The Only Radiation Units You Need to Know
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- Опубликовано: 31 июл 2024
- In order to have a meaningful conversation about the dangers of radiation exposure, it’s important to be clear about just how much radiation we are dealing with. Unfortunately, the units we use are kind of a mess… but SciShow is here with the only two you need to know.
Hosted by: Michael Aranda
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Sources:
www.gov.uk/government/publica...
www.cdc.gov/nceh/radiation/ai...
www.world-nuclear.org/informa...
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1...
www.radioactivity.eu.com/site/...
www.xrayrisk.com/calculator/ca...
www.icrp.org/publication.asp?i...
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NB...
hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/...
www.rsc.org/images/essay3_tcm...
Image Sources:
commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi...
commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi...
commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi...
commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi...
www.cdc.gov/nceh/radiation/io...
commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi...
commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi...
commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi...
commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi...
Correction! At 2:32, the label should say 1 cm^3 not 1 cm^2!
bah, cubic or square we dont care !
@@mho... it kind of does though...
You should insert a pop-up comment in the video directly that appears at 2:32 ;)
If radiation is a flow of particles and wave, then square area should be more meaningful such as the unit of pressure. If by acumulation the a volume is more significant because if treated such as poison the more concentrated the worst.
SciShow oh, I was on y’all like Becquerels on a banana.
I'm pretty sure the only radiation unit I need to know about is the BED (Banana equivalent dose
).
Don't forget the LMAO. Lifetime Median Adjusted Overdose.
Thank you for this. More people need to know about the Banana Equivalent Dose. It helps give context to how much radiation you're getting. Because the 50 bananas worth of radiation from a dental x-ray doesn't sound too bad. The 200,000 bananas that an average nuclear plant worker should get is easier to conceptualize. Like that's a lot of bananas in a year.
Not great for scientific calculations. Great tool for communicating to lay people, however.
yeah imagine the amount of calories they're getting obadiah that could make them obese
@@ObadiahtheSlim power plant workers dont experience that much radiation. We've progressed well beyond that point. Nuclear power plants are amazing. You can swim in the water containing fuel rods and still not get enough radiation to damage you.
Can we still call it rads though, it's the cool thing to say.
You mean it's rad Dude ?
That Nuka-Cola just isn't as nice if it gives 20 milligrays.
@@christelheadington1136 Excactly what I was thinking thank you.
Fallout is lame if I gotta worry about grays
@@MarkyMark1221 Grey is the most beautiful colour. (Hope you get the reference :P)
And one Grey is the amount of curiosity required to send you across an ocean to answer a seemingly insignificant historical question.
Brandon Stoppel Does that guy still make videos?
@@mxnjones He just uploaded today
david burrus> And he gave up. He seemed invested then he just kind of ehhhd the end.
He didn't give up, he followed the trail as far as he could. The only thing left was to go home or to book a hotel until after the weekend when the museum opened again just so that he can hit another dead-end.
Brandon Stoppel> …to answer a seemingly insignificant historical question.
Theoretically, he could have dug up some information that could throw the whole thing into question and allow New Jersey to make a claim on Staten Island which would hardly be insignificant.
Why dont i understand this? Could someone please elaborate?
Transmitting signal with ionizing radiation would be a dumb thing to do anyway. It's going to run into something, ionize it, and then your signal is lost.
that depends.
you see unlike alpha particles, electrons and positrons, which only have a range of a few metres in air, gamma photons are actually very unlikely to interact with anything, in fact gamma radiation can actually travel through materials other electromagnetic waves couldn't.
@@windhelmguard5295 then again, they are pretty hard to modulate an actual signal onto them. Also, to have higher energy radiation, you need to put more energy into it.
For everyday use, it's highly impractical
Lol can you imagine
@@moag2000 How in the world could you modulate an ionizing source to send a signal? The best I could think of is a shutter in front of a hot object; that or turn on and off an xray fast enough.
@@BlackWolf42- Changing the rate of decay and measuring the changing amounts of energy given off could work, but it would be rather imprecise, since the rate of decay is not constant or regular.
Personally I'm a fan of the Banana Equivalent Dose. It's just so whimsical
People are worried about the radiation dose from fish near Fukushima, even though its just like double a bananas worth of radiation by mass.
Scientists should use it when they need to tell someone that this place isn’t radioactive enough to be dangerous. “Oh it’s just like standing in a room full of bananas” is a lot more reassuring than fancy science lingo. As Chernobyl famously pointed out, the seemingly insignificant 3.6 Roentgens from the cheap meters are equivalent to 300 chest X rays and the physicists took iodine pills when they measured 8 milliroentgens in their office.
