If eating one banana only is comparable to living 50km from a nuclear powerplant for one entire year, then clearly the radiation you get from the powerplant is ridiculously small.
That fact that all this is only 1% of the radiation dose you'd otherwise get due to background radiation should only help bringing the point home.
Saying living next to a reactor is safe because even bananas contains a bit of radioactivity is somewhat like saying living next to a Ebola lab is safe because there are viruses in bananas... it's not really speaking to the fear of getting caught up in the fallout when bad things happen at the reactor.
The comparison focuses on the normal amount of background radiation from living near a nuclear plant, so fear of fallout "when bad things happen" is a separate issue and irrelevant to the banana example. The Ebola lab comparison is a good one though.
Is the EU standard banana a worthy banana for BED calculation?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commission_Regulation_(EC)_N....
Maybe someday the banana industry will address your concerns by making the fruit more radioactive.
> The radiation exposure from consuming a banana is approximately 1% of the average daily exposure to radiation, which is 100 banana equivalent doses (BED).
If your scale starts at 100, maybe it’s not such a great educational example.
If the Average Daily Exposure (ADE) is 100 BED, the number inflates in a way that make the values seem unnecessarily high.
It’s implicitly a kind of “appeal to nature” argument, but already eating 100 bananas is completely unrealistic, and that’s just background radiation.
The article goes on to say:
> The maximum permitted radiation leakage for a nuclear power plant is equivalent to 2,500 BED (250 μSv) per year
I really don’t think this is helpful, because first of all nobody eats 2,500 bananas and it doesn’t say anything about safety, and secondly we now know that this is the same thing as 25 ADE, which both sounds less and gives a better relative comparison to how small the amount is.