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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.
D. Lynn Shaeffer, F. Owen Hoffman
Nuclear Technology | Volume 45 | Number 1 | August 1979 | Pages 99-106
Technical Paper | Radioactive Waste | doi.org/10.13182/NT79-A32288
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
An analysis was made of the uncertainty in the prediction of dose to an individual’s thyroid due to the transport of radioactive molecular iodine, 131I2, from air through the pasture-cow-milk pathway. This analysis was facilitated by the adoption of a model consisting of a multiplication of several factors represented by lognormal distributions of values. Results indicate there is a 64, 50, or 23% chance of the annual dose to an individual’s thyroid not exceeding the mean, median, or most probable doses, respectively. However, these results are tentative as a result of the limited amount of data available for annual average dose assessments. The suggestion is made that consideration be given to adopting a probabilistic approach to determining an acceptable probability of an individual receiving a dose that exceeds a limiting value.