From: dave@ratmandu.esd.sgi.com (dave "who can do? ratmandu!" ratcliffe)
Subject: "SECRET FALLOUT, Low-Level Radiation from Hiroshima to TMI" [7/15]
Followup-To: alt.activism.d
Summary: part 7 of 15:  first half of chapter 15
Originator: daemon@pencil.cs.missouri.edu
Keywords: low-level ionizing radiation, fallout, deception, secrecy, survival
Organization: Silicon Graphics, Inc.
Date: Mon, 4 Jan 1993 22:55:03 GMT



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                                      15


                           Fallout at Shippingport




    THE STUDIES of Lave and DeGroot provided independent evidence that
    infant mortality was correlated with low-level radioactivity from
    nuclear-weapons fallout and reactor releases, but a number of puzzling
    questions remained unanswered.  It was understandable in the light of
    Dr. Stewart's latest findings, published in 1970, that infant
    mortality might go up significantly as a result of early intrauterine
    exposure due to the hundredfold greater sensitivity of the fetus in
    the first three months of development as compared to the adult.  It
    was difficult to understand, however, how total mortality rates,
    dominated by the older age groups rather than by the small number of
    newborn infants, could possibly be affected as strongly as Lave's
    study had shown.
       Still another puzzle was the finding by DeGroot that although
    infant mortality rates in Beaver County, where the Shippingport
    reactor was located, did not decline as rapidly as for the state of
    Pennsylvania as a whole, there was no correlation between the
    abnormally high infant mortality rates and the officially announced
    small releases from the plant.
       Both of these puzzles were destined to find their solution in a
    most unexpected manner within a year after DeGroot's and Lave's
    studies had been completed.  Late in 1972, a notice in the Pittsburgh
    newspapers announced that hearings would shortly be held by the Atomic
    Energy Commission to grant an operating license for the Beaver Valley
    Unit I reactor, which was then nearing completion.  This power station
    was being built right next to the original Shippingport reactor on the
    Ohio River, some 25 miles downstream and to the west of Pittsburgh.
    According to the newspaper story, it would be of the same
    pressurized-water type that had been pioneered in Pittsburgh by
    Westinghouse, under Admiral Rickover's direction, except that it would
    be some ten times larger.
       Knowing that it was a naval type of reactor with a double cooling
    loop to minimize the amount of gas that would have to be discharged
    into the atmosphere caused me to feel little concern, especially in
    view of the fact that the AEC had only recently announced that it was
    proposing to tighten up the standards for permissible emissions.
    (These new standards had been issued following hearings in Washington
    at which I had been asked to testify in behalf of various
    environmental groups on the need to lower permissible doses.)  Also,
    Westinghouse had just announced that it had been possible to operate
    Shippingport with "zero" gaseous releases in 1971, so that I felt
    certain that this much more advanced new power station only a short
    distance upwind from Westinghouse headquarters and the Bettis Nuclear
    Laboratories, where the first submarine reactors had been built, would
    surely be provided with the very latest in the available equipment for
    containing all radioactive gases.
       Thus, when some of my students asked me whether I planned to attend
    the hearings I expressed no great concern, saying only that I might
    take a look at the Safety Analysis Report being kept in the public
    library of the nearby town of Beaver, a few miles from Shippingport,
    to make sure that the planned emissions were indeed as low as I
    expected them to be.
       A few weeks later, an opportunity presented itself to check on the
    proposed releases.  I had to go to the nearby Pittsburgh airport to
    pick up my mother, and since the Beaver County Library was only a few
    miles from the airport, I left a few hours early to check the figures.
       Since I had examined similar reports for the Davis-Besse and other
    plants within the past year, it did not take me long to find the
    information I was looking for.  But what I found shocked me
    profoundly.  Instead of gaseous releases of only a small fraction of a
    curie, such as had been reported for Shippingport in recent years, the
    more advanced commercial plant about to go into operation was
    apparently designed to release some 60,000 curies of fission gases per
    year into the already heavily polluted air of the Ohio River valley.
    This was millions of times more than was claimed to have been
    discharged annually from the old Shippingport plant in recent years,
    even though the power output would be only ten times greater.
       In fact the summary of past releases from nuclear facilities
    published by the Bureau of Radiological Health had listed only 0.35
    curies of fission gases at the time of the highest reported discharges
    back in 1963, for which the calculated dose was 0.87 percent of the
    maximum permissible of 500 millirems to someone living near the plant.
