Units of Measurement

There's just no way to avoid the next subject, because, unless you get at least semi-comfortable with certain units of measurement, most of the book is not going to make much sense. We'll start by looking at a little shorthand "trick" used by lazy scientists and engineers.

One curie of radioactivity is a sizable amount. Many times a much smaller unit is needed especially when referring to amounts contained in milk, water supplies and other common products. We could write this unit as 0.000000000001 curie, or 1 x 10^-12 curie or spell it out as one-trillionth of a cure. But that's time consuming and a heck of a lot of trouble when you're writing it fifty times a day. The shorthand version for a trillionth of a curie is generally written as 1 pCi - or even 1 pC - with the "p" standing for pico and pCi referred to as a picocurie.

Similarly, 1 becquerel is a very tiny amount of activity amounting to one radioactive disintegration per second, while we often are interested in millions or billions of decays for a single gram of a radioactive isotope. So instead of a million Bq or 10^6Bq, it is written as MBq, with the M standing for mega.

Table 4 shows prefixes and their corresponding powers of ten. Since I find that use of so many prefixes makes comparisons difficult, I'll be limiting them to as few as possible. However, others will occur in quotations and in literature you might run across.

Table 4 - International Standard (SI) Prefixes
Quintillion = 10^18 = exa = E
Quadrillion = 10^15 = peta = P
Trillion = 10^12 = tera = T
Billion = 10^9 = giga = G
Million = 10^6 = mega = M
Thousand = 10^3 = kilo = k
Hundred = 10^2 = hecto = h
Ten = 10^1 = deka = da
Tenth = 10^-1 = deci = d
Hundredth = 10^-2 = centi = c
Thousandth = 10^-3 = milli = m
Millionth = 10^-6 = micro = Greek letter mu
Billionth = 10^-9 = nano = n
Trillionth = 10^-12 = pico = p
Quadrillionth = 10^-15 = femto = f
Quintillionth = 10^-18 = atto = a

Well, we now know that radiation is caused by an atom suddenly going to pieces, but so far there is no clue as to why these particles are dangerous - if indeed they really are. So let's move on to some quantitative information about the effect of these atomic disintegrations.

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.

The Concept of Half-Life

When an atom of a radioactive isotope decays, two things happen. First, energy is given off from the conversion of mass to energy according to Einstein's famous formula, E = mc2. (The newly formed atom and any emitted particles are always lighter than the original atom - and it is this difference in mass that is converted to energy.) Simultaneously the original element is transmuted to an element with a lower atomic number. The secondary element is called the daughter (or progeny) of the first; it can be either a stable isotope or can itself be radioactive and go through a radioactive decay. Eventually, however, the original element decays to a stable form, and no more energy is given off.

One can deduce from this that a radioactive element has a finite amount of energy to emit. Either it emits this energy very rapidly - in which case the radiation is intense and short-lived - or slowly, which would logically result in a relatively low radiation output. You can't have it both ways - a serious problem in nuclear medicine, as some of the intensely emitting therapeutic isotopes cannot be stored for more than a day.

Half-life is the time in which half the initial number of radioactive atoms decay.

If you stop to think about this phenomena, it's difficult not to have some kind of religious experience. Just think: In a tiny piece of (for example) uranium, one atom may have an internal "clock" that commands it to disintegrate in a second, while an adjacent atom in the same small sample will not decay for 13,500,000,000 years. How do they know then to "do their thing?" It's a problem that science may never solve.

Iodine 131 (used in thyroid diagnosis and ablation) has a half-life of about eight days. Thus if we started with a gram of 131I, after eight days and fifty-seven minutes we would have only a half-gram with the other half having been transmuted to stable tellurium. In another eight days we would have only one-fourth. After eighty days - ten half-lives - there is less than 1/1000 of the original specimen; beyond thirty half-lives, the isotope is considered to have disappeared. With its relatively short half-life, 131I is an intensely radioactive isotope.

Let's look for a moment at one of the most ubiquitous radioactive isotopes around: 238U, the primary uranium isotope making up 99.3% of the element's existence on Earth. [There are approximately 5,000 pounds of uranium in a volume of average soil one square mile by one foot deep.] It has a half-life of 4.5 billion years - approximately the same time estimated for Earth's age. Uranium takes 207,000,000,000 times as long to decay as 131I - with an inverse (longer time, less radiation) emission rate in approximately that proportion. Obviously it is a weak sister when it comes to being radioactive - which is fortunate for us or it would all be gone.

So, just in case I haven't made this clear, let me emphasize the following:

Short half-life = intense emitter, but gone after a short time

Long half-life = low activity and inherently not dangerous

Those who oppose nuclear technology want us to believe "Long half-life = dangerous," but it's just not true.

Understanding the concept of half-life and its relationship to intensity makes one realize that Barry Commoner - when he invokes references to a "nuclear priesthood watching over wastes for thousands of years" - is either terribly ignorant himself or is hoping that we are.

Types of Ionizing Radiation

There is no amount of radiation that is safe. - Anti-nuclear activist Dr. John Gofman

When a radioactive isotope decays, it emits one or more of three forms of ionizing radiation: alpha particles, beta particles or gamma rays. One problem in discussing the effects of radiation is the lack of understanding of these different types and how they affect the body.

