/sci/ - Science & Math

[Anonymous No.5666852]

How much radiation would it take to instantly kill someone, if possible at all?

[Anonymous No.5666866]

>>5666852
Tough to say. There have been a few examples of people that received wholebody doses in excess of 40 Sv and none of them died instantly, but in a couple hours/days. 3 Sv is enough to kill you from radiation sickness, btw.

Pic related, a guy a few hours after receiving a wholebody dose of ~40Sv. He'll be dead in a few hours.

[Anonymous No.5666870]

>>5666852
me again, your graph is interesting because it doesn't say instant vomiting until 100Sv while several documented examples ~40 - 50 Sv reported the victim immediately vomiting. I once did a lot of research on this topic and never remember finding a documented case of greater than 50 Sv, also.

[Anonymous No.5666872]

>>5666852
pretty much this >>5666866

there's some interesting stuff here
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticality_accident
might pay off to dig around in the references

[Anonymous No.5666884]

Anything above an absorbed dose of 30Gy is enough to kill in 48 hours. Although to receive a dose of say, 80Gy to the body, you would have to be standing pretty damn close to the source to receive a fatal dose in such a short period of time. The heat from such a radioactive source would probably kill you.
A good method of giving a crazy ass lethal dose of radiation to someone would be to have it in vapour form, or make it ingestible or injectable. 50 nanograms of Polonium-210 is a lethal dose. something like 300 nanograms would probably kill you in a few hours. If injected, the effect would be quicker.
Unfortunately, only 100g of Polonium-210 is produce in the world, annually.

[Anonymous No.5666891]

>>5666872
yeah I think there is a lot of information out there where a lot of people died from a lot of radiation in various accidents, it's just that almost none of these cases are documented and/or the governments just didn't release the information.

The well documented cases are almost all special cases where professionals were working with known quantities of radioactive material and were taken to a proper hospital after the accident so that the magnitude of radiation exposure could be calculated within a reasonably small margin of error.

[Anonymous No.5666906]

[Anonymous No.5666917]

>>5666906
That's absolutely brilliant for putting it in perspective.
If anyone is interested a book just came out called "Radiation: what it is and what you need to know" and it really details and describes and explains the whole radiation hysteria thing going on right now.
It's probably the most up to date book regarding systems of statistics and measurement of dose related to cancer risk.

[Anonymous No.5666923]

>>5666906
It would be pretty incredible to visit Chernobyl. They've sealed off the ground zero of the meltdown though, haven't they?

[Anonymous No.5666927]

An interesting phenomenon happens with a neutron bomb, at a certain distance away from the blast. At one distance, your soft flesh will literally melt off. That means your eyes, your tongue...etc and you will die shortly thereafter. At another range, you will turn into a zombie. Well, not an actual zombie of course but your body will be dead while you are still able to move. Your cells will be unable to repair themselves, your bone marrow will be "dead". You'll walk around for about 5-7 days and then die as your body decomposes.

[Anonymous No.5666930]

>>5666927
That can't be legit. Source?

[Anonymous No.5666943]

>>5666930
It is legit, and I don't think it should be that hard to believe anyway. I'll spend a little while looking it up, but it's information I found about 8 years ago and never forgot.

[Anonymous No.5666953]

>>5666943
Yeah, read that a bit wrong. Still pretty incredible stuff, though.

[Anonymous No.5668285]

>>5666927
Holy shit. So, we actually COULD have a zombie apocalypse?

[Anonymous No.5668293]

>>5666852
i dunno, it's possible. if you got close enough to the sun the radiation would incinerate you instantly

[Anonymous No.5668295]

>>5666927

I don't see how that could be possible as muscle cells need to be alive in order to metabolize and produce the chemicals needed to actually move.

[Anonymous No.5668296]

Pell should have died in the Alabasta arc. Even if he did manage to evade the explosion, the radiation exposure should have killed him within hours.

[Anonymous No.5668300]

Perhaps it doesn't kill muscle cells, only skin cells, and some brain cells, leading to a zombie like appearance, and a personality that's been severely damaged.

[Anonymous No.5668303]

>>5668300
Then why did Pell only break a few bones?

[Anonymous No.5668308]

>>5666927
>You'll walk around for about 5-7 days and then die as your body decomposes.

Yeah, no. If your brain if affected and severely damaged (and it would be) you won't be able to do shit.

[Anonymous No.5668327]

Why didn't Pell die?

[Anonymous No.5668353]

Death from radiation sickness is usually caused by the fact the the initial radiation kills all your cells in the stomach and colon, which kills people either by infections, malnutrition or dehydration.
Also, in the range of above 100.000mSv, heat effects become significant. It's quite possible that the only way to kill somebody instantly with radiation is to expose him to enough that he dies of the heat alone.

[Anonymous No.5668357]

>>5668353
Why didn't Pell die!!!!!!????????????!!!!!!!!!!??????/

[Anonymous No.5668367]

http://xkcd.com/radiation/

I think this is one of the best charts I've seen to explain what I think youre looking for.

[Anonymous No.5668408]

>>5666852
By my experience, 1000 RADs.

[Anonymous No.5668447]

>>5666852
I would put 20,000 grays as a reasonable upper limit, since that would be enough energy to raise a person's body temperature by about 5 degrees.