Re: Consumer reports

[Keith Welch <welch@cebaf.gov>]

Jeff King wrote:

     
>     .....Wide-spread, bulk irradiation will also come with additional 
>     public-health and environmental burdens.  We are talking about a LOT 
>     of new high activity Cs-137 or Co-60 sources avilable for things to go 
>     wrong with.  And things will inevitably go wrong since no industry is 
>     perfect.  I consider the risk to be small and an acceptable trade-off 
>     for safer food, but it is still a trade-off.....

Has anybody done a back of the napkin calculation to see in fact how many
irradiation facilities it might take to handle the throughput if by some
fluke, all chicken suppliers decided to zap their birds?  Are we talking 10
facilities or 100? more?  How do you define "a LOT"?  There are already
some irradiation facilities in use for food and other items.  They are
probably not working at full capacity????  Also, there are already "a LOT"
of sealed gamma sources in existence.  There are, from time to time,
accidents with these (usually involving misuse of the source - not
malfunctions).  Again, one could do a simplistic calculation of the current
accident rate per source and apply it to some assumed increased number of
sources in use.  My gut reaction is that it is an insignificant increase in
the present risk.  Seems to me the public health and environmental aspects
are non-problems which the anti's like to scare people with.  Yes,
technically, there's a chance of some kind of problem.  But it seems to be
below the threshold of considering it a "tradeoff".  How much thought do
these tradeoffs get when it's a cancer therapy source?


Keith Welch
Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility
Newport News VA
welch@cebaf.gov
Ph: (757)269-7212
FAX:(757)269-5048