NetNews Usenet Archive 1993 #1/NN_1993_1.iso/spool/misc/activism/progress/9775

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From: [e-mail] (dave "who can do? ratmandu!" ratcliffe)
Subject: "SECRET FALLOUT, Low-Level Radiation from Hiroshima to TMI" [8/15]
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Summary: part 8 of 15:  second/last half of chapter 15
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Keywords: low-level ionizing radiation, fallout, deception, secrecy, survival
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Date: Tue, 5 Jan 1993 15:50:58 GMT
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          Goldman and DiNunno began by admitting [in a separate
       memorandum for the files] that someone in N.U.S.  had indeed
       doctored up figures to support the company's position [in past
       work for the AEC's Health and Safety Laboratory] although there
       were unfortunately no laboratory records to verify the fact.
       This aside, however, they had a wonderful new development to
       report.  In the time since President Jones had talked to the
       AEC, N.U.S. had found some of the original high samples from
       Beaver Valley.
          Now it would be possible to see if that radioactivity had
       really been there.
          This was indeed fortuitous, especially since these samples
       were by then nearly two years old and the company did not
       usually retain its samples for more than a year.  Evidently they
       eluded the original search for samples in February.
          According to Dr. Goldman, all the company's employees had
       been instructed to ransack the premises, and the samples had
       been turned up by two lab technicians in a storage basement
       where such samples were not usually kept.
          Despite the AEC's earlier misgivings about N.U.S.'s
       credibility, the legitimacy of these newfound samples was
       accepted without question.  Arrangements were immediately made
       to have them reanalyzed by the AEC, the EPA, an independent
       private lab, and N.U.S.  It was also decided that N.U.S.'s
       performance in the reanalysis would serve as a test of whether
       the company had recovered its competence.
          So what happened?
          The samples were reanalyzed and no more radioactivity!  Some
       of the samples turned out to be as much as twenty times lower
       than before, but N.U.S. had got it right this time.  Their
       analytical methods were corrected at last.  They were saved.
       Everybody was saved.
          The press was notified.
          There were a few loose ends.
          N.U.S. had to explain why so many of its measurements had
       been twenty or more times too high in 1971.  The company
       reviewed its laboratory records again and made a new discovery:
       all through 1971 there had been systematic errors in several of
       its analytical methods, all tending to produce only erroneously
       high readings.
          That was it.  The case was closed.
          NUS's safety work for thirty-four other reactors, and even
       the low readings it somehow managed to obtain at various times
       and places in Beaver Valley, was allowed to stand unchallenged.
       Dr. Goldman and DiNunno fired several employees, including the
       lab chief, who never stopped defending his measurements, and
       N.U.S. has since continued in its work of making nuclear power
       plants "absolutely safe to public health."

       None of this, of course, was known either to me or the members of
    the fact-finding commission when the hearings began on July 31, 1973
    in the town of Aliquippa.  The panel appointed by Governor Milton J.
    Shapp and chaired by Dr. Leonard Bachman, the Governor's Health
    Services Director, consisted of seven members in addition to the
    chairman, representing a broad range of disciplines and wide
    experience in matters related to public health.  Only five of the
    panel members, however, were independent university-based scientists
    outside the state government, and only three of these had personal
    experience with studies of radiation effects in man.
       Of the three, Dr. Karl Z. Morgan, Neely Professor of Health Physics
    at the School of Nuclear Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology,
    editor-in-chief of the journal {Health Physics}, first President of
    the International Radiation Protection Association, and Director of
    the Health Physics Division of the AEC's Oak Ridge National Laboratory
    from 1944 to 1973, had the longest association with the problems of
    radiation, its control, and its measurement.
       Next in the length of his professional involvement with radiation
    and its effects on man was Dr. Edward P. Radford, Professor of
    Environmental Medicine at the School of Hygiene and Public Health,
    Johns Hopkins University, who had recently served on the National
    Academy of Science's Committee on the Biological Effects of Radiation.
       The third scientist with recent experience in the evaluation of the
    effects of radiation on human populations was Dr. Morris DeGroot,
    Professor of Mathematical Statistics and Chairman of the Department of
    Statistics at Carnegie-Mellon University.
       Of the other two university scientists, one was Dr. Paul Kotin,
    Provost and Vice-President of the Health Science Center and Professor
    of Pathology at Temple University in Philadelphia, formerly Director
    of the National Institute of Environmental Health Science, with a
    special interest in the environmental causes of cancer, and a
    consultant to both the National Cancer Institute and the Environmental
    Protection Agency.
