Luckily, you don't hold onto the radioactive potassium for very long, so to get a lethal dose of radiation you'd probably need to eat 35,000,000 bananas in one sitting – meaning radiation would be the least of your problems! If you were to receive a dose of 1 Sv right now, you would no doubt survive, but could expect intense nausea within the next few hours, and a slightly increased risk of certain deadly radiation-linked conditions in coming weeks.Įat a banana, and you'd be getting around 0.1 microsieverts, or 0.0000001 joules of radiation for every kilogram of weight you have on your bones. These units describe the amount of radioactive energy your body receives from the radiation 1 Sv is a joule of energy for every kilogram of meat on your body.
To know what that does to your body, we use a unit called sieverts. Grab your nearest banana, and you'll be holding in your hand about 100 grams (3.5 ounces) of delicious sweetness infused with potassium decaying at 15 atoms per second, or 15 Bq. Two units commonly used to describe amounts of radiation are becquerels (Bq) and sieverts (Sv).īecquerels describe the radioactivity part – 1 Bq is the same as one particle decaying every second. The team estimated that about 23 percent of the caesium-137 released by Fukushima in the wake of the tsunami stayed in Japan, while the rest fell into the oceans.Īll of this talk of wide-spread doses of radiation can be a little confronting, so here's a short breakdown of the units behind radiation, and why we don't need to panic. One of those particles they've got records of is called caesium-137 – a heavy element that can travel long distances thanks to its talent for dissolving in water, making it a useful marker for measuring the radioactive reach of the disaster. The researchers used data gathered by Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organisation, a group that keeps an eye out for nuclear explosions around the globe by measuring things like seismic activity and radioactive particles in the atmosphere.
Of course, if you happened to be a little closer to the event – say, in Japan – the average dose over the few years that followed was closer to 0.5 millisieverts, which isn't even close to what you'd get if you underwent a computed tomography (CT) scan in hospital. That's what the Norwegian Institute for Air Research calculated, based on how far two radioactive isotopes of caesium have spread, putting the dosage for most people outside Japan at less than 0.1 millisievert – also equivalent to receiving one X-ray.
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