Tag: water and soil contamination

What to Do if Radiation from Japan Arrives in the United States

On By southwerkIn business ethics

I located this publication. It appears to be from the Department of Homeland Security. It has a rather impressive name. However, it includes a lot of information about radiation that can be released from reactors. It details precautions that people can take and probable effects of the radiation.

NUCLEAR GENERATING STATION PLUME AND POST-PLUME EXERCISES AND INCIDENTS
LIBRARY OF PRESS RELEASES

Here’s an excerpt –

There are two important concepts that help in understanding radiation: exposure and contamination. Both can occur when radioactive materials are released in a power plant emergency.
Exposure: Radioactive materials give off a form of energy that travels in waves or particles. This energy is similar to an x-ray, and can penetrate the body. This exposure ends when the radioactive material is no longer present, for example, after the noble gases disperse. Some of the radioactive material deposited on the ground may also contribute to external exposure. You may hear this referred to as “groundshine.”
Contamination: Contamination occurs when radioactive materials (dusts) are deposited on or in an object or person. External contamination occurs when radioactive material or dust comes into contact with a person’s skin hair or clothing.
People who are externally contaminated can become internally contaminated if radioactive materials get into their bodies. This could happen if people swallow or breathe in radioactive materials. Some types of radioactive materials stay in the body and are deposited in different body organs. Other types are eliminated from the body in blood, sweat, urine, and feces.
Limiting skin contamination: Both external and internal contamination can cause exposure to radioactive materials. Removing contaminated clothing and washing off the radioactive materials will minimize exposure from external contamination.
If you think you have been contaminated, you should:
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Remove the outer layer of your clothing.
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Place the clothing in a plastic bag.
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Wash all of the exposed parts of your body, as you would normally, with soap and warm water. There is no need to scrub.
Do not eat, drink or smoke until you have removed contamination as described above.

This material was written for a small release of radiation, a plume, from an American nuclear power plant. It may not be totally relevant to radiation arriving from a meltdown. However, based on my reading in the area, I believe the information to be useful. Certainly, if you read the full report, you can decide for yourself if it is on point. I think it is.

James Pilant

Bismuth Nanoparticles

On By southwerkIn business ethics

I have been telling my students that way back in the 1960’s, there were television series and magazine articles that tried to predict the future. Their aim was not very good. What has come to be was not predictable, what was predicted has not come to be. Reading the future whether by ancient Mayan calendars or scientific speculation is not a matter of certainty. One unpredictable development is that of nanoparticles. Nanoparticles offer often bizarre science fiction like capabilities to many fields in particular medicine.

This is from Science Daily –

Now, researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis report that they have designed nanoparticles that find clots and make them visible to a new kind of X-ray technology.

According to Gregory Lanza, MD, PhD, a Washington University cardiologist at Barnes-Jewish Hospital, these nanoparticles will take the guesswork out of deciding whether a person coming to the hospital with chest pain is actually having a heart attack.

“Every year, millions of people come to the emergency room with chest pain. For some of them, we know it’s not their heart. But for most, we’re not sure,” says Lanza, a professor of medicine. When there is any doubt, the patient must be admitted to the hospital and undergo tests to rule out or confirm a heart attack.

“Those tests cost money and they take time,” Lanza says.

Rather than an overnight stay to make sure the patient is stable, this new technology could reveal the location of a blood clot in a matter of hours.

This is a positive development. But there should be caution in these developments as well.

From ANSES, French Agency for Food, Environment and Occupational Health and Safety:

At present, there is no routine method for measuring nanoparticles in a soil or water sample. Accordingly, few data are available on the presence of nanoparticles in these two matrices, and knowledge on the fate of nanoparticles in the environment is therefore limited. For the same reasons, it is also difficult to study the effectiveness of current drinking and waste water treatments to eliminate nanoparticles, and it is subsequently hard to estimate population exposure to such particles through water.

One of the prerequisites to the improvement of knowledge needed to assess the risks of nanoparticle presence in water is therefore the development of data acquisition tools.

More bluntly, if nanoparticles get in the water or soil, we can’t detect them and we don’t have any idea what to do if we do detect them.

That’s a substantial downside.

The French Agency recommends tough regulation –

Given this context, the Agency stresses the need to set up a system for listing and controlling the marketing of all products containing nanoparticles.

There is always going to be the question whether or not we are rushing into a technology that has the potential for enormous destruction.

I can point out based on my experience in the field of business ethics, that when confronted by the opportunity to make billions of dollars, safety concerns shrink in importance.

There is a great deal of opposition based on ideological grounds. But is it wish to allow private companies with financial stakes in positive outcomes to determine acceptable risks? There are not only many accounts of businesses that developed products without proper testing. There are accounts of businesses that when informed of serious problems closed their eyes to the danger. And lastly, there are literally thousands of cases where dangerous substances were casually dumped in the water, soil or air.

I believe regulation is necessary.

James Pilant