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Xref: sparky misc.activism.progressive:9768 alt.censorship:9821 alt.activism:20023 Newsgroups: misc.activism.progressive,alt.censorship,alt.activism Path: sparky!uunet!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!howland.reston.ans.net!paladin.american.edu!gatech!usenet.ins.cwru.edu!ukma!mont!pencil.cs.missouri.edu!daemon From: dave@ratmandu.esd.sgi.com (dave "who can do? ratmandu!" ratcliffe) Subject: "SECRET FALLOUT, Low-Level Radiation from Hiroshima to TMI" [7/15] Message-ID: <1993Jan4.225503.2038@mont.cs.missouri.edu> Followup-To: alt.activism.d Summary: part 7 of 15: first half of chapter 15 Originator: daemon@pencil.cs.missouri.edu Keywords: low-level ionizing radiation, fallout, deception, secrecy, survival Sender: news@mont.cs.missouri.edu Nntp-Posting-Host: pencil.cs.missouri.edu Organization: Silicon Graphics, Inc. Date: Mon, 4 Jan 1993 22:55:03 GMT Approved: map@pencil.cs.missouri.edu Lines: 676 * * * * * * * 15 Fallout at Shippingport THE STUDIES of Lave and DeGroot provided independent evidence that infant mortality was correlated with low-level radioactivity from nuclear-weapons fallout and reactor releases, but a number of puzzling questions remained unanswered. It was understandable in the light of Dr. Stewart's latest findings, published in 1970, that infant mortality might go up significantly as a result of early intrauterine exposure due to the hundredfold greater sensitivity of the fetus in the first three months of development as compared to the adult. It was difficult to understand, however, how total mortality rates, dominated by the older age groups rather than by the small number of newborn infants, could possibly be affected as strongly as Lave's study had shown. Still another puzzle was the finding by DeGroot that although infant mortality rates in Beaver County, where the Shippingport reactor was located, did not decline as rapidly as for the state of Pennsylvania as a whole, there was no correlation between the abnormally high infant mortality rates and the officially announced small releases from the plant. Both of these puzzles were destined to find their solution in a most unexpected manner within a year after DeGroot's and Lave's studies had been completed. Late in 1972, a notice in the Pittsburgh newspapers announced that hearings would shortly be held by the Atomic Energy Commission to grant an operating license for the Beaver Valley Unit I reactor, which was then nearing completion. This power station was being built right next to the original Shippingport reactor on the Ohio River, some 25 miles downstream and to the west of Pittsburgh. According to the newspaper story, it would be of the same pressurized-water type that had been pioneered in Pittsburgh by Westinghouse, under Admiral Rickover's direction, except that it would be some ten times larger. Knowing that it was a naval type of reactor with a double cooling loop to minimize the amount of gas that would have to be discharged into the atmosphere caused me to feel little concern, especially in view of the fact that the AEC had only recently announced that it was proposing to tighten up the standards for permissible emissions. (These new standards had been issued following hearings in Washington at which I had been asked to testify in behalf of various environmental groups on the need to lower permissible doses.) Also, Westinghouse had just announced that it had been possible to operate Shippingport with "zero" gaseous releases in 1971, so that I felt certain that this much more advanced new power station only a short distance upwind from Westinghouse headquarters and the Bettis Nuclear Laboratories, where the first submarine reactors had been built, would surely be provided with the very latest in the available equipment for containing all radioactive gases. Thus, when some of my students asked me whether I planned to attend the hearings I expressed no great concern, saying only that I might take a look at the Safety Analysis Report being kept in the public library of the nearby town of Beaver, a few miles from Shippingport, to make sure that the planned emissions were indeed as low as I expected them to be. A few weeks later, an opportunity presented itself to check on the proposed releases. I had to go to the nearby Pittsburgh airport to pick up my mother, and since the Beaver County Library was only a few miles from the airport, I left a few hours early to check the figures. Since I had examined similar reports for the Davis-Besse and other plants within the past year, it did not take me long to find the information I was looking for. But what I found shocked me profoundly. Instead of gaseous releases of only a small fraction of a curie, such as had been reported for Shippingport in recent years, the more advanced commercial plant about to go into operation was apparently designed to release some 60,000 curies of fission gases per year into the already heavily polluted air of the Ohio River valley. This was millions of times more than was claimed to have been discharged annually from the old Shippingport plant in recent years, even though the power output would be only ten times greater. In fact the summary of