Radiation Safety
Newsletter
Spring 2015
Ohio University Department of Risk Management & Safety
LEGEND:
REQUIRED
READING
Radiation Safety Office
SUGGESTED
READING
The Fukushima Disaster Wasn’t
Disastrous Because Of The Radiation
The Tohoku earthquake and tsunami that struck Japan in March of 2011 was a
disaster of epic proportions – over 20,000 people died, over 300,000 left
homeless, a blow to the country’s economic and infrastructure unlike anything in
the last 40 years.
A week later, the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, crippled by the tsunami,
released a cloud of radiation that impacted neighboring prefectures and triggered
a mass evacuation. The plant is still leaking.
Alan Watts
Laboratory & Radiation
Safety Officer
But the real health and environmental impacts from the Fukushima reactors are
nothing compared to the tsunami. Contrary to all the hype and fear, Fukushima
is basically a large Superfund site. No one will die from Fukushima radiation,
there will be no increased cancer rates, the food supply is not contaminated, the
ocean nearby is not contaminated, most of the people can move back into their
homes, and most of the other nuclear plants in Japan can start up just fine.
In fact, some Superfund sites in the United States have caused more health effects and environmental damage
than the crippled Japanese reactors ever will.
But no Superfund site will ever have as much money spent on it as will Fukushima.
Years after those nuclear reactors withstood one of the largest
earthquakes in history, only to fall to the largest tsunami in
history, the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of
Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR) made a very strong and
important statement concerning radiation effects from the
Fukushima disaster:
“It is unlikely to be able to attribute any health effects in the future
among the general public and the vast majority of workers from
exposure to radiation following the leaks and explosions at the
earthquake-damaged power plant in March of 2011.”
But there was still a flurry of debate several days ago on the 4th
anniversary of the accident, with many outrageous claims on all
sides. However, as the Breakthrough Institute points out, the most
important thing to take away from the last four years is what did
not happen – and never will.
1
To read complete article, click here!
Editor: Jennifer Beckman
www.ohio.edu/riskandsafety/radiationsafety
Radiation Safety Training from the CDC
Segment 1: Sources of Radiation
5. True or False: Ionizing radiation is less energetic
than non-ionizing radiation.
a. True.
b. False.
6. True or False: A radioactive atom is an atom with
an unstable nucleus that emits radiation to
achieve greater stability.
Check Your Knowledge:
a. True.
b. False.
Segment 2: Radioactive Decay
1. Radiation is:
a. Energy that originates from a source and
travels through space at the speed of light.
b. Energy that has an electric field and a
magnetic field associated with it.
c. Energy that has wave-like properties.
d. All of the above.
2. True or False: Visible light is a form of ionizing
radiation.
Check Your Knowledge:
a. True.
1. Match the term to its definition:
b. False.
3. Radioactive isotopes, also known as
radionuclides, are:
a. Atoms of the same element that have a
different number of protons.
b. Atoms of the same element that have a
different number of neutrons.
c. Atoms of the same element that have a
different number of electrons.
d. None of the above.
4. Which of the following is an example of
non-ionizing radiation?
2
a. X-rays.
b. Microwaves.
c. Gamma rays.
d. All of the above.
___ Radioactive
material
___ Radiation
___ Radioactive
isotopes
(or radionuclides)
___ Radioactivity
___ Radioactive decay
a. The spontaneous
release of energy from
an unstable atom.
b. A solid, liquid, or gas
that gives off
radiation.
c. The energy that
comes out of a
radioactive atom
d. The change from an
unstable atom to a
more stable atom by
the emission of
radiation.
e. Radioactive atoms of
the same element that
have different
numbers of neutrons.
www.ohio.edu/riskandsafety/radiationsafety
New Clock May End Time As We Know It
“My own personal opinion is that time is a human construct,” says Tom O’Brian. O’Brian has thought a lot about
this over the years. He is America’s official timekeeper at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in
Boulder, Colorado.
To him, days, hours, minutes and seconds are a way
for humanity to “put some order in this very
fascinating and complex universe around us.”
We bring that order using clocks, and O’Brian
oversees America’s master clock. It’s one of the most
accurate clocks on the planet: an atomic clock that
uses oscillations in the element cesium to count out
0.0000000000000001 second at a time.
If the clock had been started 300 million years ago,
before the age of dinosaurs began, it would still be
keeping time — down to the second. But the crazy
thing is, despite knowing the time better than almost
anyone on Earth, O’Brian can’t explain time.
“We can measure time much better than the weight
of something or an electrical current,” he says, “but
what time really is, is a question that I can’t answer
for you.”
Maybe its because we don’t understand time, that we
keep trying to measure it more accurately. But that
desire to pin down the elusive ticking of the clock
may soon be the undoing of time as we know it: The
next generation of clocks will not tell time in a way
that most people understand.
The New Clock
At the nearby University of Colorado Boulder is a
clock even more precise than the one O’Brian
watches over. The basement lab that holds it is pure
chaos: Wires hang from the ceilings and sprawl
across lab tables. Binder clips keep the lines
bunched together.
In fact, this knot of wires and lasers actually is the
clock. It’s spread out on a giant table, parts of it
wrapped in what appears to be tinfoil. Tinfoil?
