Essay by Eric Worrall
Both hotels were near nuclear medicine facilities. The first hotel (peak 0.14 µSv / hour) was a holiday rental in an apartment complex where lots of doctors live. The second was a popular hotel just over the road from a major Brisbane tourist attraction. Neither pose a risk to health.
The following is a fun video I captured at the first hotel, on the Queensland Sunshine Coast. The detector is sitting on a plastic coffee table in front of the sofa inside the hotel room. All the windows were closed. 12+ counts per second produces an impressive radiation detector video
Despite the impressive looking count rate in the video above, none of the radiation levels I measured are anywhere near to being a health hazard. Oregon State University gives the maximum safe exposure level as 0.02 mSV / hour – over 140x the maximum level I measured in those hotels. There are plenty of inhabited places where the natural radiation level is higher than what I measured in those hotel rooms (using a Radiocode Scintillometer).
The following is from a month ago, but as the nuclear debate just flared up again in Australia, I thought it worth mentioning.
NUCLEAR POWER STATIONS ARE NOT APPROPRIATE FOR AUSTRALIA – AND NEVER WILL BE
10.05.24 BY CLIMATE COUNCIL
The prospect of nuclear power in Australia has been a topic of public debate since the 1950s. While Australia has never had a nuclear power station, we do have 33% of the world’s uranium deposits and we are the world’s third largest producer of it. Periodically, as with the changing of the seasons, various individuals appear in the media singing the virtues of nuclear energy – claiming it is the only option for clean and reliable electricity in Australia.
In fact, over one third of Australia’s electricity is already powered by renewables, and new initiatives like the Capacity Investment Scheme are set to push us towards 82% renewable energy by the end of this decade. While the move to clean energy is still not happening fast enough, it is underway and starting to speed up. We do not need distractions like nuclear to derail our progress now, so let’s set the record straight.
…
3. Nuclear power poses significant community, environmental, health and economic risks.
Radiation from major nuclear disasters, such as Chernobyl in 1986 and Fukushima in 2011, have impacted hundreds of thousands of people and contaminated vast areas that take decades to clean up. Even when a nuclear power station operates as intended, it creates a long-term and prohibitively expensive legacy of site remediation, fuel processing and radioactive waste storage.
4. Nuclear power is not renewable, and it is not safe.
Uranium is a finite resource just like coal, oil and gas. It needs to be mined and, just like mining coal, oil and gas, this carries serious safety concerns, including contaminating the environment with radioactive dust, radon gas, water-borne toxins, and increased levels of background radiation. On the other hand, energy generated from the sun and wind releases no pollutants into the air and is overwhelmingly considered to be safe.
…
Critics are right that you can’t have nuclear power without a slight increase in radiation. My point is we already have non-health threatening radiation hotspots scattered around Australian cities, Australia is already part of the nuclear age.
The slight radiation hotspots I measured in those hotels, they could have been nuclear medicine patients staying at the hotels, shedding a few radioactive skin cells, or mildly irradiating the plumbing system when they use the bathroom. It could just be the granite facing on the local buildings, contributing a completely natural boost to local background radiation. Or it could be the soil in those locations happened to contain a little more natural radiation than the surrounding areas, the adjacency to the medical facilities could have all been a big coincidence.
I didn’t deliberately book hotels next to nuclear radiation medical facilities – the hotels just happened to be convenient for the events I was attending. I only noticed the medical facilities after I started trying to figure out why the radiation levels in the hotels were slightly higher than the background level I measured a few miles away.
I did walk inside one of the facilities, see if it got any hotter when I got closer, but I didn’t see any identifiable gradient – the radiation actually dropped a little when I walked inside the facility. So whatever it was, it was well dispersed. But the radiation did drop away significantly after I travelled more than a mile from the facilities – so while my evidence is far from conclusive, in my mind it still seems possible that nuclear medicine was the source of the slight uptick in radiation in the places I stayed.
There is a big difference between a slight uptick in background count, and a globally significant nuclear catastrophe.
The other kind of radiation leak, the kind of leak which forces people to abandon their homes, modern reactors have containment buildings which keep all the problems inside the plant. The only time I ever heard of this failing was Fukushima, but Fukushima’s plant clearly wasn’t pressure resistant the way modern US style containment buildings are. Chernobyl didn’t have a proper containment building – which is why they had to build the “sarcophagus” after the Chernobyl reactor blew its top.
Australia does not have fault zones capable of producing a Fukushima scale Earthquake disaster. Nuclear power, with a proper pressure tested containment facility, is as close to completely safe as anything can be.
My main objection to Aussie opposition leader Peter Dutton’s nuclear programme plan is I don’t think the proposal on the table makes economic sense. Australia has vast quantities of coal – we should keep burning cheap coal to keep power bills down. And Dutton’s plan for siting nuclear plants on top of coal seams potentially endangers the value of those coal resources, if a low level release ever makes its way into the coal bed. I do not have any problem with nuclear itself.
My family stayed in those hotels with me, so I was completely at ease with the safety issue. My kid thought the expression on mum’s face was hilarious when I showed my wife the Scintillometer buzzing away on the table, like a scene from the TV series “Chernobyl”, but everything was fine after I reassured my wife, and presented the yummy chocolate bar I’d been saving for marital emergencies. After the initial surprise, and showing everyone a few radiation hazard sheets, it was all a big joke – a funny Facebook post which got a few more “wows” than normal from my friends.
The small spike which I labelled “Big solar flare” was a gamma ray spike pretty much everyone on Earth likely experienced during the spectacular Auroras many of us saw a month ago. I’m too close to the Equator to experience the full effects of interesting space weather – near the equator the atmosphere is thicker, and the topography of the Earth’s magnetic field provides more effective shielding. But if anyone was playing with a radiation detector in Antarctica, Southern Chile or Northern Canada, Scandinavia, Greenland, Siberia or Alaska during the big aurora event, I’d love to know what the measured gamma ray excursion was during the solar flare. And if following your high latitude aurora gamma ray exposure you turn green, grow huge muscles, and become one of my favourite superheroes, more power to you.
Related
Discussion about this post