    This meant that the estimated radiation dose produced by 0.35 curies
    was only about 4 millirems.  Yet even at these relatively low
    calculated external doses (due to gas releases), there seemed to be a
    disturbing rise in infant mortality in surrounding Beaver County and
    especially the nearby town of Aliquippa, some 10 miles to the east in
    the Ohio valley.
       There were thus only two possibilities.  If the reported figures on
    the likely magnitude of gaseous releases from the new large reactor
    were correct, there would very likely be a major increase in infant
    mortality and other detrimental health effects unless vastly more
    efficient means of trapping the gases were installed to bring them
    down to the levels reported for the existing reactor.
       The other possibility was that the actual releases from the
    Shippingport plant had somehow been much larger than the amounts
    officially reported.  And this would of course explain why DeGroot did
    not find a relationship between the tabulated releases and the yearly
    changes in infant mortality for the Shippingport plant.
       Deeply troubled by these findings, I decided to contact the utility
    lawyer for the City of Pittsburgh, Albert Brandon, who had long been
    battling the Duquesne Light Company's growing requests for rate
    increases needed to finance the escalating cost of the Beaver Valley
    nuclear plant.  My hope was to persuade the city to intervene in the
    upcoming license hearings in order to get to the bottom of the
    disturbing discrepancy between the annual claim for "zero-release"
    nuclear plants and the actually planned emissions.  Even though it was
    too late to stop the plant from going into operation, perhaps it would
    still be possible to force the utility to install the latest equipment
    for trapping the radioactive gases so as to reduce to a minimum the
    health risk to the people living in the area.
       Concerned by these facts, Brandon promised to discuss the matter
    with the mayor, Pete Flaherty.  A few days later, a meeting was
    arranged, and after a brief discussion, Flaherty agreed to have the
    City of Pittsburgh become an intervenor in the upcoming license
    hearings, together with a group of local environmentalists to whom I
    had previously outlined my findings.
       Shortly after the public announcement that the City of Pittsburgh
    would intervene in the hearings for the new plant, I received a
    telephone call from a man who identified himself as the manager of the
    new power station being built at the Shippingport site.  He said that
    great efforts were being made to assure the safety of the people in
    the area, and that he would be glad to send me the detailed plans for
    the environmental monitoring that would be done to assure that no
    harmful amounts of radioactivity could reach the public.
       Within a day, a large manila envelope was delivered to my office at
    the university from the Duquesne Light Company.  As I leafed through
    its contents, I noticed a series of documents entitled "Pre-
    Operational Environmental Radioactivity Monitoring Program at the
    Beaver Valley Power Station" in the form of quarterly reports for the
    years 1971 and 1972.  The documents had been prepared by the N.U.S.
    Corporation of Rockville, Maryland.  These were apparently part of the
    Environmental Report for the Beaver Valley Power Station Unit II
    Construction Permit Application, submitted to the AEC in November 1972
    as required by the new National Environmental Protection Act, which
    had just come into effect.  Thus, the data were gathered to establish
    the radiation levels existing at the site prior to the operation of
    the new plant, providing a baseline for comparison with later
    measurements that would be gathered once the plant had gone into
    operation.
       As I began to look through the tables with their long lists of
    numbers, I noticed that there were some very high measurements for the
    external gamma doses in early 1971, measured in microrems per hour.
    When I worked it out in the more familiar units of millirems per year,
    I could hardly believe the result:  In March the rate was 370
    millirems per year for Station No. 10, located in the town of
    Shippingport, compared to the normal values for the area of 70 to 90
    millirems per year.  There were a few more readings at this location
    in the range of 300 to 350 millirems per year by June, and not until
    January of 1972 did the numbers return to the normal rate of 86
    millirems per year.
       Other locations showed comparable peaks of gamma radiation, but the
    highest were in the town of Shippingport closest to the site or on the
    site itself.  Could it be that these extremely high radiation dose
    rates were produced by the old Shippingport plant, for which the
    official reports had shown almost no gaseous releases at all?
       Turning to the tabulations of strontium 90 in the milk, I saw
    immediately that the levels measured in the farms around Shippingport
    were much higher than in Pittsburgh, Harrisburg, Cincinnati, and
    Buffalo as reported in {Radiation Health Data and Reports} for the
    early part of 1971.  The fact that the extremely high readings were
    confined to the Shippingport area made it unlikely that they were due
    to worldwide fallout from high-altitude atmospheric bomb testing.
       To check this further, I plotted the concentrations of strontium 90
    in the soil and found that it dropped off sharply with distance away
    from the plant both east to west and north to south.  In April of
    1971, the levels within three-quarters of a mile were fifty times
    greater than the typical levels produced by worldwide fallout, and by
    early in 1972, the rains had apparently washed most of the activity
    into the Ohio River, the measured levels having gone down from their
    peak of 6000 picocuries per kilogram to less than 100.
