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?

Before You Spend $4,000 to Shorten Your Life

The observed lung cancer rates of females in high residential radon areas in the former uranium mining areas in Southern Saxony are substantially lower than the population average of East Germany. - Professor Klaus Becker, German Standards Institute

Bernard Cohen, doctor of science and professor emeritus at Pittsburgh University, is a liberal Democrat. [He mentions this in his terrific book, The Nuclear Energy Option, Plenum Press, New York, 1990, p. 269.] I probably would disagree with everything he believes in politically. But Dr. Cohen is also a scientist. He is convinced that the way mankind can continue to raise itself up from our back-breaking labor and mud huts is through increasing our knowledge about the world we live in. And most important, he is convinced this knowledge is objective. We can find truth. It is verifiable. It can stand on its own.

In by far the largest "ecological" study of low-level radiation ever made, Professor Cohen was attempting to refine the Linear No-Threshold theory. But, in his words, "It came as a great shock to me that my data ran contrary to the LNT, and I didn't fully believe it until about 1993 - when I shut off the $1,200 radon reduction system in my home to save electricity." But he was using the scientific method, which is very clear about hypotheses that have been shown to be false: they are stuffed immediately into the trash can.

Under the LNT theory, cancer rate increases with increasing doses of radiation - even at very low exposures. If you are to plot response (cancer) versus dose, you should have a straight line with a positive slope according to this theory that has been sanctified by the regulators and rule writers. Using data from the American Academy of Sciences' Biological Effects of Ionizing Radiation committee (BEIR), the slope of this line should be an increased cancer risk of 4% per gray for chronic radiation and 8% per gray for acute exposure. By knowing the "whole body" dose given by various radon concentrations, this slope can also be expressed in terms of lung cancer mortality (since that is the only place in the body where significant radon progeny reside) per picocurie per liter of air.The value of this prediction for men, without any consideration of smoking, is 4.5 deaths per 10,000 men per year for each pCi/l increase in airborne radon. Remember this figure.

Cohen's initial study took five years, cost millions of dollars, and accumulated data from homes in 1,729 counties, comprising about 90% of the U.S. population. [Because so many retirees move to California, Florida and Arizona, these data were deleted, reducing the number of counties to 1,601. This deletion, incidentally, had an insignificant effect on the results.] It considered radon data from the EPA, state agencies, and 272,000 measurements made by the University of Pittsburgh. Census data on smoking, rural-urban balance, occupations, education, housing, medical care - a total of fifty-four socioeconomic "confounding" factors (alone and in combinations with each other) were analyzed to determine if and how they affected the lung cancer rate.

The study found - as you may now suspect - a discrepancy between the LNT's prediction of lung cancer and the actual data. This has since been known as "our discrepancy," and Cohen has invited his colleagues to try to find a confounder that would explain it. He notes that unless someone can come up with a reason to put aside "our discrepancy," the LNT must be considered a false and unacceptable theory and discarded as a source for use in regulatory authority. With more than 500 of the suspected confounders and combinations thereof already eliminated, it does not look good for the LNT advocates - most of whom do not address "our discrepancy" but prefer to snub Dr. Cohen as a mere physicist, and not an epidemiologist. (Critics overlook that G.A. Colditz is a world-class epidemiologist and was co-author with Cohen on "Tests of the linear-no-threshold theory for lung cancer induced by exposure to radon" in Environmental Research, 64, 1994.)

Note and source for Figure 33: Effect of Residential Radon Levels on Lung Cancer - Each data point represents an average of eighty-nine U.S. counties. Source: Cohen, B.L. Test of the linear-no-threshold theory of radiation carcinogenesis for inhaled radon decay products. Health Physics, 68, 157, 1995.

Figure 33 is typical of the curves plotted from the University of Pittsburgh data and is one of four similar figures in the report - this one is for males without smoking's begin taken into account. The others are for males with smoking taken into consideration, and similar data on females both considering and not considering smoking. [These are available from his paper, Test of the Linear-No-Threshold Theory of Radiation Carcinogenesis for Inhaled Radon Decay Products," Health Physics, February 1995. All curves give a similar negative correlation between radon and cancer through 6 pCi/l.]

