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Alaskan Cyclotron - Not in My Backyard!
j-beda writes "Wired reports that "Albert Swank Jr., a 55-year-old civil engineer in Anchorage, Alaska, is a man with a mission. He wants to install a nuclear particle accelerator in his home." To be used to create medically useful isotopes, and even though some of the neighbours are supportive, opponents "compared potential damage from a cyclotron mishap to the Three Mile Island nuclear reactor accident" though an expert says "Probably the worst thing that could happen with small cyclotrons is that the operator might electrocute themselves." It looks like the Anchorage Assembly plans to hold an public hearing on December 20 to determine whether Swank will be permitted to install the device."
But when neighbors learned of plans to place the 20-ton device inside the house where Swank operates his engineering firm, their response was swift: Not in my backyard.
Find local technology jobs. Local lawmakers rushed to introduce emergency legislation banning the use of cyclotrons in home businesses. State health officials took similar steps, and have suspended Swank's permit to operate cyclotrons on his property.
"Some of the neighbors who are upset about the cyclotron have started calling it SHAFT -- Swank's high-energy accelerator for tomography," attorney Alan Tesche said. "Part of what's got everyone so upset is we're not sure when it's going to arrive on the barge. We know Anchorage is gonna get the SHAFT, but we just don't know when." Tesche is also the local assemblyman who represents the area where Swank and his cyclotron would reside.
Johns Hopkins University agreed to donate the used cyclotron, which is roughly six feet tall by eight feet wide, to Swank's business, Langdon Engineering and Management.
The devices are relatively scarce in Alaska, and are used to produce radioactive substances that can be injected into patients undergoing PET scans.
Short for positron emission tomography, a PET scan is similar to an X-ray. During the imaging procedure, radioactive material administered to the patient can help medical professionals detect cancerous tissue inside the body. The substance typically remains radioactive for only a couple of hours.
For Swank, the backyard cyclotron is a personal quest: He lost his father to cancer years ago, and he says his community needs the medical resource. He also wants to use it to inspire young people to learn about science.
"My father worked with me while I was building my first cyclotron at age 17 in this same home, and he encouraged all of the educational pursuits that resulted in who I am," Swank said.
"Because of that and my desire to not see other cancer patients suffer -- if I can use this technology to prevent one hour of suffering, or stimulate one young person's mind to pursue science, I will devote every resource that I possess to that."
Swank maintains the device is not dangerous for nearby residents.
But assemblyman Tesche says noble intentions don't outweigh potential risks and nuisances. He and others fear a particle accelerator could pose hazards such as radiation leak risks to nearby residences. They also think the large amount of electricity it consumes could drain available power in the neighborhood.
"We in Alaska embrace technology, and we love it -- but we would like to see this in a hospital or industrial area, where it belongs," Tesche said. "We don't need cyclotrons operating out of back alleys, or in someone's garage."
In a letter to the city assembly, the South Addition Community Council compared potential damage from a cyclotron mishap to the Three Mile Island nuclear reactor accident.
"Cyclotrons are not nuclear reactors," explains Roger Dixon of the Fermi National Accelerator laboratory or Fermilab in Illinois, funded by the U.S. Department of Energy. "Probably the worst thing that could happen with small cyclotrons is that the operator might electrocute themselves."
At Fermilab, Dixon oversees the world's highest-energy collider, about four miles in circumference. It smashes matter and antimatter together so scientists can study the nature of energy.
Dixon told Wired News that shielding from concrete walls or lead sheets is typically used to prevent the electrical beams produced by smaller cyclotrons from escaping.
"Our neighbors here at Fermilab like us," said Dixon. "But then, our particle accelerator is not installed in a living room."
Some of Swank's neighbors are not worried. Veronica Martinson, a homemaker who has lived next door to Swank for 36 ye
But you're right: I wouldn't worry too much about the nuclear splitting capabilities either. Adequate lead shielding will protect the neighbors just fine.
John
Now to be fair, the bridge itself cost only $223 million. The $941 million was for the overall pork that Alaska got in that bill. That works out to ~$1500 per Alaskan compared to the $86 per citizen for the country as a whole.
These things are not toys. They make prompt and residual radiation. It's made to transmute elements into radioactive forms. Concern is not unreasonable.
.max
Again: this machine will be used to make radioisotopes. Short half lives or not, the proximal homowners have a legitamite reason to be concerned about a radioisotope factory next to their homes. What about contamination issues?
2: It is reasonable to have some concern about shielding. Anything energetic enough to make radionuclides can also make X-rays by the assload. Given that we're talking nuclear transmutation, a concern about neutron radiation (fairly long ranged and not stopped by standard rad shielding).
ASS-U-Ming the installation will be industry standard, there shouldn't be a problem. If this guy doesn't know what he's doing, he could cause problems. Given that nobody seems to know what his specific shielding and radcon/exposure control plan is... he screwed up by not getting preapproved in advance.
FWIW, i have run a re-tasked SDI helium-3 RFQ PET accelerator, and currently run the Tevatron, have manufactured antiprotons for the last 7 years send the Giant NuMI Neutrino beam from Fermilab to Minnesota, so i have a clue.
Let us rise above our usu. cynical smirking condescencion and allow as how the loi polloi have a legit concern in this instance.
