Suppose two people are exposed to equal doses of radiation (equal number of rads) inside their bodies. Suppose that the first pe
rson is exposed to alpha radiation, while the second person is exposed to protons. How many times worse is the biological risk for the first person than the second as a result of radiation weighting?
Radiation weighing factor is a measure of the effectiveness of per unit dose of the given radiation that how much harmful it is for a biological tissue. In other terms it can also be defined as it is the ability of radiations to transfer the energy to the body.
For different particles it has different value. Some of the values are listed below -
Photons = 1
Electrons = 1
Protons = 2
Alpha particles, fission fragments, and heavy ions = 20
Neutrons = 2-20
Thus we can see that the value for alpha particles is 20 and for protons it is 2. Thus for alpha particles it is 10 times more than the protons.