       Clearly, such a highly localized concentration of strontium 90 in
    the soil centered on the Shippingport plant could not be explained by
    worldwide fallout, which is more or less uniformly distributed around
    the globe as the rains bring down the fine particles circulating in
    the upper atmosphere.
       Still further confirmation of the localized nature of the
    radioactive contamination came from the measurements of short-lived
    iodine 131 in the milk.  Beginning in December of 1971 and peaking in
    February 1972, the levels of iodine for the six dairies within a 10-
    mile radius started to rise above 10 picocuries per liter, the Range I
    reporting level set by the Federal Radiation Council for continuous
    consumption, reaching as high as 120 picocuries per liter.  This was
    well above the 100 picocurie-per-liter limit of Range II, and it
    equaled the kind of values reached in the eastern United States during
    the height of nuclear-bomb testing.
       Yet when I looked up the monthly iodine 131 levels for other
    locations in Pennsylvania (such as Erie, Harrisburg, and Philadelphia)
    in {Radiation Health Data and Reports}, they were all listed with
    "zero" values, or below the limit of detection.  Clearly, it was
    extremely unlikely that any Chinese fallout would somehow concentrate
    radioactive iodine 131 over the Shippingport site, leaving the nearby
    areas of Ohio and Pennsylvania without any detectable increases of
    radiation in the milk.
       As a final check, I compared the monthly values of strontium 90 in
    the milk within a 10-mile radius of Shippingport with the monthly
    electrical power output in kilowatt-hours published in {Nucleonics
    Week}.  Both strontium 90 and power output peaked in January 1971 and
    again in April, moving up and down together until the plant was closed
    for repairs later in the summer.  After the plant was shut down, both
    the local and the Pittsburgh milk showed a sharp reduction in
    strontium 90 levels, from a peak of 27 picocuries per liter nearest
    the plant in early 1971 down to 7 picocuries per liter measured in
    Harrisburg that summer.  As I learned later from an analysis of the
    milk-marketing reports, the city of Pittsburgh obtained about a third
    of its milk from an area within 25 miles of the Shippingport plant.
    This finding was consistent with the fact that the Pittsburgh milk
    showed strontium 90 concentrations some 30 percent higher than the
    Cincinnati and Philadelphia milk in early 1971.
       Yet during the time of the sharp peaks in radiation levels in the
    air, the soil, and the milk that occurred between January and June of
    1971 near Shippingport, there were no nuclear-weapons tests carried
    out in the atmosphere by any nation as reported in the monthly issues
    of {Radiation Health Data and Reports}.
       After weeks of graphing and analyzing the data with the help of
    colleagues, volunteers from local environmental organizations, and
    students at the university, there could be no doubt about the result:
    The data collected by the Duquesne Light Company's own hired team of
    experienced health physicists clearly indicated that the Shippingport
    plant must have been the source of radioactivity in the environment
    many thousands of times as great as had been claimed in the official
    reports to state and federal agencies.  Instead of annual radiation
    doses of less than 0.5 millirems claimed by the utility, the
    combination of external radiation (measured by the dosimeters) and
    internal radiation (from the gases that were inhaled or ingested with
    the milk, the water, and the local meat and vegetables) was many
    hundreds of millirems per year.  Indeed, this dosage exceeded the
    level of radiation that was received by the people of this area during
    the height of nuclear-weapons testing.  Moreover, the scientists who
    had carried out these measurements had clearly failed to warn either
    the utility officials who had hired them, the public-health officials
    at the state or federal level, or the public, whose health and safety
    were being endangered by the secret fallout from the plant.
       Faced with these disturbing discoveries, the leaders of the local
    environmental groups in Beaver County decided to hold a public meeting
    at which both the Duquesne Light Company and spokesmen for a
    Pittsburgh environmental group would be able to present their views to
    the people of the area.  The meeting took place early in January of
    1973 at a shopping mall in the town of Monaca, just a few miles from
    the Shippingport plant.  After the superintendent of the Shippingport
    plant explained that the new power station would be "the Cadillac of
    the industry"--with a waste-disposal system that would permit only
    "minimal" amounts of radioactivity to escape--the head of Environment
    Pittsburgh, David Marshall, and I presented the data gathered by the
    Duquesne Light Company's own consultants.  Slide after slide showed
    the localized concentrations of radioactivity in the milk, the soil,
    and the river sediments rising to many times their normal value,
    together with the peaks during the months when there was no nuclear-
    weapons testing.  Obviously, the findings in our presentation were
    completely at variance with what the utility had told the local people
    over the years.
