NetNews Usenet Archive 1993 #1/NN_1993_1.iso/spool/misc/activism/progress/9848

Internet Message Format | 1993-01-08 | 42.4 KB

Xref: sparky misc.activism.progressive:9848 alt.censorship:9878 alt.activism:20202 talk.environment:5390
Newsgroups: misc.activism.progressive,alt.censorship,alt.activism,talk.environment
Path: sparky!uunet!wupost!mont!pencil.cs.missouri.edu!daemon
From: [e-mail] (dave "who can do? ratmandu!" ratcliffe)
Subject: "SECRET FALLOUT, Low-Level Radiation from Hiroshima to TMI" [10/15]
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
Followup-To: alt.activism.d
Summary: part 10 of 15:  chapter 17
Originator: [e-mail]
Keywords: low-level ionizing radiation, fallout, deception, secrecy, survival
Sender: [e-mail]
Nntp-Posting-Host: pencil.cs.missouri.edu
Organization: Silicon Graphics, Inc.
Date: Fri, 8 Jan 1993 18:01:11 GMT
Approved: [e-mail]
Lines: 663



                             *  *  *  *  *  *  *




                                      17


                        Incident at Three Mile Island




    A FEW MINUTES after ten o'clock on Wednesday morning, March 28, 1979,
    I was sitting in my study trying to understand the full implications
    of what I had learned during a week-long trial in Philadelphia.  At
    issue in the trial was the degree of genetic damage done to the
    soldiers who had been marched under the highly radioactive clouds
    during the Nevada tests back in the 1950s.  Just as I was trying to
    sort out my thoughts on the discovery of the large doses the men had
    received by breathing in the dust and gases, the telephone rang.
       It was a reporter calling from radio station WPLR in New Haven,
    Connecticut, a station from which I had received a number of calls
    over the past year, ever since I had testified at a Congressional
    seminar on the increases in infant mortality and cancer following
    large radioactive releases from the Millstone Nuclear Plant some 25
    miles east of New Haven.  The reporter wanted to know my reaction to a
    news bulletin that had just come over the wire, according to which a
    general emergency had been announced at the Three Mile Island Nuclear
    Plant near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.
       According to the report, high radiation levels had been measured
    inside the main containment building of Unit II, and most of the plant
    personnel who were not essential were being evacuated following the
    accidental release of radioactive steam from the primary loop of the
    reactor.
       From the little information in the first wire-service bulletin, I
    could only guess that this might be the beginning of a potentially
    serious accident.  Normally, the steam from the primary loop of a
    pressurized-water reactor contains relatively low levels of
    radioactivity, and if there was enough to force evacuation of all but
    the most essential people in the control room, there had to be major
    damage to fuel elements in the reactor core.  And since the motion
    picture {The China Syndrome} had just opened, my thoughts immediately
    turned to the possibility that right here in Pennsylvania, where the
    first commercial nuclear reactor had been built with so much hope, we
    might also experience the first melt-down and catastrophic release of
    radioactive gases about which a growing number of concerned scientists
    had tried to warn the public for years.
       The first thing I did was to call Tom Gerusky at the state's Bureau
    of Radiological Health in Harrisburg, but the line was busy.  I then
    decided to call the local offices of the Associated Press and United
    Press International in Pittsburgh to see whether more recent bulletins
    contained any more detailed information.  What I learned from these
    reports was not reassuring.  Apparently, radiation levels inside the
    containment building were still rising, and there were fragmentary
    reports of radioactive gas releases taking place, leading to above-
    normal radiation readings near the site, located some 10 miles south
    of the city of Harrisburg on the Susquehanna River.
       At the same time, spokesmen for the utility were being quoted as
    claiming that there was no serious problem, and certainly no need for
    nearby residents to evacuate the area.
       Which way were the winds blowing?  Were they blowing north, toward
    the densely populated metropolitan area?  I called the U.S. Weather
    Bureau and learned that early in the morning the winds had been
    blowing generally south and southeast, toward the rural counties of
    York and Lancaster, at a relatively low velocity.  This was of course
    relatively good news for the large population of Harrisburg, but not
    such good news for the people in York and Lancaster counties.  The low
    wind speed would mean relatively high concentrations of gases in the
    air, which in turn might lead to potentially large inhalation doses--
    as large as those I had just calculated for the soldiers in Nevada.
    And the fine drizzle in the air would bring down radioactive iodines
    into the local pastures, thus presenting still another problem for the
    people of this heavily agricultural area even if a major melt-down of
    the reactor core should be averted.
       The telephone rang again, and this time it was someone from the
