ANS webinar tackles radiological risks

Perfetti

Hayes

Moderated by Christopher Peretti, associate professor in nuclear engineering at the University of New Mexico, this presentation is an accessible and informative introduction to radiation and is specifically tailored to educate K-12 teachers.

The details: Hayes’s presentation centered chiefly around contextualization, covering the source of radiation, the magnitude of the risk it presents, and the ways we measure that risk.

Through this process of exploring the world of radiation, Hayes also touched on the environmental impact of nuclear power and its role in concert with renewables, nuclear waste storage solutions, and common misunderstandings around major nuclear accidents.

Radiological risk: After covering the current open fuel cycle and the potential for a future closed cycle utilizing reprocessing facilities, Hayes focused on the basics of radiation, starting with a journey across the logarithmic scale of radiation exposure, giving examples at each step.

• 1 millirem (mrem)—the daily background radiation dose the average American is exposed to every day from a multitude of environmental, nuclear, and medical sources.
• 5 mrem—the exposure one would receive from a coast-to-coast roundtrip airline flight and also the EPA’s annual drinking water limit.
• 10 mrem—any EPA-regulated facility’s off-site yearly dose limit for the nearest member of the surrounding community, as well as the minimum yearly radiation dose received from having potassium, a naturally radioactive element and essential mineral, in your body.
• 40 mrem—the maximum internal yearly dose from natural potassium.
• 100 mrem—the maximum yearly dose of radiation any member of the public can receive from the nearest uncontrolled space around a nuclear facility a and also the received dose from a pelvis X-ray.
• 310 mrem—the average annual background radiation exposure for an American from all natural sources, such as cosmic rays, internal potassium, and uranium in the ground (this dose is lower than 365 doses of daily background radiation because that figure includes nonnatural sources).
• 1,000 mrem—the minimum annual dose that would allow the EPA to issue evacuation orders to the affected area, and also the dose from a head, chest, or hip CT scan.
• 5,000 mrem—the maximum radiation worker’s annual legal dose.
• 10,000 mrem—the first dose that potentially causes a 0.5 percent increase in cancer probability.
• 100,000 mrem—a 5 percent increase in cancer probability.
• 500,000 mrem—a lethal dose, causing a 50 percent chance of death within 30 days.
• 1,000,000 mrem—likely death.

Key takeaway: The effects—if any—from receiving a 5,000 mrem annual dose or lower are too small to see. Despite that, most nuclear industry regulations are multiple orders of magnitude below that number. This begs the question: How much time, fear, money, effort, and cognitive dissonance–induced stress is it worth to focus on something that doesn’t have a measurable medical effect?

Go deeper: To watch the full, in-depth discussion, which further explored the scale and management of nuclear waste, the impact of the narrative around radiation, and the future of renewables and nuclear, a recording can be found on ANS’s webinars page.

Other offerings in ANS’s Educator Training series can be found here.

A recent American Nuclear Society webinar laid the basic groundwork in understanding radiation and the risks it presents. Robert Hayes, an associate professor of nuclear engineering at North Carolina State University and joint faculty member at Savannah River National Laboratory, presented “Radiological Risk in Perspective,” the latest online event in ANS’s Educator Training offerings.