past releases from nuclear facilities published by the Bureau of Radiological Health had listed only 0.35 curies of fission gases at the time of the highest reported discharges back in 1963, for which the calculated dose was 0.87 percent of the maximum permissible of 500 millirems to someone living near the plant. This meant that the estimated radiation dose produced by 0.35 curies was only about 4 millirems. Yet even at these relatively low calculated external doses (due to gas releases), there seemed to be a disturbing rise in infant mortality in surrounding Beaver County and especially the nearby town of Aliquippa, some 10 miles to the east in the Ohio valley. There were thus only two possibilities. If the reported figures on the likely magnitude of gaseous releases from the new large reactor were correct, there would very likely be a major increase in infant mortality and other detrimental health effects unless vastly more efficient means of trapping the gases were installed to bring them down to the levels reported for the existing reactor. The other possibility was that the actual releases from the Shippingport plant had somehow been much larger than the amounts officially reported. And this would of course explain why DeGroot did not find a relationship between the tabulated releases and the yearly changes in infant mortality for the Shippingport plant. Deeply troubled by these findings, I decided to contact the utility lawyer for the City of Pittsburgh, Albert Brandon, who had long been battling the Duquesne Light Company's growing requests for rate increases needed to finance the escalating cost of the Beaver Valley nuclear plant. My hope was to persuade the city to intervene in the upcoming license hearings in order to get to the bottom of the disturbing discrepancy between the annual claim for "zero-release" nuclear plants and the actually planned emissions. Even though it was too late to stop the plant from going into operation, perhaps it would still be possible to force the utility to install the latest equipment for trapping the radioactive gases so as to reduce to a minimum the health risk to the people living in the area. Concerned by these facts, Brandon promised to discuss the matter with the mayor, Pete Flaherty. A few days later, a meeting was arranged, and after a brief discussion, Flaherty agreed to have the City of Pittsburgh become an intervenor in the upcoming license hearings, together with a group of local environmentalists to whom I had previously outlined my findings. Shortly after the public announcement that the City of Pittsburgh would intervene in the hearings for the new plant, I received a telephone call from a man who identified himself as the manager of the new power station being built at the Shippingport site. He said that great efforts were being made to assure the safety of the people in the area, and that he would be glad to send me the detailed plans for the environmental monitoring that would be done to assure that no harmful amounts of radioactivity could reach the public. Within a day, a large manila envelope was delivered to my office at the university from the Duquesne Light Company. As I leafed through its contents, I noticed a series of documents entitled "Pre- Operational Environmental Radioactivity Monitoring Program at the Beaver Valley Power Station" in the form of quarterly reports for the years 1971 and 1972. The documents had been prepared by the N.U.S. Corporation of Rockville, Maryland. These were apparently part of the Environmental Report for the Beaver Valley Power Station Unit II Construction Permit Application, submitted to the AEC in November 1972 as required by the new National Environmental Protection Act, which had just come into effect. Thus, the data were gathered to establish the radiation levels existing at the site prior to the operation of the new plant, providing a baseline for comparison with later measurements that would be gathered once the plant had gone into operation. As I began to look through the tables with their long lists of numbers, I noticed that there were some very high measurements for the external gamma doses in early 1971, measured in microrems per hour. When I worked it out in the more familiar units of millirems per year, I could hardly believe the result: In March the rate was 370 millirems per year for Station No. 10, located in the town of Shippingport, compared to the normal values for the area of 70 to 90 millirems per year. There were a few more readings at this location in the range of 300 to 350 millirems per year by June, and not until January of 1972 did the numbers return to the normal rate of 86 millirems per year. Other locations showed comparable peaks of gamma radiation, but the highest were in the town of Shippingport closest to the site or on the site itself. Could it be that these extremely high radiation dose rates were produced by the old Shippingport plant, for which the official reports had shown almost no gaseous releases at all? Turning to the tabulations of strontium 90 in the milk, I saw immediately that the levels measured in the farms around Shippingport were much higher than in Pittsburgh, Harrisburg, Cincinnati, and Buffalo as reported in {Radiation Health Data and Reports} for the early part of 1971. The fact that the extremely high readings were confined to the Shippingport area made it unlikely that they were due to worldwide fallout from high-altitude atmospheric bomb testing. To check this further, I plotted the concentrations of strontium 90 in the soil and found that it dropped off sharply with distance away from the plant both east to west and north to south. In April of 1971, the levels within three-quarters of a mile were fifty times greater than the typical levels produced by worldwide fallout, and by early in 1972, the rains had apparently washed most of the activity into the Ohio River, the measured levels having gone down from their peak of 6000 picocuries per kilogram to less than 100. Clearly, such a highly localized concentration of strontium 90 in the soil centered on the Shippingport plant could not be explained by worldwide fallout, which is more or less uniformly distributed around the globe as the rains bring down the fine particles circulating in the upper atmosphere. Still further confirmation of the localized nature of the radioactive contamination came from the measurements of short-lived iodine 131 in the milk. Beginning in December of 1971 and peaking in February 1972, the levels of iodine for the six dairies within a 10- mile radius started to rise above 10 picocuries per liter, the Range I reporting level set by the Federal Radiation Council for continuous consumption, reaching as high as 120 picocuries per liter. This was well above the 100 picocurie-per-liter limit of Range II, and it equaled the kind of values reached in the eastern United States during the height of nuclear-bomb testing. Yet when I looked up the monthly iodine 131 levels for other locations in Pennsylvania (such as Erie, Harrisburg, and Philadelphia) in {Radiation Health Data and Reports}, they were all listed with "zero" values, or below the limit of detection. Clearly, it was extremely unlikely that any Chinese fallout would somehow concentrate radioactive iodine 131 over the Shippingport site, leaving the nearby areas of Ohio and Pennsylvania without any detectable increases of radiation in the milk. As a final check, I compared the monthly values of strontium 90 in the milk within a 10-mile radius of Shippingport with the monthly electrical power output in kilowatt-hours published in {Nucleonics Week}. Both strontium 90 and power output peaked in January 1971 and again in April, moving up and down together until the plant was closed for repairs later in the summer. After the plant was shut down, both the local and the Pittsburgh milk showed a sharp reduction in strontium 90 levels, from a peak of 27 picocuries per liter nearest the plant in early 1971 down to 7 picocuries per liter measured in Harrisburg that summer. As I learned later from an analysis of the milk-marketing reports, the city of Pittsburgh obtained about a third of its milk from an area within 25 miles of the Shippingport plant. This finding was consistent with the fact that the Pittsburgh milk showed strontium 90 concentrations some 30 percent higher than the Cincinnati and Philadelphia milk in early 1971. Yet during the time of the sharp peaks in radiation levels in the air, the soil, and the milk that occurred between January and June of 1971 near Shippingport, there were no nuclear-weapons tests carried out in the atmosphere by any nation as reported in the monthly issues of {Radiation Health Data and Reports}. After weeks of graphing and analyzing the data with the help of colleagues, volunteers from local environmental organizations, and students at the university, there could be no doubt about the result: The data collected by the Duquesne Light Company's own hired team of experienced health physicists clearly indicated that the Shippingport plant must have been the source of radioactivity in the environment many thousands of times as great as had been claimed in the official reports to state and federal agencies. Instead of annual radiation doses of less than 0.5 millirems claimed by the utility, the combination of external radiation (measured by the dosimeters) and internal radiation (from the gases that were inhaled or ingested with the milk, the water, and the local meat and vegetables) was many hundreds of millirems per year. Indeed, this dosage exceeded the level of radiation that was received by the people of this area during the height of nuclear-weapons testing. Moreover, the scientists who had carried out these measurements had clearly failed to warn either the utility officials who had hired them, the public-health officials at the state or federal level, or the public, whose health and safety were being endangered by the secret fallout from the plant. Faced with these disturbing discoveries, the leaders of the local environmental groups in Beaver County decided to hold a public meeting at which both the Duquesne Light Company and spokesmen for a Pittsburgh environmental group would be able to present their views to the people of the area. The meeting took place early in January of 1973 at a shopping mall in the town of Monaca, just a few miles from the Shippingport plant. After the superintendent of the Shippingport