Radioactivity at the Grocery Store

And what better way to serve nukefruit than in a uranium-glass bowl?

Presentation is everything.

1 Gray = 1 Joule of energy absorbed in 1 kg of matter, and doesn't take into account what the absorber is and what damage the radiation causes.

1 gy = 1 m²/s²

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gray_(unit)

Sounds like you think the LNT (Linear, No Threshold) theory is valid. However, it is NOT. Tests long ago showed that LNT is not valid; in fact, low levels of radioactivity are good for us. We have lived with radioactivity (natural background, foods, etc, etc) since the beginning, and we benefit from low-level exposure.

I think you are correct.

The LNT theory implies that there is no repair of damage due to radiation.Because there is repair of damage from radiation as well as other sources, then below some threshold the "maintenance crew" can keep up with the damage that occurs.

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

At least until the telomeres come unraveled....right?

This article makes me cringe at the absence of description of the measurement methodology.

What basis of measurement are they talking about? If its individual items, then if I work in a building near a brick wall having 1,000 bricks, my exposure would be 150uGy/hr (.15 x 1000) and thus 100 times natural uranium ore!!!

The poor shop staff in the fruit and veg store with 1000 avos and 2000 bananas must be copping a huge dose!

Given they are measuring gamma radiation, did they merely observe a background level of 0.16 +/1 0.01 for avocados, bananas, bricks, smoke detectors, ....... and a real reading for the uranium ore?

Then we have the Banana Equivalent Dose or BED, directly traceable (in the U.S. at least) to the NIST Standard Banana maintained in an secure, undisclosed produce department somewhere in Washington, DC between the State Department's email servers and the FBI, though it seems a bit more apropos for Queensland to receive that honour given their agricultural propensities.

Not to be left out in the radiogenic cold, similar standards are currently under development for avos, brazil nuts, cinnamon bark, and kiwis, with NZ offering to host the latter standard in a temperature-and-humidity controlled, volcano-earthquake-and-tsunami-proof vault beneath Auckland. Christchurch also wants a piece of the action and have offered to host a completely different KED standard bearing no relationship to the first or to anything else really, but it sounded good on paper.

Where were we?

You are right, the radiation hazard depends on inverse square of distance, the particular type of radiation (alpha, beta, gamma, neutrons, etc) and whatever shielding might be between the source and absorber. It's more complicated than just the amount of energy emitted by the radioactive material.

Yep. It's not like the produce guy in one store is being irradiated by the competitor's produce down the road or even by the bananas on the far side of his own bin, especially where alpha radiation is concerned.

I thought all food had to be radioactive. Isn't this how the radioactive isotope ¹⁴C gets into all of our bodies for future carbon dating. (The isotope gnomes don't inject us a calibrated volume at the moment when we die.) Now certainly some foods will have more or less of some compounds, elements, isotopes, etc. depending on where it is grown and breeding. A green sweet pepper from an abandoned garden in Chernobyl will likely have more radioactive isotopes than any of my home grown Cayenne peppers. I'll let you guess which are hotter.

There's an awful lot of radioactivity in coal. So what?

PWSlack: Yep! And it stays in the plume and the ash to be distributed in the environment. I have heard the figure 7 TONS of thorium and 5 TONS of uranium per year for a 1000 MW plant. That's just one of the reasons why I like fast nuclear reactor generating plants.

Yes, American coals average around 1 mg/Kg coal as Uranium.

Not too many years ago, food preservation by irradiation was going to be the next big thing. Whatever happened to that? Did it only make it into MRE's?

Irradiation can preserve food better than some other means of sterilization against pathogenic organisms, molds, etc. It does not mean the food will glow in the dark, unless engineered to do so.

With 19th Century Uranium glass bowls around, who needs radioactive fruit cocktail?

Why are you worried about the fruit or veggies, just measure the granite counter top.