Re: Regulations from scratch

[Kent Lambert <lambert@allegheny.edu>]

bflood@SLAC.Stanford.EDU (Bob Flood) wrote:

> Depending on whose figures you use, somewhere between 30% and 50% of those
> people who are blase about returning the badge that always read zero will
> develop cancer, and about half of them will die from it. Each one is a
> potential lawsuit claiming radiation injury, and those pages and pages of
> "Not Detected" serve to assure workers today that nothing unexpected is
> happening and to help defend the employer later. 

BRZGV@ccmail.ceco.com wrote:

>      If I remember correctly, many of the major suits were over just a
>      handful of mrem (10 or less)!

Film badges have a LLD of 10 mrem (at least from my vendor).  That means 
that anything less than 4 mrem per month (or is it 9 mrem/month?) goes 
reported as 'M'.  4x12=48 mrem/year.  So if the majority of the suits are 
for exposures of 10 mrem or less, the film badge does not support the 
defense.  That means that all of this defensive monitoring is useless.  In 
biomedical research institutions, laboratories typically use fractions of a 
millicurie per experiment, with a few uses in the 1 - 10 mCi range (e.g., 
initial aliquot preparation, labelling procedures), and rarely >10 mCi.  
As  Kathi Elliott pointed out, with these activities of usually beta 
emitters, CONTAMINATION is the issue, not external exposure.  Personal 
contamination is NOT going to be measured by a personal radiation 
monitoring device.

No one has answered the question - At a hospital or university, where do 
you draw the line?  Lab workers whose dose is zero, students whose dose is 
zero, secretaries whose dose is zero, visitors whose dose is zero?

Kent Lambert, CHP
lambert@hal.hahnemann.edu

All opinions are well reasoned and insightful.
Needless to say, they are not [necessarily] the
opinions of my employer. - paraphrased from Michael Feldman