       The other member of the scientific panel was Dr. Harry Smith, Jr.,
    Dean of the School of Management at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
    at Troy, New York, who was a biostatistician active in the health
    field over many years, serving as consultant to the National Center
    for Health Statistics of the U.S. Department of Health, Education and
    Welfare.
       Also serving on the Governor's Commission was the Secretary of
    Health for the State of Pennsylvania, J. Finton Speller, M.D., and the
    Secretary of the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Resources,
    Maurice K. Goddard.
       Although this was not known to me at the time, it would actually be
    the staffs of these two state officials who would prepare the final
    report, since there was no provision for any funding of an independent
    staff responsible only to the scientist members of the committee.  In
    particular, the radiological portions of the report were to be drafted
    by Thomas M. Gerusky, Chief, Office of Radiological Health, and
    Margaret A. Reilly, Chief of Environmental Surveillance in Gerusky's
    office, both of whom reported to Secretary Goddard.  The sections of
    the report dealing with health effects were to be prepared by Dr.
    George K. Tokuhata, an epidemiologist recently appointed as Director
    of Program Evaluation in the Department of Health.  All three of these
    key individuals had in the past made public statements denying the
    validity of my findings on low-level radiation effects from fallout
    and releases from nuclear plants.  As Griffiths later learned in a
    series of interviews with some of the commissioners also published in
    the {Beaver County Times}, the final report kept being delayed again
    and again because the staff kept creating drafts which reflected the
    view that there were no serious problems connected with Shippingport,
    and which the commissioners were unwilling to sign.
       But on the day of the hearings, I was very hopeful that at long
    last an eminent group of concerned scientists and public health
    officials would provide the kind of scientific jury able to evaluate
    fairly the serious evidence for unreported releases and disturbing
    increases in mortality rates that had recently come to light.
       After Dr. Bachman had opened the hearings and introduced the
    members of the panel, I summarized the data I had previously submitted
    in two reports to the governor in a series of slides.  In addition, I
    presented further evidence on the changes in mortality rates involving
    other chronic diseases besides cancer in a number of towns along the
    Ohio.  Thus, in East Liverpool, 5 miles downstream from Shippingport,
    heart-disease mortality had risen some 100 percent from its low point
    of 370 per 100,000 deaths in the period 1954-56 to 730 by 1971, while
    Ohio as a whole had remained constant at about 370 to 390 throughout
    this period.  Yet back in the early 1950s, before Shippingport had
    started, there was more ordinary pollution from chemicals and coal
    burning in the Ohio River, from which the drinking water for East
    Liverpool originated.  And in the ensuing two decades, there had been
    major efforts to clean up the air and water.
       I then presented other recent data in support of the possibility
    that the action of radioactive fallout on all aspects of human health
    may have been seriously underestimated, thereby explaining the
    unexpectedly sharp rises in both infant mortality, cancer, and chronic
    diseases in Aliquippa and nearby river towns since the nuclear plant
    had gone on line.
       Some of this data came from an extensive collection of heath
    statistics gathered by Dr. M. Segi at the School of Public Health,
    Tohoku University, Sendai, Japan, from work sponsored by the Japanese
    Cancer Society.  It showed that many types of cancers known to be
    caused by radiation rose sharply all over Japan, and not just in
    Hiroshima and Nagasaki, beginning some five to seven years after the
    bombs were detonated.  Thus, while pancreatic cancer had been level
    for a period of more than ten years prior to 1945--during a period of
    rapid industrialization, production of chemicals, and growth of
    electric-power generation by coal--it shot up some 1200 percent by
    1965, and only recently began to slow down its enormous rate of climb
    following the end of major atmospheric bomb testing.  The pancreas is
    also the organ involved in diabetes, a disease that had also shown
    sharp rises not only in Japan but in the United States, and
    specifically in the Beaver County area.
       Similar patterns emerged from plots of Dr. Segi's data for prostate
    cancer and lung cancer, the former rising to 900 percent of its pre-
    1945 incidence, and the latter to 750 percent.  And again a similar
    pattern had taken place near Shippingport, where lung cancer for the
    nearest sizable town of Midland had risen 500 percent from its 1957-58
    rate of 22 to a high of 132 per 100,000 population by 1970, while it
    had risen only some 70 percent, from 22 to 38 per 100,000 in
    Pennsylvania as a whole during the same period.