Alpha-particles are actually helium nuclei, which can be seen from the periodic table to have an atomic number of two and an atomic weight of four. [In alpha-decay, the radioactive isotope is changed to the isotope of an element with an atomic number two less and an atomic weight four less than the original element.]

In the subatomic world, the emission of an alpha-particle is like shooting shot put with a sling shot: there is a lot of mass involved, but it doesn't travel very far. This particle gives up its considerable energy in one-half to two inches of air. It can't penetrate the skin and, consequently, isn't dangerous when outside the body. Because of its mass, however, it is considered to be quite dangerous when inside the body - particularly when inhaled, where it may remain in the lungs in close proximity to lung tissue cells for extended periods. [It is common knowledge that plutonium, an alpha emitter, is deadly when inhaled. You will see in chapter 16 that common knowledge may be terribly mistaken.] Fortunately, there are some very good data on this subject that we'll look into.

Beta-particles are high energy electrons that can penetrate up to three feet of air, or the first layer of skin cells, and can cause a burn not unlike that from falling asleep in the tanning bed. Beta-burns were a particular problem for workers after the Chernobyl chemical explosion and for technicians involved in some phases of the weapons-testing program in Nevada. With a mass some 1/7344 that of an alpha-particle, its energy is derived from its speed, which can approach 99.8% of the speed of light. Relatively speaking, beta "rays" are not considered much of a threat to human health although there can be complications arising from beta-burns.

A third possible product from the decay of a radionuclide (a fancy word for a radioactive isotope) is gamma radiation, which is considered to be the greatest danger from nuclear decay. It is very similar - in fact in some cases identical - to X-rays and can penetrate several feet of concrete or inches of steel. Like any other electromagnetic radiation, its intensity falls off as the square of the distance from the source. For instance, the exposure at 100 yards is 1/900 that at 10 feet; at a quarter mile, the radiation is reduced by a factor of 17,424 compared with the 10-foot value. [Luckey mentions another form of radiation, delta rays, with low energies and penetrating power, but - because of their abundance and proximity to cell structures - are important in radiobiology. See Radiation Hormesis, page 2.]

There are other forms of radiation that should be mentioned even though they are not the normal products of natural decay. The first is cosmic radiation. It consists of various types of particles, sub-particles, and high-energy photons arriving on Earth from every direction in the cosmos. Cosmic radiation, with both solar and galactic components, can have unbelievably high energies, but, fortunately, it poses no danger, since there is so little of it. For instance, protons that originated in far-off galaxies four billion years ago have energies 100 million times greater than can be created in our most advanced particle accelerators. But only about one of these per year is detected by the Akeno Giant Air Shower Array located just west of Tokyo. [Energies are in the range of 3x1020 electron-volts. For more information see Scientific American, January 1999, page 32.]

These cosmic sources make up less than 10% of the background radiation that the average U.S. citizen receives, yet we still receive about 1,500 cosmic "hits" per second, each of which - because of the penetrating nature of all high-energy particles - collides with about 10,000 of the hundred-trillion cells in the adult human body. That's 15 million "cellular events" per second. If the quotation from Dr. Gofman at the beginning of this chapter is accurate, then we are indeed in a heap of trouble.

It is, by the way, the action of cosmogenic (a fancy scientific word for "from outer space) neutrons on atoms of atmospheric nitrogen that produces the carbon 14 used for radiometric dating. [Carbon 14 dating, developed in 1947 by W.F. Libby, is based on the fact that 14C is continually produced by cosmic rays. When the high-energy ray collides with atoms in the atmosphere, free neutrons are produced which, when absorbed by a nitrogen (14N) atom, cause it to eject a proton, thus converting it to 14C. This radioisotope is taken in by plants and animals while they are alive but remains constant after death. By measuring the 14C in comparison with its decay products, the approximate age of the fossil can be determined.]

Other neutron sources - accelerators, nuclear reactors, and bombs - have great potential for danger, as the lack of charge on the neutron allows it to penetrate some eight to ten feet of packed earth - about 50% farther than gamma radiation. Strictly speaking, neutrons are not ionizing radiation, since they have no electrical charge with which to influence the electrical affinity between protons and electrons. But they can smack into light-weight atoms such as hydrogen and cause them to become ionizing projectiles.

Finally, we have X-rays, which are typically produced when an energetic electron is stopped in its tracks. Just as with gamma rays, these can travel long distances and have the potential for doing harm to the body. During the past several decades, the energy - and therefore potential harm - of diagnostic X-rays has greatly decreased because of the increased sensitivity of the film and the detectors being used. Similarly, therapeutic X-ray equipment is designed to focus energy on smaller areas with less effect on healthy tissue. Sadly, an unwarranted fear of radiation causes many people who could be benefited by the use of X-ray diagnosis and therapy to shun such treatment - and thereby become subjected to unnecessary real dangers.