    Mobilization for Survival in Philadelphia, asking me whether I would
    be willing to go to a press conference in Harrisburg the next day
    together with Dr. George Wald of Harvard University.  The purpose of
    this conference would be to present an alternative source of
    information for the people in the area on the potential health hazards
    from the accident.  (So far, the people in the area had received
    nothing more than the bland reassurances being offered by the utility
    and the spokesman for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the
    government organization formed from the old AEC when it was
    reorganized a few years ago).
       The thought passed through my mind that by tomorrow, Harrisburg
    might not be a very healthy place to bring a lot of reporters together
    for a news conference, but I tentatively agreed to go, provided there
    were no further serious or unforeseen developments.  In the meantime,
    I would have to try to gather as much information as possible about
    just what was going on in the reactor.  I needed to have a clearer
    feeling for the nature of the danger that the people in Harrisburg
    were facing.
       Again I tried reaching Gerusky's office in Harrisburg, but without
    success.  Obviously, everyone in the world was trying to reach him or
    Margaret Reilly, the only people who had any firsthand information on
    radiation levels aside from the utility's own people--and the
    utility's people could not be trusted to give out the true data.
       The telephone rang again, and this time it was KDKA-TV, the
    Westinghouse station in Pittsburgh, wanting to interview me for their
    evening news program.  They read me the latest wire stories, and the
    implications were getting increasingly more serious as the full extent
    of the accident began to emerge.  Apparently a cooling pump had failed
    to function, and a series of events led to the opening of a safety
    valve that allowed large amounts of cooling water to escape into the
    main containment building.  This sounded ominous, but it was all still
    very confused.
       Later in the afternoon, a reporter from ABC-TV in New York called
    to say that he heard that I was going to go to Harrisburg the next
    day.  Would I be able to bring a survey meter along so that there
    would be some way that they could get independent information on what
    the radioactive levels at different distances from the reactor really
    were?  I told him that I would try to do so if I could manage to
    borrow one from our nuclear medicine group.
       That evening, Frank Reynolds reported on the {ABC Evening News}
    that there had been a large release of steam from the reactor early in
    the morning, that the accident had actually begun at 4:00 A.M., and
    that state officials were very upset about not having been notified
    immediately.  There were apparently radiation releases from the
    turbine building, and there was indeed some damage to fuel rods in the
    core, as I had deduced from the earlier reports.
       There was only one reliable source of information that I knew I
    could trust, and this was Henry Kendall of the Union of Concerned
    Scientists at M.I.T.  Kendall had been responsible for bringing out
    the true danger of a major accident and the inadequacy of the
    emergency core-cooling system for preventing a melt-down of the core
    that would lead to the dreaded "China Syndrome."  This was an in-joke
    among nuclear engineers for the scenario in which a molten mass of
    uranium, plutonium, and fission products would melt its way through
    the steel reactor vessel and through the concrete foundation deep into
    the earth, "all the way to China," with the release of much of the one
    thousand Hiroshima bombs' worth of radioactivity into the air if the
    containment were to be ruptured.
       I finally was able to reach Kendall late in the evening at the home
    of his mother, who was seriously ill.  He filled me in on what he had
    been able to learn.  Apparently twenty-two previous cases of defects
    in the valves and pumps of this type of reactor had been reported to
    the NRC in recent years, but nothing had been done to correct the
    problem.  As a result of the loss of cooling water, much more fuel
    damage had apparently occurred than had been expected.  But there was
    essentially no adequate instrumentation provided to allow one to
    analyze exactly what was happening inside the reactor core in this
    kind of major accident.  The designers had simply assumed that it
    would never happen.
       The emergency core-cooling system apparently had been put into
    effect, but from what Kendall was able to piece together at this time,
    the reactor was at least not on what he called "a main track toward a
    complete melt-down," though a melt-down was still possible.
       What was certain was that radiation levels inside the reactor
    containment building had risen to the highly lethal level of 4000 rads
    per hour, enough to kill an adult in five minutes, so that according
    to his rough calculation, even on the outside of the thick concrete
    wall the levels might be as high as 4 rads per hour.  This implied a
    great deal of damage to the fuel elements in the core, which must have
