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How Much Radiation-Contaminated Water Will Kill You?

s lifetime cancer risk by 4 percent, according to health physicist and radiation safety expert Peter Caracappa of the Renssealaer Polytechnic Institute. To put that in real terms, if 1,000 people are exposed to 1 Sv of radiation, 40 more of them will develop cancer in their lifetimes than would otherwise.

A person would have to ingest 77 million becquerels of radioactive iodine in order to receive a 1 Sv radiation dose, Caracappa tolda sister site of LiveScience.

At its highest level of contaminationTokyo water contained 210 becquerels of radioactive iodine per liter. A simple calculation shows that a person would have to drink about 370,000 liters (97,000 gallons) of that water to expose himself to 1 Sv of radiation, and thus increase his lifetime cancer risk by 4 percent.

At the recommended rate of eight glasses of water a day, it would take someone about 530 years to consume that much water. Besides the obvious fact that no one lives that long anyway, iodine 131 also radioactively decays within days, so the Tokyowill not remain contaminated for nearly that long. On March 24, a day after the high reading, the radioactive iodine level had already fallen to 79 becquerels per liter.

"My opinion is that we're unlikely to see an increase in cancer deaths as a result of the nuclear accident in Japan, given the information I have access to about the levels of dose that the population is being exposed to," Caracappa said.

This article was provided bya sister site to LiveScience. Follow Natalie Wolchover on Twitter @