I received a total of 25 Greys spread out over five weeks when I was being treated for cancer. Since the radiation was directed at my abdomen, I got a small amount of "radiation sickness", nausea and diarrhea, along with light radiation burns. When someone says, "Don't eat that food - it's been irradiated!", my response is, "So have I!" ;-)
Hello, after receiving this 25greys ,are you ok, I hope so and take care of your self
I don’t need to know about different radiation units I need WATER IN MY REACTOR!
Yeah, it’s always a pain when there’s a meltdown for not having enough cooling.
All you need to know is it’s the equivalent of a chest X-ray, and I’m late for a checkup so...
But, "remember you can never have too much water in a nuclear reactor." An old SNL skit where, leaving out all the punctuation gives you a somewhat ambiguous statement.
He's delusional, take him to the infirmiary.
"its only 3.6 roentgen go back to work comrades"
Casey what is this a reference to?
@@daniellewilson8527 Chernobyl
@@daniellewilson8527 Chernobyl
Not great, not terrible.
Thank you
So in a nutshell:
The raw energy given off by something: eV (electronvolts)
The number of nuclear decays happening per second: Becquerels
The number of nuclear decays happening in 1 gram of radium-226: Curie
The amount of electrical energy being produced through ionisation of air: Roentgen
How much radiation is being absorbed by your body (energy per kg of mass): Gray (old version - rad)
How much radiation is being absorbed by your body (accounting for radiation type) Sievert (old version - rem)
Have I got that right? This episode was pretty confusing.
Basically, yea, you're pretty much bang on the money. :)
@@existenceisillusion6528 Good point. I had to look for other sources to try and get my head around roentgen and Curies, for example.
Your delusional =P
Now which one is used in Chernobyl. The USSR used 'roentgen' which there are multiple completely different units, and some dosimeters show 100 roentgen = 1 uSv (or some other power of 10), so is it really the cubic centemetre of air like he said in the video, or is it rem/rad that was referred to as roentgen
I usually set my geiger counter to cpm and microseiverts
Good video! One small note though, Rad and Rem are the standard units of measure for ionizing radiation in the US. Gray and Sieverts are considered international units of measure like other SI units.
That's what I was wondering...
No field has more units than Radiology... It's downright silly but this video is hands down the best quick explanation I've seen yet.
Wow, all the different type of measurement really makes this difficult. Thanks for this episode, I did enjoy. Wish you had given more examples of everyday exposures.
Agreed. Some tangible examples would have really helped.
This was the best explanation of all of the various labels used in describing radioactive energy that I have ever seen.
This is EXACTLY the answer I've been trying to figure out for a long time! Thank you!
''37 000 000 000 Becquerels. I'm told it's the equivalent of a chest x-ray.''
That’s actually not right, though (and yes, I saw the quotation marks). The becquerel measures decays per second, and there are no decays in X-rays by definition because if it’s the result of a nuclear decay, it’s called gamma rays (yep, actually the difference between X and gamma rays is not the energy, but the source). X-rays are made by accelerating/decelerating electrons in a vacuum tube.
Yes comrade
Excellent description. Thank you.
Scichannel: “You only need to know about Grays and Sieverts”
USA Nuclear Plants: “Don’t tell me what do! WE ARE USING RAD AND REM!!!”
alarcon99 the US navy uses rad and rem too
@@matthewd109 ya, it is annoying, use real units America!
I learned using Rad and Rem too. (T~T) Now my brain has trouble thinking in Gray and Sievert.
Not just US plants. All the plants work together, so they all use Rads and Rems
Me: oh I only need to understand just 2?
Scishow: well yes, but no.
Straight to the point! Clears up a lot!
OMG...he blinked toward the end...Thanks, this actually helped clear up quite a bit.
This is an incredibly useful video; thank you!
Rads arent outdated!
But the Fallout engine is ahem *Todd* ahem
"It just works"™
Except it doesn't Todd.
Thank you, this was very helpful.
Great job guys. People need this. Take the mystery out of radiation and people won’t be so fearful of something that isn’t.
this is actually super helpful thank you scishow
Awesome. Thanks. I worked in the nuclear industry and nuclear navy, and this summary is great.
maninspired same, rad rem and ci were the basis for everything
Thanks for this video! Finally a good explanation on radiation
This vid was absolutely fantastic! This has been confusing to me, even after a physics focus back in college! 😂 Thanks!
3:40 "Gamma particles are the lightest..." I mean, I guess that technically a massless particle is lighter than a matter particle.
They aren't massless...
@@heatbaum11 Gamma "particles" are just high-energy photons (a quantum of electromagnet radiation) - by definition, they have to be massless. They do have momentum, but no mass.
