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Reply #82: I would gladly drink from that well for the rest of my long life. [View All]

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Statistical Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sat Sep-12-09 06:24 PM
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82. I would gladly drink from that well for the rest of my long life.
The report doesn't say how much tritium was found but it does say it was below EPA limit for drinking water.

EPA limit is 20,000 picoCuries per liter.
A picoCurie is a trillionth, or 0.000000000001, of a Curie.

To put it into perspective the human body has about 100,000 picoCuries of Potasium-40 (naturally occurring isotope). Yes humans are naturally slightly radioactibe.

If you drank 2 liters of water per day from that well for a year you would be exposed to about 4 mrems of radiation. To put that into perspective a single xray is about 40mrems. So 10 years of drinking water from this well is about equal to a single xray.

The average person is exposed to about 300 mrems of radiation per year from natural sources which is 75X the amount from drinking a years worth of water from this well.

Average total exposure (human & manmade is about 360 mrems).

Of course that would be at the EPA limit and the article indicates it was BELOW the EPA limit. So it is possible the amount of radioactive material was 1/4th, 1/10th, or even 1/100th the amount in my example.
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