Re: intentional misuse - proposed "cures"

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

At 10:30 AM 2/29/00 -0600, you wrote:

>the NRC required initial screening of all workers years ago.

And very few people were screened out by the process. The main effect of
the screening was to get people with a serious probability of failing the
screening to go elsewhere. Same with drug testing - those with a history
didn't bother to apply. It's easy to speculate that the same would happen
in the university environement, but it's not that simple.

Psychological testing to detect whether an individual is likely to misuse
radioactive material (or any other universtity property) is beyond the
state of the art - if psychologists can't say with certainty which rapist
will rape again or which killer will kill again, how could they possibly be
expected to identify which students or researchers might misuse lab
materials? And add in the problem of language and cultural differences, and
the test process becomes impossible. More likely a source of lawsuits than
improvements in health and safety. Unfortunately, it might have significant
PR value (from the Eyewash Solutions Department) be implemented anyway.

The people involved in cutting edge research aren't average, and designing
a test to cull out the dangerously non-average from a generally non-average
group seems very unlikely to succeed.

Remember: large scale, complex questions always have simple,
easy-to-understand wrong answers.

I just wish I knew what the answer IS instead of what it ISN'T.

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

************************************************************************
The RADSAFE Frequently Asked Questions list, archives and subscription
information can be accessed at http://www.ehs.uiuc.edu/~rad/radsafe.html