Before watching the TED-ED video: I believe that the most radioactive places on Earth includes places where there has been a nuclear meltdown or nuclear explosion, like Chernobyl, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki.
After watching the TED-ED video: I learned a LOT from the TED-ED video. First things first, ionizing radiation, which has the ability to tear electrons apart from atoms, is measured in sieverts. We humans are exposed to ionizing radiation wherever we go, but in very low amounts. Take a banana, for instance, which is equivalent to 0.1 microseiverts, or a ten-millionth of a sievert (Eating ten million bananas would be the equivalent of receiving 0.1 of a sievert). Among the most radiactive places on Earth were Chernobyl, Ukraine (5 microsieverts per hour), Hiroshima, Japan (0.3 microsieverts per hour), Fukushima, Japan (10 microsieverts per hour), and the Trinity Test Site in New Mexico (0.8 microsieverts per hour). Although the area that swept away the competition was the basement in the Pripyat hospital near Chernobyl, where they threw away the firefighter’s, who had been fighting fires caused by the nuclear meltdown, contaminated clothes, with a whopping 2,000 microsieverts per hour, or the equivalent of eating 2,000 bananas. But surprisingly, smokers actually receive 160,000 microseiverts of ionizing radiation a year. That’s over 3 times the amount that U.S radiation workers are allowed to receive and twice as much as astronauts (who are not protected by the atmosphere, which blocks most of the radiation bearing down upon Earth) who spend half a year on a space station.
Why I’m glad that I took the time to be curious: I am very glad that I took the time to be curious, as I have doubled down on my sureness that I will NEVER smoke. I also now know more about radiation and what it is measured in, and I could use this knowledge if I become a nuclear technician or engineer.
