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Yesterday there was a blackout at home while I was at work. It lasted about two minutes, and I learnt about it because one of my monitoring systems at home sent me a notification saying that two of my servers had rebooted.

You know, I’m not used to blackouts because this is the first one in the 10 years I’ve been living in Japan. Usually I wouldn’t really care about the power going offline for a few moments, especially when I’m not home. However, I’m sharing my room with two little ferrets. They don’t stand the hot weather very well, so I keep the air conditioner on during the whole summer for them. Yes, 24×7. And yes, it’s expensive. When I came home yesterday I found the air conditioner turned off because of the blackout, and the room temperature was very high. Nothing happened to my ferrets this time, but it could have.

Read on for my opinions about all this anti-nuclear movement.

In the meanwhile, thousands of people are demonstrating against nuclear power in Yoyogi Park, most prominent among them Ryuichi Sakamoto, who has been campaigning against nuclear power for quite a long time. They compare nuclear power plants with atomic bombs, calling both of them ‘nukes’ as if they were the same thing.

While I do feel very upset and annoyed, I can’t really blame them because they’re not acting on bad faith. They’re just normal people who are scared of the effects of radiation. The problem is, they’re vastly overestimating the effects, and in their fear, they’re making a big mistake when they request that the reactors aren’t restarted. Power outages will affect Japan. Hospitals, businesses, government, and just about everybody needs the power those plans will produce. We don’t have a viable alternative to nuclear power at this time. I’m glad the Japanese government is ignoring them.

An example from Facebook

Look at this guy, posting this scary radiation map in Facebook in order to spread fear:

Let’s look at the map in more detail. The most dangerous area (dark red!) is labeled at 1 µSv (micro Sievert) per hour. Scary, huh? All that red color in the graph. But wait a second, what the hell is a micro Sievert?

Let’s find out.

Sieverts, milli Sieverts and micro Sieverts

Everybody is talking about Sieverts, milli Sieverts and micro Sieverts lately, but most people are just parroting what they hear from others, without really having any idea about what they’re talking about.

What is a Sievert? And most importantly: how does it affect you?

A Sievert represents the health impact upon the body of a given amount of radiation. 1 Sievert (Sv) = 1000 milli Sieverts (mSv) = 1000000 micro Sieverts (μSv). This diagram will show the scale a bit more clearly (click for the full version):

So now you have a sense of scale when you read a news article regarding radiation.

Now, what are the effects? Well, it is agreed that 1 Sievert, absorbed over a long period of time, will increase your chances of getting cancer by about 5.5%. Other than that, amounts of up to 0.05 Sv are safe. No observable health effects whatsoever. Amounts between 0.05~0.1 Sv are safe too, and if there are any health effects, they’re too small to be observed (source).

Let’s look again at the Facebook guy’s graph again. The most dangerous area is labeled at “over 1 µSv/hour”. 1 µSv/hour is the same as 8.76 mSv per year, or also 0.00876 Sv/year (1 µSv/hour x 24 hours/day x 365 days/year = 8760 µSv (or 8.76 mSv, or also 0.00876 Sv) per year.

THERE IS NO HEALTH EFFECT WHATSOEVER FROM THAT AMOUNT OF RADIATION.

But wait, that’s not the funny part. Let’s imagine for a minute that there are no nuclear power plants in the planet and that there has never been one. How much radiation would we actually be exposed to? Here’s a list:

• Normal background radiation received by an average person over a year: 3650 µSv
• One chest X-ray: 20 µSv
• Living in a stone, brick, or concrete building for a year (all of these contain Uranium!): 70 µSv
• Smoking a pack of cigarettes a day for a year: 40000-100000 µSv (source 1, source 2)

In other words: you are ALWAYS exposed to radiation. And the amount usually released by nuclear power plants is actually the least of your concerns.

And if you’re a smoker, please don’t lit when I’m nearby.

Now let’s be fair

The anti-nuclear protesters are complaining about exposure to radiation, and the risk of having nuclear power plants operating in the country. Are things as dangerous as they say? No, they’re not. However, they do have a valid claim and they’re not completely wrong. The radiation levels around the Fukushima plant during the weeks after the tsunami were indeed high and cause for concern (almost 25 µSv/hour). On this we agree.

I’ll talk about this in a next post tomorrow, or in a couple of days. I’m too sleepy to continue now.