Is There a Large Risk of Radiation? a Critical Review of Pessimistic Claims (open access)

Is There a Large Risk of Radiation? a Critical Review of Pessimistic Claims

A number of situations where it has been claimed that moderate radiation doses cause leukemia or other cancers are carefully reviewed. We look at cases in the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union. Usually it can be demonstrated that there is an alternative, more probable, explanation for the effect seen. In several cases the authors of the papers have fallen into statistical traps. The most frequent is a posteriori selection of cohort boundaries in both space and time: a trap illustrated dramatically by Feynman. The next most common trap is to arbitrarily select one out of many ways of looking at the data, against which we were warned by Tippett. Several cohorts are compared with respect to the number of persons at risk, average dose, and the number of cancers expected. Of these, only the cohort of A-bomb survivors in Japan and the recently unclassified data on the very large occupational doses for early Soviet nuclear workers at Chelyabinsk provide evidence of clearly visible excess cancers.
Date: July 1992
Creator: Shihab-Eldin, Adnan; Shlyakhter, Alexander & Wilson, Richard
System: The UNT Digital Library
The Use of a Centrifugal Contactor for Component Concentration by Solvent Extraction (open access)

The Use of a Centrifugal Contactor for Component Concentration by Solvent Extraction

Theoretical and experimental work was undertaken to explore the use of the Argonne design centrifugal contactor as a concentrating device for metal ions in solutions such as transuranic-containing waste streams and contaminated groundwater. First, the theoretical basis for operating the contactor as a concentrator was developed. Then, the ability of the contactor to act as a concentrating device was experimentally demonstrated with neodymium over a wide range of organic-to-aqueous (O/A) flow ratios (0.01 to 33). These data were also used to derive a correlation for the effect of O/A flow ratio on extraction efficiency.
Date: July 1992
Creator: Leonard, R. A.; Wygmans, D. G.; McElwee, M. J.; Wasserman, M. O. & Vandegrift, G. F.
System: The UNT Digital Library