By Ashlee Davis, Health
This
year’s spate of natural disasters has reignited the debate over the
safety of nuclear energy, as well as the fears of people who worry they
could be exposed to harmful radiation. (As if the recent earthquake on
the East Coast wasn’t enough to rattle our nerves, it led to the
automatic shutdown of two reactors at a Virginia power plant.)
Fortunately,
most of these fears are unfounded. Even after an earthquake caused a
partial meltdown of a Japanese power plant in March, sending plumes of
radiation drifting across the Pacific, G. Donald Frey, PhD, a professor
of radiology at the Medical University of South Carolina, in Charleston,
reassured Americans that the "very low levels" of radiation were "no
reason to be concerned."
That's
because the radiation was just a fraction of the so-called background
radiation we absorb each year, from both natural and manmade sources. To
put our newfound radiation fears in perspective, here are nine sources
of everyday exposure.
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