@@heatbaum11 Already corrected bellow, just wanted to echo that, yes, photos are massless :D
Excellent guide
Thanks! Well done!!
Great show!
Thanks for the update on ionizing radiation. In the early 1980s I worked for an instrumentation company that used radioactive sources to analyze lithography in borehole walls. We carried film badges to measure our exposure in milli-rems over a specified amount of time, periodically changing out old badges with fresh new ones.
We were told that some geographical areas had high, natural radiological emission rates and that flying at high altitudes could result in more exposure than with our industrial exposure.
Amazing presentation
Great video! I would just like to point out that it is still standard practice in medicine to calculate radio-imaging doses in units of Curie or Bq so it is just as important to understand as the Grey in a nuclear pharmacy practice
Not great, not terrible.
Not terrible... but No one leaves. We cut the phone lines.
I've seen worse.
George Deng came here for this comment🤣
Eyyyy, Chernobyl fan I see xD
Comrade Deng is delusional, take him to the infirmary.
Awesome. thanks!!
Super explanation
Superb video! 🙂 when I was researching for my book ‘The Chernobyl Zone Survival Guide’ trying to get my head around the different units was a nightmare. I settled on Sieverts since it was the easiest for a lay reader (and a lay writer 😜) to understand. This video would have been very useful last year when I was writing it 😜
This video is totally rad!
The host, Michael Aranda, is radiating positive energy. 😊
This is the one video every person on Earth needs to watch.
2:32 that ought to read 1 *cm^3* not 1 cm^2!
Your right. 1 cm^2 would be squared not cubes
I think my old radio-biology teacher would be satisfied with this, so you're getting my seal of approval
This video is so helpful. I've been reading about the history of nuclear weapons lately and it's been so confusing to see all these different units, and the Wikipedia explanations being to esoteric for me to understand
great video!
So, that means that according to Fallout, 10 grays means death.
According to Fallout, you probably had to buy another DLC to be able to post that comment ;) (I'm joking!)
Google searches are all over the map, but the LD50/60 (half the population dies in 60 days) is 350 rem, or (gross oversimplification) we can call it 350 rads in Fallout terms.
The dose likely to kill in an hour is 1,000 rads/10 Gy/10 (oversimplified) Sv. Plus it's a nice round number useful in a video game.
Worth noting, there's a house in Fallout 4 that contains an Legendary Putrid Glowing One, one hell of a fight, and the (frankly horrifying and chilling) lore tapes of a woman testing what one presumes was a failed prototype of RadAway pre-War say she was "up to 6 sieverts" (600 rads in Fallout's world), which was apparently enough to start the process of ghoulification.
3.5-4.5 Gy is the LD50/30 range. Half of all people receiving an acute dose of gamma radiation in that range will die within 30 days.
@@franciscoxavier7398 that would be an EA move.
@@SimuLord ohh, thanks for that. lol
Oh! We're learning this in Physics - nice timing
This is the video my mom wanted. Thank you!
(I just need to translate it now 😂)
Okay, you got me a bit #triggered here. As a former nuclear engineer (ELT) in the US Navy, I can tell you that rad and rem are not outdated. The civilian world might not use them as much anymore, but the nuclear Navy does. When you take into account all the submarines, aircraft carriers, shipyards, prototypes, and various other shore based facilities that support the nuclear Navy, there's still a lot of people that use rad/rem on the regular.. Saying it's outdated is like saying a book is outdated because everyone uses e-readers or audiobooks.. It's not the newest form, but it's still used a lot.
Aside from that, video still good. Spot on on what radiation is and all that, making it interesting and informational, which is what we really need.
Civilian world still uses rem, at least in generation.
Yeah, but that’s the US’s autistic clinging to outdated units
If you want to be really strict, Roentgens for Ionisation chamber measurements, counts per minute/second for GM tube/Geiger measurements.
The general population has needed this video for a loooong time. Now you should do a video about what is considered a chemical.
This very good, now I need spanish subtitles for show it to my radiology protection class.
I still prefer using bananas as a unit of radiation.
As an X-ray technician, I'm glad this video was made. Too many people incorrectly think microwaves and cellphones emit ionizing radiation.
True! I discovered that my daughter had put her microwave oven in the basement and asked why, as it was very inconvenient. "The electrician told me it gave off radiation" was the answer!
You make me feel old. When I was a reactor operator in the navy, we used REM.
This was long due thanks
It might be a bit in depth, but would have liked to see you talk about deterministic and stochastic effects with regards to medical radiation exposure. Especially as you touch upon potential risks and how it can cause cancer.