plant explained that the new power station would be "the Cadillac of the industry"--with a waste-disposal system that would permit only "minimal" amounts of radioactivity to escape--the head of Environment Pittsburgh, David Marshall, and I presented the data gathered by the Duquesne Light Company's own consultants. Slide after slide showed the localized concentrations of radioactivity in the milk, the soil, and the river sediments rising to many times their normal value, together with the peaks during the months when there was no nuclear- weapons testing. Obviously, the findings in our presentation were completely at variance with what the utility had told the local people over the years. The Duquesne Light officials were unprepared for this damaging evidence and could only lamely repeat their assurances that the new plant would have negligible impact on the health of the public. It took them a few days to prepare an advertisement for the {Pittsburgh Post-Gazette} in which they claimed that they had operated their Shippingport facility safely--without releasing more than a small percentage of the releases allowed by the Atomic Energy Commission and the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, and therefore without injuring any member of the public. But the people who had attended the meeting were no longer so certain that this was the case, and there was a demand for an independent investigation of these disturbing findings by the various environmental groups in Pittsburgh and Beaver County before a new and still larger reactor would be given a license. This demand was supported by the mayor of Pittsburgh, Pete Flaherty, and his utility lawyer, Albert Brandon. Confronted with the evidence of very high levels of strontium 90, cesium 137, and iodine 131 in the area in 1971, while "zero" release had been officially reported, I began to wonder about earlier releases. The plant had been in operation since 1958, so in light of the unreliable claims by the company, I wondered if there might indeed have been long-term exposure to the people of Beaver County and nearby Allegheny County, in which the city of Pittsburgh was located. In particular, enough time had elapsed for leukemia and cancer to develop, so that one might for the first time be able to determine whether the operation of commercial nuclear plants did or did not lead to the same kind of cancer increases that I had begun to see following the start of nuclear-weapons tests in Nevada, the Pacific, and Siberia. My students and I started to examine the annual vital statistics reports for Beaver County, Allegheny County, and the major towns at different distances from Shippingport up and down the Ohio River. Within a few days the first results were tabulated, and the figures were startling. In the town of Midland, just a mile downstream from Shippingport, the people drank the Ohio River water. The cancer death rate in this town had risen from a low of 149.6 per hundred thousand population in 1958, when the plant started to operate, to a peak of 426.3 by 1970. This was an increase of 184 percent in only twelve years. For Beaver County as a whole, surrounding the plant, the rate had risen from 147.7 to 204.7 in the ten years from the time the plant had gone on line with so much hope for a cleaner and healthier environment. This was a rise of close to 40 percent during a time when the state of Pennsylvania as a whole showed an increase of only 10 percent and the U.S. cancer mortality rose by only 8 percent. From a low of 293 cancer deaths in Beaver County in 1958, the number had risen to 418 by 1968, an increase of 115 cancer deaths per year, when there should have been no more than an additional 30 if the county had continued to follow the average pattern for the state. Likewise, the Pittsburgh cancer death rate had climbed by 31 percent between 1958 and 1968, despite the steady cleanup of ordinary air and water pollution that had begun right after World War II, when the burning of soft coal in the city was ended and a major effort was begun to clean up the air and water. Similarly, in the towns along the Ohio River downstream from Shippingport and Midland, cancer rates had climbed sharply, the more so the closer they were to the plant. For East Liverpool, just across the border in Ohio and some 10 miles downstream, the cancer death rate had risen 40 percent by 1968 and 67 percent by 1971. In Steubenville, some 30 miles downstream, the cancer mortality rate was up 25 percent by 1968, and even as far away as Cincinnati, some 300 miles down the Ohio River, the cancer deaths had climbed 24 percent, while they increased only 6 percent for Ohio as a whole. Further evidence suggested that the releases from Shippingport had added heavily to all the other sources of carcinogens, from bomb tests to chemical plants. The city of Columbus, Ohio, which did not use the Ohio River for its drinking-water supply, actually experienced a 10 percent decline in its cancer rate during the same period, even though it suffered from all the other likely sources of carcinogens, including automobile exhaust, cigarettes, food additives, hair dyes, artificial sweeteners, and so on. But if Shippingport was responsible for these striking