A similar situation is found in the commercial/industrial environment where X-rays are subjected to such overprotective rules that their primary benefit - being able to detect flaws in welds and other material in order to protect human life - is rendered uneconomical. (No doubt there is also reluctance on the part of workers - who are victims of LNT theory fears - to use the equipment.)

All of the above forms of radiation are termed ionizing radiation because they have the ability to strip electrons from their orbits around nuclei, making the lone electron a negative ion and the "left-behind" proton a positive ion. Table 3 shows the electromagnetic spectrum illustrating the various kinds of ionizing and non-ionizing radiation. For all practical purposes, ultra-violet radiation is not ionizing, and it is the action of ionization that defines the beginning of the X-ray portion of the electro-magnetic spectrum. [While UV radiation cannot ionize an atom, it can dissociate a molecule. For example, cosmic UV can smack into an O2 molecule splitting it into two atomic oxygen atoms - which are very chemically active.]

Table 3 - The Electromagnetic Spectrum
Non-ionizing

• Radio waves (AM) - long wavelength ~100 meters*
• Shortwave radio - low frequence ~1 million Hz
• Television VHF - low energy ~10^-9 electron volts
• Television UHF
• Radar
• Microwaves (including ovens)
• Infrared (heat) radiation
• Red-orange light
• Green-blue light
• Ultraviolet A
• Ultraviolet B
• Ultraviolet C

Ionizing

• Vacuum ultraviolet (absorbed by short path through air)
• Low energy X-rays
• Deep therapy X-rays - short wavelenght ~10^-14 meters
• Gamma rays (overlaps with X-rays) - high frequency ~10^22 Hz
• Cosmic photons - high energy ~100 million electron volts

* The ~ symbol indicates an approximate measure.

Radioactive Isotopes

About three-fourths of the elements have two or more stable isotopes and many have radioactive (unstable) ones, some of which can be useful, and others of which can be dangerous if we come into contact with them. A few of the more common radioactive isotopes and beneficial uses are noted in Table 2.

****
Table 2 - Some Common Radioactive Isotopes
3H = Tritium = Luminous watch dials
14C = Carbon 14 = Radioactive dating
60Co = Cobalt 60 = Food irradiation
40K = Potassium 40 = Biological tracer
99Tc = Technetium 99 = Medical diagnosis
131I = Iodine 131 = Thyroid-function diagnosis and treatment
238Pu = Plutonium 238 = Spacecraft power supplies, pacemakers
241Am = Americium 241 = Smoke alarms
****

All of the elements heavier than lead in the periodic table have multiple isotopes, and all are naturally radioactive; most of them decay into one of the stable lead isotopes. Uranium and thorium have the greatest number of isotopes - uranium with 22 isotopes and thorium with 28 - though most of these are not naturally occurring. As a rule of thumb, elements are happiest when they have about the same number of protons and neutrons. When there is a sizable difference, they tend to decay until there isn't.

So, what about this radioactive business? How does it work? How dangerous is it? And for how long?

A very interesting subject: Don't miss the next chapter.

Isotopes of Hydrogen

Hydrogen offers a simple example of isotopes. Figure 4 shows three forms of the element: The first is just regular hydrogen, designated at H or 1H, which has one proton and no neutrons. [It has a name, protium, but it's only used by real physics nerds or trivia freaks.]

The second form, deuterium or 2H, is known as "heavy hydrogen." It has the obligatory single hydrogen proton, but also has a neutron in its nucleus. [Deuterium is the form of hydrogen that makes "heavy water," the substance on which many World War II spy novels are based. These stories are based on a factual February 1943 raid on the heavy water concentration plant operated by the Nazis in Vemork, Norway. While an earlier attempt resulted in disaster - all thirty-four commandos were either killed in glider crashes or executed by the Germans - the second raid was a textbook example of guerrilla warfare and bravery. Disabling the Vemork plant was a major setback for the Axis A-bomb program.]

Finally, the form of hydrogen known as tritium, or 3H, is seen to have two neutrons.

All three forms are known as isotopes with 1H making up 99.98% of the total hydrogen that we know about - and presumably in the universe. Both "regular" hydrogen and deuterium are stable isotopes, meaning that they don't change over time.

But tritium is anther story: it is an unstable isotope that will eventually decay or disintegrate into stable 1H. [All tritium undergoes "beta-decay" in which the neutron changes into a proton and an electron - a feat of amazing atomic legerdemain.] It is this process - where atoms go to pieces - that we normally call radioactivity.

Introduction to Remedial Nuclear Physics

Atom: from the Greek atomos meaning indivisible

Most of us are familiar with the representation of the atom shown in Figure 3, proposed by Niels Bohr in 1913: a nucleus orbited by electrons. While there have been many major additions to our knowledge about the atom over the past hundred years, the Bohr model still provides a convenient way to look at the atom - even though it was originally missing one major component (the neutron), which we'll get to in a moment.

During the early twentieth century, a number of physical chemists worked on the relationships between elements. Hydrogen was, by then, known to be the lightest of the elements and uranium thought to be the heaviest. In 1907, J.J. Thompson constructed an apparatus to measure the relative weights of the elements - and ran into a problem. The weights of the elements did not correspond to the integers used to classify their position on the table of elements. Moreover, he found some atoms that seemed to have two (or more) different weights according to his "mass spectrometer." Neon, for instance, was found to have two weights - 20 and 22 - when compared with the weight of a hydrogen atom.