    at least begun to melt.  Reports that he had received also talked
    about external gamma radiation doses accumulating at the rate of 1
    millirad every hour a mile or so away, or some one hundred times the
    normal background rate.
       Kendall ended up by telling me how he and his associates had just
    discovered that five years before, the NRC had learned of serious
    defects in the computer programs for calculating the design of these
    plants to survive earthquakes, but that the NRC had kept it quiet
    until his group had discovered it independently.  And he added that
    the Rasmussen estimate of the risk of a major accident had been
    underestimated by at least two hundred times, and that it was more
    like one in one hundred per year rather than one in twenty thousand
    per plant.  Using Kendall's figures with fifty plants operating, a
    potentially major accident like Three Mile Island could happen once
    every few years.
       This information made it clear to me that evacuation of the people,
    and particularly pregnant women, living within a few miles of the
    reactor should have been ordered long before, since the total doses to
    internal organs from inhalation of the fission gases were likely to be
    ten to one hundred times greater than the external gamma dose levels
    Kendall had told me about.  Just as in the case of the Albany-Troy
    incident years ago, where the external whole-body dose was only about
    100 millirads over a period of ten weeks, it would be the doses to the
    thyroids of the infants and the unborn in their mother's womb that
    would be much greater and far more serious in their effects.  Perhaps
    in a single day, thyroid doses to the unborn would reach the values of
    a few hundred to a few thousand millirads, equivalent to a series of
    abdominal X-rays, for which Dr. Alice Stewart's data had indicated as
    much as a doubling or tripling of the risk of leukemia and cancer for
    those in the early phases of development.
       Yet on the radio and television news that evening, there were still
    the bland reassurances from the Metropolitan Edison Company officials
    who operated the reactor.  According to the president of the company,
    Walter Creitz, the public was not in danger, no one was killed, and no
    one had been injured by the accident.
       There were also the usual reassuring phrases by the public-
    relations people of the NRC, with their carefully chosen qualifying
    words.  According to them, there was "no immediate danger to life."
    Put in this way, it was literally true;  so far, there were no
    immediately lethal doses, and any infants in their mothers' wombs who
    were endangered would not die until many months or years later, while
    some types of chronic diseases and cancers would not show up for
    decades.
       At six o'clock the next morning the telephone woke me, and I was
    afraid of the news that it might bring.  But it turned out to be bad
    news of a totally different and unexpected kind.  It was my mother in
    Buffalo, who said that she could not sleep all night because of severe
    abdominal pain:  could I please come to see her right away?  She had
    suffered a heart attack a year before and had been in poor health, but
    more recently she had been well enough to do without a companion.  As
    a result, she was now alone.
       I did not know what to do.  I was scheduled to be in Harrisburg at
    noon, and I did not see how I could break that commitment to the many
    people who were in danger from the radioactive gases still leaking
    from the plant.  So I told her that I would call my brother in New
    York, and that if he could fly up in the morning, I would come to
    Buffalo in the afternoon, directly from Harrisburg.  In the meantime,
    she should call her neighbor, who had been very helpful in the past,
    and ask him to drive her to the emergency room at the hospital, where
    I would call her.
       Fortunately, my brother was able to go to Buffalo at once, and I
    set out for the airport to catch the flight to Harrisburg after
    stopping at the hospital to pick up the survey meter that I had agreed
    to take along.
       I had checked the morning news just before leaving the house to
    learn the latest status of the plant.  Daniel Ford, who worked with
    Henry Kendall, appeared together with Walter Creitz on the {Today}
    show.  Apparently radiation measurements indicated a lower release
    rate than the night before, although radioactivity had by now been
    detected as far as 16 miles away.  The temperature of the reactor was
    being lowered, and Creitz talked confidently about pumping out the
    radioactive water from the containment building in the hope of putting
    the reactor back on line again in the not-too-distant future.
       Ford indicated that for the moment the reactor seemed to have been
    stabilized, that the emergency core-cooling system had been turned
    off, but that the NRC felt that there were still serious problems in
    keeping the reactor under control.  At least it seemed to me that
    there had been no major deterioration of the situation during the
    night.  From the airport I had called the hospital in Buffalo and
    learned that my mother had been sent home with what appeared to be
