Question

(a) Read the posted NYT article on "Fukushima: When Radiation isn't the Real Risk". (b) Do a brief calculation to show how to arrive at the quoted number of expected cancers due to radiation.

article link: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/22/science/when-radiation-isnt-the-real-risk.html

Answer 1

(a) Read the article.

(b) Here's the calculation:

For a radiation dosage of 1 sievert when subjected to a population of 100 people will lead to 5 cases of deadly cancer. And for the case of 1 milisievert we get the possibility down to 0.005 % for a linear model without thresholds.

This for the case of fukushima where we had about 200,000 people in a 20 km radius of the plant. Which would have been subjected to 16 milisieverts dosage of radiation which means a 0.08 % possibility.

For the given population we will have:

This is how we arrive at the projected no of cancer cases.