       The Duquesne Light officials were unprepared for this damaging
    evidence and could only lamely repeat their assurances that the new
    plant would have negligible impact on the health of the public.  It
    took them a few days to prepare an advertisement for the {Pittsburgh
    Post-Gazette} in which they claimed that they had operated their
    Shippingport facility safely--without releasing more than a small
    percentage of the releases allowed by the Atomic Energy Commission and
    the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, and therefore without injuring any
    member of the public.  But the people who had attended the meeting
    were no longer so certain that this was the case, and there was a
    demand for an independent investigation of these disturbing findings
    by the various environmental groups in Pittsburgh and Beaver County
    before a new and still larger reactor would be given a license.  This
    demand was supported by the mayor of Pittsburgh, Pete Flaherty, and
    his utility lawyer, Albert Brandon.
       Confronted with the evidence of very high levels of strontium 90,
    cesium 137, and iodine 131 in the area in 1971, while "zero" release
    had been officially reported, I began to wonder about earlier
    releases.  The plant had been in operation since 1958, so in light of
    the unreliable claims by the company, I wondered if there might indeed
    have been long-term exposure to the people of Beaver County and nearby
    Allegheny County, in which the city of Pittsburgh was located.  In
    particular, enough time had elapsed for leukemia and cancer to
    develop, so that one might for the first time be able to determine
    whether the operation of commercial nuclear plants did or did not lead
    to the same kind of cancer increases that I had begun to see following
    the start of nuclear-weapons tests in Nevada, the Pacific, and
    Siberia.
       My students and I started to examine the annual vital statistics
    reports for Beaver County, Allegheny County, and the major towns at
    different distances from Shippingport up and down the Ohio River.
    Within a few days the first results were tabulated, and the figures
    were startling.  In the town of Midland, just a mile downstream from
    Shippingport, the people drank the Ohio River water.  The cancer death
    rate in this town had risen from a low of 149.6 per hundred thousand
    population in 1958, when the plant started to operate, to a peak of
    426.3 by 1970.  This was an increase of 184 percent in only twelve
    years.
       For Beaver County as a whole, surrounding the plant, the rate had
    risen from 147.7 to 204.7 in the ten years from the time the plant had
    gone on line with so much hope for a cleaner and healthier
    environment.  This was a rise of close to 40 percent during a time
    when the state of Pennsylvania as a whole showed an increase of only
    10 percent and the U.S. cancer mortality rose by only 8 percent.  From
    a low of 293 cancer deaths in Beaver County in 1958, the number had
    risen to 418 by 1968, an increase of 115 cancer deaths per year, when
    there should have been no more than an additional 30 if the county had
    continued to follow the average pattern for the state.
       Likewise, the Pittsburgh cancer death rate had climbed by 31
    percent between 1958 and 1968, despite the steady cleanup of ordinary
    air and water pollution that had begun right after World War II, when
    the burning of soft coal in the city was ended and a major effort was
    begun to clean up the air and water.
       Similarly, in the towns along the Ohio River downstream from
    Shippingport and Midland, cancer rates had climbed sharply, the more
    so the closer they were to the plant.  For East Liverpool, just across
    the border in Ohio and some 10 miles downstream, the cancer death rate
    had risen 40 percent by 1968 and 67 percent by 1971.  In Steubenville,
    some 30 miles downstream, the cancer mortality rate was up 25 percent
    by 1968, and even as far away as Cincinnati, some 300 miles down the
    Ohio River, the cancer deaths had climbed 24 percent, while they
    increased only 6 percent for Ohio as a whole.
       Further evidence suggested that the releases from Shippingport had
    added heavily to all the other sources of carcinogens, from bomb tests
    to chemical plants.  The city of Columbus, Ohio, which did not use the
    Ohio River for its drinking-water supply, actually experienced a 10
    percent decline in its cancer rate during the same period, even though
    it suffered from all the other likely sources of carcinogens,
    including automobile exhaust, cigarettes, food additives, hair dyes,
    artificial sweeteners, and so on.
       But if Shippingport was responsible for these striking cancer rises
    in the towns using the Ohio River for their water supply, then the
    discharges into the river would have had to be vastly greater than the
    amounts for which the plant had been licensed.  Was there any evidence
    that the activity in the water had been much greater downstream than
    upstream of the plant?  After all, it was clear that it could not be
    the milk that was responsible for transmitting the radioactivity all
    the way to Steubenville and Cincinnati.