In 1932, spurred on by his mentor, Ernest Rutherford, James Chadwick of Cambridge University discovered the existence of the neutron, an atomic particle with the same weight as the proton, but without an electrical charge. It soon became clear that, while elements were identified (and reacted chemically) by their number of protons, many had differing numbers of neutrons. These variations became known as isotopes. [Actually the word isotope had been coined by Nobel laureate Frederick Soddy almost twenty years earlier; he just didn't know why they existed until the discovery of the neutron.]

It is important to note that the atomic number of an element is equal to the number of protons in the nucleus, while the atomic weight is the sum of the protons and neutrons.

Because isotopes have different numbers of neutrons, most atomic weight figures in the periodic table are not integers, but a weighted average of the atomic weights of all the isotopes of that element. We'll be using two conventions to denote the atomic weight of an isotope. For example, a carbon atom with eight neutrons (and its mandatory six protons, if it is to be carbon) will be written simply as carbon 14 or, alternatively, with the atomic weight superscript written before the elemental symbol, as in "14C." (You may find in other literature that the superscript appears after the element symbol.)

* * *

Caption of Figure 3: Representation of Carbon 12 Atom

The carbon atom has 6 protons and 6 electrons giving it an atomic number of 6. Most carbon atoms have 6 neutrons which, when added to the protons, give it an average atomic weight of about 12.

If the atom were drawn to scale with the orbits (or fields) of the electrons being the size of an average bedroom, the electrons would be microscopic, while the nucleus would be about the size of a pin head. It is only in the tiny nucleus that atomic phenomena (such as radioactivity) occur.

On the other hand, chemical properties of an element are related to its atomic number (the number of protons) - although it is actually the electrically counteracting electrons that share orbits (or fields) with other elements to make chemical compounds.

Before Going on to Radiation ...

Let's look at some common examples of where we see hormesis in humans.

• Vitamins and trace minerals clearly show the difference a dose makes. Arsenic and selenium were considered (and are) deadly poisons; but they have been found to be necessary nutrients.
• Some sunlight is necessary for production of vitamin D in the body, but too much leads to localized cancers, and in extreme cases, death.
• Some noises (such as waves) can be soothing and healthful, while long exposure to loud noises can cause mental confusion and loss of hearing function.
• Most athletes are well aware of "no pain, no gain"; too much pain, however, equals ruptured muscles, torn ligaments, and broken bones.
• Lack of stress in one's life (e.g., a deadline to complete a project) tends to make an individual lethargic, while too much stress can cause permanent physical and mental harm.

We'll be going on shortly to the specifics of radiation hormesis, but first, classes on the basics of ionizing radiation are getting underway in the next chapter.

Dose-Response Theories

While we're looking at the hormesis curve, we might as well take a look at the other theories of dose-response in comparison, as shown in Figure 2. The LNT is linear, as we would expect from its name, and indicates that all exposure is cumulatively dangerous. We often see this dose-response relationship for high levels of toxins such as lead. [It wouldn't surprise me if lead had some sort of a threshold also, but it is generally considered to have a cumulatively harmful effect.]

The threshold plot shows no effect from the agent at low doses; but at some threshold value of dose, the health effect becomes negative. We see this response to such substances as caffeine. (Even here we would likely get arguments that in small doses caffeine has beneficial properties.) When one starts searching for examples of threshold effects, the much more prevalent hormetic examples keep getting in the way.

Hormesis - A Little Deeper

The primary tenet of hormesis is contained in a cardinal rule of pharmacology: The poison is in the dose. [Often stated as the dose makes the poison.]

Figure 1 gives a graphical representation of this postulate. Point A on the curve represents a "normal" amount of something - let's use, for example, Vitamin A - which results in what we might call "normal healthfulness." Less than this dose (the dashed line) will move us up into the unhealthy zone, making us prone to deficiency diseases such as night blindness. As we take more of the supplement, there is - assuming the vitamin companies aren't lying to us - an increase of health benefit ... until we reach point B.

At this inflection point, a dramatic change occurs: Up to this point, the more of the vitamin, the healthier; but from here on, the more we take, the less healthy, since we have passed the optimum dose. If we continue to take more, we reach a point at which the dose provides us the same level of health we would have had if we had not taken any additional Vitamin A: the Zero Equivalent Point (ZEP). From here on out, thought, the news gets worse: More makes us sick; still more kills us.

Hold on now. If we shift our definitions just a little bit, we can call poisons such as selenium "necessities" - since they are necessary for optimum health - and necessities such as salt "poisons." It is merely a matter of degree, is it not? Salt fits the same curve as Vitamin A and arsenic. Too little salt, unhealthiness (or possible death); too much salt, unhealthiness (and certain death). It's as if: The dose make the poison! Or maybe:

All things are poison; nothing is poison.

This illustrates one of the problems with explaining - and understanding - hormesis: It is counter-intuitive. We naturally tend to think in terms of less-poison-good, more-poison bad. Just-a-tiny-bit-of-poison-good, doesn't figure in.

