Patient Excreta

["Sean Austin" <seanaustin@hotmail.com>]

The regulations do not apply to just in-patients under a licensees 
control.  Installing a decay tank in a hospital may, in theory, work for 
in-patients (and be very expensive for the hospital to install and 
maintain; a large hospital performing many therapies would have tons of 
excreta to store throughout the course of a year), but what about the 
thousands of out-patients that receive diagnostic scans each DAY?  Do we 
ask them to collect their excreta and hold it for decay before dumping 
down the drain?  The benefits to society of nuclear medicine far 
outweigh the risk posed by these discharges, IMHO.  

___________
OK, I can accept the argument about handling excreta, but what's so hard 
=
about putting in a holdup tank for decay?  I've always found it absurd =
that most nuclear installations are fretting about loss of a few uCi of 
=
I-131 while the hospital down the street is dumping curies into the same 
=
system.  If you have a thyroid cancer patient, they will receive ~200 =
mCi.  75% of this is excreted in the first 24-48 hours in the urine, and 
=
the rest over the next week or two.  This is not particularly short =
lived material, like, say Tc-99m.  I don't see this as a grave public =
hazard, but I have always thought that a holdup tank used only for =
highly radioactive patient excreta like this would be an application of 
=ALARA. 
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