       Fortunately, there was a way to check this.  For many years, the
    Pennsylvania State Department of Environmental Resources in Harrisburg
    had been making quarterly measurements of the radioactivity in all the
    major streams of the state at various points along each river.  When
    the students had collected the data for the Ohio and other streams in
    western Pennsylvania, the answer began to emerge.  There was a large
    peak in the Ohio River radioactivity in late 1970 and early 1971,
    exactly the time when the N.U.S. data had shown a large peak of
    radioactivity in soil, milk, river sediment, and fish.  At Midland,
    just a little over a mile below the Shippingport plant, the gross beta
    activity had climbed from a low of only 3 picocuries per liter to a
    high of 18.  But for the two rivers that joined in Pittsburgh to form
    the Ohio, the Allegheny and the Monongahela, measured at locations
    more than 30 miles away, upstream to the east the rise was no greater
    than 5 of these units.
       Thus, the rise in river radioactivity could not have been due to
    fallout, which would have affected the more distant upstream areas
    just as strongly.  But it was consistent with high, unreported gaseous
    releases that would settle on the land and then be washed into the
    Ohio River with the rain and melting snow.  In fact, the rapid
    disappearance of the high values of long-lived strontium 90 in the
    soil around the Shippingport plant between early 1971 and 1972 could
    be explained only by the action of rain carrying the radioactivity
    from gaseous releases into the local streams and rivers.  This
    possibility was further supported by the fact that the two nearest
    small rivers that joined the Ohio just a few miles *upstream* from
    Shippingport, the Beaver River and Raccoon Creek, both showed even
    larger rises in activity, reaching peaks of 20 picocuries per liter
    during the same quarter.
       It was apparently not any direct liquid discharges that were
    involved, which by the terms of the original license were to be held
    to less than 0.56 curies.  Rather, the radioactivity must have
    originated from airborne releases that settled on the surrounding land
    as far upstream as 20 to 30 miles.  Only releases into the air could
    also explain the large increases in milk activity all around the farms
    surrounding the Ohio River in Beaver County.
       This would make it possible to understand the paradoxical finding
    that even "upstream" locations and tributaries of the Ohio within 20
    to 30 miles, showed peaks in radioactivity when the local milk rose in
    strontium 90, cesium 137, and iodine 131.  And it would explain why
    cancer rates in cities as far away as Pittsburgh, upstream by 25
    miles, could have their water supplies contaminated.  The wind was
    blowing the radioactive gases up the Ohio Valley to the streams that
    filled the reservoirs serving Pittsburgh, just as the fallout from the
    "Simon" shot in Nevada had contaminated the reservoirs of Albany and
    Troy back in the spring of 1953.
       Clearly, if such releases were taking place but were somehow not
    reported, even cities using tributaries of the Ohio entering the river
    10 to 30 miles upstream from Shippingport, as well as communities far
    downstream, could have their drinking water affected and their cancer
    rates increased by the invisible, tasteless, and odorless radioactive
    fallout secretly discharged into the ambient air.
       By looking up the amount of water carried by the Ohio per second at
    Midland for each month of the year, it was possible to calculate how
    many curies had been carried downstream from the airborne releases in
    late 1970 above and beyond the amounts in the Allegheny and
    Monongahela Rivers that joined to form the Ohio some 25 miles upstream
    from the plant.  The total worked out to 183 more curies in the Ohio
    below the plant in a year than were carried by the Allegheny and
    Monongahela Rivers, which combined to form the Ohio.  This was 300
    times more than the original permit had allowed for direct discharges
    into the Ohio River from the Shippingport plant, and 2500 times more
    than the 0.07 curies that the Duquesne Light Company had officially
    reported for liquid discharges in 1970 to the state and federal health
    agencies.
       There were apparently hundreds to thousands of times as many curies
    of highly toxic radioactivity in the Ohio River than were allowed by
    state and federal limits, designed to protect the health of the people
    using the Ohio for their drinking water.  The radioactivity did not
    come from the direct liquid discharges, however, but through the run-
    off of unreported gaseous releases that had settled on the land.
       Here, then, was at least one piece in the puzzle as to why not only
    infant mortality but mortality at all ages had been affected so
    strongly, despite the relatively small external radiation doses from
    gamma rays on the ground that irradiate the whole body uniformly.  It
    was the airborne gaseous activity and the run-off into the rivers
    serving as drinking-water supplies that had apparently carried the
    more damaging short-lived beta-ray-emitting chemicals rapidly into the
    critical organs of the people, in addition to the other pathways via
    the milk, the vegetables, the fruits, the fish, and the meat that were
    most important for the long-lived strontium 90 and cesium 137.  And
    although adults were more resistant to the biological damage than the
    developing fetus, they received the doses steadily over many years
    rather than just for a few months, by continuously drinking the water,
    inhaling the gases, and eating the food that was contaminated first by
    the fallout from the bomb tests, and then by the secret gaseous
    releases from the peaceful nuclear reactors along the rivers of the
    nation.
