Radiation in airports

Los Angeles Times:

As people around the world keep an eye on the radiation escaping from the Fukushima Nuclear Plant in Japan, two experts offer differing views on the danger posed by the radiation that American fliers are exposed to when they walk through whole-body scanners in U.S. airports.

In the April issue of the journal Radiology, David A. Schauer, executive director of the National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurements, suggests that the risk to individuals may be worth the benefit for society.

Also in that issue, David J. Brenner, director of the Center for Radiological Research at Columbia University Medical Center in New York, says that, while individual risk may be close to zero, population risk is significant -- and thus the TSA should opt for scanners that don't use X-rays.

Brenner calculates that, because the TSA could perform about a billion scans a year, even if the two scans needed for round-trip travel pose only a one-in-a-million chance of developing cancer for an individual, some people would still get sick from the scans.

The risk of getting cancer from airport scanners is minute. Still, it may be more real for most Americans than any threat from crippled Japanese nuclear plants.