WORDS FROM THE WISE
Considering changes in the last 60 years
Alex Rankine chats to Deputy Editor Maureen McQueen . He has worked in the nuclear sector for 40 years in all aspects of radiation and environmental protection . He has recently completed two terms as SRP ’ s Director of Professional Standards and a total of 10 years as an SRP Trustee . Maureen has over 30 years ’ experience in radiation protection and has worked in both the UK and North America .
I had the pleasure to meet up with Alex Rankine for lunch recently to talk about how things have changed since he joined the nuclear industry in 1977 , and specifically how things have changed in radiation protection .
We discussed changes in attitudes towards radiation over the last 60 years . From the 1960s , in the aftermath of war and then through the Cold War , people were more concerned with being killed from radiation in a bomb rather than from other uses of radioactivity . In the mid 1970s the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament ( CND ) was very active and the concern was around the use of nuclear weapons . Radiation was represented by a mushroom cloud . In 1971 , Greenpeace International was formed out of small antiwar group in Canada , protesting against nuclear weapons testing . Over time , public objections about the use of nuclear weapons translated into objections about sea dumping of radioactive waste , then about the use of nuclear power . While some of these concerns had quelled by the early 1980s , they were raised again following the Chornobyl disaster in 1986 , and then again in 2011 with the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant
disaster . During all this , government attitudes waxed and waned about the benefits and dangers of nuclear power .
However , despite all these changes , Alex noted that the impact on radiation protection throughout these times was minimal . The larger changes impacting our profession were due to advances in technology , developments in the understanding of the risks of radiation and the resulting regulatory changes . We discussed the positives and negatives of these .
Computers were rare and the hand-held calculator was only introduced around 1978 . Calculations took longer by hand , and you really had to understand what you were doing from first principles . Alex recalled how a new method had come in to simplify shielding calculations , involving a large book which walked you through various charts to find the answer . When presented with a result produced using this method , Alex calculated the dose rate by hand using “ D = 6CE ” and identified that the book method was wrong . Nowadays we might use software to perform shielding calculations easily and with accuracy to five decimal places , but it is still important to make sure we have verified these with basic tests .
D = 6CE is a ' rule of thumb ' estimate (± 20 %) of the dose rate ( D , in rem / hour ) at 1 foot ( 0.3048m ) distance from a 1 Ci gamma point source . C is the quantity of radioactive material in Curies , and E is the photon energy of the radiation in MeV . It only applies for gamma emitters with photon energies between 0.07 and 4.0 MeV . 1 Ci ( Curie ) = 37 GBq 1 rem ( roentgen equivalent man ) = 10 mSv
We also discussed the changes in documentation . When Alex began his career , he spent 95 % of his time in the plant ; talking to people , operators and HP people , about how to do things and how to make them work . Only 5 % of his time was spent writing documentation . The Health Physicist became an expert in how the plant worked .
18 Radiation Protection Today www . srp-rpt . uk