I still haven't seen anything factual about the scanners' output power and frequency. Guess I'm going to have to go look.

Any exposure without benefit is just wrong.

Forget the tax payers, this is so egregious I think the senior personnel in charge of the TSA should be held personally liable for their decision.

There's a scene in Romancing the Stone. You'll remember it: "Who told you this was the bus to Cartagena? That nice man with the gun?"

Who told you that the scanners were safe?

(Hain't just the quantity of radiation but the wavelength that is more readily absorbed by soft tissue.)

Gee, I'm shocked! Shocked, I say!

Meanwhile, hand lotion, contact lens solution, and fertilizer continue to give false-positives as explosive material, causing people to be detained, have their ID taken away, groped in private, and miss their flights. Ah, well, who gives a shit? What's a little humiliation and violation -- or cancer -- in the grand scheme of things?
As long as it happens to "somebody else"!

Radiation badges are cheap to buy, easily hidden, cheaply processed. When forced to choose between one's job and one's health, I'll bet that more than a few TSA workers are gathering all the data needed for a successful personal injury lawsuit.

Has OSHA weighed in?

I searched the OSHA site for "radiation TSA" and found only one link. It was a report that dealt with luggage scanning.

As a completely irrelevant aside, who is the genius who though "Rapiscan" was a good name for these things? I can't be the only person who reads it as "Rapescan" every time I glance at it.

Mark my words, eventually hapless travelers will be getting molested at highway rest stops. TSA doesn't appear to care about anybody.

Well, a few moments with Google does the trick.

Provided the scanner is the Rapiscan 1000, here's the promo blurb from their .pdf, here.

From that page:
"• The typical dose rate for Background Radiation at sea level generally ranges from 7 to 13 microrem/hr. A screening by a Secure 1000
results in a dose that is significantly less than the dose one normally receives in one hour from background radiation.
• A screening by a Secure 1000 results in a dose that is approximately equivalent to two minutes of air travel (at 30,000 feet) or the dose one receives from eating one banana (bananas contain small quantities of radioactive potassium).
• ANSI and FDA have established a maximum limit for a radiation dose per screening to be 25 microrem."

Several things on the page make sense, including the absence of an exact number for personal exposure. If there actually were a benefit - and, at the airport, there is not, this appears to expose the subject as little as possible.
Realize that although the machine makes its image from backscatter, the beam does result in "whole-body" dose, so the mention of background and the banana is appropriate.

The "microrem" is 10^-6 REM, or Roentgen Equivalent Man, a unit of biological acute damage. 1 REM is the damage done by the deposition of 100 ergs per gram of tissue. This unit is therefore compensated for the type of radiation producing the damage - it does not matter what the particle is, then, other than to change the part of the body most affected. About 50 whole-body REM is required to note blood chemistry changes.

As I have noted before, at low levels it is flatly not possible to assign a particular cause to heritable effects, like cancer or an expressed reproductive mutation, because you are constantly being bombarded by a myriad of sources. Yet it is NEVER a good idea to increase one's exposure, because you do NOT have the ability to build up resistance or immunity to it.

Radiation exposure is expressed in very careful terms. For instance, it's not apparent to the layman that that part of the Rapiscan beam that goes clear through without interacting with you does not result in exposure.

So, study!

"Because of a regulatory Catch-22, the airport X-ray scanners have escaped the oversight required for X-ray machines used in doctors' offices and hospitals. The reason is that the scanners do not have a medical purpose, so the FDA cannot subject them to the rigorous evaluation it applies to medical devices."

What do you suppose the odds are, if Walmart started using the machines on its customers, the FDA would still be unable to find a reason to look into it?

Odds are probably so low, they couldn't be measured with existing technology.

Truckers already are

Well, dang. Yet another easy-to-find article. From the FDA:

"The radiation dose is so low that there is no need to limit the number of individuals screened or, in most cases, the number of screenings an individual can have in a year."

and

"A person would have to be screened more than a thousand times in one year in order to exceed the annual radiation dose limit for people screening that has been set by expert radiation safety organizations (see below)."

So don't think the FDA hasn't looked. That's simply not true.

It remains that airport screening is not effective, but that is for different reasons.

It's circuitous, isn't it? The government experts say we should trust the other government experts to irradiate us because still more government experts say everything's under control.

Super.

Well, not only am I not saying that, if you have some other source for technical data on the effects of radiation and the behavior of the Rapiscan 1000, post it.

Otherwise, you have nothing.

Ionizing radiation does not change based on the employment of any person. Either you state what something is and what it does, or you make meaningless noises. If you cannot tell who is making meaningless noises, then you have more research to do.

Rad, I think what Crid and the others are saying is that we have no confidence that the dose level stated in the brochure is accurate because no independent entity has been allowed an opportunity to test it. (The FDA, in this particular instance, does not count.)

"What do you suppose the odds are, if Walmart started using the machines on its customers, the FDA would still be unable to find a reason to look into it?"

Something like this already happened in the '50s. There use to be X-ray machines that were sold to shoe stores for measuring shoe sizes. Although their dose was far higher than the numbers we're talking about there, they were banned not on that, but on the general principle that they did not serve a medical purpose.

It's not too late to support this bi-partisan action:

http://www.senatenj.com/index.php/doherty/tsa-petition/sign-the-petition-help-stop-invasive-tsa-screening/7149

Thank you.

"(The FDA, in this particular instance, does not count.)"

OK, I'll bite. Who DOES count?

I bet if a private company doesn't conclude you're being crisped, it'll be said "they've been bought off".

And don't miss that the claim was that the FDA didn't look at these things. Wrong.

-----

What if I could find you a Rapiscan service manual which states its output power? See, it is NOT POSSIBLE for an X-ray machine to produce more radiation than its emitter can handle; you can confirm that anywhere you wish to look. There are fundamentals here which are not subject to whim, money, political correctness, etc.

Okay, another easily-found evaluation - this by the NIST, at this location. It's a .pdf.

"The entrance skin exposure is the most important parameter for effective dose calculations. The entrance exposure for one scan was found to be about 9.6 uR at 30 cm from the surface of the front panel. The effective close to a subject being screened varies depending on the age and size of the human subject. An adult would receive an effective dose of about 2.4 urem per frontal scan. A small child would receive an effective dose of about 4 urem per frontal scan. An infant would receive a dose of about 5 urem per frontal scan. In order to be compliant with the ANSI N43.17 standard the effective dose should not exceed 10 urem per scan at a distance of 30 cm from the "beam exit surface". The Secure 1000 was found to meet the ANSI standard requirements and recommendations relating to radiation dose to bystanders and operators. All exposure measurements outside of the primary beam, due to scatter or leakage from the cabinet, were on the order of natural background levels and far below the ANSI requirements."

Hey. Be mad about your rights. The gadget's killing your Constitution far faster than it is you.

Extra credit if you know why the exposure is higher for younger people.

And do not miss that this instrument is limited by physics. To get exposure up to the millirem range, it would have to increase power output by a factor of a thousand. It is NOT "throttled down" to the existing emission rate, though it is regulated internally. It is not an isotopic source, over which an aperture, which could jam, is opened.
A good analogy is that of a good home stereo playing through one speaker. You can't get 100 kilowatts through a speaker rated for 100, nor can you spin a dial and get 100 kilowatts from the amp when it's rated for 100. And there's no "power" dial to spin on the Rapiscan at all.

i too been playing like u,,bt the prob is i cudn't increase that tactical rating by training...usually whn sumthing like offsidetrap increases the other one goes down,...i starts with lower leage club... can u actually gave me a complete years training plan that u use...jz include more details abt ur playing style too..