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Management of Radioactive Waste in Nuclear Medicine
Published in Michael Ljungberg, Handbook of Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging for Physicists, 2022
The radioactive waste generated in medicine can be of high or low activity and with short or long half-life and can be in solid, liquid, or gaseous form (airborne). It can also consist of sealed sources used for radiation therapy or for calibration or quality control of different kinds of medical equipment. In nuclear medicine most of the radioactive waste consists of short-lived radionuclides that could be handled as non-radioactive waste after sufficient time of decay. Waste generated in radionuclide therapies consists of radionuclides with a longer half-life and higher activity and requires special precautions.
Recent Trends in Bio-Medical Waste, Challenges and Opportunities
Published in K. Gayathri Devi, Kishore Balasubramanian, Le Anh Ngoc, Machine Learning and Deep Learning Techniques for Medical Science, 2022
In hospitals, there are two kinds of waste: risk waste and non-risk waste. Risk waste includes infectious waste, pathological waste, pharmaceutical waste, sharps waste, chemicals, genotoxic waste, and radioactive waste. Food leftovers and packaging generate non-hazardous waste, which includes garbage and ordinary trash. In developed countries, hospital waste disposal infrastructure is well-organised. A well-trained staff handles various waste disposal operational activities such as segregation, internal transportation, and final disposal. All human action generates waste. We are all aware that such waste may be dangerous and must be disposed of properly. The risks of poor biomedical waste management have aroused worldwide concern, especially given their far-reaching effects on human health and the environment. Health care workers, the general public, and surrounding flora and fauna are all in danger from hospital waste. Problems with waste disposal in hospitals and other health care facilities have been a major topic of concern. As a consequence of environmental pollution caused by pathological waste produced by increasing populations and the consequent rapid growth in the number of health care centres, the majority of nations across the world, especially developing countries, are facing a grave situation.
Miscellaneous Applications
Published in Vlado Valković, Low Energy Particle Accelerator-Based Technologies and Their Applications, 2022
The elemental characterization of materials constituting radioactive waste is of great importance for the management of storage and repository facilities. To complement the information brought by gamma or X-ray imaging, the performance of a fast neutron interrogation system based on the associated particle technique (APT) has been investigated using MCNP simulations and performing proof-of-principle experiments by Carasco et al. (2010). APT provides a 3D localization of the emission of fast neutron-induced gamma rays, whose spectroscopic analysis allows identifying the elements present in specific volumes of interest in the waste package. Monte Carlo calculations show that it is possible to identify materials enclosed behind the thick outer envelope of a ≈1 m3 cemented waste drum, provided the excited nuclei emit gamma rays with a sufficient energy to limit photon attenuation. Neutron attenuation and scattering are also predominant effects that reduce the sensitivity and spatial selectivity of APT, but it is still possible to localize items in the waste by neutron TOF and gamma-ray spectroscopy. Experimental tests confirm that the elemental characterization is possible across thick mortar slabs (Carasco et al. 2010).
The Goiânia incident, the semiotics of danger, and the next 10,000 years
Published in Clinical Toxicology, 2023
Joseph Clemons, Adam Blumenberg
The Goiânia incident involved less than 100 g of pure cesium-137, which has a physical half-life of 30 years. Nuclear weapons development, including the Manhattan Project, has generated tremendous quantities of radioactive waste. Cleanup of the Hanford Washington site alone, which produced the plutonium for the “Fat Man” atomic bomb, includes 20 tons of plutonium, construction material from hundreds of contaminated buildings, 2,300 tons of spent nuclear fuel rods, thousands of tons of contaminated soil, and millions of gallons of highly contaminated waste water [21]. The radioactive waste will be dangerous for over 100,000 years. This material is intended to be stored in the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, an underground facility in New Mexico hundreds of meters below ground (Figure 5) [22]. Every nation that utilizes radioactive material shares the problem of long-term disposal of these substances.
Clinical and epidemiological observations on individual radiation sensitivity and susceptibility
Published in International Journal of Radiation Biology, 2020
Petra Seibold, Anssi Auvinen, Dietrich Averbeck, Michel Bourguignon, Jaana M. Hartikainen, Christoph Hoeschen, Olivier Laurent, Georges Noël, Laure Sabatier, Sisko Salomaa, Maria Blettner
A serious health effect of low dose radiation is an increase in cancer incidence, which has been demonstrated in many studies, including the Life Span Study of Japanese atomic bomb survivors (Grant et al. 2017). The extent of this effect is however not entirely elucidated. Some studies showed a small increase in cancer risk after low dose exposure; for example, gamma radiation from natural background has been suspected to contribute to childhood leukemia as shown in the UK childhood cancer case–control study (Brenner et al. 2003; Kendall et al. 2013). Also, occupational radiation doses (e.g. Muirhead et al. 2009; Leuraud et al. 2015; Richardson et al. 2015) and exposure to radioactive waste as in the Techa River Cohort in the 1950s (Schonfeld et al. 2013) were positively associated with increased risk of solid tumors and non-CLL leukemia.
Intergenerational and Social Justice: There Is More to Environmental Justice Than Accountability for Reasonableness
Published in The American Journal of Bioethics, 2018
AFR demands that affected parties are able to access and understand the grounds upon which policy decisions are made and evaluate their reasonableness. But the siting of a toxic or radioactive waste dump, the establishment of stable concentrations of atmospheric pollutants, and many other classic problems of environmental justice affect not only those who are around to participate in the decision, but those who will be exposed to its consequences for decades or centuries after. This intergenerational problem is most prominent in climate change, driving the “perfect moral storm” of climate ethics (Gardiner 2011). While AFR's “revisability” means that deliberation over environmental policy will not be closed to future generations by the time such policies come to affect them, often this will be too late to prevent the risks in question.