Yes, You Can Be Too Careful (Part 2)

Bernard Cohen reports, in his book The Nuclear Energy Option, [Plenum Press, New York, 1990] that $100,000 in medical treatments or highway safety improvements would save a life. Government, meanwhile, spends - or requires the spending of - $2.5 billion (yes, that's billion) to save a life from radiation exposure at the cost of 25,000 less "obvious" lives. And it now appears that the life supposedly saved from low-level radiation wasn't saved at all, as it is surfacing that the decrease in hormetic range radiation is actually costing lives.

Another appalling case reported by Rod Adams, editor of Atomic Energy Insights, involved a project used to blast out "contaminated soil" near the nuclear reactor at McMurdo Sound in Antarctica. Battling potentially lethal weather conditions, the task was completed at considerable risk to the workers and immense cost to taxpayers. So what was done with the offending material that may have caused a needed hormetic effect in the radiation-poor polar region? It was shipped (at another obscene cost to the taxpayers) to the United States, where it was used for parking lot fill in Port Hueneme, California.

Rather than trying to paraphrase the flowing and informative prose of Dr. Rockwell, here is a final example of government's mindless adherence to the Linear No-Threshold hypothesis - in his words:

"The question of whether tiny amounts of radiation must be avoided, even at great cost, is neither abstract nor trivial. Hundreds of billions of dollars are to be spent 'remediating' U.S. sites even though there is no scientific basis for claiming any health or other benefit. Worldwide, this cost has been estimated at more than a trillion dollars. [A more recent estimate, based on actual remediation projects, is $3 trillion worldwide, and $1 trillion for the United States alone. Using the figure of $20 million per life sacrificed, a trillion dollars is equal to 50,000 lives at the shrine of the Linear No-Threshold hypothesis.]

"This is in addition to the unquantifiable cost of lives lost by fear of mammograms, radioactive smoke detectors, irradiated food, or other beneficial uses of radiation. Most, if not all, of this cost would be saved if we did not try to reduce radiation levels below the natural radiation background, which is several hundred times lower than the lowest levels at which any health effects have been found."

Rockwell continues:

"But one person's wasted tax money is another's lucrative contract. Here's one example to remember. At some 46 sites in 14 states, there are some 82 million cubic feet of uranium tailings left over from the wartime weapons program. This material is what is left when you take as much uranium out of the natural ore as you can. It is now less radioactive than the original ore, and 20 times less radioactive than what the law calls "low-level waste." There is a lot of natural rock that is more radioactive. [Emphasis added.]

"The Dawn Mining Company was recently licensed to haul 35 million cubic feet of this material from the East Coast to a huge pit at its closed uranium mine near Ford, Washington. The material will travel to Spokane by train, then be transferred to trucks for the trip to the final destination. The company says this will require about 40 very large trucks, with six to nine axles and weighing 93,000 pounds each when loaded. These trucks will travel over the back roads each day for 260 days a year for five to seven years."

Of course, this doesn't include the expense of maintaining the roads under this unplanned-for load and the cost of the statistically certain accidents that will result from 93,000 pound trucks travelling some 5 million miles. But if you weren't lucky enough to get this contract, don't fret. There are another 47 million cubic feet of this material at other locations across the country. While you won't be producing any beneficial health effects, nobody really cares... and it's just taxpayers' money.

Even our state officials charged with insuring the public health are rebelling against the EPA and other heavy-handed federal government intrusions that have the force of law. For example, the EPA limit on radium-226 in drinking water is 5 pCi/l (0.18 Bq/l). The average adult will consume about one liter of water per day. Is there any evidence that 6 pCi/l will harm you? Not a whit. Yet to remove the radium is an expensive proposition borne by the local citizenry for an arbitrary, bureaucratic caprice. [A South Carolina rural water district manager recently told me that one of their wells tested at 5.6 pCi/l, requiring special treatment at a cost of $30,000 per year to the customer base for that single well.]

What evidence is there concerning the harm of ingesting radium - in addition to the fact that people have been drinking the water for hundreds of years without ill effects?

There is good evidence of a death from radium about sixty years ago. But it wasn't from drinking water with 6 pCi/l.

In 1928, an eccentric millionaire, Eben Byers, was so enthusiastic about the invigorating qualities of a radium-based patent medicine that he partook of three to four vials per day of Radithor. Each vial contained 3,500,000 pCi of radium - a 1,918-year supply according to the EPA's limitations. He eventually died of his addiction after ingesting an estimated 10 billion pCi - a 5,480,000-year dose consumed in three years.

Eben isn't the whole story, however. There were 400,000 to 500,000 vials of Radithor sold with no indication that it caused any problems whatsoever. With what other "poison" can you consume 700,000 times the government-dictated maximum dose and still walk away... not once, but on a regular basis? Could the poison be in the dose?

While support for the LNT and collective dose is rapidly waning in light of the evidence brought forth by Luckey, Cohen, and a growing flood of researchers, there are still those who will (or perhaps feel they must) defend these hypotheses. Do they do so with evidence, such as dose-response curves? Not once have I seen low-level evidence showing increased risk - unless it was an extrapolation from high-level data. The response is invariably the same: It is better to err on the side of safety than to take any chances on the possibility of an increased cancer risk.

If you're building a bridge, it doesn't cost much to increase its safety factor; a little more steel and concrete will do the trick. But the same doesn't go when building an airplane, as too great an emphasis on structural safety factors would keep the airplane from ever getting airborne. Regulators and bureaucrats - who are willing to see nuclear technology and hormesis research stay on the ground rather than expend the effort required to give a proper analysis to the overwhelming amount of data pointing to the threshold/hormesis models - are doing a great disservice to those whom they claim to be safeguarding. Whenever any of them starts feeling complacent about their rules and how they might be helping to save some theoretical life somewhere, I wish they would think a few seconds about a number - the number 100,000.

