Windscale: 0.7 PBq Lawrence Livermore 1965: 11 PBq (c. 15 times Windscale) TMI: 90 PBq into the atmosphere (1900 PBq total) Mayak/Chelyabinsk: 700 PBq (1000 times Windscale) Chernobyl: 14,000 PBq (the bulk iodine and xenon)
Curiously, I found no data for the Tsar Bomba or Castle Bravo. *Lunatic*, n. One whose delusions are out of fashion.
Your number for TMI seems orders of magnitude higher than what I remember, sure it's the right unit ? Pierre
TMI total release was very high but something like 99% (I don't remember the exact number but it was ridiculously high) of the release was "noble" gas - Kr, Xe, etc. - with extremely low to inexistent biological impact.
03
some 14 million curies of noble gases (~500 PBq) and 14 curies (~500 GBq) of I-131 were released during the course of the accident. About 50,000 curies (~2 PBq) of Kr-85 were vented from the containment and 2 million curies (~75 PBq) of tritium was released.
What people were justifiably freaking out about was iodine with the bio-concentration in the thyroid. Turned out there was very little of it.
There is no way to assess the release accurately, but it is probably comparable, over time, to the worst releases of the russian military complex. Pierre
The labs are also about a kilometer from the western (windward) edge of the Altamont Pass wind resource area, so i've spent much time there over the years. i ate lunch often at the Labs, because... well, i can be pretty dumb, and i got a thrill watching bomb designers eat and discuss baseball as if they were normal people. (Full disclosure: they do lots of other things at the labs besides bombs.) "Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage." - Anaïs Nin