    nothing more serious than a stomach flu, and so I decided to get on
    the plane together with a great many other passengers, some of whom
    must also have wondered about the wisdom of flying to Harrisburg that
    morning.  But none of them could have had any inkling of the full
    extent of the quiet tragedy that had already begun as the radioactive
    gases silently seeped from the damaged reactor only a few thousand
    feet away from where we would land on that gray, drizzly day in
    Harrisburg.
       Just before boarding the plane, I decided to recheck the survey
    meter that I had placed in my briefcase.  It still read the normal
    level of slightly less than a hundredth of a millirad per hour, and
    the reading did not change detectably after we had reached our
    relatively low cruising altitude for the half-hour flight east to
    Harrisburg across the two- to three-thousand-foot ridges of the
    Appalachian Mountains.
       Next to me sat a young woman who evidently became quite curious
    when I opened my briefcase to look at the dial of the survey meter.
    She asked me what I was doing.  It turned out that she was a nurse
    from our hospital on her way to Harrisburg to attend a conference on
    emergency medical care, and to compound the strange coincidence, her
    husband worked as a nuclear engineer for Westinghouse.  I explained to
    her that I was planning to measure for myself the radiation levels in
    the Harrisburg area at different distances from the stricken plant in
    order to have some idea as to the magnitude of the hazard that the
    continuing releases were posing for the people in the area,
    particularly for the unborn.
       Soon it came time for landing, and once again I turned on the
    survey meter to see what the radiation levels were a few thousand feet
    in the air, a few miles northwest of the Three Mile Island plant.  As
    we both watched with growing concern, the needle began to move up-
    scale, until when we were just a few hundred feet in the air over the
    river close to the end of the runway, the meter indicated a dose rate
    fifteen times what would be normal.  There could be no doubt about it:
    Some thirty-six hours after the accident, large amounts of radioactive
    gases were still escaping from the reactor whose twin cooling towers
    loomed ominously only a mile or so away through the haze.  Apparently,
    the wind had shifted and the invisible gases were now drifting
    northwestward--up the river and toward Harrisburg.
       The plane was delayed and so I was late for the news conference
    scheduled for noon in the Friends' Meeting House in downtown
    Harrisburg.  This meant that there was no time to check the radiation
    levels still closer to the plant.  But a quick measurement outside the
    airport terminal showed the readings to be ten times their normal
    value, confirming the high reading in the plane.
       On the way into the city, I noted down the readings every mile as
    the taxi driver read me the distances.  Three miles from the airport,
    the readings dropped to only three to four times normal, but at 4
    miles, they rose again to eight and nine times their usual rate.  This
    meant that there were hot spots, either due to gas pockets or to
    fallout deposited on the ground in the course of the past day and a
    half of releases.
       The high readings could not be due to any direct gamma rays
    penetrating the four-foot-thick concrete walls of the reactor's
    containment building, since they would have diminished steadily and
    rapidly with the increasing distance.  But they were consistent with
    large gas releases now drifting toward downtown Harrisburg, where the
    readings were still three to four times the normal rate as we
    approached the dome of the State Capitol 12 miles from the airport.
       The news conference was already in progress when I arrived.  There
    were a surprisingly large number of reporters with microphones, tape
    recorders, and television cameras crowded into the relatively small
    meeting room, with Dr. George Wald of Harvard sitting at a table
    toward one end.
       I apologized for being late, and then took out my survey meter to
    measure the radiation rate in the room.  The reading was still three
    to four times normal, or essentially the same as outside.  Clearly,
    the walls of the building did not provide any significant protection.
    Most likely, it was the gamma radiation from the radioactive gas that
    was by now at the same level as outside the building.  Even closing
    the windows would have been futile at this point.
       The intensity of the questions from the reporters reflected the
    great concern that existed, and I felt acutely the great difficulty of
    having to explain, without causing a panic, the seriousness of the
    situation that already existed for the pregnant women and infants.  I
    explained that at the moment, the radiation levels were not serious
    enough for the normal, healthy adult as long as they would not
    increase because of further releases.  Asked what I would recommend in
    the light of my knowledge of the situation, I said that at the very
    least, pregnant women and young children should be urged to leave the
    area within a few miles of the reactor because of the likelihood of