       Again, these patterns could not simply be blamed on cigarette
    smoking alone, although it was known that uranium miners who smoked
    had some five to ten times the lung cancer mortality rate than those
    who did not, so that those who both worked in the mines and smoked
    showed a twenty-five- to hundredfold greater risk of dying of lung
    cancer as compared with those who neither smoked nor were exposed to
    the radioactive radon gas.  Thus, in effect, the releases of
    radioactive gases into the already polluted air of Midland has
    produced the same kind of synergistic effect, as if the people in that
    town just a mile away from the Shippingport plant had suddenly started
    to work in the uranium mines.
       Thus, the data for the changes in cancer rates in the area for
    which levels of radioactivity in the air, the water, the milk, and the
    total diet had been measured as comparable with the levels produced by
    fallout from bomb tests in Siberia and the Pacific drifting over Japan
    during the 1950s clearly supported the reality of the data gathered by
    the N.U.S. scientists recently, and also the reality of the existence
    of much-higher-than-reported releases from Shippingport in the past.
       In further support of the argument that relatively low doses of
    radiation from nuclear reactor releases can have readily detectable
    results on human health, I summarized the evidence that infant
    mortality in Beaver County and other areas along the Ohio had
    increased in 1960 and 1961 following an accidental release of
    radioactive isotopes in the course of a fuel-element melt-down at the
    Waltz Mills nuclear reactor on the Youghiogheny River, some 20 miles
    upstream from the city of McKeesport in April of 1960.
       Within a year after that little-known accident, infant mortality
    rates doubled in McKeesport and then slowly declined again to the
    level of the rest of Allegheny County, which gets its drinking water
    mainly from the Allegheny River.  And the effects could be seen in a
    steadily declining pattern of infant mortality peaks along the
    Monongahela and Ohio River communities for 160 miles downstream.
       In the course of the questioning period that followed my
    presentation, I was asked how it was possible that such relatively
    small doses comparable to normal background levels could lead to such
    large changes in mortality rates, when it apparently took ten to a
    hundred times these levels to double the risk for the survivors of
    Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  In response I cited the startling results of
    a recent study published in the journal {Health Physics} in March of
    1972 by a scientist working for the Canadian Atomic Energy
    Laboratories in Pinawa, Manitoba, Dr. Abram Petkau.  Dr. Petkau had
    been examining the basic processes whereby chemicals diffuse through
    cell membranes.  In the course of these studies, he had occasion to
    expose the membranes surrounded by water to a powerful X-ray machine,
    and observed that they would usually break after absorbing the
    relatively large dose of 3500 rads, the equivalent of some 35,000
    years of normal background radiation.
       This certainly seemed to be very reassuring with regard to any
    possible danger to vital portions of cells as a result of the much
    smaller doses in the environment from either natural or man-made
    sources.  But then Dr. Petkau did something that no one else had tried
    before.  He added a small amount of radioactive sodium salt to the
    water, such as occurs from fallout or reactor releases to a river, and
    measured the total absorbed dose before the membrane broke due to the
    low-level protracted radiation.
       To his amazement, he found that instead of requiring a dose of 3500
    rads, the membrane ruptured at an absorbed dose of three-quarters of
    one rad, or at a dose some 5000 times less than one rad, much less
    than was necessary to break it in a short, high-intensity burst of
    radiation such as had occurred at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
       Dr. Petkau repeated this experiment many times in order to be
    certain of this disturbing finding, and each time the result confirmed
    the initial discovery:  the more protracted the radiation exposure
    was, the less total dose it took to break the membranes, completely
    contrary to the usual case of genetic damage, where it made no
    difference whether the radiation was given in one second, one day, one
    month, or one year.
       By a further series of experiments, he finally began to understand
    what was taking place.  Apparently a biological mechanism was involved
    in the case of membrane damage that was completely different from the
    usual direct hit of a particle on the DNA molecules in the center of
    the cell.  It turned out that instead, a highly toxic, unstable form
    of ordinary oxygen normally found in cell fluids was created by the
    irradiation process, and that this so-called "free radical" was
    attracted to the cell membrane, where it initiated a chain reaction
    that gradually oxidized and thus weakened the molecules composing the
    membrane.  And the lower the number of such "free radicals" present in
    the cell fluid at any given moment, the more efficient was the whole
    destructive process.
