Smoking Ban: Radioactive Cigarettes Are The New Chernobyl
THE smoking ban in England is coming into force. And the State can police it easily now that smokers glow in the dark:
If nothing else, this should worry smokers: the radiation dose from radium and polonium found naturally in tobacco can be a thousand times more than that from the caesium-137 taken up by the leaves from the Chernobyl nuclear accident.
Constantin Papastefanou from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in Greece measured radioactivity in tobacco leaves from across the country and calculated the average radiation dose that would be received by people smoking 30 cigarettes a day. He found that the dose from natural radionuclides was 251 microsieverts a year, compared with 0.199 from Chernobyl fallout in the leaves (Radiation Protection Dosimetry, vol 123, p 68).
Posted: 3rd, June 2007 | In: Reviews Comments (5) | TrackBack | Permalink