“That’s research grade tinfoil,” says Travis
Nicholson, a graduate student here at the JILA, a
joint institute between NIST and CU-Boulder.
Nicholson and his fellow graduate students run the
clock day to day.
Most of their time is spent fixing misbehaving lasers
and dealing with the rats’ nest of wires. (“I think half
of them go nowhere,” says graduate student Sara
Campbell.)
At the heart of this new clock is the element
strontium. Inside a small chamber, the strontium
atoms are suspended in a lattice of crisscrossing
laser beams. Researchers then give them a little
ping, like ringing a bell.
The strontium vibrates at an incredibly fast
frequency. It’s a natural atomic metronome ticking
out teeny, teeny fractions of a second.
This new clock can keep perfect time for 5 billion
years.
3
“It’s about the whole, entire age of the earth,” says
Jun Ye, the scientist here at JILA who built this
(Continued on pg. 4)
www.ohio.edu/riskandsafety/radiationsafety
Lethal lake in Russia could kill you
The reports say for years Chelyabinsk dumped about
120 million curies of radioactive waste to give you an
idea of how much that is -- it’s two and a half times
the amount of radiation released in
Chernobyl.
Add on top of that the Kyshtym nuclear disaster
in 1957 said to be on of the world’s worst ever, a
drought and strong winds blowing radioactive waste
around.
It’s being called the most polluted spot on the
planet. While Russia’s Lake Karachay might look
pretty in a painting that’s as close as you ever
want to get to it.
The NRDC said that sitting on the lake’s shores for
just an hour would be long enough to kill you! ■
In 1990, the US organization “Natural
Resources Defense Council” got their hands on
a formerly secret soviet publication that
revealed quote “astronomically” high
radioactive pollution.
The lake sits in western Russia near the
border of Kazakhstan. Nearby is Mayak,
formerly known as Chelyabinsk one of the
country’s largest nuclear production sites.
To see complete article, click here!
(Continued from pg. 3)
clock. “Our aim is that we’ll have a clock that, during
the entire age of the universe, would not have lost a
second.”
But this new clock has run into a big problem: This
thing we call time doesn’t tick at the same rate
everywhere in the universe. Or even on our planet.
Time Undone
Right now, on the top of Mount Everest, time is
passing just a little bit faster than it is in Death
Valley. That’s because speed at which time passes
depends on the strength of gravity. Einstein himself
discovered this dependence as part of his theory of
relativity, and it is a very real effect.
The relative nature of time isn’t just something seen
in the extreme.
4
If you take a clock off the floor, and hang it on the
wall, Ye says, “the time will speed up by about one
part in 1016.”
That is a sliver of a second. But this isn’t some effect
of gravity on the clock’s machinery. Time itself is
flowing more quickly on the wall than on the floor.
These differences didn’t really matter until now.
But this new clock is so sensitive, little changes in
height throw it way off. Lift it just a couple of
centimeters, Ye says, “and you will start to see that
difference.”
This new clock can sense the pace of time speeding
up as it moves inch by inch away from the earth’s
core. ■
Check out the full read here!
www.ohio.edu/riskandsafety/radiationsafety
(Continued from pg. 2)
Check Your Knowledge (Con’t):
2. True or False: The amount of radioactivity
and radiation levels do not necessarily
correspond to the size, weight, and volume
of the source of radiation.
2. Which of the following describes a radionuclide’s
half-life?
a. A radiation dose of about 0.62 rem (620
millirem) each year.
b. The length of time it takes for one half of
the radioactive atoms in a population of
radionuclides to decay.
c. The physical process of 25 radioactive atoms becoming 100 radioactive atoms.
a. Alpha particles, beta particles, and
gamma rays.
b. Nuclear radiation, atomic radiation, and
electromagnetic radiation.
c. Gamma radiation, alpha radiation, and
beta radiation.
Segment 3: Measuring Radiation
a. True.
b. False.
3. The international unit used to measure the
amount of radioactivity is the:
3. Three types of radiation given off by radioactive
atoms are:
a. Becquerel (Bq).
b. microCurie (uCi).
c. Hertz (Hz).
4. True or False: Ambient radiation levels are
measured and reported in units of time and help to
measure how much radiation is in the environment
around us.
a. True.
b. False.
Answers: Segment 1: 1. d, 2. b, 3. b, 4. b, 5. b, 6. a.
Segment 2: 1. b,c,e,a,d, 2. b, 3. a.
Segment 3: 1. d, 2. a, 3. a, 4. a. ■
R adiation Safety
Emergency Contacts
Name Office OUPD
593-1911 Alan Watts* Check Your Knowledge:
1. Common types of radiation measurements
include:
a. Amount of radioactivity.
b. Ambient radiation levels.
c. Radiation dose.
d. All of the above.
5
Cell 593-4176 740-517-5075
Crystal Brooks* 597-2950 330-903-0506
David Schleter* 593-1662 740-591-0557
David Ingram** 593-1705 Joe Adams*** 593-1667 740-707-5362 740-591-9600
* RMS Staff
** Chair Radiation Safety Committee
***Associate Vice President, Risk Management & Safety www.ohio.edu/riskandsafety/radiationsafety