Some engineers at Electricite de France did a study at one of their reactors in which they sent someone on a walking tour of one of their facilities. They had him wearing electronic dosimeters on 5 parts of his body (front right, front left, back right and back left on his belt and a fifth dosimeter on his helmet). They mounted a video recorder on him and recorded everything. They ended up with a video tape of the fellow walking around the reactor facility with dosimeter readouts displayed. It was very interesting. By eyeball, it looked as if they were seeing up to about 100% variation between the dosimeters in some locations.
Thomas Gleich Harrison <tomh@jove.acs.unt.edu> Sent by: radsafe@romulus.ehs.uiuc.edu
09-03-00 12:22 PM
Please respond to radsafe
To: Multiple recipients of list <radsafe@romulus.ehs.uiuc.edu>
cc:
Subject: Re: Radon vs. LNT - [CUT TO] the Chase
You know.. in my very, very humble opinion,.. I do wish we could simply
ignore the so called "radon health threat" that we seem to be so
mesmerized by these days. Other than for a very few specific environmental
situations such as for uranium miners where it need be addressed, we have
lived with uranium and it's progeny in our environment for how long
now...... and if radon is a "problem", how are we going to solve it....
"clean up" radon in our air ???? Is that the suggested solution ????
But let me ask about another situation... does anybody in the RADSAFE
community know about any quantitative work that has been done on
evaluating the gross underestimate for torso dose that can be expected
from single TLD or film badge display orientation to a unidirectional
radiation field ???? It seems to me that due to variable geometrical
orientation and body shielding, wearing a single film tab anywhere on the
upper torso undoubtedly results in a gross underestimate of realistic
whole body doses, possibly recording only 10% or maybe even less of the
actual dose received by the body in a unidirectional field. I've had
several students express an interest in looking into this problem if in
fact it is a problem.... simply stated, they've asked that if their TLD
reports a WB dose of 100 mrem which of course is a minimum dose, is there
a correction factor which would give them a more realistic WB
dose estimate?? My only answer is I don't know of one.....
Thanks in advance for yor help.....
Tom Harrison, Ph.D.
Radiation Safety Officer
Physics Dept
University of North texas
e-mail: tomh@facstaff.cas.unt.edu
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