Reply #63: nice of you to ignore the actual content in my post.

[Sirveri]

But hey we'll follow up this tangent. The majority of contamination sources are beta decay emitters, meaning a gamma ray and an electron (for the high energy emitters we're generally concerned with, ie not tritium). beta only provides a skin dose (if it's even powerful enough to do that), while gamma provides a whole body dose. alpha emitters are generally only found in the core, as they primarily exist in the super heavy elements. Neutrons only come from the fission process, which occurs rarely in man made isotopes such as Pu-239 which will undergo spontaneous fission, but is otherwise limited to the core.

Alpha is only dangerous if you eat it, neutrons can create unstable radio isotopes. That said, they're irrelevant in the majority of cases because the primary emission source encountered is gamma, beta will be blocked by clothing, and is generally fairly weak. gamma has a quality factor of 1, which means for every roentgen you pull you will get 1 rem. alpha has 20, neutrons are differant depending on if they're fast or thermal.

if you want to argue about the 'ideal man' used to compute the REM that's fine. It's really all fairly irrelevant since people will still be absorbing similar levels. Sure someone who is overweight will have a greater water mass and tenth thickness and will absorb more radiation. But when you're talking about levels in the millirem spectrum it's irrelevant, since you need to pull a dose of 100 REM in a short period of time to get anywhere near radiation poisoning. All it does is provide a baseline for comparison, that way you can get a standardised number.

But you just go ahead and ignore the legal limit of 20000 pCi/L, and keep posting about that 1000 pCi/L of tritium, which is barely enough to give an internal dose of .2 mrem/yr (assuming you drink 2 liters a day of that source). Of course if you stand next to a cup of water containing that tritium you won't get any dose, since the beta it emits is so weak it can't even give a skin dose.