meanoldrep

I work in a similar field as OP and I've seen the series, his assessment is 100% accurate.

While the series is entertaining, it is further misinforming the masses on a subject matter that is already filled with misinformation. I battle it every single day with a plethora of types of doctors, patients, and other medical staff.

The firefighter's hand almost instantly getting radiations burns after picking up a portion of a control rod. Acute effects like that would take hours to appear. I understand this was done for show and to convey the severity and danger of the situation but its inaccurate none the less.

The wife of a firefighter not being allowed near her husband since he's supposedly radioactive. He would only be a danger to her if he had ingested material, was still coated in radioactive dust, or the particular isotope within the dust could be absorbed if its stable form is used by the body.

The same woman whom was pregnant at the time of the event was magically saved from lethal doses of exposure by the fetus since it some how absorbed all of the radiation.

There were more but its been over a year since I've last watched it.

Not disagreeing with you at all on any of these points but there are reasons most hospitals and emergency response teams dont have very robust detectors.

Biggest being is that its too much knowledge required in a specialized field for say a firefighter or hospital security guard to have. The institutions they work for have a whole radiation safety department who advise and support them in emergency situations. Accurate and specialized detectors are often held by Rad. Safety teams for when they need to identify or quantify contamination. For example the Fluke Ray-Safe 452 is a new fantastic new detector that is a combination of solid state and GM. It even handles pulsed radiation well.

Id rather response teams just know when their Personal Radiation Detector vibrates there is an unsafe amount of radiation nearby and they report it back to their superior.

Hell, nuclear medicine techs barely understand how detectors work, all they know is they survey and when it beeps a lot there is contamination. They then tell their superior and they deal with it.

Itd be far to expensive and impractical to train and educate all these individuals in radiation/health physics and engineering on top of their existing expertise.

I really appreciate your efforts in bringing advancement and innovation to this stuborn field and hope you can find financial support to give Ludlum and Fluke a run for their money.

I work in the medical side of radiation safety, we use the same units as well. Most radiopharmacuticals come labeled in both SI and customary units of activity.

Its especially frustrating when communicating and working with medical physicists since they use SI and we both have to convert everything.

There seemingly isnt a good reason for it other than its been the standard for decades in the U.S. on top of the fact most Radiation Safety Officers are ancient and stubborn.