Sexism in airport radiation scanning: pilots exempt, flight attendants not

Unions representing both groups are advising their members not to go through the scanners because of concerns about radiation exposure. The dose per scan is trivial, but radiation exposure is cumulative.

(USA) TSA Sexism: Pilots’ Junk Off-Limits; Flight Attendants’ Fair Game, Big Think, Lindsay Beyerstein on November 22, 2010, Pilots who shun full body scans are exempt from the TSA’s new “enhanced” body searches. Flight attendants are not. Their respective unions complained about the searches, but only pilots got an exemption.

Flight attendants and pilots go through the same FBI background checks and fingerprinting. Over 95% of pilots are men and three quarters of flight attendants are women. The fact that pilots are exempt from junk-touching and flight attendants aren’t seems like a sexist double standard.

Unions representing both groups are advising their members not to go through the scanners because of concerns about radiation exposure. The dose per scan is trivial, but radiation exposure is cumulative. The unions argue that people who fly for a living are already bombarded with significantly more radiation than the average person. It’s not clear that scanning anyone is making us safer, but it seems especially gratuitous to scan pre-screened professionals. Do TSA screeners have to get scanned when they go to work?

TSA Sexism: Pilots’ Junk Off-Limits; Flight Attendants’ Fair Game | Focal Point | Big Think

1.This Month

PETITION

Free Julian Assange, before it’s too late. Sign to STOP the USA Extradition

United Nations: demasking the Torture of Julian Assange. Rico Brouwer and Nils Melzer

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Energy efficiency – theme for July 2019

Energy efficiency represents the single largest potential contributor to global emissions reduction, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA 2017). It should be a key part of the global energy strategy, for several reasons:

It could reduce global electric demand by more than 20 per cent, based on current rates in the U.S. power sector, while maintaining high levels of services such as heating and lighting.
It avoids the need for increased energy, capacity and grid services, making it the least expensive way to decarbonise at scale.
It can reduce carbon dioxide emissions by billions of tonnes.

A dramatic example of the power of energy efficiency is lighting. In 2017 the United States passed the milestone of 1 billion LED and CFL lights installed, avoiding 142 million tonnes a year of carbon dioxide emissions, at a cost of about $7 per ton of avoided carbon dioxide. In contrast, the cumulative installed capacity of rooftop solar reached 8,000 MW in 2017, saving 8 million tonnes a year of carbon dioxide, at a cost of $360 per ton. Lighting efficiency thus yielded almost 18 times the avoided carbon dioxide, at about 2 per cent the cost per ton of rooftop solar.

Google provides another example of the power of energy efficiency. Its data centers now use 50 per cent less energy than the average data center, according to the company. Google also developed an improved chip, the TPU, which performs 83 times better than standard CPUs. The new chip allowed Google to reduce power consumption at its data centers by a factor of 30—far exceeding the effect on Google’s carbon footprint of all of the company’s renewable energy purchases. ” – John Woolard, Eco Business, 10 June 2019

nuclear-news

The News That Matters about the Nuclear Industry Fukushima Chernobyl Mayak Three Mile Island Atomic Testing Radiation Isotope