The Most Radioactive Place On Earth

If you had to guess the most radioactive place on Earth, where would you pick? Let's use this banana for scale because bananas are high in potassium and around 0. 001% of potassium atoms are naturally radioactive, which means every time you eat a banana, you're ingesting around 50 micrograms of radioactive material. Now, at that rate, you would need to eat around 20 million bananas all at once to get a lethal dose of radiation. So, by that point, I would say the radiation would be the least of your concerns. Now, just hanging out in a park for a day, you're exposed to around 65 bananas worth of background radiation from the soil and space. If you get in a plane, as you climb higher, you get less and less atmosphere above you to shield you from cosmic rays, which means a 5-hour flight from New York to LA equates to around 150 bananas. What if you spent 24 hours walking around Chernobyl? Well, that's the equivalent of eating 1,200 bananas. Up above our atmosphere on the ISS, astronauts are blasted with over 4,300 bananas worth of radiation every single day. But, even that is not the highest radiation dose a person is likely to receive. No, that award goes to your everyday smoker because tobacco contains highly radioactive polonium and lead and when smoked, those atoms get directly into your lungs firing radiation into your sensitive tissues at levels equivalent to being on the ISS. The difference is astronauts get to go home, whereas smokers receive that dose day in and day out for decades. Subscribe for more banana-based reasons not to smoke.