From: dave@ratmandu.esd.sgi.com (dave "who can do? ratmandu!" ratcliffe)
Newsgroups: talk.environment
Subject: Bk Intro: "Secret Fallout, Low-Level Rad. from Hiroshima to TMI" [1/2]
Summary: part 1 of two parts excerpting segments of Dr. Sternglass's 1982 book
Keywords: human exposure to low-level radiation danger greatly underestimated
Date: 30 Dec 92 15:14:16 GMT
Organization: Silicon Graphics, Inc.


        It was not our physics and technology that had been inadequate, but
     our knowledge of biological systems and their enormous ability to
     concentrate toxic agents.  Just as in the case of DDT, it was not the
     amount distributed throughout the environment that was so serious.  It
     was the selective concentration in the food chain and then in the
     newly forming organs of the rapidly developing young embryo.  Since
     all higher animals, including man, must pass through this critically
     sensitive phase, it was clear that, unless the problem was widely
     recognized and acted upon, man could extinguish himself and all other
     animals, not through the effect of radiation on the adult, but through
     the effect on the weakest link in the chain of life--the unborn and
     the very young.


     [In Harrisburg, the day after the Three Mile Island accident began:]
        When someone asked Dr. [George] Wald [Nobel Laureate in Physiology 
     and Medicine] whether the public should believe me or the spokesmen 
     for the utility who had just reassured them that there was no danger, 
     he answered that under such circumstances, one should always ask 
     oneself who has the greater financial interest, the industry or the 
     concerned scientist trying to warn the public.  Under the present 
     circumstances, he personally would tend not to accept the reassurances
     of the industry spokesmen and would tend to believe that there was 
     indeed reason for deep concern, as I had indicated.  There was no safe 
     level of radiation, and the unborn and the young are clearly more 
     vulnerable than adults. 


                                 SECRET FALLOUT
                                  ____________

                              LOW-LEVEL RADIATION
                               FROM HIROSHIMA TO
                               THREE MILE ISLAND
                Copyright (c) 1972, 1981 by Ernest J. Sternglass

                           McGraw-Hill Book Company


                     *    *    *    *    *    *    *    *


  This is the first of a two-part introduction to the complete text of the 
  1982 book by Dr. Ernest Sternglass, "Secret Fallout, Low-Level Radiation 
  from Hiroshima to Three Mile Island" that will follow in 15 parts.  There
  is a great deal discussed and examined in this book to substantiate the 
  conclusion reached by Dr. Sternglass that low-level ionizing radiation
  created by the fallout from nuclear bomb testing and from nuclear power 
  plants--both publicly acknowledged accidents like Three Mile Island as well 
  as the routine, legal radioactive emissions in liquid and gaseous form--has 
  exacted a very high toll on the quality of public health in the United 
  States and around the world.  With a great deal of supporting evidence and 
  numerous examples, Sternglass presents the case that toxicity of low-level 
  radioactive fallout is responsible for distinct and consistent increases in 
  mortality rates as well as in cancers, leukemia, birth defects, rises in 
  chronic diseases.
  
  I have elected to included selected excerpts from the text for the remainder
  of this "introduction" so those people who may not be inclined to read the 
  complete book, can nevertheless gain a better understanding of the 
  information the author presents.  For those unable to read the whole of this
  "introduction," I have further excerpted sections from the portions of 
  chapters included here at the beginning of each portion.  Skimming only 
  these summaries will only take a short amount of time and I urge all to at
  least try to do this.  Dr. Sternglass agreed with my request to 
  include his address and phone number for anyone who is interested in asking 
  further questions about the serious nature of the subject matter he has 
  spent the last three decades studying and trying to educate the public 
  about.
               Dr. Ernest Sternglass
               170 West End Avenue
               Apartment # 27-H
               New York City, NY  10023
               212/362-1334
 
  (A note about italics text:  text bracketed in braces, "{ ... }" denotes 
   publications italics, text inside asterisks "*...*" denotes emphasis 
   italics.)
                                                           -- ratitor


from the back jacket of the book:

