Today we will be discussing the terminology and effects of radiation. Radiation can be pretty scary, but its effects are pretty well known and we have excellent detection equipment that can detect even the smallest changes. It can be dangerous, but we will try to put it into perspective.

From my childhood, I vividly remember the scene from Indiana Jones where they open the Ark and all the bad guys faces melt off

Until I started working with radiation, this is how I alwaysvisualized it

Today, of all the things I work with, radiation is the thingI fear the least

Can measure in real time

Using 100 year old technology (ifit hasn’t changed in that time, it must work really well)

All I have to do is back up

What is radiation? http://hps.org/publicinformation/ate/faqs/whatisradiation.html

Radiation you might be familiar with, also callednon-ionizing radiation

              Light

              Radiowaves

              Microwaves

Radiation we will be discussing is called ionizing radiationbecause it can produce charge particles when it strike something (me or you)

This radiation produced by unstable atom (uranium,plutonium, radon) or high voltage (x-ray)

These unstable atoms are trying to become stable and do soby emitting particles and/or energy

We are exposed to radiation at low levels everyday https://www.epa.gov/radiation/radiation-sources-and-doses

These doses come from

              Sun andstars (if you live at a higher elevation you receive a higher dose, because youare closer to the source)

              Radioactiveelements in the earth and our bodies (radon produced in areas with largeamounts of uranium, potassium 40 in many foods and Carbon 14 becomes a part ofus used in dating of organic items

Another source is man made radioactive sources associatedwith nuclear power and more commonly medicine

The sum of these exposures we call a dosehttps://www.nrc.gov/images/about-nrc/radiation/factoid2-lrg.gif

Average American receives 310mR per year

A whole body CT scan can give a dose up to 1 rem

Most people’s eyes start to glaze over when they here Rems,curies, sieverts, gray, bq, roentgens, etc

These are just units of measure just like many things we arealready used to inch, cm, grams, oz, mph etc

Just like these units of measure, it gets more complicatedbecause you have traditional units (oz) and metric units (g)

To simplify things I’m going to use only two, the curie andthe Rem https://www.cdc.gov/nceh/radiation/emergencies/measurement.htm

In simple terms, a curie tells you how often a rad source isshooting at you, but not what caliber it is using

              Is it asniper rifle or a bb gun?

The dose tells you how much radiation you have absorbed, onehit from a sniper rifle imparts much more energy than 100 hits from a bb gun

Turns out we can measure radiation down to very very verysmall amounts (micro rems or millionths of a rem) https://www.remm.nlm.gov/radmeasurement.htm

Don’t start observing effects (radiation isn’t reallydangerous until we receive 100s of rems)

When it comes to rad unit matter

One of the scariest images is a Geiger counter needleswinging from one end of the scale to the other

However, this may not actually mean anything at all

Lets use real world example

Lets say something has to be traveling 15 mph to hurt ahuman

We can measure a snail that moves 10 feet an hour (.002 MPH)pretty accurately

Now we measure bee that can move 1000 feet in an hour(.2MPH).  The bee is moving 100 timesfaster than the snail

But it isn’t dangerous because it is well below thethreshold of 15 MPH

Because we can measure very small amounts accurately thereis a large area a measurement that doesn’t mean much to our health

Once we reach a threshold, small increases can have dramaticeffects think car going 15, 30, and 60 MPH

Bottom line, when you are talking radiation,