Adding a bit to our confusion is the shape of the hormesis curve. Our "vitamin example" is oriented with "unhealthiness" in the upward, or positive, direction. This is done for compatibility with the convention for carcinogen-response curves. As we shall see, many other plots have the beneficial effect in the "up" direction.

Hormetins

While we will be concerned with hormesis arising from exposure to ionizing radiation, this is only one area where the phenomenon is exhibited. [Luckey's first book, Hormesis with Ionizing Radiation, was initially a survey of various hormetic agents and their effects. When he came to ionizing radiation, there was so much material that his wife convinced him to write the book specifically on that topic. (As is usual in marriage, she had the idea, but he took the credit!)]

Other physical "hormetins" include gravity, pressure, sound, heat, motion, time, magnetism, light, and certain other frequencies of electromagnetic radiation. Each of these - in low amounts - can stimulate the vitality of living organisms but causes harm or death to the organism in much higher dosages. That ionizing radiation does likewise is not the peculiarity; it would be much more unusual if it didn't.

Among the more important chemical hormetic agents are the metal ions (e.g., germanium, mercury, lead, tin and cadmium), oxygen, fluorine, arsenic, and selenium. While our protectors at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) would croak if they could detect some of these elements in any quantity whatsoever, they (the trace elements, not the EPA) are necessary for our optimum health and vitality.

Organic chemical hormetins include antibiotics, insecticides, vitamins, certain nutrients, some food additives, many drugs, and free radicals. It should be noted that many hormetic effects are anything but subtle. When crickets were fed 1/100 the fatal dose of the insecticide chlordane, they grew to be twice (!) as large as their unpoisoned cohorts. [Insecticide Hormoligosis, J. Economic Entomology, February 1968. This article, along with Hormoligosis in Pharmacology, J. Am. Medical Assoc., 173: 1960, appear to be part of Luckey's preparation for recognizing effects of radiation hormesis.]

I must tread lightly when it comes to claims of biologic initiators of hormesis - since I have only the vaguest idea of what they are, and virtually no idea of how they act to stimulate the organism. They, however, are known (by other people) to include hormones (naturally,), cytokines, enzyme cofactors, cell maturation compounds, and nerve transmission compounds. These are also known as intra-organismic agents. But wait, there's more...

There are also inter-organismic hormetins, such as pheromones, which are even more confusing - at least to me. And these lead us to the most puzzling agents of all: socio-psychologic factors ... including stress, love, sex, hate, responses to crowding, and fear. One can begin to see why Dr. Luckey's wife advised him to stick to something simple, like hormesis from ionizing radiation.

Hormesis - Grasping the Concept

The dose makes the poison. - Tenet of Pharmacology

Hormesis derives from the Greek hormo, meaning "I excite," from which we also get the word hormone. While of classic origin, hormesis has only recently found its way into many dictionaries and seems to have had its first modern usage by C.M. Southam and J. Erlich in a 1943 study of fungi reported in an unpronounceable scientific journal. [OK, you try it: Phytopathology. The full citation is "Effects of extract of western red cedar heartwood on certain wood decaying fungi in culture," Vol. 33, p. 517, 1943.] The word refers to a phenomenon stated by the "Arndt-Schulz" Law:

Small doses of poison are stimulatory.

Rudolf Arndt (a psychiatrist) and Hugo Schulz (a pharmacologist) were nineteenth-century German researchers who diluted poisons to the point that they were not only no longer poisonous, but had a positive effect on the growth and reproductive rates of yeast. For example, when mercury chloride is diluted by a factor of 700,000, it becomes a stimulant for bacterial growth instead of an extremely potent germicide. Arsenious acid, poisonous to bacteria in normal concentrations, showed a positive effect when diluted by 40,000 times its volume. The Arndt-Schulz team demonstrated that their principle was - or at least appears to be - universal, with regard to the dilution of inorganic toxins.

While Arndt-Schulz seem to be the first to quantify the "low-dose" effect of chemical poisons, the phenomenon had been described earlier by Bernard in Repair Strengthens Tissue (1867), by Hahnemann in Homeopathic Medicine (1810), and even earlier by a Swiss physician and chemist, Philippus Aureolus Paracelsus, in The Dose is Everything (1520). [His real name was Thophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim. (Somehow I think I could have come up with an easier no de plume.) Aside from his work in chemistry, he is credited with being the first to point out the relation between goiter in the parent and cretinism in the child.]

A relatively modern work on the subject, The General Adaptive Syndrome, was written by Nobel Laureate Hans Seyle in 1944. While he identified many agents that increased the resistance of the host to disease, his primary emphasis was on the effects of stress - both the excessive mind-destroying stress of battle and his observation that little is accomplished by humans unless there is some minimal amount of stress-stimulation in their lives. Seyle's contention was that minute doses of the hormetin (the hormetic or stimulatory agent) start and alarm reaction, small doses induce the stage of resistance, and still larger doses bring about a stage of exhaustion in which the organism is no longer able to cope with the stressing agent. X-rays were one of the stress agents he often mentioned. [In describing his experiments, Seyle remarked, "I could find no noxious agent that did not elicit the syndrome" - meaning, of course, the "reverse effect."]