     Politics/Health

     SECRET FALLOUT
     LOW-LEVEL RADIATION FROM HIROSHIMA TO THREE-MILE ISLAND

     ERNEST STERNGLASS
     Introduction by George Wald

        In "Secret Fallout" Dr. Ernest Sternglass, Professor of Radiation
     Physics at the University of Pittsburgh, presents the evidence he has
     for twenty years [since the early 1960s] battled to bring before the 
     public--the cumulative, devastating effects of low-level radiation on 
     our health.
        In the early 1960s, when nuclear testing filled the rains with
     radioactivity, Dr. Sternglass discovered a related increase in fetal
     deaths, infant mortality, and certain kinds of cancer.  His studies
     were disregarded, discredited, or suppressed--even though documents
     available under the Freedom of Information Act make clear that top-
     level government officials were aware of the accuracy of his findings.
        Nuclear power plants became the topic of his studies in 1970, and
     he gathered data showing that nuclear emissions have resulted in
     increased genetic defects, mental retardation, and death among
     newborns, as well as death due to lung disease in all age groups.
     Nuclear power plants have nonetheless proliferated.
        Dr. Sternglass made headlines in 1979 by a study linking the
     decline in Scholastic Aptitude Test scores that has puzzled educators
     to past atomic testing.  Most recently, he has looked at the evidence
     of the aftereffects of the Three-Mile Island incident and found that,
     contrary to popular opinion, tragedy was not averted:  Infant and
     fetal deaths rose dramatically in the months following the accident.

        "Secret Fallout" is the story of a courageous scientist struggling
     to uncover the dangers of nuclear power;  it is a shocking expose of
     the indifference and neglect of officials of the government and
     apologists for the nuclear industry.  But most of all it is a stern
     warning that unless we face up to the damage we have already done we
     cannot prevent our future destruction.




     {Dr. Ernest Sternglass} is Professor of Radiology, specializing in
     radiological physics, at the University of Pittsburgh Medical School,
     as well as Adjunct Professor in the Department of History and
     Philosophy of Science at Indiana University, Bloomington.  He is past
     president of the Pittsburgh Chapter of the Federation of American
     Scientists, a Fellow of the American Physical Society, a member of the
     Radiological Society of North America and the American Association of
     Physicists in Medicine.  He has testified on low-level radiation
     before the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy and many other groups both
     here and abroad.
                                   {Dr. George Wald}, Nobel Laureate in
                                   Physiology and Medicine, is Professor of
                                   Biology at Harvard.




          ___________________________________________________________

from the Preface:



     WHEN I UNDERTOOK to write the first edition of this book, originally
     published in 1972 under the title {Low-Level Radiation}, my primary
     concern was with the health effects of worldwide fallout from nuclear
     weapons, particularly on the developing infant in the mother's womb.
        At that time I also discussed the first evidence for possible
     health effects of routine releases of radioactivity from nuclear
     reactors in their ordinary day-to-day operation.
        In the ten years that have intervened since then, my concerns about
     the safety of nuclear plants have unfortunately been reinforced far
     more than I could have anticipated.  Not only in the accident at Three
     Mile Island, whose likely effects on human health are discussed in the
     present book, but also in the normal operations of many other nuclear
     plants, there is now growing evidence for rising infant mortality and
     damage to the newborn.  In the decade that has passed, cancer rates
     increased most sharply in areas closest to the nuclear reactors whose
     radioactive gas releases were found to rise most strongly, following
     the earlier pattern of death rates among the newborn described in the
     original book. . . .
        What emerges is that in order for major governments to be able to
     continue threatening the use of their ever-growing stockpiles of
     weapons to fight and win nuclear wars rather than merely to deter
     them, they must keep from their own people the severity of the
     biological damage already done to their children by past nuclear
     testing and the releases from nuclear reactors near their homes.
        It is to focus attention on the need to end this hidden threat to
     the future of human life on this globe that this new edition has been
     prepared.
                                                       Ernest J. Sternglass
                                                                 Pittsburgh
                                                                  July 1980