I have deleted the error bars and the "first and third quartile" curves because I don't think they'd mean much to the average reader. Cohen also had indicators of the numbers of counties for each data point on his curves ranging from 4 to 216 with an average of 88.9. These are counties, bear in mind, not individuals.

Remember the increase by 4.5 deaths per pCi/l predicted by the LNT? That is shown graphically by the dashed line on Figure 33. The solid line with a negative slope is the best fit of the collected data. It shows a minus 4.7 deaths per pCi/l. If some hypothetical man (recall our graph is of male data) had a choice between being exposed to, say, 6 pCi of radon in his house, or being exposed to none, what is the significance of this choice? By sealing his house and spending some $3,000 to $4,000 for the government-recommended heat exchangers, he could increase his risk of lung cancer by 7.5%.

Perhaps that doesn't sound like much to you (especially if we're not talking about your lungs), but it is a huge increase in risk compared even with the LNTer's worst chortlings. You may recall the BEIR statistic for chronic radiation exposure predicts an increase in risk of cancer mortality of 8% for exposure to 2 gray, which is 200 cGy or 200,000 mrem. This is far above the risk experienced by all but a small fraction of A-bomb survivors! So if you missed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, just hang in there with the EPA recommendation on radon. They'll help you reach that goal of a significant increase in cancer risk!

I like the way Jay Lehr summed up Cohen's results in an article, "Good News About Radon: The Linear Nonthreshold Model is Wrong":

"Thus, in spite of extensive efforts to find a flaw in the obvious results indicated by the observed data, no potential explanation for the discrepancy between theory and reality could be found. It therefore appears that the linear no-threshold theory for carcinogenesis from inhaled radon decay products is invalid. This is indeed good news."

It would have been even better news if more people knew about it.

[Dr. Lehr is a senior scientist with Environmental Education Enterprises, a provider of high-technology short courses for environmental professionals.]

Battling the Bureaucracy

I'd suggest that the only way to change country A's regulators would be for the citizens of A to understand the evidence and know the evidence proves the regulators are wrong; that their regulations are costing lives, not saving them; that the tax money of the citizens is being wasted on nonsensical programs to reduce radiation levels that are already insignificant; and that people and industries are being denied the benefits of nuclear technology because bureaucrats feel a responsibility to "enforce official policy" rather than question, observe and reason.

So, I submit, it is up to us to look at the evidence - of which the following is just a small fraction - and then, with reason and eloquence, persuade our political leaders to lead. Failing that, we should work to throw the blackguards out, and help elect those who will listen to reason - and not to the anti-technologists who would return us to the days of manure, a boring subsistence, and back-breaking labor.

In Luckey's Radiation Hormesis, the source of much of the evidence to be offered in the upcoming chapters, the subject matter was arranged in terms of parameters that were being observed, e.g., fertility, growth rate, immunity, mortality, cancer risk, life span. Subjects of the studies ranged from bacteria to fish eggs, to mice, to beagles, to humans - with each interspersed within the observed parameters. The information presented is technical, quite detailed, and frankly - because I tend to faint when reading italicized Latin words of more than two syllables - can be a bit difficult to understand. But that's what we engineers were put on Earth for: to attempt conversion of scientists' ideas into something normal people can fathom.

For this reason I've concentrated on, and am limiting the data to, studies on mice and men. Mice, because the experiments are with statistically significant numbers of specimens bred to minimize genetic differences - and men (women, too) because of a hunch that readers will be interested in that particular species. Additional details on these and related subjects can be found on the Radiation, Science and Health website at http://cnts.wip.edu/rsh.

Upcoming chapters have the following content:

• Chapter 14: Data from mice experiments concerning responses, such as longevity and various cancer mortalities, to a wide range of exposures
• Chapter 15: Observations and data from A-bomb survivors
• Chapter 16: Radiation effects on workers in nuclear power plants and nuclear-weapons facilities
• Chapter 17: Effects of different levels of background radiation on residents in different geographical areas
• Chapter 18: Some hormetic effects seen in medical treatment statistics
• Chapter 19: A huge study of nuclear-shipyard workers by Johns Hopkins University
• Chapter 20: An even bigger study by Bernard Cohen of the effects of residential radon in the United States. You may have been a participant in the study, as it covered 90% of U.S. residents in more than 1,700 counties.