       Of equal significance were the implications for one of the most
    important questions DeGroot was unable to answer:  Why had he not
    found a correlation between the changes in infant mortality in Beaver
    County and the published radioactive releases in the case of the
    Shippingport reactor, while he had discovered such a correlation for
    the other three nuclear reactors he had studied?  Clearly, if there
    existed such large unreported releases as the data gathered by the
    N.U.S. Corporation, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the State
    of Pennsylvania seemed to indicate, then one could not possibly expect
    to find a direct relationship between the *announced* annual releases
    and the changes in mortality rates.
       Now a new and most disturbing question had arisen:  How was it
    possible for large quantities of radioactive gases to escape from the
    Shippingport plant without being officially reported as required by
    the existing regulations?  Not until many months later was this riddle
    destined to be solved in a most unexpected manner.
       In the meantime, there was a growing public debate over the
    abnormally high levels of radioactivity around the Shippingport plant
    and the sharp rise in infant mortality in such nearby towns as
    Aliquippa.  I documented my findings in a report and sent it to the
    governor of Pennsylvania, Milton Shapp, in January of 1973.  Early in
    the spring, Governor Shapp announced his intention to appoint a
    special fact-finding commission of independent scientists and public
    health experts who would hold hearings on the question and issue their
    own report within a few months.
       The latest numbers for infant mortality in Aliquippa, some 10 miles
    downwind and to the east of the plant, were indeed alarming.  For the
    years 1970 and 1971, the years of high levels of radioactivity,
    Aliquippa's infant mortality rate climbed to a twenty-year high of
    44.2 and 39.7 per 1000 live births.  These were more than double the
    overall state rates of 19.9 and 18.2.  Yet back in 1949 and 1952, when
    ordinary air pollution from the steel mills was much greater, but
    before Shippingport had started, Aliquippa's infant mortality rates
    had been as low as 16.0 per 1000 births.
       This could not be simply explained by a change in the composition
    of the population, which had remained essentially constant, the
    nonwhite population representing 21 percent of the total in 1960 and
    22 percent in 1970.  And for the State of Pennsylvania and the United
    States as a whole, infant mortality had resumed its previous decline
    after the end of atmospheric bomb tests by the United States and the
    Soviet Union for both the white and nonwhite population.
       News of the controversy had reached the cities along the Ohio below
    Shippingport, and in April I was asked to present my findings at a
    public lecture at the University of Cincinnati by a local
    environmental group and university professors concerned about the
    construction of the Zimmer nuclear power station upstream from the
    city's water intake.  At the end of my presentation, members of the
    university's Department of Chemical and Nuclear Engineering attacked
    my findings, charging that numerous state and federal government
    health agencies, including those of the State of Pennsylvania, had
    found no substance to my allegations in the past and that I had been
    repudiated especially by such prestigious organizations as the Health
    Physics Society, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the National
    Academy of Science, the Atomic Energy Commission, and the
    Environmental Protection Agency.
       As Dr. Bernd Kohn, director of the Radio Chemistry and Nuclear
    Engineering Research Center put it:  "In each case, an epidemiologist
    has refuted his claim by the same data."  But Dr. Kohn and the other
    engineers present were unable to point out how else to explain the
    startlingly high localized values of strontium 90, cesium 137, and
    iodine 131 in the environment around Shippingport, other than that it
    was likely to be Chinese fallout.
       However, when I showed the data to the mayor of Cincinnati,
    Theodore M. Barry, he wrote a letter to Governor John J. Gilligan of
    Ohio, requesting an investigation by the Ohio Environmental Protection
    Agency.  Also, the chairman of the energy conservation committee of
    the Cincinnati Environmental Task Force, after seeing the data on
    radioactivity and cancer mortality changes around Shippingport and the
    other reactors that had been studied by DeGroot and me, announced that
    he would recommend that the City of Cincinnati become an intervenor in
    the public hearings on an operating license for the Zimmer plant.
       The next day, the {Cincinnati Inquirer} carried the following two
    headlined stories on its front page:  "Mitchell Denies Knowledge of
    Plans to Bug Watergate" and, just below, "AEC Denies Radiation Damage
    to Ohio River."