          ___________________________________________________________


                                   Glossary


     ALPHA RAYS:  Comparatively large, slow particles emitted from the
        nucleus of an atom.  They are easily stopped but can cause great
        damage if the chemicals emitting them are inhaled or ingested.
     BACKGROUND RADIATION:  Radiation (at a typical rate of 60-100 mrem per
        year) coming from space or from the earth.  It can be both natural
        and man-made.
     BETA RAYS:  Charged particles (electrons) emitted from the nucleus of
        an atom that are smaller and faster than alpha rays and can
        penetrate several layers of tissue up to a few millimeters, or a
        few meters of air.
     CURIE:  A measure of the amount of radiation emitted per second by
        radioactive chemicals, named after Marie Curie, the discoverer of
        radium.  It is the number of disintegrations taking place each
        second in 1 gram of radium, leading to the emission of some 37
        billion gamma rays or other particles every second.
        millicurie--one one-thousandth of a curie.
        microcurie--one millionth of a curie.
        picocurie--one trillionth of a curie or one micro-microcurie.
     FUEL CYCLE:  The sequence of steps needed for the production and
        combustion of fuel to produce nuclear energy including mining,
        milling, conversion, enrichment, transportation, and waste storage.
     GAMMA RAYS:  A very high energy form of radiation similar to X-rays
        emitted from the nucleus of an atom that can penetrate steel and
        concrete.
     KILOTON:  A measure of the power of an atomic bomb, equal to the
        detonation of 1000 tons of TNT. The first A-bombs had a size of
        10-20 kilotons, now regarded as small, tactical weapons.
     MEGATON:  A million tons of TNT in explosive force, or the energy of
        1000 kilotons, some 100 times that released by the first atomic
        bombs.
     RAD and MILLIRAD:  A radiation measure that refers to the energy
        absorbed per gram of tissue which is equal to about 83% of the
        Roentgen value.  A millirad or mrad is a thousandth of a rad.
     REM and MILLIREM:  A radiation measure that reflects the difference in
        biological damage of the radiation dose produced by different
        particles.  The relation between rad and rem depends on the kind of
        particle emitting the radiation:  for gamma rays, 1 rad = 1 rem;
        for beta, 1 rad = 10 rem;  for alpha, 1 rad = 30 rem.
     ROENTGEN:  The original term used for measuring the amount of ionizing
        radiation incident on the body.  It is equal to the quantity of
        radiation that will produce one electrostatic unit of electricity
        in one cubic centimeter of dry air at 0 degrees C.




          ___________________________________________________________


  A description of the symposium in 1969 dedicated to the biological effects 
  of exposure to radiation and a description of Sternglass's learning that 
  the most vulnerable human being is the developing embryo and fetus which 
  can concentrate a tiny amount of a radioactive isotope tens of thousands 
  of times more than a full-grown adult person.
                                         Instead of the relatively minor
     radiation dose produced by this original amount distributed in the
     70,000 grams of body weight typical of the adult, there would be a
     concentration 70,000 times greater in the early embryo.  And added to
     this was the fact that the embryo was already hundreds of times more
     likely to develop cancer or other forms of biochemical damage than the
     much more resistant, fully mature adult, as paper after paper
     presented at the conference showed.  Thus, the low external doses
     given by fallout to the body of an adult, doses on which the world's
     radiation protection agencies had based their assumption that fallout
     was harmless, were actually highly lethal doses for the early embryo.

from Chapter 12, "Counterattack at Hanford":



     IN MAY 1969, for the first time in over fifteen years, as a result of
     growing concern among radiobiologists, there was to be a symposium
     dedicated to the effects of radiation on the developing mammal,
     including the human infant, both prior to and immediately after birth. 
     . . . . 
        The evidence supporting unexpectedly severe effects on the early
     embryo and fetus from internal radiation sources continued to
     accumulate until the close of the conference.  And afterward, when I
     was able to examine the original manuscript submitted by Dr. Moskalev,
     I found that his studies did in fact confirm the most crucial points
     at issue in the whole fallout controversy.  His group had found that
     when various of the isotopes contained in fallout were fed to female
     animals during pregnancy, large fractions were transferred through the
     placenta to the developing fetus.  For example, up to 38 percent was
     transferred in the case of strontium given to rats and up to 66
     percent in the case of cesium given to a litter of dogs.  Furthermore,
     the amounts reaching the developing fetus were many times greater for
     continuous, slow intake (such as occurs with fallout in food) than for
     a large single dose.
        More significant, Moskalev had found a direct relationship between
     the size of the doses of isotopes given just before pregnancy and the
     percent of the offspring that died--even for doses as small as 4-
     billionths of a curie per gram of body weight.  This dose was well
     within the range of doses from fallout delivered to the early human
     fetus by the accumulated strontium in the mothers' bones.  Thus, the
     argument that there might not be any effects at all from long-term,
     low-level radiation as opposed to doses given all at once, like
     diagnostic X-rays, had now been disproven by direct experiments.
        Moskalev's results also showed that, regardless of whether a given
     amount of isotopes was fed to a mouse weighing 20 grams or to a dog
     weighing many thousands of grams, approximately the same fraction of
     the total amount would always concentrate in the rapidly growing
     embryo.  This was one reason why, in all species, the fetus was so
     much more sensitive to fallout radiation than the adult.  A given tiny
     amount of an isotope in the body of an adult might be quite tolerable
     if it was evenly distributed throughout the 70,000 grams of an average
     woman's body weight.  But if even only one one-hundredth of this
     amount in the mother's body goes to the embryo during the first two to
     four weeks of development, when the embryo weighs less than a
     hundredth of a gram, then the concentration of radioactivity in the
     embryonic tissue would be the same as if the entire original amount
     had been given to a 1-gram embryo.  Instead of the relatively minor
     radiation dose produced by this original amount distributed in the
     70,000 grams of body weight typical of the adult, there would be a
     concentration 70,000 times greater in the early embryo.  And added to
     this was the fact that the embryo was already hundreds of times more
     likely to develop cancer or other forms of biochemical damage than the
     much more resistant, fully mature adult, as paper after paper
     presented at the conference showed.  Thus, the low external doses
     given by fallout to the body of an adult, doses on which the world's
     radiation protection agencies had based their assumption that fallout
     was harmless, were actually highly lethal doses for the early embryo.
        It was not our physics and technology that had been inadequate, but
     our knowledge of biological systems and their enormous ability to
     concentrate toxic agents.  Just as in the case of DDT, it was not the
     amount distributed throughout the environment that was so serious.  It
     was the selective concentration in the food chain and then in the
     newly forming organs of the rapidly developing young embryo.  Since
     all higher animals, including man, must pass through this critically
     sensitive phase, it was clear that, unless the problem was widely
     recognized and acted upon, man could extinguish himself and all other
     animals, not through the effect of radiation on the adult, but through
     the effect on the weakest link in the chain of life--the unborn and
     the very young.






