14,607 days ago...
In late April of 1986 I was in busily in the delightful pedal-to-the-metal thrall of my first-ever real day gig, after finally getting my first college degree at UTK the prior June at age 39. My wife had been hired by the retiring Director of Industrial Health & Safety at ORNL (Oak Ridge National Laboratory), John Auxier, an internationally renowned PhD nuclear engineer and Certified Health Physicist (CHP; think 'radiation exposure & dose epidemiologist'). He served on the Three Mile Island Commission. Don't let the Overalls-clad Good Ol' Boy aw-shucks Kentucky Tobacco Farmer schtick fool ya.
Dr. Auxier had recently founded ASL (Applied Sciences Laboratory) out on Bear Creek Road in western Oak Ridge. ASL's remit was to conduct forensic-level trace-level environmental radioanalytics in support of consulting, site characterization, regulatory compliance, and litigation.
John first met my wife while she was working as the bar manager in a notorious Alcoa Highway roadhouse that ran illegal card and casino games in a large members-only backroom (the owner, Eddie, was a Vegas Junket operative). Another front bar patron, Jim, was the owner of Smoky Mt. Aero, the private aviation facility at the Knox McGhee-Tyson airport. John was a pilot (going back to his military service) who kept his two aircraft and a helicopter at Smoky Mt.
Jim hired Cheryl away from "Fast Eddie's" to be his customer service ops manager, where she would subsequently manage the logistics of John's aircraft, along with aircraft rental service, a repair & maintenance shop, and a flight school.
John smelled serious talent. After he founded ASL, he pilfered her away from Smoky Mt. Aero to be his Marketing Manager. He subsequently tossed in "QA Manager."
John knew of my UTK concentration in Applied Statistics ("psychometrics") and asked Cheryl if I'd be willing to come out under contract and help ASL computerize the lab and begin assembling a Statistical Quality Control regimen. They had some old-school nuke lab techs still using slide rules and doing sums of squares for control limits on yellow pads. (Seriously.)
Done.Yeah, I'll do it. I started my largely OJT effort first week of January.
I stayed 5 and a half yrs, wrote every line of bench-level and business office code, installed a Novell LAN and an SCO Xenix Oracle RDBMS running on a VAX Mini. And, "Statistical Process Control?" (pdf) Got'cha covered.
Old washed-up guitar player in need of a career change.
We eventually got bought by "International Technology Corporation."
APRIL 26TH 1986
Among the gazillion recurrent items on my plate was managing the database & reporting on a REMP study for Perry Nuclear, a nuke plant under construction near Cleveland OH. A "Radiological Environmental Monitoring Program," i.e., a lengthy environmental baseline study via which to determine "naturally occuring" radionuclide levels across a breadth of matrices—water, soil, vegetation, fish, fowl, cows milk, ambient air, etc.
The air filter samples always came back "below LLD." "Below the Lower Limit of Determination." I had a quick macro that simply entered "<0.04 pCi/cu.m" for me automatically. ("Less than 0.04 picocuries per cubic meter.")
One week after Chernobyl we got quantifiable elevated positive hits from every Perry air monitor station. Airborne I-131.
I-131 is an alpha emitter with an 8.05 day half-life, so, by June the Perry air monitor results were back down below LLD. Other, heavier rad particles with higher energies and longer half-lives were tracked for years thereafter (some likely still sampled & studied).
Earth Day.
It's always earth day.
UPDATE
Assessing radiation risk today. The regulatory politics vs the science.
When US President Trump signed an executive order in May 2025 seeking to streamline the adoption of nuclear energy by directing federal agencies to reconsider whether radiation protection standards have been unnecessarily strict, he reignited a debate that has smoldered in radiation science for decades. At the heart of the controversy is the linear nonthreshold (LNT) model—the idea that any amount of radiation, no matter how small, has damaging biological effects. Resolving whether LNT is a reasonable precaution or a costly misapplication of incomplete science will require not just better arguments, but better data.
The science underlying low-dose risk (less than 100 milligray, a measure of how much radiation is absorbed by living tissue) is incomplete. Decades of epidemiology and biology have neither confirmed LNT nor established a universally agreed threshold dose below which there is essentially no risk. Given the uncertainties, some experts advocate that doses should be as low as reasonably achievable (ALARA). There is also a hypothesis called hormesis, which holds that very low doses of radiation might be beneficial by stimulating cellular repair mechanisms. These are not purely scientific questions. How society weighs uncertain risks against economic and energy imperatives, whether in nuclear power, medical imaging, or occupational safety, involves value judgments that data alone cannot fully resolve.
Answering these questions will still require more research on several fronts. Here, experts do not agree on what that evidence will ultimately show. Some (including E.A.C.) hold that although LNT is not an established biological truth, it is a defensible regulatory tool—adding, however, that ALARA has been applied inconsistently, at times generating financial costs, psychological harm, and forgone societal benefits without proportionate protective benefit. Others (including B.A.U.) maintain that evidence for harm at low doses is lacking and that the real-world consequences of LNT-based regulation, from unnecessary abortions following the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in 1986 to evacuation deaths after the Fukushima nuclear accident in 2011, demonstrate that treating a contested model as settled science carries measurable human cost...
Every day is earth day...
