Reassessment of Atomic Bomb Radiation Dosimetry in Hiroshima and Nagasaki vol. I-II.

Fülszöveg

Scientists have deciphered a faint message in metals that bore silent witness to the first atomic bomb explosion, which rocked the Japanese city of Hiroshima at the end of the Second World War.This is the first reassessment of the radiation victims received since a 1980s study 1 cast doubt on the post-war dosage estimates. The new figures 2 confirm those originally collected in the aftermath of the 1945 blast.The corroboration will give doctors more confidence in predicting the health risks to remaining survivors and to those exposed to radiation in industrial or medical accidents since. "It's not just a historical question," says team member Gunther Korschinek of the Technical University of Munich in Germany."In general we should be comforted by this," says epidemiologist Mark Little of Imperial College, London. "If there had been things wrong with the data there would have been serious implications."The Hiroshima blast sent out two forms of radiation: gamma rays and flying atomic splinters called fast neutrons. These don't travel as far as gammas rays, but being heavy, they cause ten times more damage to the body's cells.Gamma-ray doses were relatively easy to gauge, but the physics of fast neutrons is a different matter. Atomic scientists could only estimate the numbers produced by the blast and how fast they travelled, by looking at short-lived radioactive phosphorus particles collected by bewildered researchers in the weeks following the blast...