[ RadSafe ] Re: Fw: Someone just responded to your comment

[BLHamrick at aol.com]

In a message dated 9/7/2005 8:49:05 A.M. Pacific Standard Time,  
don.mercado at lmco.com writes:

<<As part of our jobs as radiation professionals, we have to  enforce the
ALARA principle. What you believe about LNT will drive your  judgment and
actions on what you think is "reasonable". Someone who thinks  that LNT
is real might spend $100 to reduce exposure by 100 mrem per annum  per
person. Someone who thinks LNT is a crock might not. Is it ok to  walk
through a 500 mR/hr field for 20 seconds without turning off the  x-ray
machine, remembering that it takes a half hour to restabilize  the
machine after its been turned off and restarted? So LNT beliefs  can
translate into real actions, real expenditures or savings, and  real
exposures for every HP professional.>>
 
This is the real crux of the regulatory argument about LNT.  Whether  or not 
the model is correct does not matter if you do a real cost-benefit  analysis.  
The hypothesized risk cannot be assessed in a vacuum.  An  integrated 
increased cancer incidence risk of even 1E-3 in a lifetime  is not really meaningful 
to begin with, against the background risk of  incidence that is about 0.5 for 
males, and about 0.37 for females, especially  given the error bars on these 
cancer incidences.  When you add in the  benefits of using radiation and 
radioactive materials (better diagnostic  and therapeutic medicine tools, excellent 
power generation source, great  non-destructive testing applications, etc.) 
to balance the equation, I think you  will find that the hypothesized increased 
risk from low dose or low  dose-rate exposures is drowned out by the benefits 
of the use of ionizing  radiation, even if you ignore the fact that we have 
not been able to detect  the increased incidence of cancers from low dose or 
low dose-rate radiation in  the background of cancers from all causes.
 
For example, I was recently in discussions about a hand-held x-ray unit for  
certain human diagnostic applications.  There is some (in my opinion)  
appropriate concern about the potential misuse of these machines, but there is  also 
an argument to be made that in the hands of paramedics (for example), we  
might be saving some real lives (today), which must be balanced against the  risks 
of hypothetical premature deaths far into the future.  
 
Barbara L. Hamrick, CHP, JD