cancer rises in the towns using the Ohio River for their water supply, then the discharges into the river would have had to be vastly greater than the amounts for which the plant had been licensed. Was there any evidence that the activity in the water had been much greater downstream than upstream of the plant? After all, it was clear that it could not be the milk that was responsible for transmitting the radioactivity all the way to Steubenville and Cincinnati. Fortunately, there was a way to check this. For many years, the Pennsylvania State Department of Environmental Resources in Harrisburg had been making quarterly measurements of the radioactivity in all the major streams of the state at various points along each river. When the students had collected the data for the Ohio and other streams in western Pennsylvania, the answer began to emerge. There was a large peak in the Ohio River radioactivity in late 1970 and early 1971, exactly the time when the N.U.S. data had shown a large peak of radioactivity in soil, milk, river sediment, and fish. At Midland, just a little over a mile below the Shippingport plant, the gross beta activity had climbed from a low of only 3 picocuries per liter to a high of 18. But for the two rivers that joined in Pittsburgh to form the Ohio, the Allegheny and the Monongahela, measured at locations more than 30 miles away, upstream to the east the rise was no greater than 5 of these units. Thus, the rise in river radioactivity could not have been due to fallout, which would have affected the more distant upstream areas just as strongly. But it was consistent with high, unreported gaseous releases that would settle on the land and then be washed into the Ohio River with the rain and melting snow. In fact, the rapid disappearance of the high values of long-lived strontium 90 in the soil around the Shippingport plant between early 1971 and 1972 could be explained only by the action of rain carrying the radioactivity from gaseous releases into the local streams and rivers. This possibility was further supported by the fact that the two nearest small rivers that joined the Ohio just a few miles *upstream* from Shippingport, the Beaver River and Raccoon Creek, both showed even larger rises in activity, reaching peaks of 20 picocuries per liter during the same quarter. It was apparently not any direct liquid discharges that were involved, which by the terms of the original license were to be held to less than 0.56 curies. Rather, the radioactivity must have originated from airborne releases that settled on the surrounding land as far upstream as 20 to 30 miles. Only releases into the air could also explain the large increases in milk activity all around the farms surrounding the Ohio River in Beaver County. This would make it possible to understand the paradoxical finding that even "upstream" locations and tributaries of the Ohio within 20 to 30 miles, showed peaks in radioactivity when the local milk rose in strontium 90, cesium 137, and iodine 131. And it would explain why cancer rates in cities as far away as Pittsburgh, upstream by 25 miles, could have their water supplies contaminated. The wind was blowing the radioactive gases up the Ohio Valley to the streams that filled the reservoirs serving Pittsburgh, just as the fallout from the "Simon" shot in Nevada had contaminated the reservoirs of Albany and Troy back in the spring of 1953. Clearly, if such releases were taking place but were somehow not reported, even cities using tributaries of the Ohio entering the river 10 to 30 miles upstream from Shippingport, as well as communities far downstream, could have their drinking water affected and their cancer rates increased by the invisible, tasteless, and odorless radioactive fallout secretly discharged into the ambient air. By looking up the amount of water carried by the Ohio per second at Midland for each month of the year, it was possible to calculate how many curies had been carried downstream from the airborne releases in late 1970 above and beyond the amounts in the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers that joined to form the Ohio some 25 miles upstream from the plant. The total worked out to 183 more curies in the Ohio below the plant in a year than were carried by the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers, which combined to form the Ohio. This was 300 times more than the original permit had allowed for direct discharges into the Ohio River from the Shippingport plant, and 2500 times more than the 0.07 curies that the Duquesne Light Company had officially reported for liquid discharges in 1970 to the state and federal health agencies. There were apparently hundreds to thousands of times as many curies of highly toxic radioactivity in the Ohio River than were allowed by state and federal limits, designed to protect the health of the people using the Ohio for their drinking water. The radioactivity did not come from the direct liquid discharges, however, but through the run- off of unreported gaseous releases that had settled on the land. Here, then, was at least one piece in the puzzle as to why not only infant mortality but mortality at all ages had been affected so strongly, despite the relatively