From: dave@ratmandu.esd.sgi.com (dave "who can do? ratmandu!" ratcliffe)
Newsgroups: misc.activism.progressive,alt.censorship,alt.activism,talk.environment
Subject: "SECRET FALLOUT, Low-Level Radiation from Hiroshima to TMI" [11/15]
Summary: part 11 of 15:  chapter 18
Keywords: low-level ionizing radiation, fallout, deception, secrecy, survival
Date: 11 Jan 93 17:10:04 GMT
Followup-To: alt.activism.d
Organization: Silicon Graphics, Inc.
Originator: daemon@pencil.cs.missouri.edu



                             *  *  *  *  *  *  *




                                      18


                       Too Little Information Too Late




    THE TRUTH WAS more difficult to suppress this time than it had been in
    the atmosphere of fear engendered in the cold war of the McCarthy
    years, the Cuban missile crisis, and the Vietnam war.  Nonetheless, an
    attempt to keep the facts from the people was clearly being made.
       The same Freedom of Information Act that had made it possible for
    the {Washington Post} to reveal how the truth about the bomb tests in
    Nevada had been kept from the American people was used only a few days
    later to provide the first clue to what really happened at Three Mile
    Island.
       On Monday, April 16, 1979, only two days after Bill Curry's story
    had gone out over the wires, the {Pittsburgh Post-Gazette} carried
    across the top of its front page a special report from the Associated
    Press with excerpts of tape recordings of the proceedings of the
    Nuclear Regulatory Commission during the crisis at Three Mile Island.
    Strangely enough, as in the case of the Watergate affair, it would be
    the private conversations of top government officials recorded on
    magnetic tape and unexpectedly released to the news media that would
    provide the crucial information.
       My own awareness of the existence of the tapes had begun with a
    rather amusing phone call from a {Washington Post} reporter.  He
    wanted me to comment on a not very complimentary, and very bitter and
    sarcastic remark made by one of the NRC staff members on what I was
    likely to say about the doses that would be received by the people
    near Three Mile Island during the first few days of crisis.  When the
    excerpts of the NRC officials' comments appeared in the {Post-
    Gazette}, I saw immediately that my worst fears about the true
    magnitude of the radiation doses were likely to have been correct.  I
    was sure that there would once again be a large rise in fetal deaths,
    congenital abnormalities, infant mortality, and childhood leukemia,
    followed by the delayed rises in infectious diseases, heart disease,
    and cancer among those exposed in the years to come.
       The excerpts opened with the following comment by Lee V. Gossick,
    Executive Director for Operations of the NRC on Friday, March 30, the
    day after I had urged the evacuation of pregnant women and young
    children at the news conference in Harrisburg:
       "Bill, we have got a deteriorating situation up there with regard
    to some releases.  The Governor is asking us to confirm what he is
    getting from the plant, which says that they had an uncontrolled
    release of stuff."
       To this, Harold Denton, Director of the Office of Nuclear Reactor
    Regulation in charge of all NRC activities at Three Mile Island,
    answered:
       "They are getting 63 curies per second, and I can't explain to you
    the mathematics, but what they are saying is if that's true, by
    comparing it with what we know the shutdown rate was and the
    measurements taken at the north gate, and those were yesterday, they
    were on the order of three times what they were yesterday, which would
    put us in the 1200 millirems per hour."
       These were truly enormous release rates of fresh fission gases,
    since in a single hour (consisting of 3600 seconds) there would be
    3600 times 63 or some 226,000 curies being released in an uncontrolled
    manner without detailed analysis or significant hold-up to allow the
    most dangerous short-lived isotopes to decay.  Even Millstone, the
    worst of all reactors, had not released more than fifteen times that
    much in a whole year.
       The corresponding radiation dose of 1200 millirems per hour,
    equivalent to the dose of some 50 to 100 chest X-rays, was presumably
    measured in the narrow plume close to the release point at the plant,
    since it was ten thousand times the dose-rate that I had recorded the
    previous day in the airplane and on the ground a few miles away in the
    pockets of trapped gas.  The road into Harrisburg was evidently well
    away from the narrow, invisible plume of radioactive gases meandering
    upstream, to the northwest, toward Middletown and Harrisburg with the
    slowly moving prevailing winds.  Wherever it touched down, it would
    lead to an enormous inhalation dose in a very short time.
       The taped conversation continued with the following question by
    Peter Bradford, one of the NRC commissioners who was not trained as a
    nuclear engineer:

       BRADFORD:  What actual measurements do you have?
       GOSSICK:  I can't give you any at the moment.  I don't have
         anything that is current since this happened here, you
         understand.  The source has been sealed up again and I think
         this is probably being released for one or two hours.  We
         don't know, however, whether that's good for any period of
         time.
       GILINSKY (NRC Commissioner):  Do we have any monitoring
         equipment--
       DENTON:  There is a lot up there, Vic, but it takes a while for
         it to ever get back here.
       FOUCHARD (Director of Public Affairs for the NRC):  I just had
         a call from my guy in the Governor's office and he says the
         Governor says the information he is getting from the plant is
         ambiguous, that he needs some recommendations from the NRC.
       DENTON:  It is really difficult to get the data.  We seem to
         get it after the fact.  They opened the valves this morning,
         on the let-down, and were releasing at a six-curie-per-second
         rate before anyone knew about it.  By the time we got fully
         up to speed, apparently they had stopped, there was a
         possible release on the order of an hour or an hour and a
         half--
       GILINSKY:  And when did this plume--when was the puff released?
       DENTON:  Within the last two hours.
       HENDRIE (Chairman of the NRC):  Presumably it has just
         terminated recently, then.
       DENTON:  We don't know how long, but if it was a continuous
         release over a period of an hour or an hour and a half, which
         from what I understand which is a kind of lot of puff.
       HENDRIE:  A couple-of-knots wind and the dammed thing--the head
         edge of it is already past the five-mile line.
       HENDRIE:  There has been a suggestion for a five-mile
         evacuation in the northeast direction.  I take it--
       DENTON:  A good five miles, I would say from first impression.
       BRADFORD:  It ought to be made clear that you are not talking
         about lethal doses.
       FOUCHARD:  Mr. Chairman, I think you should call Governor
         Thornburgh and tell him what we know.  I don't know whether
         you are prepared at the present time to make a commission
         recommendation or not.  The Civil Defense people up there say
         that our state programs people have advised evacuation out to
         five miles in the direction of the plume.  I believe that the
         commission has to communicate with the Governor and do it
         very promptly.
       GILINSKY:  Well, one thing we have got to do is get better
         data.
       FOUCHARD:  Don't you think, as a precautionary measure, there
         should be some evacuation?
       HENDRIE:  Probably, but I must say, it is operating totally in
         the blind and I don't have any confidence at all that if we
         order an evacuation of people from a place, where they have
         already gotten a piece of the dose they are going to get into
         an area where they will have had 0.0 of what they were going
         to get and now they move some place else and get 1.0.
       GILINSKY:  Does it make sense that they have to continue
         recurrent releases at this time?
       DENTON:  I guess I tend to feel that if they really didn't stop
         the release a half an hour ago--it's probably best to leave
         it to the operational people up there.  The cloud hasn't had
         a chance to get down to these low levels.
       AHEARNE (NRC commissioner):  But Harold, what confidence do you
         have that they won't embark on the same thing?
       DENTON:  I don't have any basis for believing that it might not
         happen--is not likely to happen again.  I don't understand
         the reason for this one yet.
       HENDRIE:  It seems to me that I have got to call the Governor .
         . . to do it immediately.  We are operating almost totally in
         the blind, his information is ambiguous, mine is nonexistent,
         and--I don't know, it's like a couple of blind men staggering
         around making decisions.


       This last remark by Chairman Joseph M. Hendrie was to be quoted
    repeatedly by the news media later, but strangely enough it was always
    referred to in the context of the danger of a major melt-down.  But
    clearly, either by reason of ignorance or design, the public was not
    told that the remark was made in the context of the danger from the
    ongoing large gas releases that were rapidly approaching the critical
    EPA emergency dose of 25,000 millirems to the whole body or key organs
    such as the thyroid from internal and external sources combined.  This
    high level had been set by the Federal Radiation Council back in 1965
    and later adopted by the EPA as the maximum allowable dose before
    countermeasures or an evacuation of the population should be ordered.
    Certainly neither the people living nearby nor the reporters at the
    site had ever been told of the large radiation doses from the inhaled
    gases that they were receiving.
       The excerpts from the tapes continued to record the enormous
    concern about the growing radiation doses from the inhalation of the
    gases to the people in the area:

       FOUCHARD:  Is there anybody who disagrees that we ought to
         advise the Governor on what to do?
       DENTON:  I don't.  Just on the basis of what we know.  It's a
         good first step.
       HENDRIE:  Go ahead with the evacuation?
       DENTON:  I certainly recommended we do it when we first got the
         word, commissioner.  Since the rains have stopped and the
         plume is going--I would still recommend a precautionary
         evacuation in front and under.  And if it turns out we have
         been too conservative--
       GRIMES:  My view is that it might have been useful right near
         the site, but now it is down below the EPA [unintelligible]
         level, so it probably is the most that should be done, in my
         view, is to tell people to stay inside this morning.
       AHEARNE:  I was going to ask, what about pregnant women and
         children?
       GILINSKY:  Well, Brian says it is a factor of 10 that can be
         gained by staying indoors.  Anyway, I just think it is worth
         getting that half hour to find out, first of all, you are
         alerting people that they are going to have to do something,
         and they are not going to be able to do something in a half-
         hour anyway.
       HENDRIE (on telephone):  Governor Thornburgh, glad to get in
         touch with you at last.  I must say that the state of our
         information is not much better than I understand yours is.
         It appears to us that it would be desirable to suggest that
         people out in that northeast quadrant within five miles of
         the plant stay indoors for the next half hour.
            We have got one of those monitoring aircraft up and seem
         to have an open line to it and we ought to be able to get
         some information in the next 10 to 15 minutes.  They can tell
         us whether it would be prudent to go ahead and start an
         evacuation out in that direction.
       THORNBURGH:  So your immediate recommendation would be for
         people to stay indoors?
       HENDRIE:  Yes, out in that--out in the northeast direction from
         the plant.
       THORNBURGH:  The northeast direction from the plant to a
         distance of?
       HENDRIE:  To a distance of about five miles.
            I have got a reading.  During one of these burst, releases
         up over the plant several hours ago, up over the plant about
         1200 millirems per hour which seems to calculate out, by the
         time the plume comes to the ground where people would get it,
         would be about 120 millirems per hour.  Now, that is still
         below the EPA evacuation trigger levels;  on the other hand,
         it certainly is a pretty husky dose rate to be having off-
         site.

       Here it was:  the NRC knew that the true doses were not just a few
    millirems to the people in the area, as had been claimed at the
    Kennedy hearings, with maximum values of the order of 75 to 100
    millirems nearest to the plant.
       They knew just as I did that the greatest dose arose not from the
    external gamma radiation measured by a survey meter or a film badge,
    but from the internal beta radiation from the inhaled fission gases
    and particles in the lung, the thyroid, and the other critical organs
    that concentrate the different substances according to their various
    chemical properties.  So when the external gamma-dose rate on the
    ground was of the order of 1 to 2 millirems per hour, the true dose
    rate to the lung and other critical organs could be as much as 50 to
    100 times greater, or of the same general magnitude as the 120
    millirems per hour Hendrie himself had just mentioned.
       But they also knew, as I did, that if they ever were to order the
    full evacuation that should have been ordered long before, it would
    not only have caused a panic among the completely confused and
    unprepared population, it would also have been the end of the nuclear
    industry, whether or not the core would ever go to a complete melt-
    down.
       And so more precious time in which to save lives was being lost by
    recommending only that people should stay indoors, as was clear from
    the taped conversation with Governor Thornburgh.  At that very moment
    Governor Thornburgh was under enormous pressures from those wanting to
    protect this important Pennsylvania industry on the one hand, and his
    Secretary of Health, Gordon MacLeod, on the other hand, who was at
    that very time urging that at least the pregnant women and young
    children should be evacuated.
       But the NRC was clinging to the hope that an evacuation of any kind
    would not have to be ordered because of the continuing gas releases:

       KENNEDY:  Don't we know that it has been stopped?
       FOUCHARD:  Vice-President Herbein of the company reports it has
         been stopped.  Chairman Hendrie has talked to the Governor
         and recommended that he advise people to stay indoors up to a
         distance of about five miles for the present time.
       GOSSICK:  We have just lost telephone contact with the site.  I
         assume that it is telephone problems, but--[inaudible].
         Okay, we have got communications with a trailer up there, but
         we have lost contact with the control room. . . .
       GILINSKY:  Let me ask you, what is the status of the reactor,
         by the way?
       CASE:  Same as it was an hour ago, I guess.
       GILINSKY:  What is the state of the core?
       CASE:  Well, it is about like it was yesterday.  The
         temperature is about 280 degrees, the pressure is up
         [inaudible] . . .

       Here was the proof that up to that very moment the primary
    consideration in the decision to evacuate the people was not the
    awareness of a serious chance of a melt-down of the core, but the
    continuing uncontrolled releases of radioactive gases that were
    threatening to give internal exposures to the public on the order of
    tens of thousands of millirems.
       In fact, the subsequent excerpts made it clear that only at this
    point in the desperate deliberations did the knowledge of extensive
    core damage and a hydrogen explosion reach the NRC commissioners:

       HENDRIE (TO DENTON):  I have talked to the President and I
         think you ought to go down to the site.  He will be sending
         down, immediately, a sort of communication system that he
         takes with him when he travels.  He will send somebody with
         it and he wants to be in a position to pick up the telephone
         and go right through to the site, and be able to talk to his
         man down there for information and recommendations on what to
         do. . . .
       MATTSON:  [Director of the Division of Systems Safety] . . .
         Now, B and W [Babcock and Wilcox] and we have both concluded
         . . . that we have extensive damage to this core.  That
         corroborates with the releases we are seeing. . . .  My best
         guess is that the core uncovered, stayed uncovered for a long
         period of time, we saw failure modes, the likes of which has
         never been analyzed. . . .  We just learned . . . that on the
         afternoon of the first day, some 10 hours into the transient,
         there was a 28-pound containment pressure spike.  We are
         guessing that may have been a hydrogen explosion.  They, for
         some reason, never reported it here until this morning.  That
         would have given us a clue hours ago that the thermocouples
         were right and we had a partially disassembled core.
       HENDRIE:  Where abouts is the bubble?
       MATTSON:  The bubble is in the upper head.  The upper head
         volume at 1128 cubic feet as best we can tell.  The estimate
         of the gas in that volume now is 1000 cubic feet, best that
         we can tell.  That is at 1000 psi.  If you take the plant to
         200 psi, then--
       HENDRIE:  Yes, you are going to blow right down and empty the
         core.
       MATTSON:  I have got a horse race.  I'm putting in high head,
         and if I get down in pressure, low head and coolant, it is
         coming in the cold leg, it is going down to the lower plenum,
         it is coming up through the core, it is splashing and it runs
         into the noncondensibles, I've got a core partially full or
         maybe totally full of noncondensibles. . . .  We have got
         every systems engineer we can find, except the ones we put on
         the helicopter, thinking the problem, how the hell do we get
         the noncondensibles out of there?  . . . Do we win the horse
         race or do we lose the horse race?  And if you are lucky and
         there is not a lot of--you have overestimated the
         noncondensibles, you might win.  If you are not lucky and you
         have got the right number on the noncondensibles you might
         lose it.
       HENDRIE:  . . . It sounds to me like we ought to stay where we
         are.  I don't like the sound of depressurizing and letting
         that bubble creep down into the core.

       And then came the following most revealing words from Roger
    Mattson, Director of the Division of Systems Safety, whom I knew to be
    very knowledgeable with regard to radiation dose calculations.

       MATTSON:  Not yet.  I don't think we want to depressurize yet.
         The latest burst didn't hurt many people.  I'm not sure why
         you are not moving people.  Got to say it.  I have been
         saying it down here.  I don't know what we are protecting at
         this point.  I think we ought to be moving people.
       HENDRIE:  How far out?
       MATTSON: I would get them downwind, and unfortunately the wind
         is still meandering, but at these dose levels that is
         probably not bad because it is [inaudible].
       KENNEDY:  But downwind how far?
       MATTSON:  I might add, you aren't going to kill any people out
         to 10 miles.  There aren't that many people and these people
         have been--they have had two days to get ready and prepare.
       KENNEDY:  Ten miles is Harrisburg.
       MATTSON:  40,000 [inaudible] five miles. . . .  It's too little
         information too late, unfortunately, and it is the same way
         every partial core melt-down has gone.  People haven't
         believed the instrumentation as they went along.  It took us
         until midnight last night to convince anybody that those
         goddamn temperature measurements meant something.  By four
         o'clock this morning, B and W agreed.

       Not until later in the day did Governor Thornburgh finally agree to
    the compromise plan of ordering evacuation of pregnant women and young
    children.  But as I was to learn in an unexpected manner a few months
    later, most of the damage had already been done before the evacuation
    was ordered.
       During the latter part of the summer I received a phone call from
    someone who asked me for a collection of all my articles on the
    effects of low-level radiation.  He said that he was working on a
    study of the total economic and health impact of the Three Mile Island
    accident for the Presidential Commission chaired by Dr. George Kemeny
    of Dartmouth College, and he wanted to include an upper-limit estimate
    based on my statistical findings around various nuclear plants and
    after various fallout episodes.
       I was surprised by this request, since I had not been asked to
    testify before the Kemeny Commission, which had been holding extensive
    hearings all summer long.  Also, I wondered how the caller could use
    my earlier studies if there were no detailed estimates of releases and
    dose measurements available.  The NRC had claimed that all the meters
    in the stack had gone off scale so that no one knew or would ever know
    just how much had actually been released.
       And so I asked whether he had any detailed information on the
    quantities of gases released or the amounts of radioactivity in the
    air, the milk, and the diet on which to base a meaningful estimate of
    the likely health effects and their costs.
       To my surprise, he said that he had such a document prepared for
    the Metropolitan Edison Company by their own environmental
    consultants, Pickard, Lowe and Garrick, and that he would be glad to
    send me a copy for my examination, since it was being widely
    circulated within the NRC and the Kemeny Commission.
       A few days later, the two-inch-thick document entitled "Assessment
    of Offsite Radiation Doses from the Three Mile Island Unit 2 Accident
    TDR-TMI-116," dated July 31, 1979, arrived in the mail.  And there, in
    the second paragraph, was the proof that the evacuation ordered on the
    third day had indeed been too late:

       Based on techniques used in this analysis, dose estimates are
       consistent with the release of seven million curies of noble
       gases in the first one-and-one-half days of the accident, two
       million in the next two days and one million in the next three
       days, and a relatively small amount thereafter.

       By Friday afternoon, the third day of the accident, when the
    evacuation took place, between 7 and 9 million curies out of an
    estimated 10 million curies of radioactive fission gases had already
    been released, together with a corresponding fraction of the 14 curies
    of radioactive iodine 131 as given on page III of the report.  And
    since the report also concluded that most of the thyroid dose was due
    to inhalation--and not ingestion of drinking water or milk--in the
    first five days of the accident, it was clear that by the time the
    evacuation of the pregnant women had been ordered, most of the thyroid
    dose to the developing fetuses had already taken place.
       These were indeed very large amounts of radioactivity, comparable
    to those that arrived from the Chinese bomb tests in October 1976 on
    the East Coast, and for which I had found a 20 to 60 percent increase
    in infant mortality in the following three months all the way from
    Delaware to Maine.  Just two years earlier, I had prepared a paper on
    this incident for the Committee on the Biological Effects of Ionizing
    Radiation of the National Academy of Sciences for its meeting in
    Washington on July 17, 1977, in which the levels of radioactive iodine
    131 in the milk reported by the EPA were summarized.
       Looking at the Metropolitan Edison Company's own measurements in
    some of the nearby towns, I saw it was evident that levels of iodine
    131 had been produced by the Three Mile Island accident comparable to
    those that had been produced by the heavy rainout of the drifting
    Chinese fallout as it met a severe rainstorm moving up the East Coast
    from Delaware to Maine.  For the Hardison Farm, to the north of Three
    Mile Island, the report listed 110 picocuries per liter on April 25,
    almost a month after the accident.  By that time, the activity would
    have decayed away to only about one-eighth to one-sixteenth of its
    maximum value, so that the peak values in local farms, if there had
    been adequate monitoring at the time, would have been in the range of
    800 to 1600 picocuries per liter.  The amount one worried about was
    measured in picocuries, which was only a millionth of a millionth, or
    a trillionth, of one curie.  Yet 14 curies or 14 trillion of these
    units had been discharged into the air, breathed by the pregnant women
    in the area, and added to what they ingested with the milk.  The
    report showed concentrations in the air as high as 20 picocuries per
    cubic meter.  Since 1 cubic meter was roughly the volume of air
    inhaled by an adult every hour, 20 picocuries of iodine 131 entered a
    pregnant woman's lungs each hour at these concentrations.
       The milk concentrations compared with the highest values listed in
    the EPA's December 1976 tabulation published two months after the
    Chinese fallout had arrived.  These had ranged from 36 picocuries per
    liter in Rhode Island to 123 in Connecticut.  At that time, infant
    mortality rose 60 percent in the first quarter of 1977 compared to the
    same period in 1976 in Delaware, 41 percent in New Hampshire, 17
    percent in Maine, and 13 percent in Connecticut.  But what was even
    more significant was that in Massachusetts, where the health
    department had ordered the cows to be fed stored hay which was
    relatively free from fresh fallout, infant mortality continued its
    rapid decline.  Furthermore, infant mortality kept decreasing in the
    United States as a whole by 7 percent, as it did in Rhode Island,
    which receives most of its milk from Massachusetts.
       Thus, if the measurements reported by Picker, Lowe and Garrick were
    accurate, there simply would have to be a sharp rise in infant
    mortality in the Harrisburg area and those parts of Pennsylvania and
    other nearby states over which the radioactive gases released in the
    first three days had drifted.  On the other hand, infant mortality
    should again continue its normal decline in areas that happened to be
    spared by the invisible clouds of radioactive gases from the Three
    Mile Island nuclear plant.
       But in which direction was the wind blowing during the period of
    highest release rates?  Was there any way to find out how much was
    coming out at any given moment?  After all, according to a story sent
    out by the {Washington Post} News Service and published on April 22,
    the Nuclear Regulatory Commission had been told by one of its staff
    people, Albert Gibson, that the radiation monitors in the stack went
    off scale on the morning of the accident.  Thus, in answer to
    Commissioner Victor Gilinsky's question, "So we don't really know what
    went up," Gibson replied, "That's correct."
       The story went on to say that as much as 365 millirems per hour of
    beta and gamma radiation were recorded on the ground some 1000 feet
    from the stack, and a helicopter had recorded three times this level
    in the air over the vent, confirming once again that the dose rates
    were far higher than the public had been told at the Senate hearings
    when the beta radiation that accounts for most of the internal dose
    from inhaled gases is taken into account.  But Gibson went on to say
    that "those measurements were very inconclusive," and that "without
    knowing the precise weather patterns, we don't know if they were made
    at the appropriate locations."
       However, leafing through the report of Met Ed's environmental
    consultants, I found that these were all completely misleading
    statements.  Contrary to what the NRC commissioners and the public
    were being told, there were radiation monitoring instruments in the
    plant that never went off scale, namely in the auxiliary building,
    whose readings were directly related to the amount of radioactive gas
    being released.  Here was the way the utility's consultants described
    how it was possible to know how much gas was being released every
    moment:

       Strip chart records from all noble gas radiation monitors in the
       plant ventilation exhaust show no significant radiation levels
       during the first three hours of the accident.  Since these
       monitors are in the most probable pathway for release, it is
       concluded that no significant releases occurred before 0700
       March 28.  Shortly after 0700, however, these monitors, which
       are designed to read normal low levels, indicated rapidly
       increasing radiation concentrations.  Within a few minutes, they
       went off scale on the high side.  At about the same time, the
       in-plant building area monitors which measure radiation levels
       inside the fuel handling and auxiliary buildings began to record
       increasing levels from about 1 milliroentgen to 100
       milliroentgen per hour at 0740.  At about 0900 the readings
       began to increase again to reach about 100 milliroentgen per
       hour at 1000 hours.  They continued to fluctuate at high levels
       for about four days.  One or more of these area monitors
       continued to read on scale during the course of the accident.

       The report went on to explain in detail that by means of these
    measuring instruments it was possible to know what went out the stack
    because:

       . . . radiation levels measured by area monitors in the
       auxiliary and fuel handling buildings are proportional to the
       rate at which airborne gamma activity was released to the
       environment . . .

       In table after table and chart after chart, the releases and gamma
    radiation doses in different directions were worked out in detail.
    For every hour of the accident from 4 A.M. on March 28 until midnight
    of the fourth day, the readings of the area monitors were given
    together with the hourly wind direction and wind speeds.  It showed
    that during the period of highest releases, from 10 A.M. on Wednesday
    the 28th to 7 A.M. on Thursday the 29th, the winds were blowing north,
    northwest, and west at 6 to 9 miles per hour, sending the radioactive
    gas toward upstate New York and western Pennsylvania.  Only later,
    when the rate of release had decreased tenfold, did the winds shift
    briefly to the south, becoming more variable thereafter.
       By the time the winds were blowing toward the northeast on
    Saturday, the fourth day of the accident, the intensity had dropped to
    less than one-twentieth of its peak value, thus largely sparing the
    most densely populated areas of Philadelphia, New Jersey, and New York
    City.
       No wonder the NRC staff did not want to let the public know that
    they knew exactly in which direction the most radioactive clouds had
    moved, since this information could then be used to tie any later
    localized rises in fetal deaths, infant mortality, and cancer to the
    radioactive gas clouds from Three Mile Island.  In fact, I remembered
    only too well the attempts of some of the same individuals formerly
    working for the AEC to discredit my findings on the rises of infant
    mortality across the southeastern United States following the first
    nuclear-bomb test at Alamogordo by claiming that the winds were not
    blowing in that direction.  And they certainly did not want any of
    this to become known before the Kemeny Commission was scheduled to
    complete its report in early November.
       Once again, as in the case of the Nevada tests, it was essential to
    keep such knowledge from the public and the scientific community at
    large.  The NRC, the EPA, and all the other federal and state agencies
    knew full well that the doses were comparable with those experienced
    by the people of Utah, Montana, Wyoming, and the other states across
    the northern United States as far as New York and New England during
    the period of the Nevada tests, or for releases from some of the
    largest and most heavily emitting reactors, such as Millstone in New
    London, Connecticut, over a period of a year or two.
       If, indeed, there should once again be sudden rises in infant
    mortality in areas where the radioactive clouds had drifted and the
    public should learn of them when the televised nightmare of Three Mile
    Island was still fresh on everyone's mind, this public knowledge would
    threaten the government's and the nuclear industry's vast program to
    build a thousand of these giant reactors by the end of the century
    near all the major cities, and would result in costly damage suits,
    exactly as in the case of the Nevada tests.
       I had tried to obtain the preliminary data on monthly infant
    mortality rates by county from the Health Department in Harrisburg
    without success.  I was told that this data had not yet been sorted
    out and processed, and that it would be many months before it could be
    properly assembled, even though such data had already been sent to me
    by the Maryland Health Department.  All research on the health effects
    of Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania were under the direction of Dr.
    George Tokuhata, the same man who prepared the statistical portion of
    the Shapp Report exonerating Shippingport back in 1973.  There was
    clearly no hope for any help from that direction.
       All I could do was to wait for the state-by-state data on monthly
    infant deaths and births published by the Center for Health Statistics
    in Washington, which was usually three or four months behind.  Thus,
    if significant effects would first show up for infants two to three
    months after the accident, or for the months of May and June, the
    earliest numbers indicating an effect would not become publicly
    available until August or September, too late for any presentation to
    the Kemeny Commission.
       Nevertheless, I decided to gather whatever data I could as soon as
    possible, for an enormous media campaign had been launched by the
    nuclear industry to convince the public that there were no serious
    health effects due to the accident at Three Mile Island.  No one had
    died, and no member of the public had been injured;  the safety
    systems had worked, and there was no reason to abandon this important
    source of energy at a time when the United States depended so heavily
    on imported oil from the unstable Middle East.
       In mid-August, the latest monthly report from the U.S. Center for
    Health Statistics for the month of May arrived in the library.
    Calculating the rates of infant deaths per 1000 live births, I found
    what I had expected.  Instead of declining from the winter high,
    infant mortality in Pennsylvania had gone up following the accident at
    the end of March.  Compared to 147 deaths in February and 141 in
    March, there had been 166 in April and 198 in May, an unprecedented
    rise of 40 percent.  Yet, the number of births had actually declined
    from 13,589 in March to 13,201 in May.  Thus the rate of infant deaths
    per 1000 live births had increased even more, namely by 44 percent,
    from 10.4 in March to 15.0 in May.
       Yet, at the same time, the rate for the United States as a whole
    between March and May had declined 11 percent as it normally did,
    dropping from 14.1 to 12.6 per 1000 live births.
       These were highly significant changes, the Pennsylvania figures for
    March and May representing an increase of 57 deaths, which was more
    than three times the statistically expected normal fluctuation of
    about +/- 16, and thus unlikely to occur purely by chance in less than
    one in a thousand instances.  But how else could I test the hypothesis
    that these increased rates were likely to be due to the releases from
    Three Mile Island without having the county-by-county and the
    Harrisburg figures available to me?
       Having learned from the utility's own report that the heaviest
    releases had occurred when the wind was blowing north, northwest, and
    west, and having seen reports in the papers of high levels of
    radioactivity being measured in Syracuse, New York, some 150 miles to
    the north, at the time of the accident, I decided to examine the
    figures for New York State.  By a fortunate coincidence, the U.S.
    Vital Statistics gave separate figures for New York City and the rest
    of the state, most of whose population was located in upstate New
    York--north, northwest, and northeast of Harrisburg some 100 to 200
    miles away.  Here, then, was a clear prediction of the hypothesis that
    could be tested:  The figures for the rest of the state outside of New
    York City should have gone up, while New York City should either have
    shown no change or an actual decline.
       And this is exactly what the numbers showed:  Between March and
    May, infant deaths outside New York City climbed an amazing 52
    percent, by 63 deaths, from 121 to 184.  For New York City during the
    same period the number declined from 166 to 129.  Again, these changes
    were many times as large as normal fluctuations, and the number of
    births changed relatively little, or by less than 10 percent, so that
    there could be no doubt about the significance of these changes in
    infant deaths.
       So far, the hypothesis had passed its first major tests, but would
    it hold up for the other nearby states?  What about Maryland to the
    south, where some of the gases had drifted in the morning and
    afternoon of the second day, according to Met Ed's report.  The
    numbers were smaller than for the more populous states, but the
    changes continued to support the hypothesis:  Infant mortality rose 26
    percent, from 39 to 49 deaths, while the number of births remained
    essentially unchanged--4013 in March and 4076 in May.
       What about New Jersey, to the east and northeast of Harrisburg?  If
    the hypothesis was correct, there should not be any significant
    increase, since by the fourth day of the accident, when the winds
    shifted toward New Jersey, the rate of release had already sharply
    declined.  Again, the hypothesis held up under the test.  Between
    March and May, New Jersey infant mortality rose by only 8 deaths, from
    87 to 95.  This is not considered a significant increase, with the
    spontaneous statistical fluctuation of about +/- 13 normally expected.
       What about Ohio to the west, which had for decades closely
    paralleled Pennsylvania in its declining infant mortality figures?
    Did it show the same 40 to 50 percent rises of Pennsylvania and of New
    York State outside New York City?  It was not to be expected that the
    gases would have drifted more than 200 to 300 miles west of
    Harrisburg, counter to the generally prevailing west-to-east movement
    of air masses across the United States, and so there should really be
    very little change in the Ohio figures.  Again the numbers bore this
    out:  Between March and May, infant deaths declined in Ohio from 177
    to 160, the rate remaining constant at 11.5 per 1000 live births.
       There simply could be no other explanation for such a localized
    pattern of sharply increased infant deaths in the areas where confined
    winds had blown the radioactive gases, while infant mortality rates
    were steady or declined in all the surrounding states that were not in
    the direction of the winds during the first two days of highest
    releases.
       And yet, it would be important to have some figures for the area
    that was most heavily exposed close to the plant.  If the figures
    around Harrisburg should indeed show much higher rises in infant
    mortality than the 44 percent for Pennsylvania and the 50 percent for
    New York State outside New York City, then it would be difficult to
    reject the hypothesis that it was indeed the radioactive gases from
    the stricken plant that were responsible for the unusual increase in
    newborn deaths.
       But only Tokuhata had the data for the 5-mile and 10-mile zones
    around the plant, and there was no way that I would be able to obtain
    them.  From everything I had been able to piece together, the numbers
    in Harrisburg had to show very large increases if areas as far away as
    150 miles in upstate New York showed 50 percent rises in infant
    deaths.  From my earlier studies on fallout clouds, I knew that the
    effect would roughly decrease in inverse proportion to the distance
    from the point of release.  Thus, for Harrisburg, only 10 miles to the
    north of the plant, the rise in newborn infant mortality would have to
    be as high as 300 percent to 600 percent, corresponding to a four- to
    sevenfold increase above normal to be consistent with the rises in
    upstate New York.
       How could I get at least an indication of whether this was the
    case?  Just at this very moment, a way opened up to obtain this
    crucial information without the need to obtain access to the
    Pennsylvania Health Department's carefully guarded data.
       Earlier in the summer I had been invited to address a public
    meeting in Harrisburg on the likely health effects of the accident at
    Three Mile Island.  At the end of the meeting, someone introduced
    himself to me, and asked me whether he could be of any help.  His name
    was Warren L. Prelesnik, and he told me that he was deeply concerned,
    since he had just moved to the area with his family shortly before the
    accident, and that he was working in the Harrisburg Hospital as
    executive vice-president in charge of administration.
       I asked him whether it might be possible to obtain information on
    the monthly number of births and infant deaths together with their
    cause over the past few years, and he said that he would try to see
    what he could do.
       More than a month later, when I had already given up hope of
    receiving any information, there arrived in the mail a letter with a
    list of the monthly infant deaths, fetal deaths, stillbirths, and live
    births in the Harrisburg Hospital for the previous two years.
       At first there seemed to be no obvious change, if one looked at the
    total numbers of all types of fetal and infant deaths combined.  But
    then I examined separately the category of newborn or neonatal infant
    deaths--those that were born alive but died within the first year, but
    mainly in the first few hours after birth.  Here was the evidence I
    needed.  In February, March, and April of 1979, there had only been 1
    infant death per month.  But for each of the two months of May and
    June, there were 4.  Effectively, since the number of births had not
    only remained nearly the same but had actually declined slightly, this
    was more than a fourfold increase in the mortality rate, or of the
    right magnitude required to fit the observed 50 percent rise in the
    more distant area of upstate New York.
       From an average of 5.7 per 1000 live births in the three months of
    February, March, and April--before the releases could have had an
    appreciable effect--the newborn mortality rate had risen to 24.1 for
    May and 26.0 for June, an unprecedented summer peak that did not occur
    the previous year.  In fact, for May and June of 1978, there had been
    a total of only 3 infant deaths, while for the same period in 1979
    after the accident, there had been 8.
       As some of my colleagues with whom I discussed these findings
    agreed, by themselves the Harrisburg Hospital numbers were of course
    small, and only marginally significant, representing only about one-
    third of all the births and deaths in Harrisburg.  But taken together
    with the vastly more significant and independent numbers for all of
    Pennsylvania, upstate New York, New York City, New Jersey, Maryland,
    and Ohio, there was now a much greater degree of certainty:  It would
    have been much too much of a coincidence--perhaps less than one in a
    million--for all these different numbers to show the pattern they did.
       At this very moment, there arrived an invitation to address an
    international meeting of engineers and scientists in Israel.  The
    meeting was devoted to studying the environmental problems of
    industrialization of Third World nations.  It was to be held in
    December, and I was asked if I would be willing to address the meeting
    on the environmental health problems connected with nuclear energy.
       I could hardly believe that such an opportunity to bring these
    facts into the open should come at precisely the time when the data
    from the Harrisburg Hospital had convinced me more strongly than ever
    of the great danger of nuclear reactors.  I decided to accept the
    invitation and to devote myself in the remaining few months to
    preparing a detailed paper that would begin with a review of the
    previous evidence on the effects of low-level radiation from fallout
    and normal nuclear plant releases and end with the evidence for the
    rise of infant deaths after Three Mile Island.
       One of the remaining important questions that had to be checked,
    however, was the time and cause of death.  Clearly, if the excess
    deaths were connected with the radioactive iodine released from the
    plant, then they should be associated with underweight births or
    immaturity, since damage to the fetal thyroid would slow down the
    normal rapid growth and development of the baby in the last few months
    before birth.  The development of the lungs, which have to be ready to
    begin breathing at the moment of birth, is one of the most critical
    phases of late fetal development.  Any developmental slowdown would be
    most life-threatening if it led to the inability of the tiny air sacs
    in the lungs to inflate and start supplying the blood with oxygen.
    Failure of the lungs to function properly would therefore lead to
    immediate symptoms of respiratory distress, and if efforts to treat
    the baby should not succeed, it would die in a matter of minutes,
    hours, or days of respiratory insufficiency or hyaline membrane
    disease.
       Thus, one would not expect to find as large an increase in
    spontaneous miscarriages well before birth as newborn deaths within a
    short time after birth, since the lungs did not need to start
    functioning until the baby was born.  Also, there should be no
    significant increase in gross congenital malformations a few months
    after the accident, since by the time the baby in the mother's womb
    had reached the sixth or seventh month of development, all the major
    organs had already fully developed.  Thus, only some six to seven
    months after the accident would one expect some increase in serious
    physical malformations, since these infants would have been exposed to
    radiation in the first three months of development of critical-organ
    formation.
       The data from the Harrisburg Hospital supported these expectations.
    There was much less of an increase in the number of spontaneous
    miscarriages and stillbirths than in the number of newborn babies that
    died shortly after birth because of immaturity and respiratory
    distress, indicating the strong likelihood that it was the effect of
    iodine 131 and other shorter-lived iodines such as iodine 133 that had
    damaged the ability of the thyroid to produce the necessary hormones
    needed for normal growth and development.
       In fact, it was for this reason that I had publicly urged
    widespread screening for hypothyroidism at the time of the news
    conference in Harrisburg on the second day of the accident, the kind
    of simple test that could prevent permanent mental retardation if
    detected and treated early.  This test was already being used
    routinely for every newborn baby born in hospitals of a number of
    states in New England, the Northwest Coast, and Pennsylvania, but not
    yet in New York or Maryland.  There would have to be a rise in the
    incidence of this condition if my past findings on the increase in
    underweight births and subtle forms of mental retardation during the
    period of heavy nuclear-bomb testing were indeed related to the action
    of radioactive fallout.  But not until many months later, long after
    the Kemeny Commission hearing had been completed, would I learn that a
    rise in hypothyroidism had already been discovered by the Health
    Department of the State of Pennsylvania among the newborn babies in
    areas where the invisible radioactive gases from Three Mile Island had
    been carried by the winds.






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