Glad this topic is coming up. Too many people don't know enough about nuclear nor radiation. Hopefully this topic stays in the spot light for the next few months or years.
It's thanks to this non education that we still use coal for power today. If we didn't have the nuclear scare of the 1970-1980s we would be using clean carbon free nuclear power instead of nasty coal which funnily enough releases more radiation into the environment than a nuke plant...
@@AdamSmith-gs2dv I'd recommend the book "power to save the world" also to have any anti nuclear power people you know check it out too. It gives a great deal into the topic. I do hope that people will let go of thier fear so we can move in that direction before it is too late. But like always people fear that which they don't understand.
While studying medical imaging physics in my engineering program, we pretty much only used mSv and rad. Gray, even though it's technically the SI unit, wasn't used as much since most calculations were done on smaller scales. It made more sense to just have it in rad than to possibly misplace a decimal
This is a great post. I’m going to use this next time someone at the town hall is screaming that cell towers will kill the town with cancer.
The measuring cups in the thumbnail are genius.
Everyone should know all things about these types of waves…not just these types but the types that are being studied in all types
Cool !!!
You just made my head ache!
When I saw the Seivert units I kept hearing "Show me that smile again..." playing in my head.
Imagine you grew additional arms. That would be so rad!
The only one that matters is not 3.6 roentgen, but 15000. Spicy
I’ve seen worse
Not great, not terrible
Thanks for the video! This topic is incredibly complex, and you kind of went through a lot of information pretty quickly.
But I think you should remember the paradigm of "Linear, No Threshold" which correlates to radiation-linked cancer risk, and implies that starting from zero the greater the amount of radiation absorbed equals a directly proportionately greater risk of developing cancer. This is an outdated concept which is in part responsible for the environmental disaster that is 'public disapproval of nuclear energy plants.' The concept of "hormesis" asserts that a small dose of delivered radiation (higher than the average background radiation) can actually result in various health benefits. Hormesis has more scientific backing than Linear, No Threshold and it would be great if a scientific promulgator such as SciShow were privy to this insight! Thanks for reading, you guys rock!
You guys are awesome 😇😇😇😇😇😁😁😁
Can you do Anomalies next? I would love to hear the differences between a Springboard and a Whirligig's properties.
Cool!
This video is rad! 😂
We use Rems at my job, and it’s the first place I ever heard the unit.
Thanks for saying that not all particles are the same. Also, I think that each isotope is different - bounds better than other isotopes with some of bodies organs.
Do you guys have a video on the difference between radiation and radioactive contamination?
We only need to know 3.6 reogton is equivalent to 1 xray.
It’s not 3.6, it’s 15,000
“Phones don’t have enough radiation to damage cells”
Karens gonna pretend they didn’t hear that
Why did the FCC, NIH, NIOSH, OSHA and other regulatory bodies fix an SAR specific absorption rate for cell phone radiation at a maximum of 1.6 watts of energy absorbed per kilogram of body weight? The limit was set due to the thermal effects of cell phone radiation (all RF radiation can heat human body tissue at high enough levels) - it was not set to mitigate other biological effects cell phone radiation might have such as DNA damage or cancer.
@@ursaltydog Cell phone radiation simply CANNOT have any other impacts to living cells than (at the most!) warming them up. There ARE no other biological effects than heat - physically impossible. The wavelength of radio-waves are *below* the red side of the visible spectrum and ALL ionizing waves are *above* the ultraviolet side of the visible spectrum. Therefore: Infrared light is the most dangerous of ALL radio-waves, so beware of the radiation of your toaster, not so much your mobile phone or your microwave! Visible light is is even more "dangerous" and everything above ultraviolet light is *really* dangerous, because only these waves are ionizing. UV-radiation is the mildest of all ionizing waves, which is why we should use sun blockers.
tl;dr: long wavelengths (no impact up to heat) < middle wavelengths (visible light) < short wavelength (ionizing = dangerous!)
@cory Really? Forget people but it could spell ruin for birds and other such animals? If it hurts other animals, even of the aviary type and trees, it can hurt us for generations going forward. Btw, great that you mentioned crowd control. I wonder if that is what was used on U.S. citizens working in Cuba and in China when they incurred brain injuries.. Perhaps there are more people brain damaged than we think, considering the electorate.
@@hape3862 UV radiation is the mildest, yet we should use sun blockers? If it's so mild, then why the increase in skin cancers particularly in higher elevations and closer to the tropics and rising. I live in Tennessee, and the UV has been out of this world in the past few years. Enough to have cancer removed from my scalp, and I have a head of hair and wear hats. Perhaps it's not the UV-A or UV-B, but UV-C, the cosmic kind that rarely if ever touches earth's soil, but is now more prevalent.