    continuing releases of radioactive iodine that would concentrate in
    the fetal thyroid as well as in that of the infants and young
    children.
       By limiting my recommendation in this manner, I hoped that there
    would not be any sudden rush toward a mass evacuation of the whole
    population, which might cause serious traffic jams and accidents.  I
    was primarily concerned with preventing panic, especially since
    according to my latest information, there was apparently no immediate
    threat of a complete melt-down.  And since the greatest danger existed
    for the unborn and very young, at least they would not be exposed any
    further, although at that point I did not know whether most of the
    dose had already been received, or whether there would in fact be any
    further large releases.
       I also urged that pregnant women and young children should not
    drink fresh milk or local water for the next few weeks, until detailed
    measurements could be carried out to determine the precise levels of
    radioactivity.  The most immediate hazard was clearly from the
    inhalation of the fresh radioactive gases by expectant mothers, which
    would lead in a matter of hours to significant amounts of radioactive
    iodine transmitted through the blood stream to the placenta and from
    there to the developing infant's small thyroid gland.
       When someone asked Dr. Wald whether the public should believe me or
    the spokesmen for the utility who had just reassured them that there
    was no danger, he answered that under such circumstances, one should
    always ask oneself who has the greater financial interest, the
    industry or the concerned scientist trying to warn the public.  Under
    the present circumstances, he personally would tend not to accept the
    reassurances of the industry spokesmen and would tend to believe that
    there was indeed reason for deep concern, as I had indicated.  There
    was no safe level of radiation, and the unborn and the young are
    clearly more vulnerable than adults.
       The news conference broke up shortly thereafter, and a number of
    reporters wanted to have more details on my findings.  Unfortunately,
    I felt under great pressure to get back to the airport so as not to
    miss the next flight to Pittsburgh with a connection to Buffalo.  I
    was still deeply troubled about my mother's condition, and I could not
    stay very long to answer all the many difficult technical questions
    posed by the reporters.
       I did manage to catch the afternoon flight, and as soon as I got
    off the plane in Pittsburgh I went to a telephone to call my mother's
    house.  When I received no answer, I had a deep sense of foreboding,
    and immediately called the emergency room at the hospital.  The nurse
    who answered told me to wait a minute, until she could get the doctor
    on duty, and a few moments later I learned that my mother had just
    died in the emergency room from what appeared to have been a sudden,
    massive rupture of the abdominal aorta.  The doctor told me that my
    brother had been with her, and that it happened so suddenly that she
    lost consciousness instantly.  There was no long period of concern or
    pain, and she passed away in my brother's arms.  For this I was of
    course grateful, but it could not change the fact that suddenly my
    mother was gone, and I had made the decision not to be with her at her
    time of greatest need.
       The next few days were like a nightmare, in which I was torn
    between my private grief and the demands of an outside world clamoring
    for advice and help in the face of the growing fear that the reactor
    at Harrisburg might still melt down.  An unexplained bubble of
    hydrogen threatened the efforts to keep the core adequately cooled,
    and all through this period uncontrolled releases of radioactive gases
    continued to take place, despite frantic efforts to bring the
    situation under control.
       The next day, while making the funeral arrangements for my mother
    in Buffalo, I learned that Governor Thornburgh had ordered the
    immediate evacuation of all pregnant women and children below school
    age from the area around Three Mile Island.  It would be too late for
    many, but at least some lives would be saved, and I was grateful that
    my efforts to warn the people of the area had not been totally in
    vain.
       Even though I had told my secretary that I could not take any calls
    in Buffalo, it was impossible to stop them all.  In a way, the sense
    of being needed kept me from giving in to the deep sense of loss, and
    the continuing demands of life probably helped me to overcome the
    period of deepest grief.  My mother had been a pediatrician and
    obstetrician, and she had always been greatly concerned about my
    findings.  Somehow I knew that she would have wanted me to help the
    people who were so terribly troubled, even during this period of
    greatest personal and family upheaval.
       When a few days later I tried to reach Henry Kendall to fill in the
    gaps in my knowledge of what was happening in the stricken reactor, I
    learned that his mother had also died during that terrible week.  And,
    just as in my own case, the enormous needs of the outside world seemed
    to have helped him through his period of great personal crisis.  It
