Russell and Carol - hayle and hearty

I was struck by some of the numbers in the recent Guardian article on plans to lift radioactive contamination controls on UK sheep farms

Plans to lift radioactive contamination controls on UK sheep farms ...

www.guardian.co.uk/.../radioactive-contamination-controls-sheep-far...

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4 days ago - Sheep on affected farms have had to be tested to ensure they do not have radiocaesium levels above 1000 becquerels a kg. Those that pass are allowed to be ...

and Japan bans Fukushima rice after radiation breaches limits

Japan bans Fukushima rice after radiation breaches limits | World ...

www.guardian.co.uk/world/.../japan-bans-fukushima-rice-radioactive

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4 days ago - Too much caesium found in rice grown near Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, which was hit by tsunami in March.

I wondered if somehow Japanese becquerels are more powerful than ours - or British people are regarded as able to take more radiation than Japanese people by these two passages:

Sheep on affected farms have had to be tested to ensure they do not have radiocaesium levels above 1,000 becquerels
a kg. Those that pass are allowed to be slaughtered for food. Those
that fail are marked with dye and can leave restricted areas but cannot
be slaughter for at least three months. But checks over the summers of
2010 and 2011 suggest that radiocaesium levels are now rarely exceeded
at a time they might be expected to be at their highest.

and

Japan has banned shipments of rice grown near a tsunami-hit nuclear power plant, after detecting radiation exceeding the legal limit.

The
cabinet secretary, Osamu Fujimura, said on Thursday that a sample of
rice from a farm contained 630 becquerels of caesium a kg.

Caesium
was among the radioactive materials that leaked from the Fukushima
Daiichi nuclear plant after it was damaged by the earthquake and tsunami
in March.

Under Japanese regulations, rice with more than 500 becquerels of caesium per kilogram must not be consumed.

These figures are pretty interesting at the straight comparison level, but when you add in that the rice would need to be rehydrated and that you would likely eat a larger weight of meat than rice, they become quite worrying.