Walter A. Heiby shows numerous examples of low-dose stimulation - and the problem of over-stimulation - in his 1988 book, The Reverse Effect: How Vitamins and Minerals Promote Health and CAUSE Disease. [MediScience Publishers, Dearfield, Ill., 1988. Available for $59.50 from MediScience Publishers, Box 256A, Dearfield, IL 60015.] As you may have already deduced, his term for hormesis is "the reverse effect," expressing the change in response due to different levels of the same stimulant.

Prior to Southam and Erlich's use of the word hormesis in 1943 and Luckey's subsequent popularization of the term in his 1980 and 1991 books, another even worse tongue-torturer was used to characterize the phenomena: hormoligosis - which better defines the action of a small dose from the Greek olig meaning small or few, as in oligarchy.

A Slippery Slope

When we read the statistics on deaths involving automobile accidents, we are given the actual count of deaths as compiled by various law enforcement agencies. But when the anti-nuclear zealots tell us about the number of people who died as a result of radiation from exposure to, say, radon, they don't have a single victim they can point to with any degree of certainty. Their "statistical deaths" come from an extrapolation based on the Linear No-Threshold (LNT) theory. Just as with our falling analogy, they correctly note that very high exposures, like falling from very tall buildings, increase the likelihood of death (by cancer, in the case of radiation). Their argument falls apart when they try to extend, or extrapolate, the high-dose exposure to much lower exposures.

For a moment let's jump to an example detailed in a later chapter. Studies of the Japanese indicated that exposure to the equivalent of 100 SXR units (20 rem, if you're ahead of me) in a short time would double the number of leukemia deaths in a population of one million people, from the expected fifty deaths to one-hundred. The LNT extrapolation would predict one-tenth the increase in deaths (in this case, five) if the population were exposed to one-tenth that additional exposure (in this case, 10 SXR units).

Could they point to any bodies? No, they only have their theoretical corpses based on the LNT extrapolation. But in this case, there is actual data that completely contradict the LNT theory's prediction. Not only did the death rate not increase; it actually decreased - by an astounding 40%! To summarize:
Fifty deaths expected in unexposed population
Fifty-five deaths predicted by LNT extrapolation
Only thirty deaths occurred, according to actual data

* * *

Therein lies the crux of the hormesis/LNT controversy: Those who advocate the Linear No-Threshold theory base their belief on the extrapolation of high-level exposure responses down to low levels. But when low-level data are available, they almost always show a bio-positive - or stimulatory - response. It is this response, called hormesis, that we will be discussing in the next chapter.

The Radiation Death Toll

The total number of people known (or suspected by me) to have been killed directly by exposure to radiation is:

• One fisherman killed by bomb-test fallout
• Twenty-two killed in criticality accidents
• Four killed in Goia, Brazil
• Thirty-one murdered by the Soviets (yes, I do have a grudge)

A total of fifty-eight have died, or may have died, from direct exposure to radiation in about the same number of years with a world average population of around 4 billion. Five of these were members of the "general public." I may have missed a few, but the point is that, statistically, death from direct exposure to radiation is about as likely as death from the bite of a rabid cow.

What if we were to confront an anti-nuclear activist from the grossly misnamed "Union of Concerned Scientists" or the Sierra Club with this statistic? Would they deny it? Oh, maybe they would say that a fisherman on another boat at another time was a fallout victim, but in general this would not be of any concern to them. What would be important to them is the number of deaths that occurred "that we don't know about but are scientifically calculated."

Unclean!

On September 13, 1987, two thieves entered an abandoned clinic in Goiania, State of Goia, Brazil, and dismantled a machine used for radiation therapy. From it they took a stainless steel cylinder, which they broke apart with a sledge hammer an then sawed open a one-cubic-ince capsule filled with a glittering powder - cesium 137... 1,250 curies of it. Children in the junkyard began to play with it, and the workers took some home with them. Two weeks later, four people died, one was to have his arm amputated, and several skin grafting operations were required for those having had intimate contact with the highly radioactive isotope.

Four deaths from fire, traffic or a trench collapsing might have been totally overlooked by the news. But death by radiation is our modern-day leprosy. Fear of radioactive contamination caused the wholesale value of the entire agricultural production of the state to fall by 50%. Vacationers, afraid of the "invisible killer," cancelled 40% of the hotel rooms booked for the tourist season; conventions were moved to other states or called off. Hotels in other parts of the country refused to register Goians, while airline pilots and taxi drivers denied them transportation. Cars with Goiania license plates were stoned.

Of the 125,000 individuals who insisted on a Geiger scan, 8.3% showed signs of acute stress (extreme anxiety, rashes, vomiting, diarrhea) from fear - yet not one was found contaminated. The funeral of the first victim had to be delayed while police stopped the stoning and removed barricades at the cemetery. Where did this paralyzing fear of radiation come from? I would suspect that the Goian newspapers printed stories similar to those noted in Bernard Cohen's table of New York Times stories, resulting in similar attitudes toward the dangers of radiation.