    was a week that would forever remain deeply etched in our memories,
    and those of hundreds of thousands living nearby, who would never
    forget the days when their world had so suddenly threatened to come to
    an end.
       On April 4, 1979, exactly a week after the accident at Three Mile
    Island had begun, Congressional hearings were scheduled to take place
    in an effort to learn what the long-range health effects of the
    accident were likely to be.  They had originally been planned by
    Representative Lester Brown, and during the previous weekend, I had
    been asked whether I would be able to come to Washington to testify.
    It was not an easy decision to accept the invitation so shortly after
    my mother's death, but I agreed to come at the urging of environmental
    groups.  The environmentalists feared that otherwise only officials of
    government agencies would be testifying, and in the past these
    officials had been on record as denying the seriousness of low-level
    radiation exposures from weapons fallout and normal nuclear plant
    releases.
       Two days before they were to begin, the hearings were shifted to
    the Senate under the chairmanship of Senator Edward Kennedy, and the
    environmental groups were told that my testimony was no longer
    desired.  It was clear that both within the nuclear industry and the
    government agencies charged with the promotion of nuclear energy,
    every effort would now be made to save the industry.  Clearly, this
    required that there should be no evidence presented that would suggest
    the possibility that anyone would die as a result of the accident.
       President Carter, himself a former nuclear engineer trained in
    Admiral Rickover's nuclear submarine service, had just flown to
    Harrisburg together with his wife in order to reassure the people that
    there was no serious danger either from the gases that continued to
    leak from the damaged plant, or from the hydrogen bubble that was
    still threatening a melt-down.
       At that very time, lawsuits were underway by servicemen who had
    been deliberately exposed to the radioactive fallout from nuclear-bomb
    tests in the 1950s.  The servicemen were seeking compensation for the
    leukemia and cancers that had shown up among them at many times the
    normal rate.  Another lawsuit, which had just come to trial in
    Philadelphia the week before Three Mile Island, involved a petition
    filed in behalf of men who participated in military exercises at the
    Nevada Test Site.  At issue was whether or not the government should
    be required to notify the men that they had a significant risk of
    genetic damage that could affect their decision to have children.  And
    finally, hundreds of individual lawsuits had been filed against the
    government by residents of Nevada and Utah for leukemia and cancer
    cases resulting from the years of exposure to the fallout clouds from
    the tactical-weapons tests.
       Under these circumstances the last thing either the industry or the
    government wanted was testimony that might set off still another
    flurry of potentially costly damage suits in the Harrisburg area by
    women who were pregnant, some of whom might have miscarriages or lose
    their babies at the time of birth.  Even the possibility of one such
    suit could threaten the survival of the nuclear industry, already
    reeling from the shock of an accident that it had assured the public
    would be as unlikely as being hit by a meteor while walking on the
    street.
       The hearings by the Kennedy Committee did indeed go exactly as the
    concerned environmental groups expected.  One government witness after
    another sent to testify by the White House assured the public that
    among the two million people living within 50 miles, and the hundreds
    of thousands who would normally be expected to die of cancer, there
    might perhaps be one or at most a few extra cancer cases, clearly a
    totally undetectable and therefore insignificant number.  And, of
    course, not a word was said about the much more likely effects on
    infant mortality.
       Only Dr. K. Z. Morgan, who had been one of the members of the panel
    appointed by Governor Shapp to hear the evidence on possible health
    effects of the Shippingport plant six years earlier, expressed concern
    over the neglect of the beta radiation in the official estimates of
    the radiation dose.  But before he had a chance to explain the
    significance of the hundredfold greater beta as compared to gamma dose
    for internal organs such as the thyroid gland, the hearings were
    quickly adjourned.
       Clearly, the public would once again be misled by the combined
    efforts of the old Atomic Energy Commission scientists now working for
    the NRC and the Department of Energy following the second
    reorganization of the old AEC.  Once again, they were joined by the
    Department of Health, Education and Welfare, as had happened during
    the period of heavy bomb testing.  Ironically, the previously secret
    details of the effects of bomb testing were being released that very
    week as a result of a Freedom of Information request filed by the
    {Washington Post}.
       As told by Bill Curry in an article that appeared on April 14,
    1979,

