Very interesting. I remember hearing a story from someone that worked on a nuclear reactor on an aircraft carrier. They did the same radiation checks on the carrier, and it turned out that people out in the sun received more radiation than the people working inside on the reactor.
I think navy nuclear culture has changed quite a bit for the better since then. All of the officers and petty officers I have talked to are at least as conscious of rad safety as the civilian techs.<p>On the radiology and nuclear medicine side, air force and navy techs seem a lot more rad safety conscious than the army people I have met.
Knew a professor long ago who had worked for the AEC out on Long Island when a student. Some of the scientists would tune a cyclotron by putting an eye behind the target and waiting for the retina to light up, she said. She also said that a number had developed cataracts at an early age.
I worked at a nuclear plant during a college internship and can vouch for the strange attitude toward radiation exposure. There were guys who would work outages every year, receive their annual rad dose in a few months, and make enough money to take the rest of the year off. Then back next year to do it again. The max dose of 5 rem is about 20x the cosmic background - so 20 yrs of radiation in a year! I chose a different career soon after figuring that out.
<i>you try fixing a sodium-iodide scintillation detector without a manual</i><p>More like, you try finding a sodium-iodide scintillation detector that HAS a manual!<p>Another great story, thanks for posting.
The '5 Rem per year' allowance was set on faulty logic. It is all based on the linear no-threshold theory which took the acute radiation exposures from the Nagasaki and Hiroshima detonations and linearly projected them down to such small amounts as 5 rem. This is in essence saying that if 100% of people would die from jumping of a 100 ft building then 1% of people would die from jumping off a 1 ft ledge.<p>Professor Emeritus Bernard L. Cohen of Pittsburgh University has a lot to say on the matter: <a href="http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc/" rel="nofollow">http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc/</a>