Radiation can be found all around us in everyday materials from avocados and bananas to smoke detectors and potassium. When hearing about radiation there can be an assumption that any amount is bad, but many things around us, including the human body, emit some amount of radiation.
Rob Hayes, an associate professor of nuclear engineering, oversaw a student’s research on the background radiation in everyday objects.
The student is currently the executive officer of B Company in Fort Bragg of the 249th Engineer Battalion as well as an Army Ranger and a graduate of the U.S. Military Academy. He has served in Afghanistan and is now at Fort Bragg, where he completed an online Master of Nuclear Engineering degree at NC State, according to Hayes.
An understanding of the common radiation around us, whether it is man-made or from nature, can give people the perspective needed to interpret any news or information about radiation without immediate panic.
“There’s a lot of hysteria when somebody says we measured radioactivity from Fukushima, and people think that’s a bad thing where the truth is that it’s a very small fraction of the amount of radioactive fallout that came from atmospheric weapons testing in the last century,” Hayes said. “That’s been around a lot longer, and it’s a lot more, but even that’s a small fraction — a background. What he (the student) wanted to do was to kind of scale it, to put it into perspective.”
Humans in general are not only able to withstand a certain pressure range, vibration range, heat range, impurity range in foods, water and air, but also radiation amounts. The student wanted to study sources of radiation in an urban environment, so he measured the radiation emitted from different things around his home that Hayes knew would have an elevated amount of radiation.
“Being elevated, just like any other kind of thing, you can have dirt that’s got more iron or this amount more silica or got any other thing,” Hayes said. “They’re characteristic of the type of material, so I said these ones are likely to have an elevation due to either potassium content or uranium and thorium and radium.”
They were able to quantify all the measurements, which represented a common North Carolina home that included the radon in the environment and the naturals in the dirt and the food we eat, according to Hayes. The idea was to give a scale for radiation and to show people what’s normal.
“Radiation has not been a concern for me, because I understand that most everyday items have some levels of radiation such as certain foods,” said Jamie Lukhard, a junior studying mechanical engineering.
The element potassium is essential to all life and also has a naturally occurring isotope that is mildly radioactive. This is why bananas were one of the fruits looked at during the research — because they are high in potassium.
“There’s this thing called the sodium-potassium pump and it’s required to get water in and out of cells, and all living things on earth have to have that,” Hayes said. “In the same sense that you have to have sodium, you have to have potassium or you will die. It’s just a question of how much. Some things have more and some things have less and so that’s all that was — looking at things that had more potassium than others.”
Learning more about what’s normal in terms of radiation could reduce fear of it and give people a point of reference for comparing normal amounts to any other amount they hear of in the future. If a person wants more knowledge about a particular thing, one of the common ways of going about learning that information would be to talk to someone who is an expert in that field, but this is not always the case.
“If you were going to try to figure out how to wire your house, as a general rule most people are going to say ‘No I’m not going to do that, I need someone that’s an expert to do that cause I’m not going to chance that. I don’t want my house to burn down. I don’t want to get electrocuted,’” Hayes said. “If you’re going to have somebody design your house, you want to make sure the roof would hold, or if they’re going to design a bridge or if they’re going to design a car or something like that or even a chemical or the makeup you put on your face.”
This tendency to talk to the experts doesn’t seem to happen as much for nuclear engineering, according to Hayes. As something that is almost part of our nature, we like to hear what we already think from other people, but this can affect growth of perspective and knowledge.
“Detecting radiation generally today means it’s an issue of being able to look at smaller and smaller amounts and being able to discriminate that from something else, because that gives you information,” Hayes said. “It can be like forensic information or something like that but it doesn’t mean it’s hazardous because its forensic information, it just means you have knowledge that you wouldn’t have otherwise had without those tools.”