       Officials involved in U.S. atomic bomb tests feared in 1965 that
       disclosures of a secret study linking leukemia to radioactive
       fallout from the bombs could jeopardize further testing and
       result in costly damage claims according to documents obtained
       by the {Washington Post}.  That study, as well as a proposal to
       examine thyroid cancer rates in Utah, touched off a series of
       top-level meetings within the old Atomic Energy Commission over
       how to influence or change the two studies.

       The article then went on to say,

       The documents also indicate that the Public Health Service, the
       nation's top health agency, which conducted the studies joined
       the AEC in reassuring the public about any possible danger from
       fallout.

       Here then was the long bitter story emerging at last, just as it
    was being repeated--not in the case of fallout from nuclear-weapons
    tests carried out in the national interest at distant test sites in
    the Pacific and the Nevada desert, but in the case of invisible
    releases from peaceful nuclear reactors near the nation's cities, in
    the private interest of an industry spawned by the secret military
    atom.
       Nearly 40,000 pages of files dealing with radiation revealed a
    disturbing story of deception perpetrated in the national interest.
    Not surprisingly, the full consequences of this deception for the
    nation's health were never adequately examined.
       Reading the list of what Curry discovered made me realize something
    that I had only begun to suspect in recent years, namely that some
    individuals in the government knew long before I had stumbled upon it
    accidentally how serious the fallout from weapons testing really was.
    As early as 1959, a study found higher levels of radioactive strontium
    90 in the bones of younger children in the fallout zone.  And, as
    Curry added, "coincidentally a Utah state epidemiologist found this
    year that children living in the zone during the weapons testing had
    2.5 times as much leukemia as children before and after the testing
    program."  This was the study by Dr. Joseph L. Lyon, published in the
    {New England Journal of Medicine} just a few weeks before Three Mile
    Island.
       But what shocked me even more was Curry's account of a much earlier
    government study suggesting a link between fallout and leukemia that
    was begun even before I had submitted my first article to {Science}
    dealing with this possibility, back in 1963.  Apparently, a 1959-60
    spurt in leukemia in the southwestern Utah counties of Washington and
    Iron had been noticed by Edward S. Weiss of the Public Health Service,
    and he had immediately suspected fallout.  The study, which showed
    that the two counties experienced 9 more leukemia cases than the 19
    statistically expected, was essentially completed by July 1965, when
    Weiss submitted it for publication in a Health Service journal.  Curry
    reported in the {Post} what happened next:

          By September 1 of that year, a copy of Weiss's paper had been
       sent to the AEC, as had the Public Health Service's proposal to
       test school children in southwest Utah for thyroid
       abnormalities.
          The AEC discussed the two studies that morning.  The same
       day, a White House science adviser called the Health Service to
       ask, "What would be the federal government's liability for any
       health problems found?"
          By five that afternoon, a joint AEC Health Service-White
       House meeting was set for the next day--with three HEW lawyers
       present, an extraordinary sign of the legal problems the studies
       could cause.
          At the meeting, AEC representatives criticized the leukemia
       studies and the proposed thyroid study.  It was agreed they
       would submit suggestions for changes.
          A week later, the AEC was ready with a proposed letter to the
       surgeon general, the head of the Public Health Service.  Dwight
       A. Ink, then assistant general manager of the AEC, told his
       commissioners:
          "Although we do not oppose developing further data in these
       areas (leukemia and thyroid abnormalities), *performance of the
       . . . studies will pose potential problems to the commission:
       adverse public reaction, lawsuits and jeopardizing the programs
       at the Nevada Test Site*." [Italics added.]