       Thus, almost overnight, the entire foundation of all existing
    assumptions as to the likely action of very low, protracted exposures
    as compared to short exposures at Hiroshima or even from brief, low-
    level medical X-rays had been shaken.  Instead of a protracted or more
    gentle exposure being less harmful than a short flash, it turned out
    that there were some conditions under which it could be the other way
    around:  The low-level, low-rate exposure was more harmful to
    biological cells containing oxygen than the same exposure given at a
    high rate or in a very brief moment.
       No longer was it the case that one could confidently calculate what
    would happen at very low, protracted environmental exposures from
    studies on cells or animals carried out at high doses given in a
    relatively short time.  It was clear that the direct, linear relation
    between radiation dose and effect was no longer the most conservative
    assumption, for it was based on the implicit assumption that a given
    dose would always result in a given increase in risk, no matter
    whether the radiation was absorbed in one second or one year.
    Clearly, if Dr. Petkau's findings were to be confirmed by other
    experiments in the future, our whole present understanding of low-dose
    radiation effects would have to be revised, since small exposures
    might turn out to be far more harmful to living cells than we had ever
    realized.
       Thus, I pleaded we should not reject evidence for much higher than
    expected infant and cancer mortality rates merely because that
    evidence did not seem to agree with our previous estimates based on
    high-level, high-rate exposures at Hiroshima and in various studies.
    I now believed that we had to be prepared to revise drastically our
    expectations as to what apparently innocuous low-level, chronic
    radiation exposures to critical cells and organs from environmental
    sources might do.
       My own testimony was followed by that of Dr. Irving Bross, a well-
    known biostatistician from the Roswell Park Memorial Cancer Institute
    in Buffalo, New York, who had himself been studying the effect of
    low-level radiation on childhood leukemia for many years.  In
    summarizing his findings Dr. Bross stated that there exists a wide
    range of individuals with very different degrees of sensitivity to
    radiation, depending upon their age and their past medical history.
       This fact alone would invalidate any estimate of the likely effect
    of small radiation exposures to a large human population, since these
    had been based on the average adult, obtained at high doses, and on
    the assumption of a linear relationship between dose and effect.  For
    a non-homogeneous group, the more resistant individuals such as
    healthy young adults would not show any significant effects, while
    either the very young or the very old and those with immune
    deficiencies, allergies, and other special conditions might show an
    unexpectedly large effect.  As Bross had put it in a letter to {The
    New York Times} published just a few weeks before he testified:  "It
    follows that procedures for calculating `safe levels' based on
    `average exposures' of `average individuals' are not going to protect
    the children or adults who need the protection most."
       Next was the testimony of the Deputy Director of the Division of
    Biology and Medicine of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission in charge of
    all biomedical and environmental research, Dr. W. W. Burr, Jr.  This
    witness, as recorded by the reporter for the {Beaver County Times},
    Bob Grotevant, "tabbed all allegations about a definite correlation
    between radioactive emissions from the Shippingport plant and
    increased infant deaths and cancer cases made by Dr. Sternglass as
    `unsupportable.'"  Burr then announced that a number of follow-up
    tests after publication in 1971 of "erroneous" test data by the N.U.S.
    Corporation "proved that no such high levels of any radioactive
    products existed near the plant."
       This, then, was the way that had been chosen by the AEC to deal
    with what had happened, as we were to learn later from the internal
    memoranda, and one witness after the other for N.U.S., for the
    utility, for the EPA, and for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania
    followed the line agreed upon in the correspondence and secret
    meetings described in the memoranda.  Each independent set of data was
    rejected as unreliable or meaningless when it showed the existence of
    high radiation levels or increases in mortality rates.
       As Anna Mayo, who covered the proceedings for {The Village Voice},
    put it in an article published a few months later, "it was all
    redolent of--you guessed it--Watergate.  In the audience,
    environmentalists gnashed their teeth, wishing that the Shippingport
    horrors could have been exposed on national television.  If Duquesne
    Light would cover up, would not Con Ed, LILCO, or Commonwealth Edison
    do the same if Indian Point, Shoreham, or Dresden were at stake?"
       Indeed a great deal was at stake:  In 1973 some thirty-eight new
    nuclear reactors were in the process of being ordered, the largest
    number ever in one year, each representing a potential business of
    about a billion dollars.  And it was the stated aim of the Nixon
    administration and the nuclear industry to see a thousand of these
    reactors operating near the cities of our nation by the end of the
    century.  It would indeed be difficult for any human beings not to
    have minimized the danger when a thousand billion dollars were at
    stake.
