Samantha Watson works in the Radiation Assessments Department of the UK Health Security Agency( UKHSA) and is the magazine’ s Deputy Editor

My poor husband, the places I ' ve made him go to over the years as part of our holidays! Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and the Atomic Testing Museum in Vegas. Thankfully he ' s a good sport, and has some interest in these things. He did draw the line at visiting a cemetery in Copenhagen in search of Danish physicist Neil Bohr ' s grave though; I had to do that one alone. I didn ' t find it, by the way, though I did find Hans Christian Andersen.

Yes, I ' ve dabbled in Atomic Tourism, but some take it much more seriously. People visit the Nevada test site, and accident locations such as Chornobyl or Fukushima, both of which have tours around the exclusion zone. There are museums with artifacts related to atomic research, explosions, accidents, and atomic delivery vehicles such as the Enola Gay. It ' s not just a modern thing either. In the 1940s and 1950s, Las Vegas became one of the earliest places of atomic tourism, hosting viewings of nuclear tests at the Nevada Test Site.

Here are some“ postcards” from my travels.

Now, I need to go and plan my next holiday. I hear Essex is nice; maybe I can visit the Kelvedon Hatch Secret Nuclear Bunker?

This is the closest building to where the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima that remained standing. The nearby museum is interesting, though incredibly sobering. The peace park is lovely though.

I took the SRP flag with me on a recent holiday to Japan. This is me with the flag sat by the hypocentre at Nagasaki. The clock is in the museum there, having stopped as the bomb fell on Aug 9th 1945.

It was worth breaking away from“ The Strip” at Vegas to visit this museum. You can see that I even took the SRP flag there!

While I haven ' t been on a proper“ tourist” visit to Chornobyl, I did visit the exclusion zone as part of a training course in Belarus. This included a trip to the labs and a chance to see the beautiful Przewalski ' s horses.

16 Radiation Protection Today www. srp-rpt. uk