Re: Business airflights = occupational exposure?

[Al Tschaeche <antatnsu@pacbell.net>]

> I want to hear your points of view: A businessman/woman who does a lot of
> air travel (due to his/her work) gets more of cosmic radiation than others.
> Should this be classified as occupational exposure or not? Are there any
> clear analogies?

The purpose for classifying people as radiation workers is so they can be
educated about the "risk" and protected from getting doses above regulatory
limits.  From the data I've seen, it is highly unlikely that very many, if any,
flight personnel, let alone businesspersons will get doses above 20 mSv (for SI
people) or 50 mSv (for Americans) per year for their working lifetimes.  As
someone already said, flying is not like working with radioactive material or
radiation generating machines.  You can't get large dose rates  or large
internal exposures unexpectedly.  Not even solar flares are much of a problem.
So all you have to protect against is a relatively uniform, very low dose rate
of known radiation. Not very exciting.

Unless you are a die hard LNTH person, ALARA should not play a role in
protecting people from radiation when flying at current altitudes.  Collective
dose is also not applicable here (or anywhere for that matter).  There are not
many practical ways of reducing flyers doses significantly.  And you can't turn
off the radiation (yet).  Unless someone has human data (and not projected
effects based on the LNTH) that demonstrate current flyers are suffering harm,
IMHO, we should forget this whole subject (even for pregnancies).

Of course, if a researcher wanted a good project, they could find a money
source and spend years trying to find an effect directly caused by radiation
while flying (and not dry air or some other cause).  There are a lot of flying
people to study.  But I think the money would be better spent studying those
who get medical exposures, particularly therapeutic doses.  Better yet, study
both groups.  And, while we are at it, study particularly those who get exposed
from both sources to see if we can tell if flying is more or less hazardous
than medical exposure.  We should be able to spend billions on such research.
And scare the public more.

If you are die hard LNTHer then you must protect ALL the flyers, not just
business persons.  Collective dose and ALARA would compel that.  How to do that
is a neat problem.  Maybe just ban flying.  Then we could get rid of all the
complaints about small seats, no leg room, bad air, lost bags, delays, bad
food, surly employees, air rage, congestion at air ports and in the air, and
lost frequent flyer miles.  Wow, with that list let's do it.  Think how much
happier the public would be.  We would be doing them a huge favor.

Oh well, it's Sunday and I haven't much else to do.

Al Tschaeche antatnsu@pacbell.net
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