small external radiation doses from gamma rays on the ground that irradiate the whole body uniformly. It was the airborne gaseous activity and the run-off into the rivers serving as drinking-water supplies that had apparently carried the more damaging short-lived beta-ray-emitting chemicals rapidly into the critical organs of the people, in addition to the other pathways via the milk, the vegetables, the fruits, the fish, and the meat that were most important for the long-lived strontium 90 and cesium 137. And although adults were more resistant to the biological damage than the developing fetus, they received the doses steadily over many years rather than just for a few months, by continuously drinking the water, inhaling the gases, and eating the food that was contaminated first by the fallout from the bomb tests, and then by the secret gaseous releases from the peaceful nuclear reactors along the rivers of the nation. Of equal significance were the implications for one of the most important questions DeGroot was unable to answer: Why had he not found a correlation between the changes in infant mortality in Beaver County and the published radioactive releases in the case of the Shippingport reactor, while he had discovered such a correlation for the other three nuclear reactors he had studied? Clearly, if there existed such large unreported releases as the data gathered by the N.U.S. Corporation, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the State of Pennsylvania seemed to indicate, then one could not possibly expect to find a direct relationship between the *announced* annual releases and the changes in mortality rates. Now a new and most disturbing question had arisen: How was it possible for large quantities of radioactive gases to escape from the Shippingport plant without being officially reported as required by the existing regulations? Not until many months later was this riddle destined to be solved in a most unexpected manner. In the meantime, there was a growing public debate over the abnormally high levels of radioactivity around the Shippingport plant and the sharp rise in infant mortality in such nearby towns as Aliquippa. I documented my findings in a report and sent it to the governor of Pennsylvania, Milton Shapp, in January of 1973. Early in the spring, Governor Shapp announced his intention to appoint a special fact-finding commission of independent scientists and public health experts who would hold hearings on the question and issue their own report within a few months. The latest numbers for infant mortality in Aliquippa, some 10 miles downwind and to the east of the plant, were indeed alarming. For the years 1970 and 1971, the years of high levels of radioactivity, Aliquippa's infant mortality rate climbed to a twenty-year high of 44.2 and 39.7 per 1000 live births. These were more than double the overall state rates of 19.9 and 18.2. Yet back in 1949 and 1952, when ordinary air pollution from the steel mills was much greater, but before Shippingport had started, Aliquippa's infant mortality rates had been as low as 16.0 per 1000 births. This could not be simply explained by a change in the composition of the population, which had remained essentially constant, the nonwhite population representing 21 percent of the total in 1960 and 22 percent in 1970. And for the State of Pennsylvania and the United States as a whole, infant mortality had resumed its previous decline after the end of atmospheric bomb tests by the United States and the Soviet Union for both the white and nonwhite population. News of the controversy had reached the cities along the Ohio below Shippingport, and in April I was asked to present my findings at a public lecture at the University of Cincinnati by a local environmental group and university professors concerned about the construction of the Zimmer nuclear power station upstream from the city's water intake. At the end of my presentation, members of the university's Department of Chemical and Nuclear Engineering attacked my findings, charging that numerous state and federal government health agencies, including those of the State of Pennsylvania, had found no substance to my allegations in the past and that I had been repudiated especially by such prestigious organizations as the Health Physics Society, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the National Academy of Science, the Atomic Energy Commission, and the Environmental Protection Agency. As Dr. Bernd Kohn, director of the Radio Chemistry and Nuclear Engineering Research Center put it: "In each case, an epidemiologist has refuted his claim by the same data." But Dr. Kohn and the other engineers present were unable to point out how else to explain the startlingly high localized values of strontium 90, cesium 137, and iodine 131 in the environment around Shippingport, other than that it was likely to be Chinese fallout. However, when I showed the data to the mayor of Cincinnati, Theodore M. Barry, he wrote a letter to Governor John J. Gilligan of Ohio, requesting an investigation by the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency. Also, the chairman of the energy conservation committee of the Cincinnati Environmental Task Force, after