Overcoming Vested Interests

Bureaucracy defends the status quo long past the time when the quo has lost its status. - Dr. Laurence J. Peter

In light of the available evidence showing either the hormesis model or a threshold below which no harm occurs, it is difficult to understand why anyone would cling to the LNT hypothesis. This question was addressed at the 1999 Tucson Waste Management Conference in Stanley Logan's paper, "Radiation Exposure: Overcoming Vested Interests That Block Good Science." [While I have borrowed heavily from Dr. Logan, I have embellished his material with my comments. In essence, the facts are his; the opinions are mine.]

After outlining the evidence for a re-evaluation of the entire radiation protection mechanism, Dr. Logan defined the following groups that oppose or ignore evidence pointing away from the LNT and collective dose theories. [Stanley E. Logan is founder of the Sante Fe consulting engineering firm that bears his name. A former associate professor of nuclear engineering, Dr. Logan has 27 years experience in areas of hazardous waste management and probabilistic risk analysis.]

Brazil

• No unusual congenital abnormalities, stillbirths, or changes in live births could be found in a Brazilian study of 44,000 pregnancies, even though the background radiation was five to ten times "normal."
• (From the same investigation) "The high terrestrial radiation, 9 mGy/year [900 mrem/yr], in Espirito Santo, Brazil did not affect the fertility of 8,000 couples in this study. [Freire-Maya, A. and Kreiger, H. Human genetic studies in areas of high natural radiation. Health Physics, 34, 61, 1978.]
• The beaches of Guarapari have 25%-35% monazite sand giving a dose to vacationers (who bury themselves in it) of 0.03 mGy/hr (at least 30 mrem per ten-hour day - 420 mrem for a two-week vacation). Though it's illegal, the tourists steal the rocks and sand for their bedrooms at home. [Cullen, T.H., et al. Two decades of research in the Brazilian areas of high natural radioactivity. Radiation Protection: A Systematic Approach to Safety, Pergamon Press, Oxford, 1980.]