Dan Hirsch Is A Nuclear Professor?

According to Reuters he is.  I don't know what a "nuclear professor" is...is it someone with a small nuclear pacemaker???

A professor is someone who teaches at the college level.  But a "nuclear" one?

My guess is that most people would interpret that to mean he is a nuclear engineering professor or a nuclear medicine professor...but he's neither.  He has lectured at the U of CA, Santa Cruz on nuclear policy, and he's against nuclear power being the head of Committee To Bridge The Gap.

Now I'm not engaging in an ad hominem attack on Mr. Hirsch.  What he says is basically correct, but if he's really an expert he could have given some sense as to what the estimated expected cancer increase would be....but then we'd all see how safe the tuna is.  And he doesn't want that.

So let's play...the study doesn't provide the wet weight of the tuna, but they grow to 555 kg.



The average concentrations in the study were 6.3 Bq/kg of Cs-137 & 4.0 Bq/kg of Cs-134, but remember that's only in the muscle tissue.  The concentrations will be lower in most other tissues.

So let's say you could gorge on 555 kg (1,200 lbs) of tuna!!  And let's say that the concentrations above applied to all tissues (which it doesn't).

What is your cancer risk?

Multiply the concentrations by the mass and one gets about 3,500 Bq of Cs-137 & 2,220 Bq of Cs-134.

The Allowable Limit Of Intake (the quantity ingested which leads to a dose of 0.05 Sv) for Cs-137 is 3.7E6 Bq and for Cs-134 it's 2.6E6 Bq from Appendix B of 10 CFR 20 regulations.

From BEIR VII, we estimate that 0.1 Sv results in an increased cancer risk of 1%.

Now we set up the equations to determine the excess cancer risk from gourging on 1,200 pounds of tuna:

Cs-137:  (3,500 Bq) x (0.05 Sv / 3.7E6 Bq) x (1% / 0.1 Sv) =  .00047%

Cs-134:  (2,220 Bq) x (0.05 Sv / 2.6E6 Bq) x (1% / 0.1 Sv) =  .00043%

This risk is in addition to the estimated "background" risk of 42% chance of getting cancer.

The risk is trivial, Nuke Dan!