[ RadSafe ] Fwd: Airport X-Ray Radiation

[radbloom at comcast.net]

Not sure why this hasn't been posted yet... 


----- Forwarded Message ----- 
From: radbloom at comcast.net 
To: "The International Radiation Protection (Health Physics) Mailing List" <radsafe at health.phys.iit.edu> 
Sent: Wednesday, December 1, 2010 9:21:15 PM 
Subject: Re: [ RadSafe ] Airport X-Ray Radiation 






I took a quick look at the paper on the link Barbara provided.  I saw no mention of film or TLD badges.  The results were obtained with instrumentation (ion chamber, a "micro rem survey meter" and a pancake GM detector for finding the areas with the most scattered radiation).  The radiation measurements were presented in terms of roentgen and rem (the GM results were in counts per minute).  I didn't see anything indicating how (or for what energies), the instruments had been calibrated, but I don't believe that it would be appropriate to take their reported units of rem and multiply by the inverse of the skin weighting factor to get rad.  There was discussion of a previous survey and its limitations.  It was also noted that the kV measurement might not have been accurate because of the minimum "hardness of the beam" (in millimeters aluminum [mm Al]), and that the dose conversion coefficients from ANSI/HPS N43.17-2009 were selected based on 50 kV.