Specific Activities

When interested in relatively low-level radioactive material, the picocurie, or pCi (one-trillionth of a curie, remember?), is used. In Table 6, the activity is in pCi per liter and in Bq per liter. [You will also run across Bq per cubic meter (Bq/m3) in some radon studies. Multiply Bq/l by 1,000.]

Table 6 – Specific Activities of Common Substances
Material	Picocuries/liter	Becquerels/liter
Normal air	2	0.074
Typical radon level in homes	3	0.111
EPA limit: Ra-226 in drinking water	5	0.185
Nuclear power plant leak	15	0.555
“Contaminated” milk at TMI*	22	0.814
Rainwater **	360	13.3
Whiskey	1,200	44.4
Salad oil	4,900	181.5
Spa waters of Bad Gastein	16,200	599
Drinking water in Maine***	53,700	1,987
*The increase in radioactive iodine in Harrisburg after the Three Mile Island “disaster” was 1/20 that caused by Chinese A-bomb tests in 1976. You remember how Jane Fonda and Ralph Nader protested those, don’t you?
**Measured at Santa Fe, 5/11/1986. (Probably atmospheric carbon 14 and wind-blown potassium 40 salts.)
***Based on an average of 226 samples. Radiation Controversy, Ralph Lapp, Reddy Communications, 1979.

Since most Americans have no idea what danger might lurk in a glass of water having 200 picocuries per liter, we are at the mercy of those who might use this lack of knowledge to their political advantage. Professor Petr Beckmann pointed out that activity in a well-publicized reactor leak at Indian Point power plant outside New York City was equivalent to that in a pint bottle of salad oil. Without this knowledge, an interested citizen would be led to believe (a) nuclear power was unreliable, and (b) such technology was a danger to life and limb - exactly what anti-techologists Nader, Commoner, Ehrlich and their fellow primitivists would have us believe. Exactly the opposite of the truth.

You might want to bookmark this page, for easy reference to Table 6 as you read on.

In answer to the question posed in the chapter title, 100 picocuries is the approximate activity in a handful of average soil produced by the disintegration of potassium 40. (I always knew there was something dangerous about working out in the yard.)

Next we'll take a look at how the effect of ionizing radiation on the human body is measured.

China & India

"In China, a meticulous study measured the radon level for 1 year in the houses of several hundred women with lung cancers and in homes of a similar number of healthy women. The results demonstrated at a 95% confidence level that women who lived in high-level radon houses (more than 350 Bq/m^3) had an 80% lower lung cancer risk than those living in low-level radon houses (4 to 70 Bq/m^3). For perspective, the EPA considers that remedial action at any level down to 70 Bq/m^3 would be cost effective, even for the cost of reducing the level from 150 to 70 Bq/m^3 at about $2 million per hypothetical life saved. (Schiager 1992)." [Blot, W.J., et al. Indoor radon and lung cancer in China. Journal of the National Cancer Institute, 82, 1025, 1990.]

"While the poorly fed coastal population in Kerala, India, receives 400% - 800% more background radiation than neighboring areas, the people have a higher fertility rate with the fewest neonatal deaths of any other Indian state." [Auxier, J.A., Reactions to BRC. Health Physics Society Newsletter, 16, 5, 1988.]

Japan

Spring waters have often been found to have significant amounts of dissolved radon. This seems particularly true at springs that are considered "health spas," such as Bad Gastein in Austria, where the activity from radon and its progeny reaches 16,200 pCi/l - a mere 73,600% higher than the "contaminated milk" of such great concern to the media at Three Mile Island. A case in point are the radon springs at Misasa, Japan, where Mifune et al. [Mifune, M., et al. Cancer mortality survey in a spa area (Misasa, Japan) with a high radon background. Japan Journal of Cancer Research, 83, 1, 1992], investigated the prevalence of cancer mortality in Misasa versus that in the nearby town of Beppu Spring, a village with minimal waterborne radon. Also, used as a control, were the Standard Mortality Ratios for all Japan. Data were collected during the period 1952-88.

Caption for Figure 24: Japanese Mortality vs. Radon Prevalence: Mifune, M., Sobue, T., Arimoto, H., Komoto, Y., Kondo, S. and Tanooka, H. Cancer mortality survey in a spa area (Misasa, Japan) with a high radon background. Japan Journal of Cancer Research, 83, 5, 1992.

Stomach cancer mortality is singled out and plotted in Figure 24, since it might be expected from ingesting radon in the water. Obviously there is a significant negative correlation between radon exposure and cancer - in conflict with the LNT and in good agreement with hormesis expectations.

One unusual feature of the data concerns female responses. Often the observed beneficial effect of radiation is less in females than in males. The Misasa data, however, indicate SMRs for colon/rectum and lung cancer that are signficantly lower for women.

