Ken Miller fell into his career while working in a health physics lab between
college and grad school. Soon after starting work in the lab, he decided it
was what he wanted to do with his life.
"It offers me all the things I enjoy doing," says Miller. He is now director
of health physics at Penn State University's Hershey Medical Center.
"First of all, I enjoy teaching. And this gives me an opportunity to do
as much teaching as I want. It puts me in a situation where I work with professional
people like research scientists and physicians. And it puts me in a position
where I can do research of my own."
Miller works with a keen sense of what his hospital would be like without
health physicists keeping watch.
"If the materials are not used properly, then the state and federal agencies
that regulate the use of these materials would come in and shut down our programs
and remove our radioactive materials," says Miller. "And that would have a
direct impact on approximately $50 million worth of research a year. And it
would also impact directly on the jobs of probably 2,000 people."
Genevieve Roessler is a retired professor at the University of Florida.
She took her master's there before becoming its head of health physics.
Today, she edits the website of the Health Physics Society (HPS). That's
a nonprofit organization that has spent nearly five decades representing its
members in the profession and responding to the public. Roessler calls HPS
a vehicle of awareness.
"We're not out marketing and promoting the use of radiation, but rather
explaining and assisting, raising awareness," she says.
Roessler says this explaining is needed to fight the public's perception
of radiation as an evil energy source.
"I think a lot of us feel it's unfortunate that we have to live with this
unnecessary fear of radiation," she says.
"We've made our careers out of understanding it and working with it. So
we're always sort of dismayed when we find that people have this irrational
fear of it. I guess we're partly responsible, because I guess we haven't listened
well enough to people's concerns or haven't communicated well enough with
them."
Partly as a result of the public's fear of personal and environmental contamination
from radiation, Roessler says many U.S. nuclear labs are being closed down.
It's a process called decommissioning. And it has kept many health physicists
busy scrubbing the radioactive trail left by industry.
"Nuclear power plants are not being built so much as they once were, and
some of them are closing," she says. "It's a pretty major responsibility,
once one is closed, to decommission and decontaminate a plant."
Paul Mansfeld is an expert in decommissioning old radiation sites. He works
as a radiochemist at a private radiation monitoring lab in Connecticut. The
lab is contracted to measure radioactivity in decommissioned nuclear plants
and other facilities. It makes sure levels are brought down to acceptable
limits.
"The Nuclear Regulatory Commission licenses facilities like nuclear power
stations and pharmaceutical research labs," says Mansfeld.
"If they want to abandon an area that has been designated as radioactive,
they have to either clean it themselves or hire someone like us to go in and
survey it and clean it up. We do that by either applying special cleaning
agents or removing the surface, say, like a contaminated tile floor."
Mansfeld says he blames much of the decommissions on fear-fuelled politics.
"I think the public's perception of radioactivity is somewhat erroneous,
as it hasn't been well promoted," says Mansfeld.
"There are definitely certain dangers, but people seem to have an inflated
sense of these dangers. Radiation damage can be as simple as getting a sunburn.
Your body is naturally radioactive. It's not as serious as it seems, but it's
made more serious in the public's sort of knee-jerk reactions, which are based
on little or no information, or misinformation."
Richard Lessler is an environmental engineer with the U.S. Environmental
Protection Agency (EPA). The EPA sets the acceptable radiation levels health
physicists work to match.
The EPA's health physics mission is to make sure the public doesn't receive
any unsafe dose from either government or private radioactive facilities.
This federal body makes the rules that determine what the public can be safely
exposed to.
"There's no such thing as harmless levels. Everywhere you go, you're exposed
to radiation from the sun and cosmic rays. But we try to keep it down to what
we call a risk of one in a million -- the dose should be such that the chance
of getting cancer is less than one in a million," says Lessler.
"We set the standards and the facilities adjust themselves accordingly
to meet those standards. We're a regulatory force to protect the public, not
so much by directly enforcing the standards but by informing the public through
our websites and mailouts, just making people aware that they're
well protected."