Skip to main content

Honoring Radiation Protection Professionals

By

hps_Page_1 Next week is National Radiation Protection Professionals Week. Why them? Let's let Senator James Inhofe (R-Okla.) tell you (warning: pdf):

Members of the radiation protection profession make it their life’s work to allow government, medicine, academia, and industry to safely use radiation. By providing the necessary leadership, these professionals protect people from radiation hazards thus enabling society to reap benefits of this remarkable technology.

And so it is: we of course think of radiation as a factor in the nuclear business but radiation is everywhere:

Small amounts of radioactive materials can be found in our bodies, in products we use daily, in the ground, in building materials, and in outer space. They are a natural part of our everyday life. We commonly find radiation devices such as x-ray machines in a hospital or at the airport. We use radiation mainly for its beneficial purposes such as in medicine to diagnose disease, in industry to generate electricity, and in smoke detectors to make our homes safer.

That comes from Radiation Answers, a Web site that's a gold mine of information. It dispels myths, shows how radiation is used in every aspect of our lives, and yes, shows when and how radiation can be dangerous. If there weren't some danger, we wouldn't need radiation protection professionals, would we?

Here, via the Health Physics Society (another pdf - they must have a deal with Adobe), are some suggestions on what you can do during their special week:

• Post National Radiation Protection Professionals Week posters around your office and distribute informational pamphlets (such as What is a Radiation Protection Professional?) to staff, management, clients and local schools.
• Hold a staff appreciation lunch and distribute items of appreciation.
• Create a forum where people can discuss radiation protection professional recent advances in technology.
• Invite clients, citizens, management and or public servants to tour facilities showing beneficial uses of radiation when possible.

We'd add a treasure hunt so you can do something with those geiger counters you brought to the party. The Health Physics Society sponsored the resolution with the Conference of Radiation Control Program Directors (and boy, does their Web site need a second look! - great information, though). It looks like Congress recessed before passing Inhofe's resolution recognizing the week, but let's just pretend it did and party anyway.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How Nanomaterials Can Make Nuclear Reactors Safer and More Efficient

By
The following is a guest post from Matt Wald, senior communications advisor at NEI. Follow Matt on Twitter at @MattLWald.

From the batteries in our cell phones to the clothes on our backs, "nanomaterials" that are designed molecule by molecule are working their way into our economy and our lives. Now there’s some promising work on new materials for nuclear reactors.

Reactors are a tough environment. The sub atomic particles that sustain the chain reaction, neutrons, are great for splitting additional uranium atoms, but not all of them hit a uranium atom; some of them end up in various metal components of the reactor. The metal is usually a crystalline structure, meaning it is as orderly as a ladder or a sheet of graph paper, but the neutrons rearrange the atoms, leaving some infinitesimal voids in the structure and some areas of extra density. The components literally grow, getting longer and thicker. The phenomenon is well understood and designers compensate for it with a …
1 comment
Read more

Why America Needs the MOX Facility

By
If Isaiah had been a nuclear engineer, he’d have loved this project. And the Trump Administration should too, despite the proposal to eliminate it in the FY 2018 budget.

The project is a massive factory near Aiken, S.C., that will take plutonium from the government’s arsenal and turn it into fuel for civilian power reactors. The plutonium, made by the United States during the Cold War in a competition with the Soviet Union, is now surplus, and the United States and the Russian Federation jointly agreed to reduce their stocks, to reduce the chance of its use in weapons. Over two thousand construction workers, technicians and engineers are at work to enable the transformation.

Carrying Isaiah’s “swords into plowshares” vision into the nuclear field did not originate with plutonium. In 1993, the United States and Russia began a 20-year program to take weapons-grade uranium out of the Russian inventory, dilute it to levels appropriate for civilian power plants, and then use it to produce…
Post a Comment
Read more

Nuclear Is a Long-Term Investment for Ohio that Will Pay Big

By
With 50 different state legislative calendars, more than half of them adjourn by June, and those still in session throughout the year usually take a recess in the summer. So springtime is prime time for state legislative activity. In the next few weeks, legislatures are hosting hearings and calling for votes on bills that have been battered back and forth in the capital halls.

On Tuesday, The Ohio Public Utilities Committee hosted its third round of hearings on the Zero Emissions Nuclear Resources Program, House Bill 178, and NEI’s Maria Korsnick testified before a jam-packed room of legislators.


Washingtonians parachuting into state debates can be a tricky platform, but in this case, Maria’s remarks provided national perspective that put the Ohio conundrum into context. At the heart of this debate is the impact nuclear plants have on local jobs and the local economy, and that nuclear assets should be viewed as “long-term investments” for the state. Of course, clean air and electrons …
Post a Comment
Read more