       In the light of the enormous discrepancy between the official
    claims of "zero releases" and the N.U.S. findings of much larger than
    normal amounts of strontium 90 in the soil, the milk, and the river
    sediment around Shippingport, the coincidental juxtaposition of these
    two stories took on an ominous ring.  The facts that had emerged so
    far were hardly consonant with the AEC's claim in the {Inquirer} story
    that "the release of effluents from the Shippingport Atomic Power
    Station is carefully controlled and monitored so as not to endanger
    the public."
       The story went on to say that "the radiation levels in these
    effluents are so extremely low that they pose no threat to the people
    in the cities mentioned by Dr. Sternglass."  It all sounded exactly
    like the old reassurances that had been issued by the AEC at the time
    of the nuclear tests in Nevada, and the denial by former Attorney
    General John M. Mitchell before a federal grand jury that he had any
    prior knowledge of the Watergate case and always vetoed any bugging
    plans that were suggested while he was President Nixon's campaign
    manager.
       There would soon be another kind of grand jury appointed to hear
    the differing claims of government officials and independent
    scientists who had stumbled upon information that was not meant to
    reach the ordinary citizen of our country.
       Newspaper stories in the Pittsburgh area repeating the denial of
    large discharges from Shippingport and blaming the high readings
    either on fallout or on errors in the measurements were clearly
    indications of deep concern by the AEC, Duquesne Light, and N.U.S.
    All three organizations now knew that before long they would be facing
    hearings by an independent body of knowledgeable scientists.  The
    bureaucrats and scientists in the AEC knew that this time the hearings
    would not be under their control, unlike the case of the usual
    licensing hearings, where both the hearing officers and the staff were
    appointed by the agency whose mandated task it was both to promote and
    regulate the safety of the nuclear industry.
       But the full extent of the behind-the-scenes efforts to make the
    public believe that nothing had happened at Shippingport did not
    emerge until long after the hearings of the fact-finding commission
    had taken place at the end of July.  The story was pieced together
    later in an article by a free-lance investigative writer, Joel
    Griffiths, and published in an article in the {Beaver County Times} on
    June 7, 1974, after the AEC had issued licenses for the operation and
    construction of the Beaver Valley Power Station Units I and II.
       Quite unexpectedly, the story came to light as the result of a
    routine request submitted by the attorney for the City of Pittsburgh,
    Albert Brandon, in connection with the discovery procedures preceding
    the licensing hearings for the new reactors at Shippingport.  (This
    was a few months after the Shapp Commission hearings in Aliquippa had
    taken place.)  Brandon had asked for copies of all correspondence and
    internal memoranda connected with the Shippingport controversy in the
    files of the AEC.  And then, one day in the fall of 1973, not long
    before the licensing hearings were scheduled to begin, a large
    envelope arrived at Brandon's office with a devastating series of
    internal memoranda, letters, and other documents revealing what had
    taken place behind the scenes.
       As Griffiths described it in his article, early in 1973 the AEC's
    Earth Science Branch had conducted an in-depth investigation of the
    situation and concluded that "it is highly unlikely that the
    radioactivity was of Chinese origin.  Most likely it was either of
    local origin, or the result of inadequate sampling procedures."
    Griffiths wrote that this was a crucial finding.  "Local origin" was a
    euphemism for Shippingport, since there was nothing else in the
    vicinity that could have produced that amount of radioactivity.  Thus,
    if the radioactivity had in fact been there, Shippingport was clearly
    implicated.  The only other possibility was that maybe the
    radioactivity had really not been there in the first place.
       As Griffiths put it:

          This was where "inadequate sampling procedures" came in.  The
       idea was that N.U.S. might have bungled procedures it had used
       to measure the radioactivity in the samples of soil, milk, and
       other items from Beaver Valley and somehow produced hundreds of
       erroneous readings, and all of them too high.  This, however,
       was synonymous with the conclusion that N.U.S. was incompetent.
          There was only one way this question could be settled in a
       conclusive manner.  Some of the radioactivity in the samples
       that N.U.S. scientists had collected in 1970 and 1971 was long
       lasting.  If N.U.S. could turn up some of the original samples
       that had shown the high levels, they could be reanalyzed to see
       if the radioactivity had really been there.
          According to the records, N.U.S. conducted a search in
       February 1973 at its Rockville headquarters to see if any of the
       original high samples were still around.  Unfortunately, it was
       the company's stated policy not to retain samples for more than
       a year after analysis, and none could be located.