       As expected, when the report of the Governor's Commission finally
    appeared a year later, after the licenses had been granted to Beaver
    Valley Unit I and II, it did not call for a moratorium on nuclear
    power plants, as Anna Mayo had suggested it should at the end of her
    article.  In fact, she had predicted the outcome exactly.  As she had
    put it bitterly:  "About the most that can be expected is a modest
    plea for further studies:  that is, more and more necrophiliac
    nitpicking."
       The summary of the commission's report set the tone of the entire
    document.  By carefully using certain qualifying words that are easily
    passed over by the hurried reader, such as "substantial,"
    "systematic," or "significant," a draft had finally been prepared by
    Tokuhata, Gerusky, and Reilly that the members of the committee could
    no longer continue to refuse to sign after months of efforts to arrive
    at some sort of acceptable wording.  It provided sentences which, when
    taken separately, could be widely used by the utility to claim that it
    had been completely cleared.  For example, consider the very first
    sentence:  "There is no substantial evidence that the quantities of
    radioactive materials released by Shippingport Atomic Power Station
    have been greater than reported by the plant operators."  This
    sentence was followed, however, by one that would satisfy the
    consciences of some of the more concerned commissioners:  "However,
    the absence of comprehensive off-site monitoring during plant
    operations precludes accurate verification of the data on plant
    releases," and so on throughout the long and inconclusive report.
       Far more revealing than the report as to the true feelings of four
    of the five independent scientists on the commission willing to go on
    record were the answers to questions submitted to them by Griffiths in
    his article, which appeared just before Governor Shapp released the
    report in June of 1974.
       For instance, to the question, "Did the data in the original N.U.S.
    report point to Shippingport as the source of the high radiation
    data," the scientists answered as follows:

       DR. DEGROOT:  "If we accept those data, then the circumstantial
         evidence points to Shippingport largely because of the
         location of the radioactivity and the lack of plausible
         alternate sources."
       DR. MORGAN:  "The original N.U.S. data very strongly suggested
         to me that the radioactivity came from the plant.  If you
         take the data as fact, you'd be very hard-pressed to find any
         other source that could explain it."
       DR. RADFORD:  "Well, there was some indication in the original
         N.U.S. data that there was a release from some source.  As to
         whether that source was Shippingport, I'd have to look up the
         data again."
       DR. SMITH:  "I can't find any direct connection between the
         radiation levels measured by N.U.S. and the Shippingport
         plant.  All that mish-mash is so unscientific that one would
         never be able to draw any valid scientific inferences from
         it."

       Another question referred to the discrepancy between the original
    N.U.S. analysis and the reanalysis:  "After N.U.S. reanalyzed its
    data, the high radiation levels disappeared.  Did this reanalysis
    prove to you that the radioactivity was never there?"

       DR. DEGROOT:  "No, it did not.  It did convince me that the
         reanalysis was highly unreliable.  However, I am equally
         convinced that the original N.U.S. data showing high levels
         cannot be considered reliable evidence.  There are just so
         many inconsistencies in their work that I cannot accept any
         of it. . . .  This comment does not mean that all their high
         readings were wrong.  In fact, I find it highly unlikely that
         N.U.S. could have made systematic errors, all in one
         direction, in several different analytical techniques."
       DR. MORGAN:  "The explanations advanced by N.U.S. did not at
         all convince me.  For example, if they had found something
         wrong in only one of their systems, it would not be too
         surprising.  We all make mistakes.  But to have systematic
         errors in several different analytical techniques, all
         tending to produce only high readings--the chances of that
         are quite low. . . .  There appears to be a strong suggestion
         of dishonesty, and that estimate is borne out by written
         comments from Dr. John Harley of the AEC, whose integrity I
         respect.  Dr. Harley found that N.U.S. seems to have doctored
         some of their data to fit their arguments.  If a person will
         do that with one set of scientific data, it is very possible
         he will do it with another. . . .  So, as far as I can see,
         there is no proof that the radioactivity levels around
         Shippingport were not quite high in the past.  For a long
         period now the radioactivity levels in milk in that general
         area have been high according to the public-health agency
         surveys, which are completely separate from the N.U.S.
         survey.  This has never been explained."
