NetNews Usenet Archive 1993 #1/NN_1993_1.iso/spool/talk/environm/5363

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From: [e-mail] (dave "who can do? ratmandu!" ratcliffe)
Newsgroups: talk.environment
Subject: "SECRET FALLOUT, Low-Level Radiation from Hiroshima to TMI" [7/15]
Summary: part 7 of 15:  first half of chapter 15
Keywords: low-level ionizing radiation, fallout, deception, secrecy, survival
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Date: 7 Jan 93 15:50:55 GMT
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                                      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