Dr. Conca reports that every day thousands of people drive to the Hanford Site here in eastern Washington State to what is sometimes described as the most radioactive place on Earth. It’s not, but there are 56 million gallons of nuclear waste stored here, along with a lot of other materials left over from weapons production during the Cold War. Fearmongering aside, it baffles many of us in the field that there has never been any spike in cancer or increases in deaths from radiation at Hanford, or at any of our Cold War nuclear sites, compared to the general population (1,2,3,4,5). The same goes for commercial nuclear energy. If radiation is so bad, how have we handled it for so long without killing a whole bunch of people? For that, we have to thank Herbert M. Parker who, in the 1940s, pioneered radiation protection during the Manhattan Engineer District, later called the Manhattan Project, in the new profession called Health Physics. Named to help veil its real purpose, Health Physics is devoted to protecting people and the environment from possible harmful effects of radiation.
Born in England in 1910, Parker began forging the modern protocols of radiation treatment for cancer, both the detailed scientific calculations as well as the clinical procedures, at the age of 22. He recognized the changing effects with age and was an early proponent to better protect child patients. But the greatest legacy of Parker is his development of radiation protection protocols, standards and safety procedures that radiation and nuclear workers around the world still use today. Parker built the Hanford Laboratories in Washington State that later became the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. He even developed the units we use to measure radiation dose.
The discovery of X-rays in the closing years of the 19th century excited the world and revolutionized physics. People were mesmerized by these invisible rays that could penetrate solid matter and leave behind a shadow picture of the internal structure, a characteristic immediately applied to medicine. Since X-rays could not be seen, felt, smelled or otherwise detected with the human senses, the original conclusion was that they were harmless to people and hence a great boon to mankind. They were immediately adapted to medical diagnosis, commercial enterprises and public demonstrations, even to measuring one’s shoe size for routine fitting of footwear. Soon, however, reports of skin burns and other injuries associated with the use of X-rays began to appear, and controversy raged among physicians and scientists whether exposure to X-rays could be harmful. Following Boston dentist William Rollins experimental demonstration in 1902 that large exposures to X-rays could prove fatal to higher life forms, it still took about a decade before it was generally accepted that radiation could be harmful.
Organized protection efforts first appeared in June 1915, when physicist C. C. Leyster introduced a resolution to the British Roentgen Society that called for the development and adoption of stringent X-ray protection measures. Early recommendations were pretty sophisticated and included, among other things, the concept of limited work hours to protect workers against excessive exposure. In addition to X-ray protection, the recommendations included consideration of radium. Despite its high cost and limited availability, radium had achieved legendary status as a panacea for its supposed tonic and curative properties. It took until the early 1920s before the dangers became generally known, mainly because of the tragic deaths of the radium watch dial painters.
After that, the field adopted formal dose limitation guidelines based on the concept of a ‘tolerance dose’, a radiation level to which an individual could be exposed over a given period of time without ill effect. Independent non-governmental scientific committees were formed to standardize radiation controls, including what eventually became the International Commission of Radiological Protection (ICRP) and the National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurements (NCRP).
For more, read the article. The original URL: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2017/12/05/herbert-m-parker-and-the-making-of-the-atomic-bomb/#170c4ad67010
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