nuclear war

[Sekwo]

(21 July 2023, 19:09)Pete Grey Wrote: Death from ARS, acute radiation syndrome, can be in as short a time as two weeks according to our favourite source Wikipedia, so don’t worry about cancer you won’t live long enough.

That would be useful, if that had been what we were talking about. We aren't talking about acute radiation sickness but about long term effects of living with radiation. One is a one-off dose, which we can recover from, the other is cumulative.

Acute radiation sickness occurs at does above 100rads which is roughly 1Sibert. Cancer can be caused at normal background levels of radiation which is Levels typically range from about 1 to 4 millisievert per year. In other words it would take 250 to 1000 years to get a total dose that (over a short period) would give us acute radiation sickness.

But background radiation varies a lot and some people will get an acute from natural radiation equivalent to the short-term dose needed for radiation sickness ... but they never get radiation sickness, because their body recovers.

But we can tolerate much higher levels that background. To put that background level in perspective, the dose rate for astronauts is about 100x that of background.