       Griffiths went on to relate an interesting development:

          By this time, a sharp divergence of opinion had grown between
       N.U.S. on the one hand and the AEC and health agencies on the
       other.  Faced with a choice between attributing the
       radioactivity to Shippingport or to N.U.S.'s incompetence, the
       AEC and others picked incompetence and began leveling various
       technical charges against the N.U.S. reports.  This placed
       N.U.S. in a delicate position.  If their reputation was to be
       salvaged without crucifying their employer, the Duquesne Light
       Company and the AEC, N.U.S. had somehow to prove that the
       radioactivity had been there but had not come from Shippingport.
       So despite all the evidence, N.U.S. picked fallout.
          In March, 1973, N.U.S. completed a draft report on the
       Shippingport situation, defending the accuracy of its original
       high readings but attempting to prove that they were not
       particularly unusual and were probably due largely to Chinese
       bomb tests.
          This draft report was sent to Dr. John Harley, director of
       the AEC's Health and Safety Laboratory.  Dr. Harley had been
       playing a leading role in the AEC's investigation of the
       Shippingport affair, and he was well aware that the high
       radiation levels could not be explained by fallout.

       In fact, I knew that he had worked in this field for years and had
    previously been involved with minimizing the health impact of the
    fallout from the "Simon" test that had rained over Albany and Troy
    back in 1953.  He had also played a major role in trying to discredit
    the findings I had made that showed a connection between the upward
    changes in infant mortality from the atmospheric tests in the Pacific
    and Nevada and the levels of fallout in the milk and diet through the
    use of the misleading "gummed film" data, which falsely showed high
    strontium 90 levels in the dusty, dry areas where the milk levels were
    actually quite low.
       As Griffiths's story indicated:

          The memoranda in the AEC files showed very clearly that Dr.
       Harley was not happy with N.U.S.'s draft report.
          In comments for the AEC's files, dated March 8, 1973, Harley
       fumed:  "This draft proves to my satisfaction that the work of
       this organization is incompetent. . . .  It is obvious that
       their staff is not familiar with the field and is not competent
       to evaluate their data or those of others."
          Harley went on to list several examples of N.U.S.'s
       incompetence in their attempt to prove the fallout theory and in
       other aspects of their report, remarking that "Investigation
       would certainly turn up gross calculation errors or even that
       some doctoring of the numbers had occurred."
          He signed off:  "I believe the situation is very serious."
          Serious indeed.  Could Dr. Harley have been referring to that
       team of "outstanding scientists" who, according to Duquesne's
       ads, were engaged in the vital work of making people aware that
       their large nuclear plant was to be "absolutely safe to the
       public health"?
          Yes, he was.
          More serious was that N.U.S. had already performed extensive
       safety studies for some thirty-four other nuclear power plants,
       many of which had already started operating.
          If they were bunglers . . . .
          Dr. Harley's accusations of incompetence were more
       incongruous in view of the apparent excellent credentials of the
       N.U.S. staff, including the two members who prepared the draft
       report.
          One, the vice-president in charge of all N.U.S. nuclear
       safety work, Dr. Morton Goldman, had spent ten years as a
       nuclear safety expert with the U.S. Public Health Service (now
       the Environmental Protection Agency) and was a consultant to
       state and federal health agencies.
          The other, Joseph DiNunno, the scientist directly responsible
       for the Beaver Valley survey, had received all his training and
       experience in the AEC's own reactor safety branch.
          Why, N.U.S. almost was the AEC and EPA.  Incompetence?
       Doctoring of figures?
          Nevertheless, a couple of months after Dr. Harley's outburst,
       the AEC issued a definitive report stating that the high
       radiation levels had been due to N.U.S. bungling.  The report
       was hand carried to the Pittsburgh newspapers before N.U.S. even
       got a chance to look at it.
          Shortly thereafter, on June 7, 1973, according to AEC
       documents, the president of N.U.S., Charles Jones, called the
       AEC.  Jones maintained stoutly that the radioactivity really had
       been there and that there was nothing wrong with N.U.S.'s
       methodology.
          The AEC representative to whom he spoke, Dr. Martin B. Biles,
       director of the Division of Operational Safety, disagreed.
       Jones then complained that the unfavorable publicity was
       damaging his company and something must be done.  Dr. Biles
       suggested a meeting.
          On June 20, 1973, a meeting was held between Dr. Goldman and
       DiNunno of N.U.S., Dr. Harley and Dr. Phil Krey of the AEC, and
       a Duquesne Light Co. attorney.
          According to Dr. Harley's subsequent memo to the AEC's files
       [dated June 22] it was a fruitful meeting.



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