5. Radiation Safety and Health Physics
This chapter covers information on health physics and radiation
safety concepts.
Terms
Roentgen The Roentgen is equivalent to 1 electrostatic unit
of charge from interaction of gamma radiation
in 0.001293 gram of air at 1 atmosphere pressure
and is a unit of exposure.
RAD The Roentgen has limited use since it does not
consider the dose effects of the radiation.
Initially, it was replaced by Radiation Absorbed
Dose, and is a unit of dose.
Rem The RAD only applied to air so it was soon
replaced by Rem. The Rem includes the
biological effectiveness of the radiation type. It
is related to the RAD by its Relative Biological
Effectiveness (RBE) or Quality Factor, and is a unit
of dose, referred as equivalent dose.
Quality Factor (QF)
Quality factor takes into account the differences
in biological effect of different radiation. For
example, QF for X-ray and gamma rays is 1, 20
for alpha particles and 10 for high energy
neutrons.
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