RE: Man Sentenced in radioactive Poisoning Case

[Bob Flood <bflood@SLAC.Stanford.EDU>]

At 04:50 PM 1/11/2000 -0600, you wrote:
>All radioactive material was - as the Austrian
>Radiation Protection Law and the Ordinance require - kept in lead castles,
>which were locked with special locks, for which I had the keys.

I don't want this to sound like an accusation - it most certainly is not.
But the situation you describe proves the point that a licensee can indeed
be the victim and not deserve citing - your institution made a conscious
decision to trust you with control of the radioactive material - what
happens if you decide to misue the material? I don't expect you would, but
these misuse cases involve someone in a position of trust misusing the
material, and a comprehansive program that guarantees that such conduct is
impossible cannot be done and still make use of the material. Ultimately,
the institution has to trust SOMEONE.

And if that institution places its trust in a person, and that person
misuses the radioactive material, what can the institution fix? Impounding
the material so that such misuse by a trusted individual is the same as
abandoning the use of radioactive material althogether.

===================================
Bob Flood
Dosimetry Group Leader
Stanford Linear Accelerator Center
(650) 926-3793
bflood@slac.stanford.edu
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