Re: Q: dose from airport x-ray?

["Charles Meyer" <CMEYER@brc1.tdh.state.tx.us>]

Date:          Sun, 29 Sep 96 18:54:24 -0500
Reply-to:      radsafe@romulus.ehs.uiuc.edu
From:          Michael Williamson <m.williamson@mailbox.uq.edu.au>
To:            Multiple recipients of list <radsafe@romulus.ehs.uiuc.edu>
Subject:       Re: Q: dose from airport x-ray?

M. Woo wrote:
> 
> I have a question from someone who is concerned about putting food
> through a typical airport x-ray security scanner and would like to give
> her a "real life" frame of reference.  As I have no idea of the typical
> operating parameters of such a unit, I can't do the calcs for
> exposure/dose/whatever to an item going through the scanner.
> 
> As numbers tend to be meaningless in a case like this, what would be
> ideal is some sort of comparison relative to say, what dose her food
> would receive from a trans-Atlantic flight or something similar.
> Anyone have a rough estimate?
>

This is a good excercise in x-ray dose estimation, but the larger 
question is why is this woman concerned about the dose received by 
any food going thru an x-ray machine.  If she thinks it somehow makes 
her food radioactive, then she needs to be told it won't.  If she's 
worried about radiolytic compounds, she needs to be told there's not 
enough energy deposited to be cause for concern at doses of hundreds 
of thousands of times the dose delivered by the airport x-ray 
machine.

<><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><>            
<>    Charles R. (Russ) Meyer                  <>
<> Email: cmeyer@tdh.state.tx.us           <> 
<>     Phone:(512)834-6688                       <>
<>        Fax:(512)834-6654                        <>
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