Dr. Mifune, regarding a study much like that of Misasa, comments, "Similarly, in one region of Japan with an average indoor level of 35 Bq/m^3, the lung cancer incidence was 51% of that in a low-level radon region (11 Bq/m^3), and the mortality caused by all types of cancers was 37% lower." By the way, to convert Bq/m^3 to pCi/l, you divide by thirty-seven - which means both of the above cited areas have relatively low indoor radon. (Just wait until you see what Bernard Cohen says about all this in chapter 20.)

Table 12
Standard Mortality Ratios for Residents of Misasa, Japan
	Male	Female
Total Cancer	.538	.463
Stomach	.400	.452
Colon/rectum	.296	.142
Lung	.475	.187
Leukemia	.445	.534
Source: Mifune, M. et al. Cancer mortality survey in a spa area (Misasa, Japan) with a high radon background. Japan Journal of Cancer Research, 83, 1, 1992.

100 Picocuries - That's a Lot! (Or is it?)

Since most Americans have no idea what danger might lurk in a glass of water with 200 picocuries per liter, we are at the mercy of those who might use this lack of knowledge to their political advantage.

Imagine sitting in a chair three feet away from a gram of an unknown radioactive metal, about the size of a penny, on the floor in front of you. Should you be concerned? I know I would be - at least until I knew more about what it was. Obviously we would be interested in what type of radiation was being emitted. It if were alpha or beta particles, there would be no problem as the 3 feet of air would stop any significant amount. But what if it were gamma rays? Then we would want to know just how "active" the source was - with the activity of a radioactive source being measured in the number of atoms that disintegrate every second.

Let's suppose our one gram of material is radium, specifically 226Ra. Would you care to guess the number of disintegrations per second? A mere 37,000,000,000 (37 billion)! This, by the way, is the number of disintegrations defined as 1 curie, or 1 Ci, since the curie is defined as the activity of one gram of radium. You needn't run away, but you might not want to hang around. If it were one gram of cesium 134, a quick exit would be advisable. [Cesium 134 is a gamma and beta emitter that has about fifteen times the activity of the Goian cesium 137, which is only a beta emitter.]

The curie, a United States (USA) unit, is still in common use but is gradually being replaced by the International Standard (SI) becquerel or Bq, which is defined as one disintegration per second. Obviously, then, 1 curie is equal to 37 billion Bq - not exactly the easiest conversion constant to work with, especially when you have to go the other way: 1 Bq = 2.7 x 10^-11 Ci = 27 pCi.

A few elements of interest and their specific activities - that is, their activity per gram - are given in Table 5.

Table 5 – Specific Activities of Selected Elements
Element	Curies	Becquerels	Half-Life
Thorium 232	0.000000166	4,316	14.05 billion years
Uranium 238	0.000000333	12,300	4.47 billion years
Potassium 40	0.00000722	267,200	1.27 billion years
Radium 226	1	37 billion	1,620 years
Strontium 90	139	5,143 billion	28.8 years
Cesium 134	1,290	47,900 billion	2.06 years
Iodine 131	124,000	4,588 trillion	8.04 days
Tellurium 133	113,000,000	4,200,000 trillion	12.4 minutes

Note that the half-life of the low activity 238U is very long - 4.5 billion years, while one-half the very active 131I isotope is gone in 8.04 days. We would expect this, since there are a finite number of atoms in a gram of any substance, and if the rate of decay (i.e., the activity) is high, it will take less time for the substance to lose its radioactivity. This is verified by the very low relative activity of the primordial radionuclides such as thorium, uranium and potassium, which have extremely long half-lives since these were presumably created at the same time as the Earth - estimated by most cosmologists as some 4.6 billion years ago. The shorter half-life isotopes - say a mere few million years or so - are long gone, although some are being replaced by decay products of the low activity elements.

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?

Radon: Scourge or Blessing for Mankind?

Government was tightening industrial radioactive emission standards to ridiculously low levels, while demanding that homeowners modify their homes to the point where radon doses to the average citizen were hundreds of times greater than the levels dictated to nuclear workers.

Radon is the heaviest of the "noble gases," so named because it - like its cousins neon, argon, krypton, and xenon - does not react with other elements to form compounds. It is radon's "nobility" that minimizes its effects on the body, since it is mostly a transient that is breathed in and then expelled without any chemical reaction taking place. When radon decays in the body, however, it spawns a series of short half-life progeny that are not only chemically reactive with tissue, but are - as we would suspect from their half-lives - also highly radioactive.

