Rami Arieli: "The Laser Adventure" Laser Safety Appendix, page 1

Appendix 1:

Laser Safety Inside the School Laboratory, and Outside

Lasers are everywhere (!):

The Bar Code Scanner at the cashier at big stores.
The Laser Pointer at the lecture hall, and inside the compact disk.
Helium-Neon and Visible Diode lasers at the physics laboratory.

The big question is: How safe is the use of these lasers?

In short, this question can be answered by the following statement:

When awareness regarding the different aspects of laser safety exists, and minimal precautions are taken, visible lasers with output power of less than 1 milli-watt can be used with no fear (Explanation for this particular limit is given below).

The main risk in using a low power laser is with regard to the radiation emitted. Thus, the dicussion below will be limitted to radiation damage.