       DR. RADFORD:  "Well, they had three separate laboratories
         reanalyze some of the original 1971 milk and soil samples,
         and each lab got similar low readings.  If these samples were
         valid, then it is pretty clear there was not much
         radioactivity there to begin with.  Now of course you could
         say they dug up soil from somewhere and analyzed it--I cannot
         argue that."
       DR. SMITH:  "I think that the degree of scientific merit on one
         side really was better.  I would accept the explanations
         advanced by N.U.S."

       Another question:  "Was there any evidence in the mortality
    statistics that Shippingport had caused health damage, or did the
    statistics tend to refute this?"

       DR. DEGROOT:  "We cannot really decide the issue because of the
         poor quality of the available health statistics and because
         the population is not large enough for a really meaningful
         statistical analysis.  But there is certainly nothing in the
         available data to lower the probability that there may have
         been health damage.  It is true that the Pennsylvania State
         Health Department went back and discovered errors of a
         certain type in its published infant mortality rate for
         Aliquippa in 1971, and that the ensuing corrections sharply
         lowered the rate. . . .  However, I feel it is likely there
         were also errors of another type which could have raised the
         rate back up again.  Unfortunately, the resources were not
         available to investigate this possibility.  So, to my mind,
         the corrections are incomplete.  The only type of error
         investigated was one that would reduce the number of deaths
         and lower the rate. . . .  In any case, I think there remain
         some anomalies that have not been fully explained.  For
         example, I did an analysis of infant mortality in Aliquippa,
         and the rate definitely seems to have shifted upward
         recently.  To my mind this upward shift is not fully
         explained by demographic or socioeconomic factors.  I do not
         know if any of it is due to Shippingport, but I think it
         warrants further investigation."
       DR. MORGAN:  "I do not personally feel that the mortality
         statistics refute the possibility of some adverse effects on
         the population's health.  Taking the original published data,
         it appears to me that there was an effect.  However, after
         the Health Department got through making corrections and
         applying all the epidemiological and statistical techniques
         to the mortality rates for the population near the reactor,
         they seem to have come up with the belief that there were no
         significant health effects. . . .  I cannot help but be a
         little skeptical.  To me, if you are going to make all these
         corrections for the population that might have been exposed
         to radiation, you have to give equal consideration to the
         unexposed control population.  It was very obvious to me that
         if they had, it would have made a difference in at least one
         instance."
       DR. RADFORD:  "The statistical evidence favors the hypothesis
         that the plant did not cause any health damage.  For example,
         the mortality rates do not decline with distance in all
         directions away from the plant.  The mortality rates for
         Beaver County as a whole are quite low, and on that basis one
         would be hard-pressed to say that Aliquippa was affected,
         since the rest of the county should also be high. . . .
         Then, when the mortality rates for Aliquippa are corrected
         for errors, you see that Aliquippa is no worse off than any
         other town with comparable population characteristics."
       DR. SMITH:  "In my opinion the mortality statistics indicate
         there was no effect from the reactor.  The adjusted mortality
         rates are not abnormally high.  One comes to the conclusion
         that the Shippingport area may not be the greatest place to
         live, since the mortality rates are higher there than in many
         other communities, but such high rates are normal, expected
         occurrences in places with the kind of demographic and
         socio-economic characteristics you find around Shippingport.
         . . .  Also, I have to find a scientific link between
         radiation exposure and infant mortality, and this requires a
         great deal of what I call logical extrapolation or inferences
         step by step through a process which proceeds from the birth
         of a child to its ultimate death, and I cannot find
         sufficient evidence for that link in this case."

       Although the majority clearly were deeply suspicious of the
    "reanalysis" of the radiation data and the "adjustment" of the vital
    statistics by Tokuhata, I was surprised by Radford's comment that the
    mortality rates do not decline with distance away from Shippingport,
    and that therefore the evidence favored the hypothesis that the plant
    did not cause any health damage.
       Not until later, when I saw the final report, did I see what could
    have led Radford to this conclusion.  In Table 13, Tokuhata had listed
    the cancer death rates according to distance from Shippingport for the
    years 1961 to 1971.  There were columns for the rates within 5 miles,
    between 5 and 10 miles, beyond 10 miles, for Beaver County, and for
    Pennsylvania as a whole.  And at the bottom of each column, there were
    listed the average mortality rates for each of these regions.