Look folks, the amount of material produced would be very, very small - on the order of micro or pico curies of the DIAGNOSTIC isotope of fluorine - that has a 6 hour half-life!
Iodine 131 is another reagent common in treating thyroid cancers...
Molybdenum has an isotope with a half-life measured in seconds! Used in scintillation scans of soft tumors. Molybdenum has six stable isotopes and almost two dozen radioisotopes, the vast majority of which have half-lives measured in seconds. Mo-99 is used in sorpation generators to create Tc-99 for the medical nuclear isotope industry.
Finally, the cyclotron is not radioactive - it bombards the target element to create an isotope that is radioactive. I'd live next door to one - even in Anchorage (spent last August in that city) with the extrodinary earthquake & tsunamai risk - because the cyclotron could only release the very small amount of material that it was bombarding at the time of a catastrophic failure.
Also, have any of you folks noticed that AK is 5 time zones removed from the East Coast? You simply can't ship these short-lived isotopes.
Many hospitals have cyclotrons for that very reason! Others have manufacturers in the same city. Not the case in AK.
Three Mile Island was nearly catastrophic.
It certainly wasn't good, and it definitely underscored the need for more modern designs in nuclear power plants. However, the plant *did* shut down like it was designed to do. And even if it hadn't, we still wouldn't have had another Chernobyl on our hands. Chernobyl was a poor design that was intentionally compromised for "testing". A very bad situation indeed.
The TMI design was sufficiently different that the materials wouldn't have been able to spread in the way that Chernobyl did. (And Chernobyl has been somewhat overstated, mind you.)
And radiation did leave the plant during the accident.
It's not the radiation you need to worry about. Radiation falls off according to the inverse square law. Unless you were standing next to the plant itself, you weren't in much danger. The *real* problem is the radioisotopes. If they escape the plant (which is what happened in Chernobyl's rather spectacular boiler explosion) they will make their way into the food and water supplies, and - by extension - into our bodies. Those radioisotopes would then proceed to give you cancer from the inside out.
I was a young child then, and I still remember the terror of living within the evacuation area. Nobody knew when they would need to jump in the car and leave their homes behind.
Which is the sad part about the lack of public education on everything nuclear. The plant was not a "bomb" waiting to destroy your neighborhood. Had TMI gone through a spectacular failure, you would have been able to evacuate without too much difficulty. The local resources would have been contaminated, but otherwise you would have been reasonably safe.
Keep in mind that the dozen or so people who died in Chernobyl were people at the plant. All other deaths (which have been greatly exaggerated by the media, mind you) were from radioisotope contamination. Thankfully, most everyone who experienced Thyriod problems were treated. (An impressive feat given the status of the Soviet government at that point.)
Don't get wrong. Nuclear technology can be a scary thing, and people DID die in Chernobyl. Had something worse happened, people might have died from TMI as well. But the amount of FUD surrounding these two incidents has caused massive (perhaps irreparable) damage to the development of safer technologies for controling nuclear power. Technologies, mind you, that could be useful in the next generation of power production. Even Fusion performed without proper safeguards is a very dangerous practice.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
"And radiation did leave the plant during the accident."
t -sheets/3mile-isle.html ,the average dose to people nearby was 1 millirem. That's 1/6th of the dose from a full set of chest x-rays and less than 1% of yearly exposure to background radiation.
OH MY GOD! TRACE AMOUNTS OF RADIATION WERE RELEASED!
SHUT DOWN THE COAL-FIRED PLANTS NOW!
Yes, coal-fired plants do release radioactive materials into the atmosphere. There's one plant in Utah that dumps more radioactive material into the atmosphere in a single day than the TMI accident. (This is due to trace amounts of uranium in the coal burned by the plant.) Oh, let's not forget that in addition to being radioactive, the uranium that the aforementioned coal plant releases is chemically toxic too, as opposed to the krypton released by TMI which is chemically inert and hence there is no way for it to bind itself to anything in the body. Let's not forget all the other chemical nastiness in the emissions from coal plants.
According to http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fac
In short, coal-fired plants do more damage to the environment each day than the worst nuclear accident in U.S. history.
Chernobyl does not count here, because it could not have happened in a U.S. power reactor, here are a few reasons why:
U.S. power reactors are fully water-moderated. If the water boils off, the core will likely melt, but the reaction will begin slowing down because the water is needed for the reaction to continue. Chernobyl, on the other hand, was graphite moderated and hence the reaction could continue even when water boiled off.
U.S. power reactors don't contain large amounts of superheated flammable substances in their core. The initial incident at Chernobyl was a steam explosion that wouldn't have been bad if not for the fact that it exposed the superheated radioactive graphite in the core to air, which immediately began burning violently, dispersing the core's contents into the atmosphere.
Operators of U.S. power reactors don't disable all of their reactor's safety systems in order to run dangerous experiments. (Chernobyl's reactor should have scrammed itself long before the accident occurred, but the operators intentially disabled all of the reactor's safety systems.)
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Fortunately even high-energy X-rays (which is what you would be dealing with in terms of photons) don't get very far in air so the guys neighbors will be safe. That's why the dentist jams the x-ray machine in your jaw. I worked for several years around synchrotrons and the major risk is electrocution, NOT radiation.