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Going Nuclear: Notes from the officially unofficial book tour
I work in the analytical labs at one of Europe’s oldest and largest nuclear sites: Sellafield, in northwestern England. I spend my days at the fume hood front, pipette in one hand and radiation probe in the other (and dosimeter pinned to my chest, of course). Outside the lab, I have a second job: I moonlight as a writer and public speaker. My new popular science book—Going Nuclear: How the Atom Will Save the World—came out last summer, and it feels like my life has been running at full power ever since.
S. Ring Peterson, Wolfgang Raskob
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 54 | Number 1 | July 2008 | Pages 277-280
Technical Paper | Environment and Safety | doi.org/10.13182/FST08-A1812
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Throughout fifty-three years of operations, an estimated 29,300 TBq of tritium have been released to the atmosphere at the Livermore site of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory; about 75% of this was released accidentally as gaseous tritium in 1965 and 1970. Routine emissions contributed slightly more than 3,700 TBq gaseous tritium and about 2,800 TBq tritiated water vapor to the total. Mean annual doses (with 95% confidence intervals) to the most exposed member of the public were calculated for all years using the same model and the same assumptions. Because time-dependent tritium models require detailed meteorological data that were unavailable for the large releases, ingestion/inhalation dose ratios were derived from experience with UFOTRI. Even with assumptions to assure that doses would not be underestimated, all doses from routine and accidental releases were below the level (3.6 mSv) at which adverse health effects have been documented, and most were below the current regulatory limit of 100 Sv per year from releases to the atmosphere.