cesium

In an attempt to grasp how toxic the water is, wouldn't it be more effective to measure levels of cesium 137 instead of overall background radiation?

The real issue is that everyone in networking likes round base10 numbers divided over some arbitrary cesium fluctuations.

Or, Tom Van Baak measuring gravitational redshift with a minivan and some old HP cesium beam clocks.

However, it is also not ongoing; in fact, increase in cesium detected around the plant has fallen dramatically in the last two years.

I live in a city in Brazil where there was a very grave cesium leak, and two people involved in the incident ended up eating a cesium sandwich, including a little girl.

Worst-case estimates are that 2-4 kilos of Cesium 137 were released.

It is an absolute measure of elapsed time based on the decay of cesium atoms, where one day is equivalent to exactly 86,400 TAI seconds.

Uranium creates Cesium (and Iodine I think, i'm not expert on this) when decays, so the real cesium should be now 50% plus X (where X is the cesium constantly created since the accident).

Still, this girl ingested cesium and died as a result.

For those who can't move their families, the radioactive isotopes of cesium and what was iodine in the initial exposure obviously could cause cancer or other diseases.

Before the experiment, they expected a background level of Cesium 137 of between 1 and 2 bq/M^3 (caused by 1950s nuclear testing, which released a ton of it).

The fundamental problem is that there are two reasonable time standards for different applications: mean solar seconds for ordinary day-to-day timekeeping, and cesium seconds for applications that require a precision of more than a second per year.

But yes, I do consider particles like Iodine-129 and Cesium-137 "contamination".

I should imagine it would be easier to use the cesium seconds for UTC and just bundle everything else into the time zone offsets, which everyone is already using to turn scientific timekeeping into something "meaningful" for human consumption.

Prior to 1972, UTC and TAI used different definitions of a second (UTC used a definition based on positions of celestial bodies while TAI used a definition based on the hyperfine transition of cesium, and the two were periodically manually "stepped" back into sync).

From a report on Chernobyl [0]: "Most of the decrease [in radiation] in the coming years will be at only the rate of the physical half-life of 137Cs." Cesium-137 has a half-life of 30 years [1], so if we use the number given in the article (10,000 roentgens/hour) the dose is apparently 434 million times background radiation, 23 microroentgens/hour [2].

It would take over a millennium to reduce Cesium-137 by a factor of 434 million[3] That's the Elephant's Foot, though.

Wouldn't be surprised if this starts a mass migration over to Cesium.

So, they add meaningless amounts of Cesium.