Talk:Ionizing radiation/Archive 2010

Someone help with this

Someone please merge Positron_emission_tomography#Safety to the giant table, and put a main-article link on that page. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 98.169.86.44 (talk) 02:28, 4 January 2010 (UTC)

Ionizing radiation is only a type of particle radiation??

This entry starts out by saying 'Ionizing radiation is a type of particle radiation'. If you look up 'Radiation' in Wiki, 'particle radiation' and 'electromagnetic radiation' are two different things. Xrays are electromagnetic radiation and they are ionizing... which seems to contradict.

X-rays are EM waves and particles (photons), and will display the behavior of one or the other depending on context. See Wave-particle duality. -nbach 03:48, 24 December 2006 (UTC)

Quantum Mechanics tells us that E.M. Radiation can be seen as either Waves or Particles. At the low frequency end it is more convenient to talk about Waves, at the High end Particles make more sense. But the Physics state that Particles and Waves are interchangeable.

I do agree that Wiki in general is very confused and confusing on this issue. 119.18.11.19 (talk) 09:53, 6 August 2010 (UTC)

Broken Links

Following links are broken:

"120 30-year exposure, Ural mountains, lower cancer mortality rate[21]" and

"500 USA NRC occupational whole skin, limb skin, or single organ exposure limit 30-year exposure, Ural mountains, (exposed population lower

cancer mortality rate) [25]"

Ural mountains are not mentioned in the article. Can't find replacement link. Remove/Find replacement? Slidersv 22:44, 11 September 2006 (UTC)

Radon gas could be the second largest cause of lung cancer in America, after smoking.[4] Citation #4 leads to a 404. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 74.84.99.26 (talk) 03:48, 4 March 2010 (UTC)

Most of the UV spectrum is not ionizing

I have been doing some research on where the boundary is drawn between ionizing and non-ionizing radiation, but I was unable to find a specific wavelength or even any sort of range. Nevertheless, there is plenty of papers and other official websites (e.g. http://www.osha.gov/SLTC/radiation_nonionizing/index.html) that state that UV light is not ionizing. Personally, I just learned this recently in my molecular biology class. I did some calculations myself regarding the wavelength of light needed to ionize some of the most common atoms in cells (C, O, H, N, etc.) and found out that UV light is only ionizing at it's shortest wavelengths (about 110 nm and above). The book that I use for genetics ("Principles of Genetics" by Snustad and Simmons, 3rd edition, pg. 350) states that ionizing radiation includes X-rays, gamma rays, and cosmic rays, while non-ionizing radiation includes ultraviolet light, visible light, and above.

There are a lot of websites and post stating that UV light is ionizing, but I think most of those are mislead by the fact that UV causes sunburn. Sunburn, however, is not caused by ionizing radiation. Sunburn is caused by DNA damage through creation of pyrimidine dimers (electron excitation and new bond formation, but not ionization). Aurimas (talk) 03:40, 14 November 2009 (UTC)

There seems to already be some discussion about this on the Non-ionizing radiation page. Aurimas (talk) 03:59, 14 November 2009 (UTC)

As I noted above, there are confirmed reports of radio waves ionizing water, so really the distinction is somewhat artificial. 0¹⁸ (talk) 02:14, 5 January 2010 (UTC)

Ionizing radiation level examples

I'm thinking this table might be best converted to all daily doses. Otherwise things get a bit incomparable across the spectrum. Swamp Ig (talk) 03:16, 3 May 2010 (UTC)

How can you possibly convert exposures due to thing like x-rays to a "daily" dose? Just assuming one per day would be even more misleading...and for flight time exposures, a daily dose makes little sense as well. Fell Gleaming^(talk) 09:37, 3 May 2010 (UTC)

Of course, it would be either a daily dose, or an acute dose. I guess an hourly for a flight time, but that's way down the bottom of the table anyhow. They are the exceptions, a lot of the other stuff is either daily, yearly, or even 'per gestation'.Swamp Ig (talk) 14:24, 3 May 2010 (UTC)