seeing the data on radioactivity and cancer mortality changes around Shippingport and the other reactors that had been studied by DeGroot and me, announced that he would recommend that the City of Cincinnati become an intervenor in the public hearings on an operating license for the Zimmer plant. The next day, the {Cincinnati Inquirer} carried the following two headlined stories on its front page: "Mitchell Denies Knowledge of Plans to Bug Watergate" and, just below, "AEC Denies Radiation Damage to Ohio River." In the light of the enormous discrepancy between the official claims of "zero releases" and the N.U.S. findings of much larger than normal amounts of strontium 90 in the soil, the milk, and the river sediment around Shippingport, the coincidental juxtaposition of these two stories took on an ominous ring. The facts that had emerged so far were hardly consonant with the AEC's claim in the {Inquirer} story that "the release of effluents from the Shippingport Atomic Power Station is carefully controlled and monitored so as not to endanger the public." The story went on to say that "the radiation levels in these effluents are so extremely low that they pose no threat to the people in the cities mentioned by Dr. Sternglass." It all sounded exactly like the old reassurances that had been issued by the AEC at the time of the nuclear tests in Nevada, and the denial by former Attorney General John M. Mitchell before a federal grand jury that he had any prior knowledge of the Watergate case and always vetoed any bugging plans that were suggested while he was President Nixon's campaign manager. There would soon be another kind of grand jury appointed to hear the differing claims of government officials and independent scientists who had stumbled upon information that was not meant to reach the ordinary citizen of our country. Newspaper stories in the Pittsburgh area repeating the denial of large discharges from Shippingport and blaming the high readings either on fallout or on errors in the measurements were clearly indications of deep concern by the AEC, Duquesne Light, and N.U.S. All three organizations now knew that before long they would be facing hearings by an independent body of knowledgeable scientists. The bureaucrats and scientists in the AEC knew that this time the hearings would not be under their control, unlike the case of the usual licensing hearings, where both the hearing officers and the staff were appointed by the agency whose mandated task it was both to promote and regulate the safety of the nuclear industry. But the full extent of the behind-the-scenes efforts to make the public believe that nothing had happened at Shippingport did not emerge until long after the hearings of the fact-finding commission had taken place at the end of July. The story was pieced together later in an article by a free-lance investigative writer, Joel Griffiths, and published in an article in the {Beaver County Times} on June 7, 1974, after the AEC had issued licenses for the operation and construction of the Beaver Valley Power Station Units I and II. Quite unexpectedly, the story came to light as the result of a routine request submitted by the attorney for the City of Pittsburgh, Albert Brandon, in connection with the discovery procedures preceding the licensing hearings for the new reactors at Shippingport. (This was a few months after the Shapp Commission hearings in Aliquippa had taken place.) Brandon had asked for copies of all correspondence and internal memoranda connected with the Shippingport controversy in the files of the AEC. And then, one day in the fall of 1973, not long before the licensing hearings were scheduled to begin, a large envelope arrived at Brandon's office with a devastating series of internal memoranda, letters, and other documents revealing what had taken place behind the scenes. As Griffiths described it in his article, early in 1973 the AEC's Earth Science Branch had conducted an in-depth investigation of the situation and concluded that "it is highly unlikely that the radioactivity was of Chinese origin. Most likely it was either of local origin, or the result of inadequate sampling procedures." Griffiths wrote that this was a crucial finding. "Local origin" was a euphemism for Shippingport, since there was nothing else in the vicinity that could have produced that amount of radioactivity. Thus, if the radioactivity had in fact been there, Shippingport was clearly implicated. The only other possibility was that maybe the radioactivity had really not been there in the first place. As Griffiths put it: This was where "inadequate sampling procedures" came in. The idea was that N.U.S. might have bungled procedures it had used to measure the radioactivity in the samples of soil, milk, and other items from Beaver Valley and somehow produced hundreds of erroneous readings, and all of them too high. This, however, was synonymous with the conclusion that N.U.S. was incompetent. There was only one way this question could be settled in a conclusive manner. Some of the radioactivity in the samples that N.U.S. scientists had collected in 1970 and 1971 was long lasting. If N.U.S. could turn up some of the original samples that had shown the high