       When I looked at them, I was startled to find that Radford seemed
    to be right.  The lowest rate did in fact exist for the circle 5 miles
    in radius around Shippingport:  155.7 compared with 170.4 in the next,
    more distant region 5 to 10 miles away from the plant, and a still
    higher rate of 182.3 for Pennsylvania as a whole.  This certainly
    seemed to suggest that radiation was good for one's health, and that
    the closer one lived to the reactor, the better off one would be.
       What exactly had Tokuhata done to arrive at this conclusion that
    had obviously convinced Radford and Smith?  It took me a while to work
    it out, but when I did I was furious.  Looking down the entries for
    each year from 1961 to 1971, I saw that all areas showed lower cancer
    rates in 1961 than in 1971, but that the area nearest to Shippingport
    had happened to have by far the lowest rates to begin with, well
    before any major releases had occurred from Shippingport and well
    before any increases in cancer mortality due to Shippingport could
    have shown up in the statistics.  It had been a largely rural area,
    relatively free from pollution and therefore with relatively good
    health, cancer mortality having reached a low point of only 102.6 per
    100,000 population in 1964, lower than any other listed at any time
    for any area in the table.  The average for the first four years,
    1961-64 was only 133.4, compared with 155.3 for the 5-to-10 mile range
    and 176.8 for Pennsylvania as a whole.
       But by the time that the 1963-64 Shippingport releases had had a
    chance to act, namely by 1969-70, the area nearest to Shippingport had
    increased the most, shooting up to a peak of more than double its
    lowest rate of 102.6, namely to 225.6 in 1969 and 218.9 in 1970, while
    the more distant areas increased much less.  Thus, the 5-to-10-mile-
    distant zone had risen to 189.2 by 1969 and 191.2 by 1970, while the
    area of Beaver County beyond 10 miles from Shippingport was listed at
    only 164.9 and 164.3 for these years.
       In fact, taking the last four years of 1968 to 1971 in the table
    when cancers had had a chance to manifest themselves, and comparing
    them with the first four years when the effect of any releases could
    not yet have appeared in the mortality statistics, it was clear that
    the data fully confirmed my earlier findings obtained from the Vital
    Statistics reports of Pennsylvania and Ohio by town and by county.
    The greatest increases had indeed taken place for the people nearest
    to the plant:  a rise of 38 percent compared with only 22 percent for
    the next zone and 20 percent for the area beyond 10 miles, while
    Pennsylvania as a whole showed only a 6 percent increase in cancer
    mortality.
       Thus, by averaging over all the eleven years listed in the table so
    as to include the years of lowest cancer rates for the rural area
    around Shippingport before the plant could have had any effect on
    cancer rates, Tokuhata had successfully managed to give the impression
    that the closer one lived to the plant, the less was the risk of
    cancer.
       There was one question that had remained unanswered even by the
    internal documents from the AEC files:  How and where in the plant did
    the radioactive gases escape without being officially reported, as
    required by both state and federal regulations?
       As so often before in the Shippingport story, the answer came in
    the most unexpected manner, this time not through the mail but in a
    phone call late one evening a few weeks after the Aliquippa hearings
    had ended.
       The caller said that what had been brought out at the hearings so
    far was in the right direction, but that the full story behind the
    high radioactivity in the area could be found by putting the plant
    operators on the stand in the forthcoming licensing hearings that were
    to be held by the AEC later in the year.  What we needed to do was to
    have the men explain during cross-examination the details of the
    treatment system for the radioactive gases, and then force them under
    oath to say whether they had found any anomalous conditions in the
    hold-up tanks where the radioactive gases were supposed to be stored
    for many weeks to allow the shorter-lived radioactivity to decay
    before they would be discharged from the monitored stack.
       This was of course the kind of break we had hoped for.  Together
    with the internal memoranda of the AEC that had revealed the attempt
    to explain away the findings of high radioactivity in the air, the
    soil, the milk, the water, and the local diet, it would complete our
    case for arguing that the Duquesne Light Company should not be given a
    license to operate two even larger nuclear reactors, since their
    employees were either too incompetent or too corrupt to do so without
    endangering the health and safety of the public.
       And so I obtained the detailed engineering drawings of the gas-
    treatment system for the Shippingport plant from articles published in
    the literature, and explained the complex system to the attorney for
    the city, Al Brandon, who would have to do the actual cross-
    examination.
