[ RadSafe ] Is it a privacy or radiation issue?

[Ahmad Al-Ani]

Many radiation experts naively think that scaring people of radiation is the way to protect them from the associated risk. But time proved that this approach created an unnecessary radio-phobia within the majority of people, and complete apathy within the authorities when there is actual risk.

I believe this whole uproar about airport scanners is not about radiation exposure, rather about privacy and civil rights. And the advocates of those issues have good experience in riding any train that will take them to their objectives. 

This time, they took the radiation train, and many of us radiation experts subsidized their tickets, for lack of educating the public, and not engaging with the manufacturers and users of those scanners early on in the process.

According to Johns Hopkins Report below, the effective dose per scan is less than 0.05 micro Sv, the same dose an airline passenger at 10,000 m altitude get in 3 minutes from cosmic rays.

http://www.tsa.gov/assets/pdf/jh_apl_v2.pdf

Ahmad Al-Ani
Radiation Physicist