What’s a Becquerel and is it dangerous?

Before today’s updates, it might help many readers to further explain the Becquerel, with respect to some of the reports coming out of Japan. Please recall the Becquerel’s definition of one radioactive disintegration per second. One other way to look at it (in a very, very general sense) is one click per second on a Geiger counter. You will get dozens of “Geiger clicks” per second off a low-grade granite counter-top due to its containing low concentrations of natural Uranium, Radium, and Thorium. The same sort of thing happens with an adobe brick. The point is that a Becquerel is a tiny, tiny unit of measurement. On January 20^th, TEPCO announced they had discovered contaminated water inside a vertical pit near unit #1. The news media said the water in the pit was highly radioactive. However, the actual activity of the water has been analyzed and found to contain 0.2 Becquerels/cc. That is, one would have to wait some 5 seconds between “Geiger clicks” when monitoring a cubic centimeter sample. Is that really “highly radioactive”? Of course not. Why did the Press call this essentially innocuous activity “highly radioactive”? Two possibilities come to mind. Either they don’t know any better, or they are intentionally exaggerating. I hope it’s the first because education will eventually correct the error. If it’s the second, then the Press is purposefully exacerbating the mental damage caused by radiophobia.