The fact check says the story is true. Jimmy Carter is a realio, trulio nuclear physicist. I have a friend who was a nuclear engineer at Chalk River, in the 1970's, and Carter was a real hero of his, which is surprising, since he's a hardcore conservative.
No.
Nuclear engineers and nuclear physicists do calculations. They create and run complicated codes which analyze nuclear phenomena such as the chain reaction in reactor cores, or they design nuclear power plants and stuff like that.
Carter was a nuclear worker. By his own admission, he was sent in to turn a few bolts and get out before he received too much dose. Countless people perform such manual labor at nuclear power plants today. They are not nuclear engineers; they are power plant outage or decommissioning workers.
The Wapo article states:
In one minute and 29 seconds, Carter had absorbed the maximum amount of radiation a human can withstand in a year.
Carter stated in 2008:
“They let us get probably a thousand times more radiation than they would now,” he said. “It was in the early stages, and they didn’t know.”
It's complete nonsense.
In 1952, radiation dose limits may have been about three times what they are today...
Today, they are 5 REM per year. That's 5 Roentgen Equivalent Man.
1000 times this amount will surely kill a person. 200 times this amount will as well. 1000 REM kills ya.
At most, Carter received a few times what is allowed today. The fact that he has lived to be 98 pretty much proves this point.
Without a doubt, Carter was not a nuclear engineer/physicist. No nuclear engineer would say something so ridiculous about radiation doses, which is so fundamentally incorrect.
On the positive side, his work for Habitat For Humanity for decades is quite admirable.
Regards,
Jim
