The Dose Makes the Poison – Rockwell on Properly Evaluating Radiation Hazards
Ted Rockwell is a man who literally wrote the book on radiation shielding while he was serving as the Technical Director at Naval Reactors. He was in that position during the period when the Nautilus and the Shippingport reactors were built to use the heat generated by fission to produce useful power. Ted has been working around radiation and using his honed communications skills since well before I was born and I am a grandfather! He is a fission pioneer who was there at the beginning of the industry.
Ted has recently posted a new blog titled It’s the Dose that Makes the Poison: The Importance of Numbers that adds perspective to scary news stories about leaks and radiation exposure. I highly recommend that you go and read it several times. Bookmark it and refer to it when you get engaged in Internet debates about radiation health effects.
“In these more hazardous cases of non-radioactive spills, we devote a modest effort to cleaning up the area, leaving earth or concrete permanently stained and contaminated to the degree that, if you tried to eat it, you might suffer some deleterious effects. And we rightly conclude, that’s a reasonable course. (Maybe we should post OSHA warning signs: DO NOT EAT THE DIRT.) There is no realistic justification for requiring that the ground be decontaminated to hospital or “clean room” standards.”
I love it!