There has been much written on Fukushima and sadly much of it is ill-informed and misleading. Here we take estimates of radiation release from the most authoritative sources and calculate various radiation equivalents:
- Radiation release is listed in Peta 10^15 becquerels and becquerels. You are naturally radioactive at 5kBq and a banana is about 150 Bq.
- Hiroshimas – total radiation release in multiples of the radiation release from the Hiroshima fission blast (89 TBq)
- Mega-tonnes – the mass of TNT equivalent in fission explosions required to produce the same amount of released radiation
- Radium – the weight of Radium in tonnes required to produce the same radiation release
A comparison using various metrics for the release of radiation from various accidents and weapons testing