Reddit reviews Introduction to Health Physics: Fourth Edition
We found 3 Reddit comments about Introduction to Health Physics: Fourth Edition. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
McGraw-Hill Medical Publishing
I got a leg X-ray once last year and asked the technician how much dose I would get from the ordeal. She took three shots of my knee at 6 millirem per picture; therefore I got about an 18 millirem dose of ionizing radiation in that appointment.
An average person gets around one millirem per day from their environment. A radiation worker in the USA is limited to 5 rem per year, or 5000 millirem.
While the LD50 (Lethal Dose) for an acute exposure (all at once) is 600 rem source, or 10,000 times the dose from an x-ray examination, a technician who spends her days doing nothing but x-rays could accumulate enough dose to exceed her 5 rem /yr dose.
The mechanism by which ionizing radiation damages cells is that it knocks atoms out of your DNA; if it does this faster than your cells can repair themselves, you have problems.
Back-scatter scanners in airports use Terahertz frequency photons(T-rays), about on the threshold between IR and Microwaves, more energetic than your cellular phone, and MUCH less than the photons coming from your computer screen. Do you know what 3G and 4G phones mean? It means that the bandwidth on which they operate is in the Gigahertz range.
TL;DR: nuclear engineer tired of being whipping boy each time some chain smoking flower-child-gone-to-seed gets lung cancer.
This is the health physics text I used in college its decent enough and should be approachable by someone with an engineering background and a basic grasp of radiation. It's mostly concerned with the the math used when dealing with radiation, but it does have some good high level discussion of detection/health effects.
What sort of information are you looking for about the field? Seems like the specific focus you want to search for is "health physics".
What kind of record do they have? You keep saying they have a horrible record but what else have they done wrong? Three mile island? Chernobyl? Because no health effects were detected from Three mile island so that isn't a horrible track record. Chernobyl didn't fail under normal operations but under a badly designed test but if you want to count it then sure. They've had 1 accident before this one.
Now Michio Kaku is not a nuclear anything. I doubt he has ever even taken a radiation safety course. His claim to fame is being a string theorist and showing up on random tv shows. But now that I've watched the video lets take his claims apart. He talks about ingesting plutonium being the worst thing that is actually not true inhaling it is a lot worse. Now if you go through with that and calculate. One kilogram of plutonium in the atmosphere would be enough to kill 2 million people if inhaled which is on the order of nerve gas. Finally plutonium is an alpha emitter which means if you don't get it inside of you it doesn't harm you at all. But the rest of it is just speculation. Sure if they evacuated then you would have a slightly larger problem but to date that is not a serious concern...
Why Japan built a nuclear reactor in a tsunami zone has nothing to do with what the world knows about nuclear power. It is also completely unrelated to how reactors are designed or what their health effects were. Also it was built with a tsunami in mind (7m high one they got a 14m high one).
Ok so if "trust the experts (and I mean real ones not the fake ones that go on TV)" is not good enough for you. Let me recommend you some reading required to get up to speed on radiation damage in humans:
Once you've read those come back and we can discuss it more. In short: You claim to not trust the actual experts because your biases lead you to trust nut jobs more. This in term means that the actual claims have a higher standard of proof to you than the ones that confirm your bias. Seriously click on that XKCD link I gave and look at all the things that give you more radiation...
http://online.itp.ucsb.edu/online/plecture/bmonreal11/ <- Or you can read that...