Just How Dangerous is Radiation?

In March 1954, sailors onboard the Lucky Dragon were exposed to fallout from a hydrogen bomb test conducted on Bikini atoll. While his two compatriots suffered from radiation sickness, one sailor died the following September. I was a teenager at this time, and yet I can remember a huge amount of news regarding the incident. I suspect it shaped my fear of radiation.

In July 2000, a joint U.S.-Russian Federation report gave as sixty the total number of "criticality" accidents that had occurred in the United States, Russia, France, the United Kingdom, Canada, Argentina and Japan. These accidents occur when too much "fissionable" material comes together for whatever reason and produces for a few moments the same conditions as would be found inside a nuclear reactor. It doesn't cause a "nuclear explosion" but a flash of blue light and a large spike of heat energy. Mr. Harry Daghlian has the unenviable distinction of being the first criticality accident victim in August 1945, during the Manhattan Project. Since then, there have been twenty-one similar deaths, with seven having occurred in the United States.

The most recent were in 1999 when an accident at a Japanese enrichment facility killed two workers. A third worker survived after experiencing severe radiation sickness. I saved the newspaper with that story (prior to the deaths) with the headline "Japanese contain radioactive gas leak" emblazoned across five of six columns at the top of the front page. On the same page there was a notice "Deadly Quake Strikes Mexico/Page 7A." Oh well, I guess earthquake deaths just aren't as fashionable.

Yes, sadly some individuals have died from exposure to radiation. But it is surprising how few, and since there are so few we can account for all or nearly all of them. (This obviously doesn't count the unfortunates who were victims at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, almost all of whom died from blast and heat, but would very likely have died of radiation sickness had they survived the primary causes.)

It is unclear what killed the thirty-one firemen and rescue workers at the Chernobyl disaster. The graphite reactor was in flames (not possible in U.S. power reactors) and was convecting extremely radioactive materials from the core. The probably cause of the firemen's death was heat, since death by radiation generally takes several days to do its work on internal organs. But they, as in the case of the Japanese bomb victims, would very likely have died from radiation.

[I cannot allow Chernobyl to be considered in the same light as other nuclear power facilities. It was built by a Communist government with no concern for the safety of its citizens - as evidenced by the lack of a containment structure to prevent what did happen from happening - and constructed of graphite, rather than water, as a moderator in order that it could be used to produce bomb-grade plutonium. In my opinion, the firemen were murdered by a lack of responsibility on the part of the Soviet government.]

A "Media Created" Fear?

Dr. Bernard Cohen - who was group leader for cyclotron research at Oak Ridge about the same time I was researching my toes in the shoe store X-ray machine - had noticed a disparity between the deaths and injuries from radioactivity accidents and the media's concern over this danger. So, like the researcher he is, he obtained the number of entries in the New York Times Information Bank for the years 1974-1978 for various types of accidents and the death toll resulting from them. [Bernard Cohen, The Nuclear Energy Option, Plenum Press, New York, 1990, pp. 58-59.] (This avoided the Three Mile Island "disaster," which would have made the situation look much more ridiculous than it already does.) His data looked like Table 1.

Table 1: News Stories on Deaths from Various Causes [Source: New York Times Information Bank, 1974-1978.]

	News Stories	Deaths per Year	In Previous Decade
Auto accidents	120	50,000	500,000
Industrial accidents	50	12,000	120,000
Asphyxiation accidents	20	4,500	45,000
Radiation accidents	200	0	0

This table reminded me of two news stories I read less than a month apart some years ago, both of which reported more than twenty deaths in two separate geothermal well accidents in South America. Do you remember them? Or the dozens killed in refinery accidents and pipe line accidents? How about the 100 people that are killed each year from being hit by trains carrying coal for power generation? I guess those people are not as important as the people who didn't lose their lives in nuclear accidents.

Radiation: Fear Versus Reality

Some observers believe there will be a million people with direct and backup assignments to guard the nuclear industry by the year 2000. - Ralph Nader, 1975

Most people believe that radiation - the kind that comes from nuclear power plants - is not only dangerous, but cumulatively so. A little now, a bit more later - it all adds up with life-threatening consequences. We have been convinced over many years that all radiation has the ability to cause cancer, and the more we get of it, the more likely we are to develop the disease. There is also a prevalent idea that radiation causes mutations in humans because of its damage to our DNA. (This will also be shown to be false, even when the radiation levels are very high, as in the Japanese cities bombed at the end of World War II.)

So how did we come to "know" these things? Where did we get our fear of radiation? That's an interesting question.

It's not one of those innate fears like the fear of heights or growling animals. How could we be born with a fear of something we can't feel, smell, see or otherwise sense?

It's not something your parents taught you. Did your mother ever say, "Darling, be sure to look both ways when you cross the street, and watch out for gamma rays"?