[When uranium decays (which isn't very often with a half-life of 4.5 billion years), the products of the decay go through four more stages (taking a couple of million years) until radium is formed. With a half-life of 1,600 years, radium 226 decays into radon gas with a half-life of 3.8 days. The daughters of radon are polonium 218, lead 214, bismuth 214, polonium 214 - and a couple of others. The aforementioned have very short half-lives and are therefore highly radioactive.]

Hazard to Miners?

For years, radon has been thought to be a hazard to miners, and a special confusing unit of activity - the Working Level (WL) - was derived to measure the danger. [One WL is the activity of air containing 100 pCi (3.7 Bq) of radon in equilibrium with its daughters (which, by the way, virtually never happens in the real world) per liter of air. For an approximation, a Working Level Month (WLM) is equivalent to a one-time whole body dose of about 300 mrem (0.3 cGy).]

Recently, however, as evidence of radiation hormesis has emerged, the jury is back out to deliberate a reconsideration of radon's guilt. It is now recognized that other carcinogens - in particular, the particulates suspended in the air of all mines and, more recently, the fumes from diesel engines - were present, but never considered. Radon was assumed to be the carcinogenic culprit, a theory that appears now to be based on flimsy circumstantial and anecdotal evidence.

A related re-evaluation of lung cancer in the Joachimsthal mining community [a famous mine in Czechoslovakia] noted that victims were invariably "pensioners," i.e. miners (not their unexposed, above-ground cohorts) who had made it to a retirement age, which was about ten years longer than their life expectancy. One might easily speculate that the cancer was caused by microscopic dust lodged in the lungs, and the miners' long lives a beneficial product of radon gas. [One of Europe's most famous health spas is Bad Gastein near Salzburg, Austria, which advertises "air with the highest radon content in Europe." The activity of its water is noted in Table 6, in this blog's entry on Monday, January 25, "Specific Activities."]

There has also been a piece of the puzzle right under our noses.

Radon gives its dose of mixed radiation primarily to the bronchial epithelium (fancy scientific words for "windpipe"), hence one would expect cancers caused by radon to be concentrated in this area. Au contraire! The miners' cancers are deep in the lungs [Nobel Laureate Rosalyn Yalow, Radiation and Society, Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, 16, 4, 1991], similar to the cancers caused by the South African amphibole-type asbestos [not to be confused with the common, domestic serpentine type of asbestos, which has not been shown to cause disease], used in ships because of its resistance to brine, acids, and oils.

It is difficult not to see the parallel between non-degradable asbestos fibers in the lungs and non-soluble silica particulates found in most mining environments.

Home Is Where the Radiation Is

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

From Table 11, radon is apparently the dominant source of background radiation. As pointed out earlier, it has not always been considered to be such, as residential radon seems not to have existed until December 1984, when a nuclear worker set off radiation alarms on his way into the Pennsylvania Limerick power plant. A subsequent investigation showed that the residential radon level in the Reading Prong area of Pennsylvania and New Jersey exceeded the level found in many mines. Always quick with a horror story, the EPA "found" this new "danger" to millions of citizens and gleefully reported that as many as 20,000 lung cancer deaths in the United States are caused by residential radon. Perhaps someone at the EPA should have been reading a certain $36 per year newsletter.

Petr Beckmann was well aware of this noble gas situation, as evidenced by 106 different mentions of radon in his newsletter Access to Energy from September 1979 through June 1992. [Now edited by Dr. Arthur Robinson, President and Research Professor, Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine, Box 1250, Cave Junction, OR 97523. Back issues, twenty-one-year CD-ROM, and index available.]

Professor Beckmann was wise enough not to condemn the radon levels out of hand, but he took the bureaucrats to task for their double standard: One hand of government was tightening industrial radioactive emission standards to ridiculously low levels, while the other hand was encouraging/demanding that homeowners modify their homes to the point where radon doses to the average citizen were hundreds - if not thousands - of times greater than the levels dictated to nuclear workers. Here is an example from the November 1983 edition of his newsletter - prior to the EPA's "discovery" of residential radon:

"Although radon exposures of the public are regularly hundreds and even thousands of times higher than from nuclear power operations, that alone may not be cause for alarm. Our purpose here is not to scare readers with the dangers of radon, but to point out the inconsistency of the media and of the politicians bent on pleasing them."

When it came to radon, one might ask about the government's myopia for so many years. Well, one might also remember that during this period we were having one of our regularly scheduled energy crises and were being urged to seal up our residences and commercial buildings. (Anyone born before 1960 should surely remember Carter's "thermostat cops.") Without ventilation, the heavy gas, almost eight times heavier than air, seeps into basements or lower floors with additional amounts coming from unvented or poorly vented natural-gas heaters. There appears to have been a contest between which "crisis" was more important - energy or radiation. Energy shortage was first out of the gate, but it's radiation coming down the homestretch.

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.

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.