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Scientists Question Safety of New Airport Scanners
An anonymous reader sends this quote from a story at NPR about the accelerated deployment of new scanning machines at airports:
"Fifty-two of these state-of-the-art machines are already scanning passengers at 23 US airports. By the end of 2011, there will be 1,000 machines and two out of every three passengers will be asked to step into one of the new machines for a six-second head-to-toe scan before boarding. About half of these machines will be so-called X-ray back-scatter scanners. They use low-energy X-rays to peer beneath passengers' clothing. That has some scientists worried. ... The San Francisco group thinks both the machine's manufacturer, Rapiscan, and government officials have miscalculated the dose that the X-ray scanners deliver to the skin — where nearly all the radiation is concentrated. The stated dose — about .02 microsieverts, a medical unit of radiation — is averaged over the whole body, members of the UCSF group said in interviews. But they maintain that if the dose is calculated as what gets deposited in the skin, the number would be higher, though how much higher is unclear."
Backscatter x ray is *not* the same as millimeter wave. Millimeter wave is about of the order of magnitude of milli-electron volt and not an ionizing radiation energy. OTOH x ray is at least on the order of magnitude from 100 electron volt and is definitively an ionizing radiation. There is a reason they were measuring the amount of radiation absorbed in millisievert, whereas for millimeter wave scanner there is no concern (around near infrared).
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You are correct. One of the highest radiation dose jobs in the world is pilot, followed by co-pilot and flight attendant. This is drilled into those taking radiation safety courses. Of course, one must be aware of the different affects the specific energy particles/rays have on DNA to give a complete picture of the long term hazards. Interestingly enough, the NPR piece, which had an expert stating that they were not worried about excessive x-ray dosages from equipment malfunction, was immediately followed by one on the accidental excessive x-ray doses from medical scanners. Whoops!
Every time your 5-year-old child steps through, it's just like you made them smoke a cigarette. Would you make your 5-year-old child smoke a cigarette?
Once you start despising the jerks, you become one.
The passengers are checked to ridiculous measures, but if you work at an airport your protocols are entirely different
That's an understatement. I have a friend who used to work at the local airport. I've been on behind the scenes tours with him and the security folks (ranging from TSA, to law enforcement to rent-a-cops) never even batted an eyelash when he took me past the checkpoint. They didn't ask me to go through the metal/explosives detectors or to wear a guest badge of some sort. We just walked right past them and my friend says "He's with me." Granted, this is a small town airport with not a lot of activity (three flights per day) but the ease with which it was possible to get into the secured areas seemed to make a mockery of all the FUD we've been fed about airport security. It occurs to me that if somebody wanted to do bad things he could just buy off the right person(s) at the airport to gain access.
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We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Looks like it's mandatory.
On thing the article points out is that the level of x-ray radiation you receive during your flight (because of the high altitude) is going to be higher than the amount of radiation you're going to get from the scanner. Essentially spending 4 minutes at cruising altitude will expose you to the same level as the machine.
.02 received from the machine is probably negligible, unless it really is significantly concentrated in certain places on the skin.
Also, the average person in the average year receives 3,000 microsieverts of radiation just from the environment (cosmic radiation, etc). So the
Qxe4
In the U.K.
Everywhere else but the U.K., you have a fundamental right to be hand searched. That's why I've decided that instead of going through Heathrow like I usually do, for future trips to Europe, I'll be flying through Charles de Gaulle instead.
For everyone who thinks U.S. air travel policies are absurd, the U.S. allows you to request a manual search. Only the U.K. is so fascist that they will not allow hand searches.
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Umm. Because the people screening the passengers as they got on were in England maybe?
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Have you ever been through one? They're slower than a metal detector. You still have to put your bags through the conventional scanner. Then rather walk through and wait for your bags on the other side, you have a 30 second procedure to get yourself scanned also.
And everyone stands in there wrong, or is used to carrying their wallet (which you can't do into these), and so on and so forth. Based upon standing in line and counting numbers at Albuquerque, NM the millimeter wave system is anywhere from 2x-5x slower than traditional systems largely based upon the ability of the people going through it to understand advanced instruction....
All of this to see if you have a conformal bomb strapped to you. Something that, obviously, a bomb-sniffing dog would be very good at doing......But you can't build a job program around bomb sniffing dogs.