Did you read the whole article or just the excerpts I copied into my post.
There is more there, but it's against forum rules to post the whole thing.
There are specific measurements. A person living there would be exposed to as much as 500 millisieverts of radiation per year, whereas the government's upper limit for safe exposure is 20 millisieverts.
Yes, i did. And reading it simply confirmed what i suspected about the style of the article. It's mainly fear-mongering crap.
See, first they set the "fear the atom" stage by all the vague statements that you cited here. Then the usual reference to Chernobyl comes along, what else.
Then some side-notes about how bad the government was/is working. And then the beef starts. They talk about 508.1 mS/yr and how that is way above the limit of 20 mS/yr. However, they packed it such that most people will likely overlook the fact that this refers to _one_ particular spot, _2_ miles from the plant. Then they go on how three dozen spots up to 12 miles around the plant are above the safe levels.
They never tell you what the levels are in these other spots, only that they are above that 20mS/yr limit. They never tell how big these spots actually are, for all we know it could have been one spot the size of a park bench. They never tell that radioactive material decays, which means that the dose/year will become lower and lower as time passes by.
Instead they build up a fear-scenario at the start, mention Chernobyl, how stupid the government in Japan is/was, that there is a spot with 508 mS/yr and that there are three dozen more spots. The casual/usual reader will very likely get this wrong and thinks that all those spots are that high in contamination, and is lead to think that it will probably stay that way forever, thanks to the first parts of the article.
Oh, and i don't see a link to any sources for the claims made in that article.
Sorry, but no. That's the type of fear-inducing reporting that we have seen far too often by now.
Here you can see some actual data about radiation levels around that plant..
Greetings,
Chris
ETA: And of course they never tell you if the 508 mS/yr would be just the current level extrapolated to one year. And they also never tell you what would happen to these levels if decontamination is done. See, it could be collections of dust and other material at the very top of the soil layer. Once removed it could drop to "safe" levels there. Not saying that it will, but just that it could. That's the problem with such half-baked fear-mongering articles. Way too much information is missing to make any sense at all from them.
