tuesday rant

I'll be adding items to this as the day goes on, no doubt.

My first rant is the poor use of science in the media. The reason this is on my mind is that I recently caught up on my West Wing episodes. I've been recording it but not watching it for about 3 months and I caught up with the show this last Thursday and Friday. I watched 8 episodes and one of the subplots was a California nuclear reactor almost had a meltdown.

As part of the solution, President Bartlett had 2 engineers enter the plant with protection gear to open stuck valves allowing the coolant water to enter the containment vessel. This would expose them to large amounts of radiation even with their protective gear.

As it turned out, there was one further repair needed and President Bartlett had to decide whether to have the two engineers already in the facility to make that repair or to send new engineers in. He decided to have the engineers already inside make the additional repair--knowing this would put them well past the maximum allowable radiation dosage levels. As a result one engineer died fairly quickly of radiation poisoning and no doubt the other one would follow.

The problem I see here is that I find it difficult to believe that a President, with all his advisers, would make such a foolish mistake. Hollywood scriptwriters, on the other hand, I can see making this mistake.

All animals on the planet, including humans, have the ability to repair damage to ourselves from radiation. It's not an unlimited ability but we can repair some damage. It's a damn good thing since we're bombarded constantly by a number of different types of radiation, mostly natural, every day. For that reason, there are levels of radiation that are quite safe for us to encounter--and levels that become increasingly dangerous up to the point where the level is fatal.

On West Wing it would have been fairly safe to send a number of teams into the facility on a rotating basis so no one team had really high levels of exposure. Probably the scriptwriters were thinking in terms of exposure to lethal biological agents where it's all or nothing--you get the disease or you don't. In a scenario like that, it can be considered optimal to expose very few people and isolate them from the rest of the population afterwards. The repair people would be sacrifices to keep everyone else safe.

Radiation, on the other hand, is gradual damage to the body and limited radiation exposure to many repair people is the way to operate. Nobody dies.