Get in the scanner

There’s been a lot of hyperventilating recently about the radiation from the new scanners at the airport.

You get far more radiation from the flight. 

For a typical cross-country flight in a commercial airplane, you are likely to receive 2 to 5 millirem (mrem) of radiation, less than half the radiation dose you receive from a chest x-ray. People in the United States receive an average of 360 mrem of radiation per year from natural and man-made radiation sources, which includes cosmic radiation exposure during commercial flights.

A millirem is 1,000 times a microrem.

Each full body scan produces less than 10 microrem of emission, the equivalent to the exposure each person receives in about 2 minutes of airplane flight at altitude.

For those that don’t trust the manufacturer’s numbers, an independent study of the backscatter scanners was done by Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory.  The manufacturer’s numbers are correct.  The millimeter wave scanners produce no ionizing radiation at all. 

http://blog.tsa.gov/2010/03/advanced-imaging-technology-radiation.html