146
THE SHORTER-TERM BIOLOGICAL HAZARDS OF A FALLOUY FIELD
protect against the radiation. Mavbe it would
not bea gas mask. This illustrates our difficulty
ation it was common practice for the fellows
to sleep topside with lite or no clothing on,
of working with yourface covered.
and if they relied completely on the reading of
of this thing, There are lots of things you can
do about it. The question in my mind is just
slept there through the nigh€ with 70 1 per
hour, they would have had quite a nice erythema and would have euded up with ulcers
and other difficulties. So IT began then the
argument that under certain situations it is
Mr. Lainpwarm.
1 wonder about the payoff
what the payoff is when you go to the trouble
of putting in something like that that might
wind up giving you something useless in the
long run.
Mr. Greens. Let me mention that if one
does use an ionization chamber at atmospheric
pressure, and it is not putictured, vou can still
use it. [ think we better fight this out some
other way.
“ol Brennan.
This is a very interesting
angle and the whole point of looking at this.
Does anybody have any other comments?
Dr. Morcax (CORNT,). I didn’t want to get
into this argument, but 1 recall away back in
the Bikini days that they threatened to throw
meoverboard unless 1 kept my mouth shutand.
quit complaining about the beta-gammaratio.
Finally they gave me a crew of men and we
went out and made measurements and as I
indicated before on the topside of MFT ships,
we found values as high as several hundred. In
onecase it was as high as 700.
In sucha situ-
the gamma. instruments, say 1 re per hour, and
quite vital that we do measure the betagamma ratio or measure the beta dose even
though it is a difficult job. We do it in the
laboratory under all types of eonditions.
[t
can be done. I knowthat there are some prob-
lems but just because # job is hard to do, I
think is no reason why you should run the risk
of sacrificing the lives of people.
Col. Brennan. J certainly would agree with
that. In general, then, the responsive action
would be to cither protect against it in lerms
of clothing or time or geometry, and be very
sure you have good protection or if you can’t
do that, you are prettvy much conumitted to
measure it. At least measure it often enough
to control the hazard, however difficult that
may be. That is at least the direction one
ought to go.
Topic V
Internal Emitters