The Most Radioactive Place On Earth

0:00 If you had to guess the most radioactive place on Earth, where would you pick?

0:03 Let's use this banana for scale because bananas are high

0:07 in potassium and around 0.001% of potassium atoms are naturally radioactive,

0:13 which means every time you eat a banana,

0:15 you're ingesting around 50 micrograms of radioactive material.

0:19 Now, at that rate, you would need to eat around 20

0:22 million bananas all at once to get a lethal dose of radiation.

0:25 So, by that point, I would say

0:27 the radiation would be the least of your concerns.

0:30 Now, just hanging out in a park for a day,

0:32 you're exposed to around 65 bananas worth

0:35 of background radiation from the soil and space.

0:37 If you get in a plane, as you climb higher,

0:40 you get less and less atmosphere above you to shield you from cosmic rays,

0:44 which means a 5-hour flight from New York to LA equates to around 150 bananas.

0:49 What if you spent 24 hours walking around Chernobyl?

0:52 Well, that's the equivalent of eating 1,200 bananas.

0:55 Up above our atmosphere on the ISS, astronauts are blasted with over 4,300

1:00 bananas worth of radiation every single day.

1:02 But, even that is not the highest radiation dose a person is likely to receive.

1:07 No, that award goes to your everyday smoker because

1:11 tobacco contains highly radioactive polonium and lead and when smoked,

1:15 those atoms get directly into your lungs firing radiation

1:18 into your sensitive tissues at levels equivalent to being on the ISS.

1:22 The difference is astronauts get to go home,

1:25 whereas smokers receive that dose day in and day out for decades.

1:29 Subscribe for more banana-based reasons not to smoke.