Ambient office  = 93 nanosieverts per hour

Ambient outside = 130 nanosieverts per hour

Soil exposed to rain water = 125 nanosieverts per hour

Pinapple from Central Market = 130 nanosieverts per hour

Tap water = 143 nanosieverts per hour

Filter water = 136 nanosieverts per hour

Ambient office  = 63 nanosieverts per hour

Ambient outside = 135 nanosieverts per hour

Soil exposed to rain water = 136 nanosieverts per hour

Organic carrot from Central Market = 94 nanosieverts per hour

Tap water = 103 nanosieverts per hour

Filter water = 97 nanosieverts per hour

Ambient office  = 97 nanosieverts per hour

Ambient outside = 96 nanosieverts per hour

Soil exposed to rain water = 100 nanosieverts per hour

Cherry tomato from Central Market = 133 nanosieverts per hour

Tap water = 113 nanosieverts per hour

Filter water = 102 nanosieverts per hour

Dover sole – Caught in USA = 93 nanosieverts per hour

Part 2 of 2 Parts (Please read Part 1 first)
       During the Cold War, there were some calls for civil defense measures to prepare for a nuclear attack by the Soviet Union. School children were told to practice “Duck and Cover” under their desks. During the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1961, there was a boom in the construction of bomb shelters. One of Ronald Reagan’s White House staff suggested that people should dig a hole in their yard, cover it with a door and then dirt for a shelter.
        The Center of Disease Control’s Strategic National Stockpile has already designated sites for stockpiles of medical supplies to be used after disasters such as a nuclear detonation. He said, “All states, all large cities have all thought about this. I think the challenge for us will be distribution, a very large one.”
        The CDC national stockpiles currently have medicine and medical materials to treat radiation sickness. Adams expressed a concern that they may not have enough burn kits to treat burns from the blast. Medical specialists from the American Burn Association often raised concerns during the workshop about the number and training of burn experts in the U.S. The treatment of children was of special concern. There are only about three hundred qualified burn surgeons currently available in the whole country. Burn treatment training during medical school for surgeons was cut back ten years ago.
       A nurse from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health pointed out that nurses and doctors had a great fear of radiation exposure and might flee a nuclear detonation instead of staying around to treat the survivors. She also pointed out that there had been no study of the economic effects of a major nuclear detonation on the U.S. economy. She said that legislators would not be inclined to vote for a bill to train and equip emergency responders for a nuclear attack unless the extra cost of such training and equipping could be justified.
          Ron Miller is the acting director of the National Disaster Medical System at the US Department of Health and Human Services. He was also worried that not all the estimated six thousand nurses, doctors, or other medical professionals would actually show up after a nuclear attack.
       Dallas raised concerns about what he said were two types of widespread complacency that made it more difficult to plan for dealing with a big nuclear detonation. The first complacency is the belief in areas far from big cities that nuclear attacks would not affect them. The truth is that a major nuclear attack anywhere in the U.S. would strain the resources of the entire country no matter where the attack took place. The second complacency is the belief that a major nuclear attack would just kill everyone in the area and that planning for disaster response would be futile. The truth is that acute radiation poisoning and severe burns can be successfully treated.
       There is a tendency for people to ignore threats that they cannot do anything about. It is important that U.S. citizens realize that although a major nuclear attack in the U.S. would kill and injure many people, there are many things that can be done before any such attack to prepare for treatment of victims.

Ambient office  = 53 nanosieverts per hour

Ambient outside = 88 nanosieverts per hour

Soil exposed to rain water = 89 nanosieverts per hour

Iceberg lettuce from Central Market = 77 nanosieverts per hour

Tap water = 92 nanosieverts per hour

Filter water = 88 nanosieverts per hour

Part 1 of 2 Parts
         The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) reports that they are now moving away from planning for the aftermath of small nuclear detonations in U.S. cities carried out by terrorists to planning for big nuclear detonations over sixty of the biggest U.S. cities by “state actors.” A two-day National Academy of Sciences workshop for public health officials and emergency response groups is currently being held at the NAS headquarters. This shift is at least partly because of the threat now posed by North Korea.
       Luis Garcia is the chief of FEMA’s chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear branch. He recently told a reporter that their focus is on one hundred to one thousand kiloton detonations. The current nuclear detonation guidance for emergency planners was released by FEMA in 2010. These guidelines were related to one to ten kiloton blasts which would be smaller than the nuclear detonations at Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of WW II. Following the attack on 9/11, it seemed reasonable to focus on nuclear attacks by terrorists which would likely be small bombs.
       When N.K. tested a thermonuclear device last year that was estimated to be in the range of two hundred and fifty kilotons, planners realized that they had to start thinking in terms of big nuclear detonations over U.S. cities. Cham Dallas of the Institute for Disaster Management at the University of Georgia told the attendees at the NAS workshop, “The North Koreans have really changed the calculus. We really have to look at thermonuclear now.”
       At the NAS workshop, Dallas speculated that a rough estimate of the deaths that would result from an urban detonation of a nuclear device could be derived by multiplying one hundred thousand by twice the number of megatons in the bomb. This would mean that if a one megaton device were detonated over a major city, there would be about two hundred thousand fatalities. There would also be many survivors with major burns and radiation caused illnesses.
       The new guidelines will apply to the sixty largest U.S. cities. They will be based on newer detonation models developed at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) . These new models include weather patterns that will direct and distort the clouds of fallout from a detonation. They also include estimates of the shelter provide by concrete buildings. A representative of LLNL said, “A 10 times larger [explosion] yield does not make things 10 times worse.” If people remain in shelters for hours or days after a detonation, there will be fewer cases of radiation sickness.
       There are also other contingencies that are taken into account in the new LLNL model. There might be cyberattacks that accompany nuclear attacks. Infrastructure such as power plants or cell phone systems could be crippled. Another possibility is that a single nuclear detonation could be triggered and then blackmail messages could follow with the threat of more detonations if terms are not met. Garcia responded to an audience question that FEMA had also considered a scenario in which a nuclear bomb detonation, a cyberattack, an electromagnetic pulse and a biological weapon release all occurred at the same time somewhere in the U.S.
Please read Part 2