Hopefully, one or more of these topics will be helpful in your evaluation of the experimental basis of hormesis - or, as United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR) puts it - "the adaptive response to radiation in cells and organisms."

Bane of the EPA

In 1990, the first of Bernard Cohen's studies was published showing that higher household radon levels were associated with lower lung cancer rates. The wealth of evidence rocked the scientific community, most of whom had never bothered to question the Linear-No-Threshold model. They were to be even further "rocked" by his even more comprehensive report in 1995. He is still [2005] evaluating even the most unlikely confounding possibilities that might discredit his highly significant findings. As a seeker of scientific truth, Cohen is working diligently to prove himself wrong.

The evidence chapters of this book contain many references to radon, including a whole chapter on Cohen's study (chapter 20). It might be a good idea for you to read them prior to spending big bucks for a government-approved, radon-reducing heat exchanger, which allowed circulation without appreciably changing the temperature of the room air.

You Can Run, But You Can't Hide

If an increase in low-level background radiation caused any problems, decades of anecdotal evidence would have made Denver a ghost town.

No one escapes radiation. As mentioned earlier, the average person receives 15,000 "hits" each second, while a medical X-ray may easily score some 100 billion cellular incidents. [Risk of Nuclear Power by Bernard L. Cohen, University of Pittsburg professor. You can read the entire article at http://www.physics.isu.edu/radinf/np-risk.htm.]

Those who say that "it takes only one gamma ray to cause cancer" may be technically correct, but they neglect to mention a small statistical detail: The odds against any particular gamma ray causing cancer in an affected cell are 1 out of 30,000,000,000,000,000. (That's 30 quadrillion, or 30 x 10^15, to one.) Besides, hormesis evidence indicates that the gamma ray of concern is more likely to prevent cancer than to cause it.

Before defining the units used to measure radiation exposure, you may recall we used the SXR (shoe X-ray) as a yardstick to compare the dangers posed by various radiation sources. As you may have guessed, the SXR is not exactly a reference unit recognized by the scientific community. A more convenient benchmark would be the average background exposure that we receive from the various natural and man-made sources. But, as we'll see, this "natural background" value varies by a factor of a hundred or so in different locales on planet Earth - almost all of which is the fault of nature, not man. Still, it would be desirable to reference other levels of radiation to some normal amount; so we'll arbitrarily use, as a definition of "natural background," the exposure to the average U.S. citizen - previously mentioned to be 300 mrem from natural sources and 63 mrem from man-made (mostly medical) origins.

Until the twentieth century, the average background dose of radiation for a human being had continually decreased over our specie's existence because of the slow decay of the primordial radionuclides such as thorium 232, uranium 238, and potassium 40. So what happened during the 1900s that turned the curve upward?

Most people would answer (a) fallout from atom/hydrogen bomb testing, and (b) nuclear power plants. Nice try, but no cigar. Bomb tests did inject huge amounts of highly radioactive materials into the atmosphere, where most decayed to safe levels within ten days of testing. Other longer-half-life isotopes from fallout caused a temporary worldwide increase of background radiation in the neighborhood of 1% to 4% depending mainly on location. [The one of primary concern being strontium 90 with a half-life of twenty-nine years and a propensity to replace calcium in bones.] Today it amounts to less than 1/1000 of the average background level. As mentioned, there has been only a single "fall-out fatality" from atom/hydrogen bomb testing, which occurred on the misnamed Lucky Dragon. While anti-nuclear statistics have killed off many (theoretical) thousands in their quest for an atomic scapegoat, our inaccurate friends have been unable to directly attribute any other death or injury to radiation from fallout, except as a statistical article-of-faith based on the discredited LNT and "collective dose" theories.

Nuclear power plants, on the other hand, have known emissions of radioactive products such as xenon (a non-reactive "noble" gas), but these are so low in practice as to be immeasurable. It is calculated that the average U.S. resident receives a dose considerably less than 1 mrem from all nuclear power plants combined - again, as with fallout, about 1/1000 of the normal background radiation. For those truly troubled by potential radiation exposure, it is not necessary to avoid being in the vicinity of power plants, but you might want to stay away from the U.S. Capitol building and Grand Central Station, both of which emit considerably more radiation than would be legal for any U.S. nuclear power plant to emit.

So where did the increase come from?