       The hearings by the Atomic Safety and Licensing Board on the
    operating permit for Beaver Valley Unit I and the construction permit
    for Unit II finally got under way in the fall of 1973 in the Federal
    Court House in Pittsburgh.  Although we had few illusions as to what
    the ultimate decision would eventually turn out to be, we at least
    hoped to expose to the public what had actually been going on behind
    the scenes at the Shippingport plant, widely advertised all over the
    world by Westinghouse and Duquesne Light as the cleanest and safest
    nuclear reactor in the world.
       For a while we did not know whether we would be allowed to put the
    operators of the plant on the stand.  But then the ruling came down,
    and it all really happened.
       The first few men, when shown the diagrams of the gas-treatment
    system, claimed that they were not aware of anything abnormal.  But
    suddenly, one of the men, when pressed by Brandon as to whether he had
    ever noticed anything unusual in the operation of the system, and
    whether there might not have been some leakages from the gas-storage
    tanks in the yard, admitted that he had observed something that had
    caused him to become concerned.
       Some time in late 1970 or early 1971 he had noticed an unusual drop
    in the amount of recorded radioactive gas releases in the plant log,
    and he had mentioned it to his supervisor, who told him not to worry
    about it.  Questioned by Brandon he admitted that the situation
    persisted over a period of a few weeks, and that he then decided to
    investigate what might be going on for himself.  He went out into the
    yard where the large gas-storage tanks were located and found that a
    lock on one of the rusty valves had been broken.  The valve looked as
    if it might be leaking.  Using a small brush to paint a soap solution
    over the suspected area, he saw bubbles being formed, indicating that
    radioactive gas was in fact leaking from the tank.
       Again, he said that he reported the situation to his supervisor,
    who told him that he would take care of it, and that he should not
    concern himself with this problem any more since this was not part of
    his job.
       As Brandon expected, none of the supervisors he put on the stand
    could recall this incident, and the local newspaper that evening
    reported that the plant personnel had testified that there were no
    problems in the plant.
       Dr. Morton Goldman, the vice-president of N.U.S. and former
    public-health officer in the U.S. Department of Health, Education and
    Welfare, testified under oath that all their early high readings of
    radioactivity had been in error, substantiating the testimony of the
    plant supervisors that no unusual or unreported releases could have
    taken place, and a few months later the Atomic Safety and Licensing
    Board issued the permits for the new reactors.
       Once again, the industry had managed to win the battle in the
    special courts set up by the AEC, which controlled the judges, the
    staff, and the rules of procedure for the benefit of the industry it
    was designed to promote and protect.
       It was only the people that were the losers.  Two years after the
    licenses were granted and five years after the high radiation levels
    had been measured by the N.U.S. Corporation, with the same time delay
    as in Hiroshima, the cancer rates in Beaver County and Pittsburgh
    climbed to a second peak.  They rose a full 23 percent in Beaver
    County and an unprecedented 9 percent in Pittsburgh in the course of
    only three years:  The rise to an all-time high of 304.8 per 100,000
    population took place after a generation of costly efforts to reduce
    the ordinary pollution from fossil fuels in the air and chemicals in
    the water.
       But the heaviest price of all was to be paid by the men who worked
    at Shippingport, as I was to learn at another kind of hearing at
    Aliquippa seven years later.
       When preparing testimony for a hearing before a workmen's
    compensation referee in behalf of the family of a man who had died of
    bone-marrow-type leukemia while working at the Beaver Valley nuclear
    plant next to the old Shippingport reactor, I was shown the death
    certificates of twenty-one other operating engineers who had died
    between 1970 and 1979.  All of them had been working with pumps and
    other heavy equipment to clean up the radioactive spills and move the
    radioactive wastes on the site.  Out of these twenty-two men, ten had
    died of cancer, more than twice the number normally expected.
       Even more significantly, four of these ten were of the bone-
    marrow-related type, namely multiple myeloma and myelogenous leukemia,
    known to be most readily induced by radiation, when less than one in
    twenty cancers of this type would have been expected.
       The men who worked at Shippingport were only too well acquainted
    with these facts.  There was a common saying among them:  high pay and
    early death.
       Yet there was also a sign of hope for the future.  After
    Shippingport was shut down by an explosion of hydrogen gas in its
    electrical generator early in 1974, infant mortality in the town of
    Aliquippa declined to an all-time low of only 11.3 deaths per thousand
    babies born in 1976.
       If the public could only learn these facts as the nation entered
    the third century of its revolution against the arbitrary authority of
    another distant government careless of the inalienable human rights to
    life and liberty, even the tragic tide of rising cancer and damage to
    the unborn could eventually be reversed.






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