levels, they could be reanalyzed to see if the radioactivity had really been there. According to the records, N.U.S. conducted a search in February 1973 at its Rockville headquarters to see if any of the original high samples were still around. Unfortunately, it was the company's stated policy not to retain samples for more than a year after analysis, and none could be located. Griffiths went on to relate an interesting development: By this time, a sharp divergence of opinion had grown between N.U.S. on the one hand and the AEC and health agencies on the other. Faced with a choice between attributing the radioactivity to Shippingport or to N.U.S.'s incompetence, the AEC and others picked incompetence and began leveling various technical charges against the N.U.S. reports. This placed N.U.S. in a delicate position. If their reputation was to be salvaged without crucifying their employer, the Duquesne Light Company and the AEC, N.U.S. had somehow to prove that the radioactivity had been there but had not come from Shippingport. So despite all the evidence, N.U.S. picked fallout. In March, 1973, N.U.S. completed a draft report on the Shippingport situation, defending the accuracy of its original high readings but attempting to prove that they were not particularly unusual and were probably due largely to Chinese bomb tests. This draft report was sent to Dr. John Harley, director of the AEC's Health and Safety Laboratory. Dr. Harley had been playing a leading role in the AEC's investigation of the Shippingport affair, and he was well aware that the high radiation levels could not be explained by fallout. In fact, I knew that he had worked in this field for years and had previously been involved with minimizing the health impact of the fallout from the "Simon" test that had rained over Albany and Troy back in 1953. He had also played a major role in trying to discredit the findings I had made that showed a connection between the upward changes in infant mortality from the atmospheric tests in the Pacific and Nevada and the levels of fallout in the milk and diet through the use of the misleading "gummed film" data, which falsely showed high strontium 90 levels in the dusty, dry areas where the milk levels were actually quite low. As Griffiths's story indicated: The memoranda in the AEC files showed very clearly that Dr. Harley was not happy with N.U.S.'s draft report. In comments for the AEC's files, dated March 8, 1973, Harley fumed: "This draft proves to my satisfaction that the work of this organization is incompetent. . . . It is obvious that their staff is not familiar with the field and is not competent to evaluate their data or those of others." Harley went on to list several examples of N.U.S.'s incompetence in their attempt to prove the fallout theory and in other aspects of their report, remarking that "Investigation would certainly turn up gross calculation errors or even that some doctoring of the numbers had occurred." He signed off: "I believe the situation is very serious." Serious indeed. Could Dr. Harley have been referring to that team of "outstanding scientists" who, according to Duquesne's ads, were engaged in the vital work of making people aware that their large nuclear plant was to be "absolutely safe to the public health"? Yes, he was. More serious was that N.U.S. had already performed extensive safety studies for some thirty-four other nuclear power plants, many of which had already started operating. If they were bunglers . . . . Dr. Harley's accusations of incompetence were more incongruous in view of the apparent excellent credentials of the N.U.S. staff, including the two members who prepared the draft report. One, the vice-president in charge of all N.U.S. nuclear safety work, Dr. Morton Goldman, had spent ten years as a nuclear safety expert with the U.S. Public Health Service (now the Environmental Protection Agency) and was a consultant to state and federal health agencies. The other, Joseph DiNunno, the scientist directly responsible for the Beaver Valley survey, had received all his training and experience in the AEC's own reactor safety branch. Why, N.U.S. almost was the AEC and EPA. Incompetence? Doctoring of figures? Nevertheless, a couple of months after Dr. Harley's outburst, the AEC issued a definitive report stating that the high radiation levels had been due to N.U.S. bungling. The report was hand carried to the Pittsburgh newspapers before N.U.S. even got a chance to look at it. Shortly thereafter, on June 7, 1973, according to AEC documents, the president of N.U.S., Charles Jones, called the AEC. Jones maintained stoutly that the radioactivity really had been there and that there was nothing wrong with N.U.S.'s methodology. The AEC representative to whom he spoke, Dr. Martin B. Biles, director of the Division of Operational Safety, disagreed. Jones then complained that the unfavorable publicity was damaging his company and something must be done. Dr. Biles suggested a meeting. On June 20, 1973, a meeting was held between Dr. Goldman and DiNunno of N.U.S., Dr. Harley and Dr. Phil Krey of the AEC, and a Duquesne Light Co. attorney. According to Dr. Harley's subsequent memo to the AEC's files [dated June 22] it was a fruitful meeting.