If we are to believe a report from the National Academy of Sciences Committee on the Biological Effect of Ionizing Radiation (BEIR IV), most of the increase came from weather-stripping storm doors, and polyethylene wrapping of new homes. Not that any of these products was unusually radioactive, but because they made houses "tight," thus causing radon gas, which bubbles up from decaying radionuclides in the soil, to be trapped in the living areas. This, they calculate, amounts to 200 mrem per year - unless, as well shall see, you are fortunate enough to get more.

The second largest component of the increase is from X-rays and nuclear medicine. The averages used for medically related exposures are somewhat misleading, however, since they range from a 1-mrem dental X-ray to about 100,000 mrem (100 cGy) for a thyroid ablation. [In 1979, the University of Michigan outfitted the husband of a woman undergoing radioactive iodine diagnosis with a dosimeter. They found that he received a dose of 2,500 mrem(!) during their vacation - which would no doubt cause the EPA to forbid them to sleep together.]

In other words, most people fall well below the combined 53 mrem medical dose, while a few have relatively massive doses. As the evidence section will show, even these huge doses of X-rays or medical radioisotopes produce no measurable increase in cancer - and indeed are seen to have a hormetic effect in those cases where low-level effects were investigated.

Finally, about 10 mrem comes from consumer products such as smoke detectors, television receivers, and tritium watch dials. None comes from the process of food irradiation for a very simple reason: The process physically can not make the food radioactive. Does having an X-ray make you radioactive? Same thing.

Table 9 gives a breakdown of sources in the United States, according to the BEIR committee. Obviously, for most of us, our largest dose of radiation comes from natural sources. The exposures from "man-made" sources are almost entirely voluntary. If you don't want to have a dental X-ray, then don't. If your doctor wants to check your thyroid function using iodine 131, tell him, "No thanks, I'll just feel awful for the rest of my life." If you don't want a smoke detector in your home, then don't buy one; burn your family up if that's your preference. Don't watch television or use a computer terminal.

Table 9
Sources of Average Annual Radiation for a U.S. Citizen
Natural Sources	mrem/yr	cSv/yr	% Total
Radon	200	0.2	55
Cosmic*	27	0.027	8
Terrestrial	28	0.028	11
Internal	39	0.039	11
Total Natural	300	0.3	82
Man-made sources
Medical X-rays	39	0.039	11
Nuclear medicine	14	0.014	4
Consumer goods	10	0.010	3
Nuclear power	< 1 **	< 0.001	-
Fallout	< 1	< 0.001	-
Total Man-made	63	0.063	18
TOTAL	363	0.363	100
* Doubles for every 6000 feet in altitude.
** The symbol “<” means “less than.”
Source: Department of Energy Report YMP-0337 from BEIR IV. Available in its entirety at http://www.ocrwm.doe.gov/factsheets/pdf/ymp0337rev1.pdf

But to avoid the natural background radiation, you need to take some pretty serious steps. Moving to Antarctica or living underwater in a nuclear submarine are your best bets. Or you could also move from high-background-radiation Colorado (with a low age-adjusted cancer death rate) to the low-background-radiation southeastern and eastern coastal states (with high age-adjusted cancer death rates). Then again, you might move out of your high-radon-exposure home in the Reading Prong of Pennsylvania to an area with a lower radon dose rate... but with a higher lung cancer toll.

You're not going to do any of these things. Why? Because if an increase in low-level background radiation caused any problems, we would see evidence - in the form of dead bodies. Decades of anecdotal evidence would have made Denver a ghost town, and Leadville, Colorado - the city with the highest altitude, therefore the most cosmic radiation - would have only monuments to its former short-lived citizens. But the only people who think that there is any such danger are the regulators, anti-nuclear activists, "environmentalists," and government scientists - who cling to the Linear No-Threshold (LNT) Hypothesis. We will be discussing this concept as applied to ionizing radiation, but since our government is so concerned about the doses we receive in this country, let's see what the situation would be if we lived with the background radiation experienced by fellow human beings who live in places outside the United States.

Remember, the average background radiation in the United States is 300 mrem (.3 cGy) plus an average of 63 mrem, primarily from medical sources. And remember that the radiation rules-makers are out to regulate public exposures down to a single mrem (.001 cGy); they intend to put a limit on public exposures at 100 mrem (0.1 cGy).

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.