Re: Letter to Shirley Jackson

[muckerheide@mediaone.net]

David Scherer wrote:

Thanks for the effort, but its your strawman threshold and rather disingenuous
analysis, not mine. 

Neither case you use here is chronic/lifetime. If you want chronic, take high
background or even the 500 rem lifetime of radiologists estimated by Doll in
1981 with no excess cancer, or the radium-burden population. Obviously some
substantial populations exceed 1 rem/year, do they have effects; some small
populations/individuals go above 10 rem/year. Why don't you use them?

I still argue that we have no idea where a serious effort would work out, but
that we are dishonestly preventing such an honest, formal, open, scientific
assessment and consensus process from addressing the actual data. And that's
not an accident. Al Tschaeche has proposed to inaugurate a standards process.
(Scientific committees seem to be unable to define anything other than how to
justify more science. Standards are the process by which the engineering
process can bound what is known to establish how to actually build something
that won't fall down :-)

> Jim Muckerheide suggested the following specific thresholds:
> 
> 30 rem for breast cancer (based on fluoroscopy patients)
> 10-15 rem for leukemia (based on radiotherapy patients?)
> 
> Let's see where they lead us.  We want to be protective, so I'll use
> an overall threshold of 10 rem.  You can use another value if you wish.
> 
> STANDARD NO. 1: The accute exposure limit is 10 rem.
> 
> We need to protect from chronic radiation as well, so I'll use a DDREF
> of 2 and a working lifetime of 50 y. Calculate with another if you like.
> 
> STANDARD NO. 2:  The annual occupational dose limit is 400 mrem.
> 
> Members of the public may be exposed for their enire lives, not just
> their
> working lifetimes.  I'll use a life expectancy of 80 y.
> 
> STANDARD NO. 3:  The annual dose limit for the public is 250 mrem.
> 
> I think I'd rather stay with the present standards.  Thank you just
> the same.
> 
> Regards,
> Dave Scherer
> scherer@uiuc.edu