Low Levels of Ionizing Radiation May Cause Harm

[kp88]

The way I read the link, the average nuke plant worker's dose records would say they got 160mRem last year...your mileage may vary...

Request your dose record from the NRC at the REIRs web site.

[Content1]

I have been recently diagnosed with Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia, and it is not in my family, but I have have noted it when I worked at Rocky Flats during a physical.   By "Chronic" I am not dying tomorrow, but it can get worse at any time.  Should I blame radiation as a worker? Maybe.  But I got more of a dose living in Colorado than I got from Rocky Flats.  Other factors?  I am also diabetic, which can lead to it too.   Who to blame?  Maybe I was just unlucky and had I never been a worker I still would have got it.   Until the Science is there, we do want to be like John Edwards, who made his money filing lawsuits based on bad science who later turned out wrong, but it did not help the insurance companies who were out millions of dollars.

[Marlin]

I've long-since lost the link to this paper, but Dr's Rudy Nussbaum and Wolfgang Kohnlein contend that a significant number of cancers are directly linked to background radiation.  In one's lifetime, one receives an average of 5 REM from background radiation (there are noteworthy exceptions; Kerala India, for example).
Background radiation is inescapable so we simply must deal with it but its contribution to cancer, in their opinion, is equally inescapable.

I have no link to provide so you must disregard this post as having any value.

Bill

If this was true wouldn't cancer rate have at least some correlation to natural background? There isn't any. A lot of these studies get lost in the minutia and forget to lift up their heads to get their bearings. K.I.S.S. and "Accams Razor" are my favorite Duh!! checks for theories of any sort... radiation, finance, or PolySci.

[RTRT]

This study of shipyard workers shows the opposite:

http://www.ecolo.org/documents/documents_in_english/low-dose-NSWS-shipyard.pdf

ABSTRACT:
This paper is a summary of the 1991 Final Report of the Nuclear
Shipyard Worker Study (NSWS), a very comprehensive study of occupational
radiation exposure in the US. The NSWS compared three cohorts: a high-dose
cohort of 27,872 nuclear workers, a low dose cohort of 10,348 workers, and a
control cohort of 32,510 unexposed shipyard workers. The cohorts were
matched by ages and job categories. Although the NSWS was designed to
search for adverse effects of occupational low dose-rate gamma radiation, few
risks were found. The high-dose workers demonstrated significantly lower
circulatory, respiratory, and all-cause mortality than did unexposed workers.
Mortality from all cancers combined was also lower in the exposed cohort. The
NSWS results are compared to a study of British radiologists. We recommend
extension of NSWS data from 1981 to 2001 to get a more complete picture of
the health effects of 60Co radiation to the high-dose cohort compared to the
controls.

[Marlin]

This study of shipyard workers shows the opposite:

http://www.ecolo.org/documents/documents_in_english/low-dose-NSWS-shipyard.pdf

Opposite of what?

[ballscratcher]

This study of shipyard workers shows the opposite:

http://www.ecolo.org/documents/documents_in_english/low-dose-NSWS-shipyard.pdf

Looks like a valid study, RTRT and I don't quite know what to say.  I'd like to enter into a discussion / debate about the study but only with the understanding that such discussion would be a friendly comparison of ideas on the subject.

As I see it, this subject needs to be discussed and this is the perfect place for such debate.

When I was a child, I thought that trees caused the wind.  It was a reasonable conclusion: when the trees moved, there was wind.  Okay; I was wrong and I've been wrong thousands of times since then.  I'm not certain of the ratio but I think it's around seven to one that I'm wrong more often than I'm right.  Still, I'm sometimes right and I think that this subject is one of those rare occasions; of course, I was pretty sure about the trees.......

I welcome point - counterpoint debate that engages the intellect and leaves the ego in the back yard.  Interested?

Bill

[ballscratcher]

I clearly haven't mastered the the "quote" feature of the forum..........

Bill

[Marlin]

I clearly haven't mastered the the "quote" feature of the forum..........

Bill

Everything between the Quote switches will be in the dialogue box, type responses after or before the switches.

[B.PRESGROVE]

I have a question about this, do the studies take into consideration those working in the medical field?  Been working at a nuclear pharmacy for over a year now and am amazed at the lack of consideration for radiation exposure.  One of my pet peeves (being an ex-inspector) we get what we call generators, used to make radio pharm drugs, they very from 30 to 70 mrem/hr contact and about 20 to 50 mrem/hr @ 1m.  They will let this generator sit in the middle of a room by the enterance door for a while before placing into a sheilded box where we store up to 8 at one time. 

No one, let me say it again, NO ONE cares that this generator is sitting there.  I make a big deal about it when I come in, and the general attitude is Im scared and this stuff wont hurt you.  So just curious what that study says about the med field.

[JsonD13]

I have a question about this, do the studies take into consideration those working in the medical field?  Been working at a nuclear pharmacy for over a year now and am amazed at the lack of consideration for radiation exposure.  One of my pet peeves (being an ex-inspector) we get what we call generators, used to make radio pharm drugs, they very from 30 to 70 mrem/hr contact and about 20 to 50 mrem/hr @ 1m.  They will let this generator sit in the middle of a room by the enterance door for a while before placing into a sheilded box where we store up to 8 at one time. 

No one, let me say it again, NO ONE cares that this generator is sitting there.  I make a big deal about it when I come in, and the general attitude is Im scared and this stuff wont hurt you.  So just curious what that study says about the med field.

The lack of consideration could extend into a bunch of possibilities, but I will touch on two.  One could be that your training program is not up to par on teaching ALARA and risk.  That's an easy fix.  The other could be that your personnel (mainly doctors) do not have enough sensitivity to low doses ("milirem sensitivity").  Commercial plants like the one I work at are graded on their yearly dose and personnel contamination events.  Rankings between all the nation's power plants help determine their insurance rates.  Plants that are high in dose will usually have a higher bill to pay.  The problem with the medical field is that there is not enough supervision and there is not a financial burden by getting higher doses.  Does your hospital have a monetary amount assigned to each milirem?  I bet if you did it could help to explain to upper management how much the docs are burning up in dollars per year.  The old tried and true excuse of them getting a higher dose rate due to the benefit to the patient can be countered by observing a few of them perform their procedures and checking if they are following proper radiation protection procedures.  Just my two cents.

Jason