       Not only would the study have jeopardized the commission's program
    at the Nevada Test Site for using strings of hydrogen bombs to build a
    new Panama Canal and to test designs for anti-ballistic-missile
    warheads in the atmosphere, but as I learned later, it might also have
    endangered the ambitious program of rapidly building a whole new
    generation of gigantic nuclear reactors all over the nation, each ten
    times as large as Shippingport, which were about to be considered for
    licensing.  Among these were to be the plants of Beaver Valley,
    Millstone, and Three Mile Island.
       As Curry's story made clear, this was to be the end of the report
    that might have given the public and the scientific community a timely
    warning of the unexpected seriousness of the planned normal and
    accidental releases of low-level radiation before the enormous
    financial commitment to a trillion dollars' worth of nuclear plants
    had been made by the nation's utilities.
       In fact, it was clearly no coincidence that at exactly this time,
    namely the years 1964 and 1965, the Johnson White House had ordered a
    twentyfold increase in the permissible levels of iodine 131 and
    strontium 90 in the milk before it needed to be withdrawn from the
    market.  (This fact came to light in the course of hearings by the
    Joint Committee on Atomic Energy on Radiation Standards held in 1965.)
    And it was also the time when the Johnson administration had made a
    secret commitment to a major involvement of American armed forces in
    Vietnam, where tactical nuclear weapons might have to be threatened or
    used if the Chinese should enter the conflict, as they had in Korea.
    That was clearly not the time to alarm the American people about the
    possible risk of leukemia, thyroid disease, and congenital defects
    among newborn children from the clouds of radioactive fallout that
    were certain to drift back over the United States if these weapons
    were ever used.
       As Curry's story made clear, the AEC was determined to prevent the
    publication of the Weiss study, which would of course have fully
    substantiated the concerns of scientists such as Linus Pauling, Barry
    Commoner, Eric Reiss, E. B. Lewis, Jack Schubert, Ralph Lapp, myself,
    and many others who had warned of the possible rise in congenital
    defects, thyroid cancer, and especially childhood leukemia only a few
    years earlier.  But our concerns had largely ended with the signing of
    the test-ban treaty by Kennedy and Khrushchev in the fall of 1963,
    just before Kennedy was assassinated.  The release of the Weiss study
    would clearly have evoked renewed opposition from the scientific
    community and the public to the vast military and civilian programs
    that were being planned by the Pentagon, the AEC, and the nuclear
    industry for the use of bombs to dig canals and for vastly increasing
    the radioactivity in the environment from the production of weapons
    and the routine releases from giant commercial nuclear power plants.
       The next part of the story in the {Washington Post} was therefore
    the inevitable next step in a Greek tragedy that would eventually lead
    to Three Mile Island and the crisis that a stunned nation would face
    when the promised source of cheap, clean, and economical nuclear power
    to replace the imported oil would suddenly turn into a national
    nightmare on their television screens:

          The next day, Sept. 10, Ink sent to the surgeon general a
       critique containing criticisms of the study's scientific basis
       which were made public in January with the Weiss report.  The
       letter did not, however, make any reference to the AEC's
       concerns about damage suits, adverse publicity or its effect on
       the testing program.
          Meanwhile, the Public Health Service was gearing up to
       announce the thyroid study and to disclose the leukemia study.
       Weiss' study was formally prepared and dated Sept. 14.  Two days
       later, the thyroid study was announced, but there was no mention
       of the leukemia findings.
          One Health Service document suggests that the service itself
       may have even suppressed the study temporarily to avoid
       excessive press coverage of the thyroid study.  "All of this
       interest," an official wrote of the congressional and press
       concern for fallout studies, "will be intensified if publication
       of the leukemia portion of the study occurs before the [thyroid]
       project begins."
          Earlier, the Health Service had decided to minimize any
       publicity of the thyroid study.
          The result was that the Weiss study was not released and in
       1966 was still under review and revision.  It was never
       released.

       It was now clear what Surgeon General Jesse L. Steinfeld had
    referred to when he answered an inquiry from Representative William S.
    Moorehead back in 1969.  Moorehead wanted to know what had happened to
    the promised large-scale epidemiological studies on thyroid cancer,
    leukemia, and congenital defects in relation to fallout radiation
    requested by Congressmen Holifield and Price after the August 1963
    hearings on low-level radiation.  Steinfeld had written that the
    feasibility studies for such a program led to a decision that "a
    national program was not indicated" and that "the feasibility studies
    were not published."  Those were the studies of Edward S. Weiss, a
    Public Health Service Officer who had tried to protect the lives and
    health of the people of the United States in accordance with his
    professional oath.
       And as inexorable as that fateful decision was to suppress the
    truth about the biological effects of the worldwide fallout from
    nuclear-weapons testing in the interest of national security, it would
    now be necessary for the government to keep from the people of this
    country and the rest of the world the truth about what I knew would
    surely happen in the wake of the drifting fallout clouds from Three
    Mile Island.






                             *  *  *  *  *  *  *