Re: tritiated water uptake

[lavelyp@uclink2.berkeley.edu (Paul Lavely)]

Bill Lipton wrote:
>This sounds like a deliberate contamination event.
>There seems to be an  epidemic of these . . ..

Epidemic?  Per my dictionary --  "Epidemic: Spreading rapidly and widely
among the inhabitants of an area."

There are several thousand members of the Health Physics Society and
several thousand more "HP's" who are not members of the society. I estimate
there are several hundred thousand "radiation workers" who we provide
services to. In the last 10 years there appear to have been less than 20 of
these deliberate events.  This is less than 2 per year and over a group
several hundred thousand in number. This is a rate of 10 to the -5 to 10 to
the -6 per year. I don't call than an epidemic.

A quote of "There seems to be an  epidemic of these [contamination events].
. " is, in my opinion, just the type of quote that we as professional HP's
need to prevent. It is certainly one that if it had come from an
anti-nuclear group we would all be attacking.

What we have has been a series of discrete illegal uses of licensed
radioactive materials. They are crimes and the perpetrators needed to be
treated as criminals. The fact that we may be seeing greater reporting of
these events than in the past is not indicative of an epidemic. Perhaps if
we were to publicize the fate of the known perpetrators (loss of job, jail,
criminal prosecution, civil prosecution, etc.) these isolated events would
be even further decreased.

Do we believe that the misuse of radioactive materials is greater than
non-radioactive chemicals and poisons found in the workplace?

I have tried to compile a listing of the verified misuses of radioactive
and non-radioactive materials that involved exposure or contamination. If
people will provide what they know I will summarize the information and
publish it on Radsafe.

I welcome all comments.

Paul Lavely
Director
University of California, Berkeley
lavelyp@uclink2.berkeley.edu
(510) 643-7976