Cars in Nigeria soon to run on radioactive materials, says NNRA

Nigeria may soon find itself in an era where companies would start producing vehicles that run on fuels gotten from nuclear and other radioactive materials, according to the Director General, Nigerian Nuclear Radiation Agency, Mr. Lawrence Dim.

Dim, whom Mr. Timothy Akpa, General Manager, Department of Nuclear safety, Physical Security and Safeguards, represented, made the prediction at the Second National Technical Meeting on Personal Dosimetry for Dosimetry Service Providers and Radiation Safety Advisers in Abuja.

The move would be driven by the current rate of industrialization across the world, which is fueling the use of nuclear fuels and radioactive materials.

“We are now starting to see how we can use radiation in producing electricity. In many countries, radioactive materials are being used for heating purposes. As I once said, it may likely be that in the future, as safety consciousness grows all over the world, we would soon begin to have vehicles running on fuel of radioactive materials.

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“Nigeria cannot afford to be behind. As long as we are building more industries, the refineries and so on, we need radiation to monitor what we are doing. The most important is even in health.

”All aspect of medical services – diagnosis, interventional radiology, radiotherapy and even nuclear medicine, all require radiation; and anywhere there is radiation, there is also the possibility that we would also have to be sure that the use conforms to the internationally recognized dose limits.

He explained that the technical meeting is a requirement by the International Atomic Energy Agency, IAEA, that every country must have a system of dosimetry that they would use as a benchmark to know how much radiation that the people are getting, and that people are not over-exposed in the course of their work in the industry using ionizing radiation.

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