Other Factors?

While Logan lists the groups that he believes have an aversion to even considering the possibility of a new regulatory structure, I've got a few more groups and other factors that I'll list by motivation:

1. Inertia: When most of us make a mistake, we own up to it and try not to make that mistake again. But it is different for scientists whose opinions are their stock in trade. Once some people take a position and harden it (and scientists are included in "some people"), they will take a conviction to the grave rather than admit they have been wrong.

2. Money: There are on-going and proposed projects that are based almost entirely on the LNT theory and collective dose. An example is Yucca Mountain -- where scores to hundreds of scientists are engaged in the nuclear version of determining the number of angels who can dance on the head of a pin. Many of these scientists are among the smartest, kindest, nicest people on earth. Yet they intend to milk this cash cow for all its worth. (I understand this quite well, as I was in the NASA cow-milking business as a young engineer in the early 1960s.)

Suppose you are an associate professor at Armadillo State University, and your physics department head is on course for a $20 million federal contract to determine the safety of using residential smoke detectors. Are you going to blow the whistle and tell the grant committee that there are already data showing those devices are already completely safe? Oh sure you are - and you'll no doubt enjoy the sight of your effigy twisting in the wind from the lamppost in front of the physics building.

You remember the game: paper covers rock, rock breaks scissors, scissors cut paper. In federally sponsored research, politics covers truth.

3. The Good Old Boy Network: The National Fire Prevention Association is a non-government committee that seeks to minimize fire hazards in the United States. A subcommittee of this organization supervises the National Electric Code - or, in the parlance of all electricians, the Code. This subcommittee, which maintains and modifies the Code is made up of scientists, engineers, and master electricians. It also includes electrical contractors, users, manufacturers, and fire department officials - virtually everyone who is involved in the electrical industry. They are selected by an elaborate system that - while its primary function is to ensure safety and minimize fire risk - also recognizes advances in scientific knowledge, improvements in insulation and other materials, and new techniques that deliver electrical power safely and more efficiently. Without the NFPA and NEC, government-controlled agencies might still be requiring cloth insulation, fuse boxes and pull chains on all lights. The NEC allows innovators to get their say, too.

Unfortunately, in the nuclear-safety business, there are no such safeguards to keep a relatively small number of LNT believers - connected through interlocking protection organizations, universities and government agencies - from setting the regulation criteria. Independent observers and commercial interests not in the club need not apply.

Theodore Rockwell gives specifics of "good old boy networking" in regard to the selection process for the Biological Effects of Ionizing Radiation Committee:

"Most members have connections with the NRC, NCI and/or EPA. Six members have served with NCRP, five with RERF, four with ICRP, one with BEIR and one with NRPB. This is the same clique that has produced all the previous reports defending the status quo. This is not a group capable of producing the "independent, impartial review" called for by the American Nuclear Society." [Quoted from personal correspondence from Theodore Rockwell to the author.]

Where the Terrorists Have Already Won

In 1978, Jimmy Carter reneged on the opening of a reprocessing plant that was nearing completion in Barnwell, South Carolina. This facility was to take "spent" fuel rods from power reactors owned by the utilities, dissolve them in acid, then separate the uranium and plutonium from the contaminants that would "poison" and eventually stop the chain reaction. The highly radioactive progeny of the energy-producing reactions - amounting to some 1% or 2% of the volume - would be disposed of by any one of a number of perfectly safe methods. The fuel portion would then be reformed into uranium or "MOX" pellets for insertion into fuel assemblies.

Hold on. Could one infer from this that these "spent" fuel elements contain in excess of 90% of their intial fuel? Yes, one could. Is this what we plan to bury under Yucca Mountain? Precisely.

Does this make sense to you? It certainly doesn't to the English, French, Japanese, Russians, and others who think we are absolutely nuts for planning to bury unbelievable amounts of readily obtainable energy. But it made sense to the Carter administration, and even though Reagan reversed the decision, there were no corporate takers who were willing to risk their shareholders' money on a project that could be changed by the whim of a government with a history of caving in to the slightest pseudo-environmentalist pressure. And there would certainly be pressure - since, as we "know," all radiation is dangerous, since any gamma ray could cause cancer... even though the odds against it are 30 quadrillion to one.

What was the reason - excuse, really - that the Carter administration used to stop reprocessing? It was the threat of terrorism. Let's consider briefly the problems from the standpoint of terrorists who are planning a heist of plutonium, with which they intend to make a bomb.

Waste 'n' Time

Uh, oh. I'm afraid I've kind of painted myself into a corner here by minimizing the "problem" of nuclear wastes. If I give it short shrift, it will appear that I'm avoiding the subject. On the other hand, while the matter of nuclear wastes is somewhat afield from our general topic, there is a connection that might be of interest.