I suggest that our fear of radiation comes from two sources. First is its invisibility and lack of any kind of "early warning" altering us to a dangerous presence. If gamma radiation were seen as purple flashing lights, we could see its presence and avoid it, much as many of us must do to prevent being sunburned. In this way radiation is similar to the plague and other scary germ-borne diseases: We tend to fear any kind of invisible killer - as well we should. Being rational beings, however, we don't stay inside under oxygen tents because the Ebola virus is active in Africa or because a Nile virus-bearing mosquito might be in the neighborhood. We make a "risk versus benefit" analysis in order to live a normal life, and we save our irrationality for radiation.

The second reason is an almost total lack of knowledge of radiation, how it is measured, and its effects at various levels. The common knowledge is that all radiation is dangerous, period. Most science textbooks don't add much, if anything, to this dearth of knowledge. Typically there will be a picture of a nuclear plant with a caption reading: "Concrete and steel walls four to five feet thick protect workers from deadly radiation." If we were to see a newspaper article stating that "Mrs. Jones is wearing a special protective suit to ward off the poison darts," we would rush to the next paragraph to find out what kind of darts? How many? How poisonous? Where are they coming from? But as regards nuclear "darts," we just nod our heads and think, "Well, all radiation is dangerous."

Lois, Call Clark!

All of this makes one continue to wonder: where are the journalists and the investigative reporters? They may not have taken biology and physics in college, but are they unable to grasp the ramifications of changing the way radiation is viewed by major scientific organizations? Or do they think that their "environmentalist" buddies will get upset if they are involved in jerking a major plank out of the platform of those who want us to fear and distrust all technology? (What would the anti-nukes do if they couldn't scare Maude and Harry with stories of radioactive clouds and plutonium mega-deaths?)

Whatever the reason, a major discovery - that is inspiring a worldwide movement - has been totally ignored by the popular media. How important is the story? Myron Pollycove, M.D., Visiting Medical Fellow on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, calls hormesis "the issue of the decade." As you will see, the evidence is incontrovertible. It is no challenged. It is ignored for whatever reason: ignorance, ideology, or indolence.

We have touched on what the taxpayers might save if the government policymakers were to understand that low-level radiation is harmless; but there are positive effects that those who have studied hormesis believe are even more compelling.

The potential benefits to health and vitality are phenomenal. As we shall see, a random dosage of radiation reduced cancer mortality by forty percent in 15,000 nuclear workers, compared with their fellow workers who were not exposed. While cancer is the disease commonly associated with radiation - and consequently there are more data in this area of study - there was also a reduction of 26% in deaths from all causes in 28,542 exposed nuclear shipyard workers when weighed against co-workers with only normal background exposures. The latter investigation, which we will look at in some detail in chapter 19, indicates that there is a beneficial effect to the entire immune system, which, if properly understood and maximized, could lead to the reduction of infectious diseases and possibly prevention of immune-system dysfunctions.

Since the 1950s, uses of nuclear technology outside of medicine and industrial instrumentation have been stifled because of the fear of radiation. (Smoke detectors are about the only consumer good that have escaped demonization by anti-nuclear activists because, in my opinion, they realized they could get annihilated by risk statistics on this one.) [I recently found that Ralph Nader proved me wrong on this. He actually came out against smoke detectors because of the tiny speck of americium that has saved thousands of "real lives."]

What about community or even residential power plants taking advantage of the technology advances that have occurred over the past forty years? What about nuclear vehicles that would be fueled at the factory for twenty years?

The science for many nuclear miracles is either already available or within reach of technological development. But the pervasive fear of low levels of radiation keeps these advances from being used for the benefit of humanity.

For more than thirty years, the "energy crisis" has been a convenient excuse for those who want more government control over energy resources, but the "crisis" is phony as a three-dollar bill. There is, and has been, readily available energy which is denied us solely because of the manufactured fear of low-level radiation.

This resource is not the promise of fusion, which seems to get further away every year, but the available-with-today's-technology breeder reactors that turn "wastes" into incredibly valuable fuel. Where, pray tell, do the advocates of environmentally pristine electric-powered vehicles think they are going to get the electricity to run those cute little things? A recent newspaper article warns that it would take at least a dozen full-scale (1,000 megawatt) power plants to replace the energy from gasoline and diesel engines in the transportation industry for the city of Los Angeles alone.

Available fuel from power plant "wastes" (which still have more than 95% of their original energy in a readily available form) and thousands of tons of "depleted" uranium currently choking our enrichment facilities could power the United States for many decades using available breeder reactor technology. Other uranium resources could fuel our country for centuries. But, as Edward Teller points out, the "breeding" of thorium - a source as common as dirt (actually it is dirt) - into a usable fuel (Uranium 233) could easily provide energy for 100,000 years.

[Each square mile of the earth's surface averages 2.5 tons of thorium in the first food of depth.]

* * *

Radiation hormesis - just as in the case of nuclear power - will be opposed by radical "environmentalist" leaders who oppose all technological progress and the transfer of its benefits to the multitudes, whom they consider to be unwelcome intrusions on the "Green" concept of nature. But both hormesis therapy and nuclear energy will ultimately become commonplace in our world, because they are based on scientific truths that the doomsayers and propagandists can mask only for so long. The question is: "How much unnecessary human misery will occur before truth and reason prevail?"

So let's take a look at how we developed this fear of radiation.

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).]