You’re suggesting that we shoot hot neutrons at someone’s head just for shits and giggles and imaging purposes?
Isn’t there a saying in nuclear chemistry that goes:
You’re given an alpha emitter, a gamma emitter and a neutron emitter. You have three things you can do: throw one away, swallow one, and hold one in your pocket. Which goes where?
And the correct answer is something like: you swallow the gamma emitter, you hold the alpha emitter in your pocket and you don’t throw away the neutron emitter, you run away from it instead?
The dose equivalent for neutrons is at most 20 times the dose of xrays, and that’s for the worst-case around 1 MeV.
The cookie test does not mention the intensity of the individual emitters. I’d prefer to hold a small neutron source from a moisture gauge over merely being in close vicinity of an iridium-192 radiography pellet. Those things are bright.
Besides, if a limited dose of neutrons into a hard tissue of the tooth significantly lowers the risk of a toothache, I’d consider it a win.
And the permitted doses are ridiculously low anyway. The linear no-threshold model is not supported by observations, and the longer-term effects of even fairly high single doses are less catastrophic than the public mythology of radiation effects would suggest. Check e.g. the list of criticality accidents, and the fates of the survivors, for some extreme doses that involve even the bad’n’ugly neutrons.
I’d rather just avoid exposure to ionizing radiation as best I can.
* says the man who smokes a pack a day and knows full-well that the ash and smoke is putting an above-background-levels-amount of actinides directly in his lungs *
My bet is that the radiation-from-cigarettes is more an additional scaremongering than a real threat. I’d worry way WAY more about the polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons and their ilk.