The only danger even attributed to nuclear wastes is that of causing cancer in future generations that are too stupid not to bit into a glassified chunk of power-plant waste. As we shall see, there is a threshold below which - even for those future glass munchers - there is no fear of increased cancer risk. But even if there weren't such a threshold, there are a number of issues regarding nuclear wastes that have been ignored in the media's misreporting of the subject that you should know about.

• More than 95% of the long half-life "waste" in nuclear fuel is not waste at all, but uranium and plutonium that may be reprocessed into fresh fuel assemblies. Most other industrialized nations do just this, as our government promised the utilities, but the Carter administration reneged on the agreement. (More about this later.)
• Among the "wastes" that anti-nuclear activists are eager to bury are valuable medical radionuclides that are produced at high cost in specialty reactors. As in the case of the reprocessable fuel, the baby is being thrown out with the bath water.
• The most sensible way to eliminate the unusable wastes from reprocessed fuel (which about to about 1% of their volume) is to dilute it a few millionfold and pour it down the drain, or to dump it into ocean abysses where there is no biological activity. Man's puny efforts at creating radionuclide wastes are dwarfed by the enormous amounts existing in nature. There are, for example, 36 billion curies of rubidium 87 and 380 billion curies of potassium 40 in the oceans, almost all of which will still be there when the few million curies of man's wastes have long since decayed to undetectable amounts. 

Why then, you may ask, are there hundreds or thousands of government- (read "taxpayer-") supported scientists busy writing reports on Yucca Mountain? I suggest there may be three reasons: (1) they don't know - or, more than likely, don't care - that low-level radiation is not harmful; (2) it beats having to get a real job; or (3) grants to study the mating habits of the Zambian sweat bee have already been taken.

Because They Say So, That's Why

The U.S. government plans to spend $85 billion (about $1,000 per U.S. family) in cleaning up a single radioactive site at Hanford, Washington - not to avoid the searing radiation analogous to falling 100 feet, but to escape the almost imperceptible disturbance from falling less than two-tenths of an inch. In terms of our SXR units, the Hanford reservation area (if you can find it in the Easter Washington desert) has an annual "excessive" exposure of far less than 1 SXR, while it would take well over 6,000 SXR units to be fatal - and that would have to occur in a relatively short time or it might well be bio-positive. Alas long suffering taxpayers, I'm sorry to tell you that this is only one of four similar locations!

To these mega-clean-ups, you'll want to add the high cost of reducing the negligible emissions of nuclear plants, the counter-productive recommendations for reducing radon levels in homes, and last but not least - Yucca Mountain, the Federal government's potential (maybe some day in the future) high-level waste disposal site. In a move rivaling the building of Mayan pyramids to have a swell place to sacrifice virgins, Yucca Mountain is perhaps the greatest government boondoggle in U.S. history. Here we are spending billions of dollars to study outlandish fictions of (a) major climate changes bringing unprecedented rainfall to the desert where (b) the fictitious rain infiltrates through hundreds of feet of rock ordinarily considered impervious, to (c) dissolve stainless steel containers that hold the waste products after which they (d) seep through thousands of feet of rock into an isolated aquifer, into which (e) deep wells will be drilled that are impossible to drill without modern equipment, and (f) the water will be drunk by some unknown people who have modern drilling equipment, but no knowledge of any potential radiation danger. And that's the reasonable part of the Yucca Mountain story.

What is totally unreasonable is the contention that the so-called wastes would be harmful to anybody after 10,000 years no matter how they were eaten, drunk, sniffed, snorted, mainlined or whatever. Nuclear medicine therapies routinely involve millions of times any conceivable exposure from this nuclear "seep-out." Government-paid, regulatory-agency-entrenched "scientists" are bewailing a potential tragedy caused by "high level" wastes that, in 600 to 1,000 years, will be less radioactive than the ores from which they came!

In addition to the wasting of taxpayer money - which we'll get back to in later chapters - the LNT theory has created irrational and unwarranted fears in citizens, causing them needless worry over their essential medical X-rays, tricking them into believing that irradiated foods are dangerous, and even causing unnecessary concern about 30,000 delayed cancer deaths predicted for their European relatives resulting from Chernobyl... which, incidentally, will most likely never happen, but wouldn't be detectable if they did.

[Evidence is (as you will see) that there should be a decrease in the death rate in the higher ambient radiation areas. But, probably, we'll never be able to detect it. There would normally be approximately 25 million cancer deaths (plus or minus a few million) in the affected area. Thirty thousand additional would amount to a change of 0.1% - statistically undetectable. In the United States, cancer rates vary by about 50% between Utah (low) and the District of Columbia (high).]