• @PetDinosaurs
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    1 year ago

    Radiation units are difficult. Especially so because Sievert is used in SI for several different concepts (that really don’t belong in the SI, imo).

    I can’t really explain this to you simply. There’s probably some YouTube videos that are good, but you really need a sophisticated understanding of modern physics and lots of engineering principles.

    I’ll be brief, but I just can’t explain this stuff in a text post and I’m not used to not explaining it to people who don’t already have detailed knowledge.

    Bq and Curie are units of activity. That’s how many times you measure a decay per second.

    Roentgens is a unit of exposure. That’s about how much the radiation is charging up a unit of air. You recognize this from the Chernobyl series (which is extremely good and at least accurate in the physics).

    Absorbed dose is the cumulative energy deposited. This is Gray in SI. That’s the unit of measure you use when you prescribe someone radiation therapy.

    Then there’s equivalent and effective dose. Those depend on various ways about where the radiation goes and what kind of radiation it is. You can irradiate your hands a lot without problems. It’s different for your colon or brainstem.