That's the lower estimate of unborn children who were aborted out of a totally unreasonable fear of their being "nuclear monsters" [after Chernobyl]. I wonder if those (almost) mothers sacrificed any Mozarts or Madame Curies or Salks on the altar of the LNT?

Chernobyl - Symbol of Unconcerned Totalitarianism

One can hardly compare the Chernobyl fire in the Ukraine to the alleged "Three Mile Island disaster" in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Thirty-one firement and plant workers were killed in the former, while the only victims at TMI were from media-caused anxiety. Volumes have been written by analysts on the mistakes made a both power plants. But Chernobyl, with its graphite reactor designed to produce weapons-grade plutonium as well as electricity - and with no containment building - cannot even be compared with the pressurized water reactor (PWR) at TMI in which the nuclear reaction is stopped by the laws of physics when there is a loss of coolant water. Of course that hasn't stopped the anti-nuclear, anti-technologists from trying. But perhaps the strangest story out of Chernobyl was that the Soviet hierarchy, who had strongly supported the anti-nuclear activists in the United States, were apparently led to believe their own propaganda about radiation dangers.

The accident at Chernobyl provided both good and bad news for anti-nuclear activists. For decades, they had been attempting to come up with some reasonable way that radioactive products from nuclear power plants could be spread over the countryside. The best they'd been able to come up with for U.S. power plants went like this:

(a) A loss-of-coolant accident occurs, and the emergency core cooling systems fail to operate, leading to a meltdown of the fuel assemblies inside the reactor.

(b) Although the nuclear reaction stops when the coolant is lost (the water acts as a moderator to slow down the neutrons so they can be captured and allow the reaction to continue), there is still heat generated from the decay of the "daughters" of the reaction. This is supposedly so intense that it melts through six inches of steel in the reactor vessel, and continues through many feet of high-strength, reinforced concrete.

(c) But it can't stop there. The molten mass must then continue to melt through perhaps a few hundred feet of earth until reaching an aquifer. There the steam generated causes "blow holes" to develop, and the steam carries the radioactive products back to the surface. (Hold on, we're almost there.)

(d) The weather must cooperate with a gentle breeze blowing toward a populated area. (Too much wind and our "cloud" dissipates; under calm conditions, the product settles to the earth at the facility and is taken care of there.)

But the graphite fire at Chernobyl provided an actual way that about 90 million curies of radioactive material could be efficiently spread around the countryside. Yes, the anti-nukes got their dream of a large scale nuclear disaster - which had been becoming more and more difficult to conjure up, given the fact that Three Mile Island showed that the uncovered fuel elements couldn't even melt through the reactor vessel.

But there was bad news for them also. There weren't any bodies on the streets. Aside from those who died on-site, mostly firemen who expired from burns with possibly complications from radiation, there is no sign of a cancer epidemic or any other chronic problems.

Oh, sorry, there's one. The governments involved are going broke (broker?) from the payments they are making to victims. Victims? Didn't I just say there weren't any victims? Yes, but I meant from the radiation. The victims as defined by the governments involved are those who were traumatized by fear of radiation or from the trauma of being evicted from their homes and forced into refugee camps.

Of the radionuclides escaping from the burning graphite reactor at Chernobyl, the one of most concern was cesium 137. A gamma emitter with a half-life of thirty years, this reactor product settled to Earth over much of Europe. Yes sir, it did. But nobody seemed to notice it settled right on top of soil that already contained naturally occurring radioisotopes such as U238, Th232, and K40. In a mistaken spirit of humanitarianism, the Soviet Army evacuated its citizens when the dose from the Earth exceeded 0.5 cGy (500 mrad) per year. [One of the purposes of this book is to show how some authorities - even nuclear officials - have no connection with reality and, indeed, make recommendations and rules that cause great harm. This example shows nationality is no barrier.]

They apparently didn't notice they were already sitting on "highly radioactive" dirt. Figure 5 shows the Chernobyl contamination relative to naturally occurring radiation. Is it any wonder that the "Project Team's Main Recommendations" included the following?

"Measures with less impact on traditional agriculture should be investigated; better public information is needed, particularly on doses and risks, and studies of the acceptability to people of living in contaminated areas." [Emphasis added.]

Table 11 – Chernobyl Cs 137 Burden in Various Areas vs. Natural Background
Location	Range (Bq/m^2)
European Cs 137 contamination outside former USSR	20,000 to 23,000
Cs 137 contamination inside former USSR	40,000 to 5,000,000
Natural radionuclides in soil of above areas	177,000 to 6,500,000
Source: Table 2 in 1997 statement by U.N. Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR) member Zbigniew Jaworowski

Table 11 gives another look at the Cs 137 "fallout" and the natural radionuclides in the top 10 cm (about four inches) of soil in several locations around Chernobyl. Note the range of natural soil radiation. Wouldn't you think that someone would have noticed a variation in the detrimental effects of natural radiation when some areas had thirty-six times the soil radioisotopes of others - if indeed there were any detrimental effects? Would you think one area would be known as Cancervania - because of regular affliction of the populace from radiation, while another area would go by Vitalia, because of superior health derived from a dearth of radiation exposure? But we don't see Europe having such disparities in cancer or other immune disorders on the basis of location, do we?

Well, actually we do: the health resorts are almost always located on springs with a high radon content.