FCC: www.fcc.gov/general/specific-absorption-rate-sar-cellular-telephones
NTP: www.niehs.nih.gov/health/materials/cell_phone_radiofrequency_radiation_studies_508.pdf
NIH: www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/high-exposure-radiofrequency-radiation-linked-tumor-activity-male-rats
@cory "Higher microwave frequencies" is literally just infrared. You get tons of that by the sun alone. You're seriously scientifically illiterate lmao
Alpha is a bit tricky. The radiation itself is not really that dangerous on the outside because the alpha particle doesnt travel more than a few inches in air and practically nowhere in more dense matter. The danger with alpha particles is contact, via inhalation or ingestion, with the radionuclide, which would then release the particle and it will almost certainly get absorbed by you body, stripping electrons from the first thing it hits.
As a radiation oncologist, I approve of this message ;) haha great episode! Also @scishow, if you want any kind of interview, or whatever I'd love to be involved
And what about the type of radiation that does the most harm but wasn't even mentioned? The ultraviolet which kills through skin cancer, one of those things no one wants to hear about for some odd reason.
@@bhatkat Kenneth, stop making so much sense breh. Let the people die how thay want to die.
When I do contractor work for Excelon (maintenence/construction), all our paper work, briefings, and our electronic dosimeters use rem units. So when you say they are outdated, that's news to me ;)
Ya, mostly overseas is it way more common, so it is the international unit of choice, but meerica
@@BeCurieUs 'murica*
@@ewthmatth :D
Just started my graduate degree in medical physics, what interesting timing!
I'm radiating right now!
Finally, I have a clear understanding of radiation measuring units. Now if I can just keep the Troy ounce vs the Avoirdupois ounce straight. Or a gold karat vs a diamond carat. And when my British friends tell me how many Stone they weigh. Plus while we're at it, astronomy may as well confuse us with astronomical units vs parsec vs light years.
So, sievert is to gray as wind chill or humidex is to temperature?
50 mSv/yr is also the dose rate for many high background radiation areas. Other high altitude locations, like Denver, expose people to about 10 mSv. Low dose radiation is complicated to understand the exact health effects as we assume a linear nature while not actually observing it at extremely low doses, like the ones discussed largely in this video. The best evidence we have for harm really keys in at about 100mSv/yr.
That abdomen CT scan seems seriously dangerous. 1 in 2000 is no joke...
It raises it *by* 1 in 2000, whereas your baseline risk of dying from cancer is already something like 25% IIRC. An extra 1/2000 is pretty negligible.
Yeah, that get me concerned... captain?!?!
V21Jays damn. I actually knew that. I learned it when there was a big scare about processed meats and people were saying it increases your risk of cancer by X%... same thing, it increases your “base” risk by a minute %, meaning a negligible increase.
@@AA-fn9xz Ya, base risk for cancer is actually 40% these days (cause we live longer). Generally, the excess risk from diagnostics is far less than developing cancer under the radar, particularly for aggressive cancers like pancreatic and such.
Went on a tour in Chernobyl a couple years ago. The Geiger counters we had displayed measurements in microsieverts/hour.
Growing up in the 80s, we were taught about rems and rads. The new measures confuse the hell out of me and I keep having to use conversion calculators.
1/2000?
Man that’s still kinda scary.
@@dragonknight512 It's a 0.05% increase, you forgot to multiply by 100 to get the percentage.
Fenridium oops your right. @5:14 I thought he said “percent” the first time I watched it, he actually said “respectively” XD. My b.
Your lifetime risk of dying of cancer is already like 1 in 5, though. It's one of the usual suspects when it comes to people dying. Adding 1 in 2000 to that, does it really make that much of a difference?
If only my math professor could see this now!
"Just remember the grey unit: it's got 3 other units in it"
I know it's not a formal scientific measure, but I was rather hoping to hear about banana equivalent dose. It's too amusing to talk about radiation in terms of bananas, at least in my opinion.
that confused me tho cuz bananas don't admit ionising radiation
"Mom, can I stay home from school today? I got the sieverts."
Fun fact: the Soviet roentgen and the "standard" roentgen are slightly different. The Soviet one is often called the REV (roentgen equivalent value).
Well, that is one way to make me feel old. When all of the reading, training and testing is no longer used and now I have to learn it all over again. Not happening, I am too old to care. :( Thank you for reminding me that I don't know it all anymore. :(
Could you please contextualise SAR / Specific absorption rate as well?
Röntgen is also the german word for x-ray
Well, he did discover them!
Cool