NetNews Usenet Archive 1993 #1/NN_1993_1.iso/spool/talk/environm/5364

Internet Message Format | 1993-01-07 | 14.6 KB

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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" [8/15]
Summary: part 8 of 15:  second/last half of chapter 15
Keywords: low-level ionizing radiation, fallout, deception, secrecy, survival
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Date: 7 Jan 93 15:51:51 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