Re: Electric chairs in our homes?

[Bob Flood <bflood@SLAC.Stanford.EDU>]

At 06:58 PM 2/11/98 -0600, you wrote:
>THE FUTURE OF radon removal may be as simple as powering up your living
>room. In tests conducted under a grant from the EPA, SR Environmental of
>Amherst, New York, has shown that electrically charging a few furniture
>surfaces continuously can eliminate as much as 90 percent of radon
>particles circulating in a large room.

What a terrific discovery! Why don't we call it an electrostatic precipitator?

BTW, your TV set already does this. But, will the bookcase or sofa used to
collect this evil radioactive stuff have to be disposed of as radwaste?
After all, even after a gazillion half-lives, there will still be some
absurdly small, non-zero fraction remaining, right?

And, correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe it would be correct for EPA to
claim that radon MAY be the second leading cause of lung cancer, since they
cannot show with certainty that radon causes lung cancer at all. And the
only statistical,associations I have ever seen showed negative
correlations, not positive.


---------
Bob Flood
Dosimetry Group Leader
Stanford Linear Accelerator Center
(650) 926-3793
bflood@slac.stanford.edu