

As part of sustaining the traditional #radiophobia in #Germany the Umweltministerium is periodically posting[^1] this scary map. Its purpose is to demonstrate that the negative effects of #Chornobyl disaster last even 40 years after it happened. The color coding for Cesium-137 content is the essence of this manipulation, because red suggests its something dramatically exceeding the norm but the scale next to it shows the highest content is ~48 kBq/m2.

Let’s now convert it into actual radiation dose ingested by a potential consumer. The calculation is conveniently provided by Germany’s own Bundesamt für Strahlenschutz[^2]

The ingestion of 80,000 becquerel caesium-137 corresponds to an exposure of about 1 millisievert for adults.

For reference, a single CT full-body scan delivers 10–30 mSv. So if you somehow consumed all mushroom completely covering 1 m2 of the “polluted” land you’d receive 0.05-0.15 of a CT scan (because the max is 58 kBq/m2 and in the example above they use 80 kBq). But the BfS example actually also conveniently refers to the actual mushroom consumption too:

The consumption of 200 grams of mushrooms with 1,000 becquerel caesium-137 per kilogram results in an exposure of 0.0025 millisievert. This is considerably less than the radiation exposure during a flight from Frankfurt to Gran Canaria. However, if adults eat such a mushroom meal each week, they will receive an additional annual radiation exposure corresponding to about nine flights from Frankfurt to Gran Canaria. Expressed in numbers it is 0.13 millisievert.

P.S. human body naturally emits ~5 kBq from potassium-40 (K-40) all the time

[^1]: https://xcancel.com/UmweltBW/status/2048133845828956468?s=20

[^2]: https://www.bfs.de/EN/topics/ion/environment/foodstuffs/mushrooms-game/_functions/cs137-nahrung.html