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?

Under the Grandstand

The first man-made chain reaction occurred under the grandstand of the University of Chicago football field on December 2, 1942, in what was known as an atomic "pile." It was so named because it was constructed of a "pile" of 45,000 high-purity graphite bricks (250 tons), with 19,000 drilled holes to contain the approximately 93,000 pounds of uranium metal and uranium oxide along with the cadmium control rods. When operating at its design point, it generated a half watt of power - enough to almost power a pencil sharpener. (Fortunately, it was not designed as a power reactor, but as an experiment to prove the "chain reaction" hypothesis.)

Why the "high-purity graphite bricks?" It has to do with the statement a few paragraphs back about "... if the energy of the neutron is within a certain range." When we want to make little rocks out of big rocks, we are accustomed to using a bigger hammer and swinging hard. Not so in the nuclear world. In order for a neutron to have a decent chance at fissioning a U235 nucleus, it must be slowed down by the action of a moderator. Carbon - as long as it is of high enough purity to avoid absorbing the neutrons - is a good moderator, although, as Chernobyl demonstrated, it has a few potential problems - which is why U.S. power reactors never use this material... or this type of "graphite reactor." It is typically used in military reactors for the production of plutonium - which reportedly was one of Chernobyl's functions, in addition to generating power. [Other uses would be in research reactors, as well as in reactors for use in creating medical radionuclides.]

Footnote to chapter: There is much evidence that a natural reactor "happened" in Western Africa in the Republic of Gabon at Oklo some 1.7 billion years ago when the ratio of U235 to U238 was considerably higher. It appears to have operated in accordance with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission rules of that time and was safely shut down after several hundred thousand years of operation. See Oklo Reactor, Scientific American, August 1976.

"Why Don't They Evacuate Norway?"

"Why don't they evacuate Norway?" - a question by UN Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR) Member Dr. Zbigniew Jaworowski in noting that the limits set for evacuating people from around Chernobyl were below the average background radiation in Norway, and far, far below the high background areas of Norway and many other places in the world.

On a planet where virtually nothing is distributed equally, we should be surprised if terrestrial sources of background radiation were somehow evenly allocated. And they are definitely not. As noted in Table 10 (in chapter 11), some places have more than 130 times the average background radiation of the United States, and since the U.S. average is considerably higher than the ambient radiation inn other locations, there is easily a factor of 150 difference between points on the earth.

Believers in the Linear No-Threshold (LNT) hypothesis tell us that all radiation is dangerous, and that the danger is proportional to the dose received. Hey, since we have all these different levels of background radiation across the globe, all they have to do to prove their theory is to demonstrate that as the background radiation increases, so does cancer incidence - and perhaps even other maladies that we haven't yet even considered might be caused or aggravated by additional exposure.

Sadly (for them), this is demonstrably untrue. More than that. There is a large body of evidence that points in the opposite direction - that we are "underexposed" and that exposure to additional radiation will increase our health and vitality. This chapter intends to show some of that evidence.

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.

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.]

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).]

I Still Have My Toes

We have got to stop science and scientific progress... Facts separate people. - Abby Hoffman

Dateline: Memphis, Tennessee; circa 1950: When my mother would take me to buy shoes in my pre-teen years, we would use the shoe store's fluoroscope to check the fit of shoes on my rapidly growing feet. I thoroughly enjoyed my chance to be like Superman with X-ray vision, seeing my toe bones wiggle through layers of rubber and canvas. Of course I would have to check several pairs of shoes each visit. And there were three or four visits every year.

Dateline: Europe; May 1986: After the Chernobyl accident, there was, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna, and increase of between 100,000 to 200,000 European babies who were intentionally aborted by their mothers. These were not unwanted fetuses. The babies' mothers had been convinced they might be carrying "nuclear monsters."

* * *

What is the significance of these two events, separated as they are in time and distance? In my opinion, they show the sea change in our attitude toward radiation dangers - and provide a good example of the widespread ignorance of the means and units by which dangers can be quantified.

While we'll get around to using proper units to describe radiation and its biological effects a little later, for now let's just call the radiation I got from inspecting my toes through the fluoroscope as one SXR (Shoe X-ray). We'll compare this dose to the doses received by the Europeans after Chernobyl.

Obviously the amount of radiation received from the accident at Chernobyl would be strongly dependent on geography. In Greece, where abortions were epidemic, the dose from Chernobyl was about 1.4 SXR units. This is the equivalent of the additional radiation received from background sources in nineteen months of living in Colorado instead of Texas. In Italy it was 0.8 SXR; in France less than 0.5 SXR. The increase over background radiation in Spain and Portugal was not really measurable, as the tiny theoretical increases disappeared below the slightest variations in natural background radiation.

So, what has changed in the forty-odd years since we didn't give a thought to using the shoe fluoroscope, and today, when mothers abort their children because of a mind-distorting fear that trivial amounts of radiation would cause genetic dangers to their in utero children? And we should remember, all of this occurred long after data were widely available showing no genetic damage or excessive mutations (over the approximately 6% rate of naturally occurring genetic defects) reported in extensive investigations of Japanese mothers exposed to 100,000 times the radiation received by women downwind of the Chernobyl fire.

Before going on, though, let's look at the radiation on the borders of U.S. nuclear power plants, and also review the Three Mile Island "disaster" that anti-nuclear activists want so badly for us to consider as being on the same order of magnitude as Chernobyl.

Under U.S. law, it is the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) that regulates the amount of radiation that a nuclear power plant can emit annually at its boundary. In practice, the plants seldom approach this limit, but it amounts to just under 3% of a SXR. So, if you lived next to a power plant emitting its maximum for thirty-five years, you'd get the same amount of radiation I did each time I pushed the button to see if my Keds were large enough to be worn out before my toes pushed through.

"But what about accidents," you might ask, "such as the catastrophe at Three Mile Island?"

In our worst nuclear plant accident, the "survivors" living within a few miles of the "disaster" at TMI were subjected to a withering 0.6% of an SXR - but only if they had remained unclothed, outside, during the entire incident. Those who remained "on site" for the duration would have been exposed to just under one-half of an SXR.

But were't there injuries at TMI? Only if you consider anxiety an injury. All the reported afflictions consisted of people who were either mentally or physiologically harmed by the media's sensationalistic mishandling of the incident. Ironically, those who evacuated to the homes of relatives in Denver would have received more additional radiation in a one-day stay than had they lain naked in the front yard of their Harrisburg homes during the week of media frenzy.

[The main concern of the politicians and bureaucrats was a hydrogen bubble they feared would explode and spew radioactive materials across the state. Fortunately, there was a high-school chemistry student who reminded them that oxygen is needed for hydrogen combustion. The hydrogen was vented to the atmosphere, and the danger evaporated.]