If nothing else, this should worry smokers: the radiation dose from radium and polonium found naturally in tobacco can be a thousand times more than that from the caesium-137 taken up by the leaves from the Chernobyl nuclear accident.
Constantin Papastefanou from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in Greece measured radioactivity in tobacco leaves from across the country and calculated the average radiation dose that would be received by people smoking 30 cigarettes a day. He found that the dose from natural radionuclides was 251 microsieverts a year, compared with 0.199 from Chernobyl fallout in the leaves (Radiation Protection Dosimetry, vol 123, p 68).
Though the radiation dose from smoking was only 10 per cent of the average dose anyone receives from all natural sources, Papastefanou argues that it is an increased risk. "Many scientists believe that cancer deaths among smokers are due to the radioactive content of tobacco leaves and not to nicotine and tar," he says.
So it seems to me that if the anti-nuke people really want to get some traction they should start comparing potential exposures to cigarette smoking. I think that would put it in terms everyone understands. Living next to a nuke power plant would be like what? A whiff of second-hand smoke across a restaurant once a month?
1 comment:
It should be pointed out that "many scientists" is not a consensus of scientists in the field. The dosimetry of alpha emitters in the lung is very complicated not least because of lack of knowledge of the target cells involved in carcinogenesis. Even the use of effective dose in the original article is an acknowledgement of this point, since what is required is the equivalent dose to the appropriate target tissue(s). All this is why Papastefanou did not in fact mention lung cancer in his RPD article. It simply isn't accepted science. There is also very little recent published work relating radioactivity on tobacco to lung cancer for the same reason. All of the references he uses in his article regarding tobacco and radioactivity and relating this to lung cancer are more than 20 years old. I think you will find that the consensus is that lung cancer from smoking is caused by the many well known chemical carcinogens in tobacco smoke.
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