Making A Mountain Out Of Dust

Arnie Gundersen and "leading scientist", civil engineer Marco Kaltofen get some dust from around Fukushima.  It contained 153 Bq of cesium!


Then they scale up the units into 1.5 MBq/kg, and carry on and on.

Kaltofen actually writes up an 8 page report on a piece of dust.

And, oh, Arnie warns his cult followers to notify him prior to sending in any samples so that everything can be done safely.  Afterall, it's "highly concentrated radioactive material"!

Let's get real.

(153 Bq) (1 dis/sec-Bq)(60 sec/min) = 9,180 disintegrations per minute (dpm)

The U.S. NRC (see Table 1) allows facilities to be unconditionally used by anyone if the average residual radioactivity is 5,000 dpm/100 cm2, with hotspots up to 15,000 dpm/100 cm2.  Though the removeable (the dust may or may not have originally qualified as removable) residual radioactivity is limited to 1,000 dpm/100 cm2.

They're making a mountain, but let's call it what it is: