From: dave@ratmandu.esd.sgi.com (dave "who can do? ratmandu!" ratcliffe)
Newsgroups: talk.environment
Subject: "SECRET FALLOUT, Low-Level Radiation from Hiroshima to TMI" [6/15]
Summary: part 6 of 15: chapter 13 through chapter 14
Keywords: low-level ionizing radiation, fallout, deception, secrecy, survival
Date: 6 Jan 93 13:21:03 GMT
Organization: Silicon Graphics, Inc.



                             *  *  *  *  *  *  *




                                      13


                          The Public's Right to Know




    NOT A WORD of the findings reported at Hanford appeared in the
    national press or the other public news media.  No science writers had
    been present, and none of the wire services had covered the meeting,
    held in a remote part of the country.  Yet in view of the accumulated
    evidence presented at Hanford, it was now clear that the sensitivity
    of the early embryo was so great that if a nuclear war ever broke out
    only the more resistant reptiles and insects would survive the
    lingering radiation.
       In June 1969 I wrote a letter to {The New York Times} describing
    the Hanford findings and their implications for the ABM debate.
    Shortly after the letter appeared, I received a phone call from the
    New York correspondent of {The London Observer}, Joyce Egginton.  The
    first thing Miss Egginton asked was why there had not been any stories
    about these startling findings either in the news section of {The New
    York Times} or in any other newspapers served by the national wire
    services.  In particular, she wondered why nothing had been reported
    about my findings in view of the fact that I had just presented them
    again at a recent meeting of the Health Physics Society.  There, the
    University of Pittsburgh's public relations department had made
    arrangements with the public relations department of the Health
    Physics Society for an interview with an individual who stated that he
    wanted to write a story on my work for the Associated Press.  After
    the presentation of my paper, this individual introduced himself,
    stating that he was in charge of the newsroom for the Society but also
    often wrote stories for the Associated Press.  He already had much of
    the story written and merely wanted to check certain details.  It
    seemed to be quite a good account.  But his story was never carried by
    the Associated Press.  Not until later did it become clear what had
    happened.
       Meanwhile, the editor of {Esquire}, Harold Hayes, called soon after
    Joyce Egginton to ask whether I would be willing to write a story on
    my findings for his magazine.  In view of the fact that the general
    public had heard nothing at all of the findings presented in
    Pittsburgh or at Hanford, I accepted.
       A week or two later, I received a call from Hal Stromholt, a writer
    for the Associated Press office in Pittsburgh.  He said that the AP
    had asked him to do a story on my findings presented at the recent
    Health Physics Society meeting, which Joyce Egginton had just reported
    in {The London Observer}.  I asked him why the AP had not carried the
    story that had been written for it many weeks before.  Surprised,
    Stromholt asked the name of the man who had done this earlier story.
    I told him, and he then said that no one by that name either worked in
    the AP office in Pittsburgh or was employed as an occasional writer or
    "stringer."  Furthermore, he added that no earlier story could have
    been sent to the AP, for they certainly would not have asked him to
    write a second one on exactly the same news item.  Significantly, the
    Associated Press did in fact use Stromholt's story, and it was carried
    throughout the country.
       Shortly thereafter the publishers of {Esquire} decided to stop the
    press run on the September issue in order to include the article on
    infant mortality and nuclear testing as a special insert.
    Furthermore, in view of the serious implications for the decision on
    whether the U.S. should build the new antiballistic missile nuclear
    defense system, which would fill the atmosphere with hundreds of times
    as much fallout as all of the past nuclear tests if it were ever to be
    used, the publishers had decided to take out full-page advertisements
    in {The New York Times} and the {Washington Post} that would summarize
    the principal points of the article.  They felt that these
    advertisements might appear in time to be considered in the Senate
    debate.  Harold Hayes also sent advance copies of the article to every
    congressman and senator, together with a personal letter explaining
    the reason for this unprecedented action on the part of his magazine.
       But for the ABM debate, it was too late.  The final vote came only
    eight days later with a narrow victory for the Defense Department and
    the AEC, before the evidence of biological risks had a chance to be
    fully considered by Congress and the public.
       On October 12, 1969, a few weeks after the {Esquire} article
    appeared, {The New York Times} published an account of a critique of
    my Troy data prepared by Dr. Peter Greenwald, director of the New York
    State Health Department's Bureau of Cancer Control, and Mrs. Sandra
    Kinch, director of the department's Office of Biostatistics.
    According to the {Times}, these two officials said that their analyses
    "tend to refute the validity and the conclusions" of my studies, which
    they described as having "definite factual errors" in the data used.
    To prove this, they submitted their own table of leukemia deaths among
    children under age 10 in the Albany-Troy-Schenectady area.  The
    figures they gave were as follows:

                    Birth Years             No. of Deaths
                  ---------------         -----------------
                      1940-42                      6
                      1943-45                      8
                      1946-48                      9
                      1949-51                      7
                      1952-54                     10
                      1955-57                     13
                                                 ----
                                          Total:  53

       But the figures supplied by Dr. J. H. Lade in his 1964 letter to
    {Science}, which I had used in my study, were (when regrouped in
    similar three-year periods):

                    Birth Years             No. of Deaths
                  ---------------         -----------------
                      1943-45                      9
                      1946-48                      8
                      1949-51                      9
                      1952-54                     15
                      1955-57                     13
                                                 ----
                                          Total:  54

       This was indeed peculiar.  Five cases were missing from Greenwald's
    table in the critical 1952-54 period, yet the overall total number of
    cases was nearly the same in both tables.  Examination of Greenwald's
    table showed that he had added a new category not present in Lade's:
    the 1940-42 period, for which he listed six cases.  He had also
    deleted two cases from the 1949-51 period, with the final result that
    the total number of cases was nearly the same for both tables--even
    though the exact five cases that indicated a large increase in
    leukemia during the critical years 1952-54 were missing.
       Why had these five cases been removed?  I re-examined the
    correspondence I had received from Greenwald.  In it he stated that
    inaccuracies had been found in Lade's table among five of the eight
    cases born in the year 1953.  But should these five cases have been
    eliminated from the 1952-54 entry?  The answer could be found by
    examining Greenwald's critique, in which he described the nature of
    the inaccuracies in these cases.  He stated that two of the children
    had actually been born in 1952 instead of 1953, while another had been
    born in 1954.  But in his table in the {Times}, Greenwald had used the
    time period 1952-54, *not* 1953.  Therefore these cases should have
    been included in his table by his own criteria.  The fourth missing
    case was born in Montgomery County, New York, according to Greenwald,
    and not in the Albany-Troy area.  But Montgomery County is right next
    to Albany-Troy, so this case could certainly have been caused by the
    fallout.  And the same would hold true for the fifth and last child,
    who was born in New Mexico, according to Greenwald, and brought to
    Troy as an infant, and thus also would have been exposed to the
    fallout in the diet.  I had hypothesized in my study that the fallout
    could have caused leukemia by genetic damage to the parents before
    conception or by direct damage either to children in the womb or to
    young infants.  Therefore, there was no reason to exclude *any* of the
    five cases from the evidence.  If they had been included, Greenwald's
    table would have shown fifteen cases for 1952-54, a doubling over the
    average rate for the previous years.  Furthermore, the thirteen cases
    in the 1955-57 period were consistent with the hypothesis of
    genetically caused leukemia.
       Other distortions of data were present in the critique by Dr.
    Greenwald and Mrs. Kinch.  But how would the general public ever
    suspect?  This was the voice of the New York State Health Department
    and not the AEC.  Readers of the nation's press would simply assume
    that responsible and independent public health officials had proven
    that fallout was harmless after all.
       During this period, amid the resultant publicity surrounding the
    article in the {Observer}, I was invited to appear on the NBC-TV
    "Today" show.  According to Hugh Downs, one of the reporters on the
    program, the AEC had learned of the plans for my appearance and called
    the producer, urging him not to invite me.  When the producer refused,
    the AEC urged that a scientist holding an opposing view should be
    present to give an immediate rebuttal.  When this also was turned
    down, the AEC insisted on equal time as soon as possible after my
    appearance so that two independent scientists would be able to present
    the argument against my thesis.  NBC finally agreed to provide equal
    time the following week.
       On the program itself, Hugh Downs brought this out into the open:
    "I was just going to say that the Atomic Energy Commission called us
    yesterday.  They were concerned about your appearance on the program
    today."
       I asked the identity of the independent scientists whom the AEC
    wanted to present.  Downs replied that one was a physician by the name
    of Dr. Leonard Sagan from the Palo Alto Medical Clinic, and the other
    was a Dr. John Storer from the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.  Both,
    of course, had worked until very recently for the Atomic Energy
    Commission's Division of Biology and Medicine.  As to the reason why
    the AEC had urged NBC to cancel my appearance, Hugh Downs reported:
    "They say that their experiments with animals show that there is no
    damage to offspring at all from parent animals given strontium 90 in
    those low dosages that we get."  This was in complete contradiction
    with the evidence submitted at Hanford by Moskalev and numerous other
    independent scientists.  The explanation lay, as usual, in the manner
    in which the AEC studies were constructed.
       This point was to be confirmed a few months later in a most
    unexpected manner by a chief scientist at one of the AEC's own
    laboratories.  I had received an invitation to present a paper on my
    other research work regarding the reduction of diagnostic X-ray doses
    at a meeting in San Francisco in October 1969.  I was also asked
    whether I would be willing to debate my fallout thesis on the Berkeley
    campus with Dr. Arthur Tamplin, who had written a critique of my work
    that was about to be published in the {Bulletin of the Atomic
    Scientists}, and to which I had just written a reply.  Tamplin was a
    biophysicist at the nearby Livermore Laboratory, operated for the AEC
    by the University of California.  During the question period following
    our debate, someone in the audience brought up the argument that AEC
    studies had found no significant increase in mortality among the
    offspring of experimental animals fed strontium 90 for long periods of
    time.  Immediately, someone else in the audience stood up and asked to
    comment on this question.  It turned out to be Dr. John Gofman,
    Tamplin's supervisor, who was Director of the Biomedical Division of
    Livermore and an Associate Director of the laboratory.  This was the
    man the AEC had placed in charge of all their radiobiological studies
    at Livermore back in 1963, when the hazard from internal fallout doses
    first aroused widespread public concern.  For years Gofman had been
    studying the possible connection between radiation, chromosome
    defects, and cancer.  He told the audience that he had investigated
    all the animal experiments carried out by the AEC, and in no case had
    they been designed to detect the kind of small reduction in
    birthweight and ability to fight infections that I had suggested as
    the likely cause for the increased infant mortality in man.  He
    concluded that, to the best of his knowledge, there was not a single
    animal experiment that would contradict my hypothesis, and with that
    he sat down.
       Within less than a year, both Gofman and Tamplin publicly denounced
    as complete falsehood the position of the AEC as expressed by Sagan
    and Storer on the "Today" program, namely, that "the levels of
    radiation to which the American public was exposed from fallout have
    been harmless."  As told by the two scientists themselves in the pages
    of {The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists}, their public denunciation
    of the AEC's position on low-level radiation effects was precipitated
    by the attempt of the AEC's top management to force Tamplin to
    suppress his own independent calculations, made in his original
    critique of my findings, that perhaps as many as 8000 infant deaths
    per year might have taken place as a result of genetic damage from
    nuclear testing.  Dr. Spofford English, the Assistant General Manager
    in charge of the AEC's entire research program, together with the head
    of the Division of Biology and Medicine, Dr. John Totter, as well as
    Dr. Leonard Sagan and Dr. John B. Storer, had indicated to Gofman that
    Tamplin should publish his critique minus his own estimate of the
    possible fetal and infant deaths, thus effectively keeping this
    information from the public.
       As Gofman and Tamplin put it:  "They wanted us by omission to
    support their incredible position as stated on the `Today' show, and
    to put Tamplin's estimate into a less widely read scholarly journal,
    where it would evidently not be seen by the scientific community at
    large, the general public, and their elected representatives in
    Congress."
       Subsequently, Dr. Gofman resigned his position as Associate
    Director of the Livermore Laboratories, and all but one of Tamplin's
    research group of twelve people were taken away from him six months
    later.  Both scientists have continued to testify before various
    congressional committees that there is no safe threshold of radiation
    exposure and that presently permitted radiation exposure levels must
    be cut back to virtually zero.  They have proposed that no release
    whatsoever of radioactive materials into the environment should be
    permitted without a full, nonpartial, interdisciplinary examination of
    each situation.  And they have assembled a vast body of data
    indicating that if the radiation doses now allowed by AEC regulations
    (an average of 170 millirads per year for the entire population and
    not more than 500 for any single individual) were to be received by
    the entire U.S. population as a result of peacetime uses of nuclear
    energy, there would be at least 32,000 and perhaps as many as 64,000
    additional deaths each year from cancer and leukemia alone.  And these
    figures did not even include fetal and infant mortality or any more
    subtle long-range effects on health.
       At the hearings on the environmental effects of electric power
    generation held by the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy in November
    1969 and January 1970, Gofman and Tamplin presented their conclusion
    that a direct relationship exists between low-level radiation doses
    and the development of cancer, not only in the fetus and infant, but
    also in the mature adult.  Furthermore, they urged an immediate
    tenfold reduction in the permissible radiation doses to the general
    population from all peaceful uses of nuclear energy.






                             *  *  *  *  *  *  *




                                      14


                             The Price of Secrecy




    AS LATE AS the spring of 1970, I believed that the radiation resulting
    from the normal operation of nuclear power plants was so low as to
    present no significant hazard to public health.  This belief was based
    on the results of an old study of emissions from the first commercial
    nuclear electric power plant, located at Shippingport, Pennsylvania.
    Conducted almost ten years earlier, it had measured the radioactivity
    in the cooling water taken from the Ohio River both before and after
    it had passed through the plant.  It found that the plant added so
    little radioactivity to the water that there were times when the
    chemically filtered water leaving the plant was actually less
    radioactive than the river water entering the plant--especially during
    periods of heavy fallout.
       It therefore seemed reasonable to expect that if such low levels of
    radioactive waste releases had been achieved in 1957 in the very first
    nuclear power reactor built in this country, then the later, more
    advanced plants would release even less.  But early in 1970 I
    discovered that this was not the case.  In the published record of the
    hearings on the environmental effects of electric power generation,
    held by the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy in November 1969, there
    were tables supplied by the AEC listing the amounts of radioactivity
    discharged into the water and air by commercial nuclear power plants
    in the United States.  Many plants were listed as actually releasing
    hundreds of thousands of times as much radioactivity into the air as
    others.  For example, in 1967 two reactors had discharged as much as
    700,000 curies, while another had released only 2.4 curies, or some
    300,000 times less.
       These were truly enormous quantities.  Some of the many different
    isotopes contained in these gaseous and liquid discharges, such as
    cesium and strontium, were regarded as hazardous at levels as low as
    one ten-billionth of a curie per day in milk or food.  A single curie
    of iodine 131 could make 10 billion quarts of milk unfit for
    continuous consumption, according even to the existing guidelines
    adopted by the federal government.  Such large releases of
    radioactivity were in fact comparable to fallout from small tactical
    nuclear weapons.  Although dilution in the air would reduce the hazard
    to people living more than fifty miles away from these plants, those
    living nearby were unknowingly accepting vastly greater risks to the
    health of their children.
       Furthermore, the *permissible* levels listed for many of the
    reactors were enormous.  For the Dresden reactor, located some fifty
    miles from Chicago, which had emitted 260,000 curies of radioactive
    gases in 1967, the permissible amount had been set at 22,000,000
    curies per year by the AEC.  Thus, in terms of permissible levels, the
    huge amount actually released could be, and was, cited by the power
    company as representing only about 1 percent of the maximum levels
    allowed.
       Curiously, there was no listing given in the record of the hearings
    for the Shippingport plant.  Why had the AEC left it out of the
    material presented to Congress?  A few months later, at a meeting of
    the Health Physics Society, Charles Weaver, Director of the Division
    of Environmental Radiation of the Public Health Service's Bureau of
    Radiological Health, presented the results of studies just published
    in March of 1970 on the radioactivity emitted by a series of nuclear
    plants.  According to his report, in 1968 Shippingport had emitted a
    grand total of only 0.001 curies into the air, or 240 million times
    less than was released the same year by the Dresden reactor near
    Chicago, Illinois.  And the same report also explained why some
    reactors released so much more radioactivity than others.  They were
    grouped according to type of design, and it was only the boiling-
    water-type reactors that showed such very large releases, while the
    pressurized-water reactors, which included Shippingport, consistently
    showed the lowest waste discharges.  Some of the commercial
    pressurized reactors did, however, emit much more than others, and all
    of them discharged significant quantities of radioactive tritium into
    the cooling water, which was then released into the surrounding rivers
    and lakes.
       Why weren't all the reactors designed like Shippingport, so as to
    release the smallest amounts of radioactivity?  The answer could be
    found in the history of reactor development.  The pressurized-water
    reactors, like Shippingport, were originally designed for use in
    nuclear submarines by Westinghouse under the direction of Admiral
    Hyman C. Rickover.  Since they had to operate for long periods in a
    sealed, submerged vessel, these rectors had to be designed with a
    minimum of radioactive leakage either into the submarine, where the
    crew had to live for months as a time, or into the water, where the
    bubbles of radioactive gases would permit easy detection of the
    submarine's position.  The Shippingport reactor was in fact a
    prototype naval propulsion plant owned by the Navy and the AEC, and
    not a commercial power plant at all.
       Meanwhile, the General Electric Company was encouraged by the AEC
    to quickly develop a new type of large power reactor that would be
    cheap and efficient enough to compete successfully with the fossil-
    fuel-burning electric power plants in widespread use.  For the more
    complex pressurized reactor with its double cooling loop, although
    safer, was too expensive.  And so GE developed the much simpler
    boiling-water reactor.  This design, in which economic considerations
    were the major factor, sacrificed protection against radioactive leaks
    in favor of lower cost and greater efficiency of operation.
    Experiments showed that corrosion was a more serious problem in the
    single-coolant-loop GE design.  Large amounts of fission products
    would inevitably build up rapidly in the coolant and escape through
    pipe joints, valve packings, and high-speed rotating shaft-seals to be
    discharged into the air and water.  Thus, if a cheap, economical way
    to generate large quantities of electric power was to be demonstrated
    quickly so as to convince the utilities to go nuclear, there was only
    one solution:  Set the permissible amounts of radioactive waste
    discharges into the environment so high that the actual releases would
    always be well below this limit.
       By 1959, the first large boiling-water reactor plant was completed
    at Dresden, Illinois, and in August of 1960, the first electricity
    from the 200-megawatt Dresden generators began to flow into the power
    grid of the Commonwealth Edison Company, serving the people of
    Chicago.  The releases of radioactive gases into the atmosphere were
    relatively low in the first full year of operation, and so were the
    discharges of tritium, strontium 90, and other isotopes into the
    Illinois River.  In 1961 only 0.158 percent of the maximum allowable
    amount had been released into the air, and even liquid wastes were
    held down to 6.3 percent of permitted levels.  Compared to the amounts
    of radioactivity then being released into the water and the air by the
    renewed testing of nuclear weapons, this was certainly quite small.
       But signs of trouble began to appear the very next year.  By the
    end of 1962, corrosion had begun, and the amount of radioactive gas
    that had to be discharged into the air increased by almost ten times
    to 284,000 curies.  Even the radioactivity discharged into the river
    rose more than three times.  By 1963 emission of radioactive gases had
    been successfully brought back down to 71,600 curies by the
    replacement of leaking fuel rods, but the corrosion continued, and
    gaseous releases shot up to 521,000 curies in 1964.
       No longer were the radiation doses to the surrounding population
    negligibly small compared to background radiation, as everyone had
    hoped.  Annual average external doses to the population within a few
    miles of the plant could be estimated at 20 to 30 millirads by 1964.
    This was fast approaching the 88 millirads that the people in the area
    normally received from cosmic radiation and natural radioactivity in
    the soil, and it compared with what had been produced by weapons
    fallout.
       It was becoming clear that the permissible levels of radiation from
    nuclear plants could not be lowered, as some scientists were beginning
    to urge, without having to shut the huge plant down only a few years
    after it had been built at a cost of well over a hundred million
    dollars.  In fact, pressures were actually building up from industry
    and the military to *raise* the permissible discharges to the
    environment from nuclear activities, especially in the event of an
    accidental heavy release from a reactor or from fallout if weapons
    tests in the atmosphere were ever renewed.  And so, in 1964 and 1965,
    the director of the Federal Radiation Council, Dr. Paul C. Tompkins,
    who had previously served as Deputy Director of the AEC's Office of
    Radiation Standards and Director of Research in the Bureau of
    Radiological Health of the U.S. Public Health Service, announced a
    twentyfold rise in the permissible amounts of the most hazardous
    isotopes in milk in the event of an accidental release.  For the first
    time in the history of radiation standards the permissible doses to
    the public were raised rather than lowered, despite the mounting
    evidence that there was no safe threshold dose of radiation as
    presented in August 1963 before the Joint Committee.  And this was
    done quietly by presidential executive order, for which no public
    hearing is required.
       When in 1966 the gaseous discharges from the Dresden plant had
    climbed to 736,000 curies, or more than twenty times what they had
    been in 1961 and more than twenty million times more than Shippingport
    had released the same year, a decision was made to start replacing the
    corroding stainless-steel-jacketed fuel rods with more resistant, but
    also more expensive, zircalloy-clad fuel.  By this time, the liquid
    releases, containing iodine, strontium, cesium, and other highly toxic
    elements, had risen to forty-three times their initial value, and,
    instead of being a small fraction of the permissible level, they had
    actually reached a full third of the AEC standards.  Enormous
    quantities of these isotopes went into the Illinois River, flowing
    past Peoria, where the river water began to be used for drinking, and
    on to the Gulf of Mexico, concentrating thousands of times higher in
    the fish and in the birds that fed on them.
       The example of Dresden clearly showed that it would not be possible
    to lower permissible radiation levels without having to shut down the
    whole series of boiling-water reactors that had now gone into
    operation all over the United States, each having cost some one
    hundred million dollars.  And construction would have to be halted on
    dozens of even larger reactors in various stages of development
    throughout the United States and the rest of the world.
       On June 6, 1970, just a few months after all the new reactor
    emissions data had been published, the British medical journal
    {Lancet} printed a full account of Dr. Stewart's fifteen-year study of
    the increase in leukemia and cancer among the nineteen million
    children in England and Wales that were born between 1943 and 1965.
    Her conclusions were now statistically unassailable:  doubling the
    number of X-ray pictures doubled the risk of leukemia and other
    cancers, and there was no evidence for a safe threshold even at a
    single diagnostic X-ray.  One modern pelvic X-ray gives about the same
    dose to the fetus as is permitted for the general population by the
    existing federal radiation standards (175 millirads).  And when the
    radiation was given in the first three months of pregnancy, Dr.
    Stewart's data showed that a mere 80 millirads--about the dose that
    was received from external radiation alone by the people living near
    the Dresden reactor in the peak year of emission--would double the
    spontaneous rate of leukemia and cancer in the children before they
    reached the age of ten.  And there had been significant rises in
    leukemia and fetal and infant mortality in the Troy area at similar
    external dose levels of only 50 to 100 millirads.
       There was thus little doubt that detectable health effects should
    have occurred in the areas surrounding the Dresden plant and other
    reactors.  But it would require a considerable effort to collect the
    data from the volumes of the U.S. Vital Statistics, and I had no one
    to help in such a task, for I had been unable to obtain any funds for
    such studies.  Fortunately, a group of students who had become
    interested in environmental pollution as a result of Earth Day
    indicated a willingness to help.  The group divided itself into small
    teams, and each took on the task of gathering the data for a
    particular nuclear installation.
       Since most of the fission products emitted by reactors are short-
    lived, persisting only for anywhere from a few days to a few months,
    it appeared that the effects on infant mortality would be sharp and
    immediate, just as had occurred with the short-lived isotopes in the
    case of fallout.  There would probably be no significant residual
    effect, and so the rises and falls in infant mortality should
    correlate closely with the rises and falls in the reactor releases.
       In October 1970 we examined the infant mortality rates in the
    counties around the Dresden reactor.  In 1966, within a year after the
    emissions rose sharply from the relatively low value of 71,600 curies
    in 1963 to 610,000 curies in 1965, the infant mortality rate in Grundy
    County, where the reactor was located, and in adjacent Livingston
    County, jumped by 140 percent, or to more than twice its 1964 value.
    While only thirteen infants in these two counties had died in the year
    after the minimum radioactive emission, by 1966 this number had jumped
    to thirty.  And the number of babies born live in these two counties
    actually decreased slightly from 1170 to 1082 in 1966, so that the
    jump in rates per 1000 births was actually even larger.
       There could be little doubt about the statistical significance.
    Established statistical estimation techniques showed that the
    possibility of such a fluctuation being accidental was much less than
    one in 10,000.  But this was not all.  The students had gathered the
    data for all five counties surrounding Grundy County, as well as for a
    control group of six counties as far to the west and north of Grundy
    as possible within the state of Illinois, counties that bordered
    neither on the contaminated Illinois River nor on the Mississippi,
    where the effluent from other nuclear plants upstream in Minnesota and
    Wisconsin might lead to rises in mortality.
       And when we carried out the comparison in the change of infant
    mortality rates for these two groups of rural counties of similar
    climate, medical care, and socio-economic character, the result was
    even more conclusive:  While the mortality rates in the counties
    around the reactor had increased an average of 48 percent, the upwind
    control counties actually showed a decline of 2 percent in their
    average infant mortality rates.
       Furthermore, with the prevailing westerly winds, the radioactive
    gas would drift eastward to Cook County, where Chicago was located,
    with a population of some five million.  Since the radioactivity would
    have become much diluted with distance, only a small rise in mortality
    rates of a few percent would be likely.  But since so many more
    children were born every year in Chicago than in Grundy County, the
    total number of additional deaths would be significant.  And when we
    checked the figures, this is exactly what had taken place:  Infant
    mortality in Cook County had gone up by 1.5 percent, during a time
    when in New York City it had declined by 6.7 percent.
       Since some six million people lived within a radius of 50 to 60
    miles from the Dresden reactor, and since the total population of
    Illinois was ten million, there should have been a significant rise in
    infant mortality for Illinois as a whole.  And there was indeed--from
    an all-time low point of 23.9 in 1963 to a peak in 1966 of 25.6, in
    exact coincidence with the peak of gaseous emissions from the Dresden
    reactor.  This was followed by a renewed decline in both recorded
    gaseous releases and infant mortality as the defective fuel rods were
    replaced.
       With the advice of Dr. Morris DeGroot, head of the Statistics
    Department, Carnegie-Mellon University, who had become interested in
    the problem, we applied further statistical tests.  The results were
    always the same:  A significant rise and decline in infant mortality
    in Illinois compared to all other neighboring states in the northern
    U.S., correlating directly with the rise and decline of radioactive
    emissions from the Dresden reactor.  Relative to Ohio, a few hundred
    miles to the east, where the infant mortality rate had been the same
    as in Illinois before the reactor had been started up in 1960, the
    excess infant deaths in Illinois for the years 1960-68 numbered close
    to 4000.  And for each infant dying in the first year of life, it was
    well known that there were perhaps three to four that would live with
    serious genetic defects, crippling congenital malformations, and
    mental retardation, afflictions in many ways far worse than death in
    early infancy.
       The largest numbers of deaths among the newborn infants were caused
    by asphyxia or respiratory distress, including hyaline membrane
    disease, long known to be associated with immaturity, and also general
    immaturity and "crib death."  These were the very causes that had
    risen sharply all over the world during the period of nuclear testing
    and had only begun to decline again a few years after the test-ban
    treaty came into force.  Yet here in Illinois, they were still
    increasing.  And among the older infants, noninfectious respiratory
    disease deaths rose almost 90 percent, and bronchitis almost 50
    percent, in the two years after 1964.
       In fact, for all ages, there was a rapid rise in deaths due to such
    lung diseases as emphysema and bronchitis after the onset of the
    Dresden emissions.  The rise was far greater than in more heavily
    polluted New York.  In the ten years between 1949 and 1959, these
    death rates in Illinois increased by only 9 percent, but they rose by
    75 percent in the short period from 1959, when the reactor was
    completed, to 1966, the last year for which data were available.  This
    was more than eight times the previous annual rate of increase.
       Thus, the radioactive gases released from reactor stacks, gases
    which had been widely regarded as relatively harmless, now appeared to
    be far more serious in their effects than had been anticipated.
    Although these gases do not concentrate and remain in the human body,
    they do dissolve readily in the bloodstream and especially in the
    fatty parts of many cell membranes when they are inhaled over periods
    of hours or days.  And some of them transform themselves into the
    biologically damaging cesium, strontium, and yttrium inside the body.
    As a result, the internal radiation damage to the small air sacs of
    the lungs, which are lined with cells that produce a crucial fatty
    substance (lipid) that acts to keep these air sacs open when the air
    is exhaled, could be far more serious in causing respiratory damage
    than the external radiation dose from the radioactive gases outside
    the body.
       There was still another way, more indirect but more efficient, in
    which small amounts of radioactivity could produce deaths from
    respiratory problems, especially in the newborn.  Some of the
    radioactive chemicals produced by the fission of uranium--such as
    yttrium 90, the daughter product of strontium--were known to
    concentrate in the pituitary gland.  And recent studies had revealed
    that the critical lipid needed to prevent the lung from collapsing was
    produced in special cells of the lung under the chemical control of
    the pituitary gland in the last few weeks of fetal development just
    before birth.  Thus, even slight damage to the pituitary gland from
    radioactivity in the air or in the mother's diet could lead to a
    slight retardation in development, so that the lung would not be quite
    ready to function properly immediately after birth.  And the result
    would be that otherwise apparently normal babies would be born
    underweight and would succumb to respiratory failure shortly after
    birth.
       The rise in infant deaths from respiratory diseases associated with
    immaturity also indicated that the atmospheric reactor releases should
    be causing an increase in low-birthweight babies.  This expectation
    was confirmed by the data for Grundy County, where the Dresden reactor
    was located.  The number of low-birthweight babies born in this county
    rose and declined in exact synchronism with the measured gaseous
    emissions, the rises going as high as 140 percent.  No such increases
    in the number of underweight babies took place in the six control
    counties more than 40 miles west of the reactor.
       The sudden rise in emphysema and bronchitis all over the United
    States and other countries, noted by I. M. Moriyama, followed the
    onset of large-scale atmospheric releases of radioactive gas and dust
    in the early 1950s, also fitted the hypothesis that radioactivity in
    the air was causing lung damage.  When we plotted the emphysema and
    bronchitis death rates for the states where ordinary air pollution was
    lowest but radioactivity in the air itself was highest, such as dry,
    dusty Wyoming, Utah, and New Mexico, where the winds picked up the
    radioactive dust again and again, we found that after declining in the
    1940s, the respiratory death rates per 100,000 people suddenly began
    to rise sharply between 1946 and 1951, exceeding those in the much
    more polluted but higher-rainfall states of the east such as New York
    and Massachusetts, where the radioactivity was cleansed from the
    atmosphere and soaked into the ground by the rains.  By the early
    1960s, even in the heavily polluted coal-and steel-producing state of
    Pennsylvania, these types of respiratory deaths, normally attributed
    only to ordinary air pollution, were lower than in the clean mountain
    air of Wyoming.
       Clearly, air pollution from ordinary fossil-fuel-burning power
    plants, which had doubled steadily every ten years for many decades,
    could therefore not be blamed for all of the alarming rise in lung
    disease deaths.  Instead, all the evidence pointed to radioactive air
    pollution, both from fallout and from nuclear power plants, as the
    greatest single contributor to the rise in all types of chronic lung
    disease around the world, multiplying the effects of the other
    pollutants--including cigarettes, as in the case of the uranium
    miners.
       Furthermore, there was one source of radioactive pollution that was
    potentially even more serious than the boiling-water reactors.  This
    was the effluent from the nuclear-fuel processing plants.  These
    plants recovered uranium from the spent reactor fuel elements, as well
    as plutonium, which could be sold back to the government for use in
    building bombs and missile warheads.  In the process, radioactive
    gases and large amounts of other fission products were discharged into
    the air and adjacent rivers.  Here all the efforts to prevent the
    escape of radioactivity from the reactors themselves were therefore
    completely nullified.
       The students gathered the data for the first commercial fuel-
    reprocessing plant, located in West Valley, New York, some 25 miles
    south of Buffalo.  This plant had gone into operation in April 1966,
    and reports on its radioactive gas releases, as well as measurements
    of liquid waste releases and doses from the food produced nearby, had
    just been published by the U.S. Bureau of Radiological Health in May
    1970.  When we looked at the available data for infant mortality in
    Cattaraugus County, where the plant was located, we saw that infant
    mortality had jumped up 54 percent between 1966 and 1967, far above
    the rate for New York State as a whole.  Once again, every adjacent
    county had gone up dramatically at the same time, while the next ring
    of counties rose only slightly.  And those beyond 50 miles all showed
    declines in their infant death rate, as did New York State as a whole
    and all the adjoining New England states to the east.
       But this situation was not confined to New York State.  In some of
    the counties in Pennsylvania just to the south of the plant, the same
    rise in infant mortality had taken place.  Warren County, directly to
    the southwest along the valley of the Allegheny River, had gone up
    almost exactly the same amount as Cattaraugus County.  And along the
    Allegheny River below Cattaraugus County where the plant was located,
    infant mortality had either jumped up or refused to decline further,
    the effect diminishing with distance all the way down to Pittsburgh.
       The map of the area made the explanation evident:  The small
    tributaries that flowed into the Allegheny River as it passed through
    New York State originated within a few miles of the fuel-processing
    plant near West Valley, where the radioactivity discharged from the
    stack and the storage reservoirs seeped into the watershed for the
    entire Allegheny River system.  Along the Allegheny near the
    Pennsylvania border, infant mortality had risen 56 percent in Warren
    County and 48 percent in Venango, through which it passed next.  Even
    as far away as Armstrong County, more than 100 miles downriver, infant
    mortality had gone up 4 percent that same year, while Pennsylvania as
    a whole showed no such rise, though it was not declining as rapidly as
    rural states having no nuclear facilities.  Evidently it was not just
    the inhalation of the atmospheric gases that was important in infant
    mortality, but also their deposition by rainfall in the headwaters of
    the Allegheny river, contaminating water, fish, milk, and vegetables
    with radioactive cesium, strontium, iodine, and other toxic elements.
       When we checked the levels of radioactivity in milk reported by the
    Public Health Service, we found the confirmation of what we had begun
    to suspect:  Of all the milk-sampling stations in the entire United
    States reporting for the 12-month period ending in March 1970, only
    those in Pennsylvania showed a level of short-lived iodine 131 greater
    than 1 micromicrocurie per liter.  And there was a more disturbing
    piece of evidence:  strontium 90 had climbed back up to more than half
    the level that existed at the peak of atmospheric weapons testing, and
    it was still rising.  The West Valley plant was the first commercial
    facility of its type in the United States, and it emitted far greater
    amounts of toxic radioactive elements into the environment than did
    any single nuclear reactor, including Dresden.  Yet many more of these
    plants were planned for the future.
       There simply could be no further doubt as to the cause of the
    rising infant mortality around the West Valley plant:  Measurements
    carried out by the Public Health Service and published in May 1970
    showed that, aside from the dose produced by the krypton gases
    released into the air, doses as high as 250 millirads from cesium and
    532 millirads from strontium would be received in a single year by any
    individuals who ate significant amounts of the area's heavily
    contaminated fish and deer.  These were doses much greater than the
    100 millirads normally received from natural background radiation.  In
    fact, they far exceeded even the annual doses during the height of
    nuclear testing.  And these dose calculations were only for the adult,
    and not for the much more sensitive fetus and infant, where the even
    more intensive concentration in various critical organs would make the
    doses far higher still.
       The findings were further confirmed when the infant mortality rates
    in the counties around the AEC's Hanford Laboratories in Washington
    were graphed.  It was at Hanford that nuclear fuel was first processed
    to produce the plutonium for the Trinity explosion at Alamogordo, New
    Mexico, in 1945.  During this period large quantities of radioactivity
    were released by the Hanford plant.  These releases had explained the
    early infant mortality rise in Montana and North Dakota that showed up
    on the Trinity map.  But at the time, I did not examine the effect on
    the counties around the Hanford works itself.  Now, when we compared
    the infant mortality rate for 1945, after the emissions had occurred,
    with the rate for 1943, before the plant had been started up, we found
    that the rate for Benton County, where the plant was located, had
    jumped 160 percent.  Umatilla, the adjoining county to the south, had
    gone up 60 percent, while Franklin, directly to the east, increased 50
    percent and Walla Walla, just to the southeast of Franklin, rose 10
    percent.  Yet infant mortality for the state of Washington as a whole
    declined, as it also did in Oregon.
       And within a few more months, the results for Consolidated Edison's
    Indian Point plant on the Hudson River in Westchester County, 20 miles
    north of New York City, disclosed similar rises and declines in infant
    mortality that correlated with the rises and falls in the plant's
    radioactive releases, including observable effects on New York City
    itself.  Yet this was a pressurized-water reactor, the type that
    generally had the lowest releases of all, and it was located in an
    area of excellent medical care.  Evidently it had not been possible to
    maintain the standards of a naval-type plant and remain commercially
    competitive with the boiling-water plants.  Similar situations existed
    around all the reactors we checked in various parts of the country.
    Even the small research-type reactors, such as the TRIGA, installed on
    college campuses and in laboratories all over the world, appeared to
    be capable of causing the same effect.  When figures on the year-by-
    year emissions of the TRIGA reactor at Pennsylvania State College
    became available, we compared the infant mortality rates in the
    surrounding town, State College, with those in Lebanon City, a similar
    town some 100 miles to the east.  State College showed precipitous
    rises and falls in infant mortality, corresponding closely with the
    rises and falls in emissions from the TRIGA.  The State College rate
    went from 9.9 per 1000 births in 1963 to 24.7 in 1968.  During the
    same period, the rate in Lebanon City, as well as in Pennsylvania as a
    whole, declined steadily from the peak reached during the atmospheric
    tests of 1961-62.
       Since the population of State College was comparatively small,
    however, a remote possibility existed that these increases could be
    due to chance fluctuations.  So we next examined infant mortality
    rates around the TRIGA on the University of Illinois campus in Urbana,
    where the population was much larger.  From 1962, when the reactor
    commenced operation, through 1965, the year it reached full power,
    infant mortality increased by 300 percent.  In this study, for the
    first time, we also had an opportunity to look at another category of
    possible radiation effects:  deaths from congenital malformations.
    During the same period in Urbana these deaths increased by 600
    percent, from 3.5 per 100,000 in 1962 to 23.5 in 1965.  And in 1968,
    after the reactor was shut off, they turned downward to 6.6 per
    100,000, while infant mortality showed a similar drop.  In McLean
    County, which extended 20 to 60 miles northwest of Urbana and thus
    would not have been significantly exposed to the effluent, both
    categories of death declined steadily throughout the same period.  The
    surprising strength of the effects from the TRIGA emissions, which
    were much lower than the emissions from the larger reactors we
    studied, could be explained by the fact that the TRIGAs were located
    right in the middle of densely populated areas.  Therefore, the
    emissions would reach the developing infants in much more concentrated
    form, with much less time for the short-lived isotopes to lose their
    radioactivity.
       It was the announced intention of the AEC, numerous public
    utilities, and the government that this country's energy needs would
    be supplied largely by nuclear-power reactors in the near future.
    Only fifteen or twenty such reactors were in actual operation, but
    more than a hundred were under construction or planned, as were the
    necessary number of fuel-reprocessing plants.  But if our findings
    proved correct, then the entire program, with its phenomenally large
    investment of funds and scientific energy, would become virtually
    useless in its present form.  Considering the apparent effects from
    normal operation of these plants, during which no more than one ten-
    millionth of their stored-up radioactivity had ever been discharged, a
    single large accidental release could be a national catastrophe of
    nuclear warfare dimensions.  If the general public grasped this fact,
    then most people would probably consider the risk of this technology
    far too great to be accepted.  But through all the years while reactor
    technology was being developed, the possible dangers of low-level
    radiation--either from fallout or from nuclear power plants--had been
    publicly minimized by the military, by industry, and by the health
    agencies that had given their stamp of approval to nuclear activities.
    The warning signs had been ignored or suppressed.  And little or no
    funds had been made available for development of the potentially safer
    and more efficient alternatives to nuclear power, such as coal
    gassification or magnetohydrodynamics, which would permit the
    continued use of the still-enormous reserves of fossil fuels.  Little
    or nothing was done to find means of harnessing the vast stores of
    geothermal energy in the crust of the earth, or the pollution-free
    energy of the sun.  Yet there was little question that these
    alternative means of electric power production could have been
    successfully developed.
       Our reactor findings were met with opposition as strenuous as that
    which greeted the evidence on the effects of fallout.  Notable among
    our critics was Edythalena Tompkins, a public-health scientist who was
    recently placed in charge of all studies of radiation effects on the
    population by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.  Edythalena
    Tompkins was also the wife of Paul C. Tompkins, the director of the
    Federal Radiation Council who in 1964 had presided over the first
    raising of permissible radiation levels in history.  Additionally, she
    had been a critic of the fallout evidence, particularly that relating
    to the effects of the Trinity test.  In the spring of 1970, a student
    at the Pittsburgh School of Public Health had informed me that Mrs.
    Tompkins had told him there were serious errors in my map of infant
    mortality after the Trinity explosion.  My map had shown no rise in
    infant mortality among the white population in three states that were
    in the path of the fallout--Oklahoma, Florida, and South Carolina.
    The explanation for this was that according to the official weather
    map these states had received little or no rain and thus little
    fallout during the week following the Trinity explosion.  This fact
    had provided an important confirmation of my hypothesis.  However,
    Mrs. Tompkins had told this student that just the opposite had been
    the case:  The infant mortality in these states had actually risen,
    just as it had in the states that received the rains.  He then gave me
    a series of five maps that had been prepared by Mrs. Tompkins, and on
    all of these maps the three key states did indeed show sharp increases
    in white infant mortality during the five years following Trinity.
       This appeared to be a devastating piece of evidence, but my
    associates and I rechecked our figures and found that only in these
    three crucial states did they differ from those on Mrs. Thompkins's
    maps.  I suggested to the student that he himself recalculate the
    figures.  After doing so he informed me that our figures were the
    correct ones and then called Mrs. Tompkins for an explanation.  Mrs.
    Tompkins said that she had evidently made a mistake, but that in any
    event these maps were not intended for publication.  Subsequently,
    however, AEC representatives and members of the Joint Committee on
    Atomic Energy stated publicly that my infant mortality figures for the
    states that had low rainfalls after the Trinity test had been proved
    to be inaccurate and that the true figures completely invalidated my
    conclusions.  Yet the only time these particular figures had ever been
    challenged was by Mrs. Tompkins.
       After our group began making the reactor findings public, Mrs.
    Tompkins, by now with the newly formed Environmental Protection Agency
    to which she and her husband had been transferred, began conducting
    her own studies of this subject too.  Her method was to calculate the
    infant mortality rates in a series of circular areas surrounding the
    reactor, and compare these figures for five-year periods before and
    after the reactor had gone into operation.  She concluded that even
    the most heavily emitting boiling-water reactors had no detectable
    effect on infant mortality.
       Since vital statistics are recorded by county and not by circular
    regions around reactors, however, Mrs. Thompkins's method first of all
    necessitated that she make her own estimates of both the population
    figures and the infant mortality rates.  And her use of concentric
    ring-shaped areas omitted a very important consideration:  The
    emissions from reactors are not evenly distributed in all directions.
    Their distribution depends not only on the direction of the prevailing
    winds, or on geographical features such as high mountains and
    resulting differences in rainfall, but also on the discretion of the
    reactor engineers, who can and do time the releases to coincide with a
    certain wind direction that may or may not be the prevalent one.  And
    then, of course, the counties that take their drinking water and fish
    from the rivers, lakes, or oceans into which the reactor releases its
    liquid effluent would also be expected to show sharper increases than
    the others.  Thus, highly asymmetrical situations can develop around
    reactors, situations in which the counties most heavily exposed to the
    effluent show sharp rises and falls in infant mortality that correlate
    directly with rises and falls in the reactor releases, while in other
    counties, such as those upwind to the west of Dresden, the rate may
    continue the decline that began shortly after the cessation of
    atmospheric testing.  Thus, if all the surrounding counties are
    averaged together over five-year periods, as in Mrs. Tompkins's
    method, the overall figure may show little or no increase in infant
    mortality.  Furthermore, in the case of reactors that began operation
    in the early 1960s in areas that had received heavy fallout (as had
    the three boiling-water reactors studied by Mrs. Tompkins), it is
    possible by this technique to demonstrate an actual *decline* in
    infant mortality after the reactors were started up and the fallout
    levels died down.  But in all of these cases, if one examines the
    yearly figures, the infant mortality rates in the counties heavily
    exposed to the reactor effluent show sharp rises and falls in direct
    correlation with the releases, declining steadily with distance in any
    direction from the reactor when the counties are of similar socio-
    economic and climatic character.
       Significantly, an independent statistical study of this subject was
    presented at a scientific meeting in July 1971 by Dr. Morris H.
    DeGroot, head of the Department of Mathematical Statistics at
    Carnegie-Mellon University.  Dr. DeGroot found that infant mortality
    increases did take place in close correlation with releases of
    radioactivity from the heavily emitting reactors at Dresden, Illinois;
    Indian Point, New York;  and Brookhaven, Long Island.  Perhaps most
    important was his finding that in the area around the reactor at
    Shippingport, Pennsylvania--the only other reactor studied by Dr.
    DeGroot--there was no correlation between releases and changes in
    infant mortality.  As the official release figures showed, the
    Shippingport reactor had the lowest gaseous emissions of any reactor
    in the country, since it was a non-commercial naval submarine type of
    plant.
       But later in 1971, the most comprehensive independent study of all
    was completed.  It was conducted by Dr. Lester B. Lave and his
    associates, Dr. Samuel Leinhardt and Martin B. Kaye, of the Graduate
    School of Business Administration at Carnegie-Mellon University.  This
    was a study of fallout effects, but the results apply equally to
    reactor emissions.  The three scientists concluded that, during the
    time period studied (1961-67), fallout appears to have been the single
    most important factor affecting fetal, infant, and adult mortality,
    more important than ordinary air pollution.  Through the use of
    computerized statistical techniques they corrected their estimates to
    account for the effects of such variables as sulfur dioxide, socio-
    economic factors, background radiation, and others in 61 metropolitan
    areas of the United States.  The principal findings and their
    implications may be briefly summarized as follows:
       Infant mortality is strongly associated with levels of strontium 90
    and cesium 137 in milk, especially the former.  The association is
    such that for every single micromicrocurie of strontium 90 per liter
    of milk there is an increase of 12 infant deaths per 100,000 births.
    Since, during 1961-67, there was an average of 15.8 micromicrocuries
    per liter of milk in the U.S., then these findings indicate that
    during this period there were close to 7600 infant deaths *every year*
    due to fallout.  For the world population, this would mean an extra
    100,000 infant deaths per year.  But during the peak of testing, these
    levels reached between 50 and 100 micromicrocuries per liter in many
    locations around the world, and as late as 1971 they were still
    between 5 and 15 in most parts of the northern hemisphere.  And they
    then began to rise again following the large French and Chinese test
    series and the rapid growth in releases from nuclear reactors and fuel
    reprocessing plants.
       Dr. Lave's group also found that mortality rates for the whole
    population--in other words, all causes of death among all ages--were
    also highly correlated with fallout levels.  The calculations showed
    that there were 1.29 extra deaths per 100,000 people for each single
    micromicrocurie of strontium 90 per liter of milk.  At the 1961-67
    levels, this amounts to some 40,000 extra deaths each year in the
    United States, and thus some 600,000 among the world's population of
    over three billion people.
       And during the fifteen-year period of heavy nuclear testing that
    began in the early 1950s, when the short-lived iodine and other
    isotopes were added to the strontium 90 in the milk, there would have
    been many millions of extra deaths.
       At long last, more than a quarter century after Hiroshima, studies
    of the health effects of fallout were being made by independent
    scientists outside the government such as Lave, Leinhardt and Kaye.
    But as I was not to learn until much later, neither the public nor the
    scientific community at large would be able to learn of these results.
    When the Carnegie-Mellon scientists submitted their paper to
    {Science}, Abelson refused to publish it, even though a similar paper
    by the same group linking ordinary air pollution to mortality
    increases using the same statistical techniques had been published by
    {Science} earlier.
       The paper was finally accepted for publication in the much less
    widely read journal {Radiation Data and Reports}, published monthly by
    the Environmental Protection Agency.  But the important findings of
    Lave, Leinhardt and Kaye never appeared in print.  Just before
    publication, when the plates had already been prepared, the authors
    received word from the editor that objections from highly placed
    government officials forced them to destroy the plates.  The article
    has never appeared in the scientific literature, and at the end of
    1974, publication of {Radiation Data and Reports} ceased with the
    December issue after fifteen years of providing the only comprehensive
    source of data on radioactivity in the environment, following deep
    budget cuts in the Office of Radiation Programs ordered by the Nixon
    administration.






                             *  *  *  *  *  *  *
Newsgroups: talk.environment