[ RadSafe ] Sickening Solar Flare

[Minnema, Douglas]

With regards to the affect of medical intervention, I'll throw in my two
cents worth.  

In September 2000 the Oak Ridge and Los Alamos National Laboratories jointly
sponsored a video conference on nuclear criticality safety.  The invited
guests were the pioneers of criticality safety, such as Dixon Calihan and
Joe Thomas from ORNL and Hugh Paxton, Dave Smith, and Don Petersen from
LANL.  The panel interviewing them included Dr. George Voelz from LANL, Dr.
Ron Goans from ORISE REAC/TS, and Dr. Fred Mettler, JR. from Univ. of New
Mexico, three of the pioneers in treating criticality victims.  The result
is a 9 disc DVD set covering a wide range of criticality safety, radiation
injury, and dosimetry issues from their vast experiences, including
everything from the early Los Alamos accidents to SL-1 to Tokaimura.  If you
ever have a chance to see some of the these recordings, I highly recommend
it.

The reason I introduce that here is that in one discussion regarding the
Tokaimura accident, Dr. Goans and Dr. Mettler agreed that given current
medical treatment and drug advances, they now believe that they could
successfully treat a patient for acute doses of up to about 1000 rads, as
long as the radiological nature of the injury was recognized early enough.
However, at that level the next roadblock appears to be damage to the lungs
that is slower to present itself, but leads to fatality in 6 - 9 months.

Unfortunately, there are no references provided in this video package, and I
do not have any further details as to how they reach that conclusion.  But I
thought it was a very interesting perspective.

Doug Minnema, PhD, CHP
National Nuclear Security Administration, US DOE


-----Original Message-----
From: Dick Petit [mailto:petit at marshall.edu]
Sent: Friday, February 11, 2005 1:09 AM
To: radsafe at radlab.nl
Subject: Re: [ RadSafe ] Sickening Solar Flare


While I agree that the radiation dose fatal to 50% of humans (LD-50) is not
precisely known, the thing that is being overlooked in comments on the
LD-50 in the NASA article is medical treatment.

300-rads may in fact be the approximate LD-50 without medical intervention,
while 

450-rads is the approximate LD-50 for persons receiving the best medical
treatment, and 

>600-rads has been quoted as the approximate dose level at which virtually
100% of human victims will not survive - even with the best medical
treatment.
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