          ___________________________________________________________


  The Atomic Energy Commission's own claims that experiments on animals given
  strontium 90 in low doses caused no ill effects in their offspring was
  completely contradicted by one of the AEC's own chief medical scientists.
                                . . .  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.

from chapter 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.
                                              . . .  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.






          ___________________________________________________________


  Dr. Sternglass recounts how he came to understand the routine releases from 
  nuclear power plants were themselves causing grave increases in measurable 
  declines in public health--especially infant mortality.  In 1964/65, "For 
  the first time in the history of radiation standards the permissible doses 
  to the public were raised rather than lowered . . . And this was done 
  quietly by presidential executive order, for which no public hearing is 
  required--despite the mounting evidence that there was no safe threshold 
  dose of radiation as presented in August 1963 before the Joint Committee."  
  An listing of instances of government suppression of information regarding 
  various commerical power plant releases and their effects on human adult 
  and infant mortality rates increasing and decreasing with the rise and fall 
  of radiation levels from reactor releases culminating with the conclusion:
        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.

from chapter 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. . . .

        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. . . .
        There was thus little doubt that detectable health effects should
     have occurred in the areas surrounding the Dresden plant and other
     reactors. . . . 
        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. . . .
        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.
                                       . . .  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. . . .

        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.






          ___________________________________________________________


  Dr. Sternglass recounts how he came to learn that the official claim that the
  first commercial nuclear electric power plant, located at Shippingport, 
  Pennsylvania had the lowest gaseous emissions of any reactor in the country,
  was false and that in fact there were clearly detectable increases not only
  in infant mortality but mortality at all ages in relation to the high 
  readings of radioactivity both on the land and in the Ohio River.  Sternglass
  describes learning about the studies of Dr. Abram Petkau who was "examining 
  the basic processes whereby chemicals diffuse through cell membranes" and how
  Petkau's findings seemed to indicate that
     the more protracted the radiation exposure was, the less total dose it
     took to break the membranes, completely contrary to the usual case of 
     genetic damage, where it made no difference whether the radiation was 
     given in one second, one day, one month, or one year. . . .
        Thus, almost overnight, the entire foundation of all existing
     assumptions as to the likely action of very low, protracted exposures
     as compared to short exposures at Hiroshima or even from brief, low-
     level medical X-rays had been shaken.  Instead of a protracted or more
     gentle exposure being less harmful than a short flash, it turned out
     that there were some conditions under which it could be the other way
     around:  The low-level, low-rate exposure was more harmful to
     biological cells containing oxygen than the same exposure given at a
     high rate or in a very brief moment.
  Unfortunately even with the grand jury appointed to investigate the situation
  at Shippingport, in the end the same outcome occurred as has happened time 
  and time again throughout the United States: 
        Once again, the industry had managed to win the battle in the
     special courts set up by the AEC, which controlled the judges, the
     staff, and the rules of procedure for the benefit of the industry it
     was designed to promote and protect.
        It was only the people that were the losers. . . 

from chapter 15, "Fallout at Shippingport":



     [ . . . ]
        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. . . .
        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. . . .

        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. . . .

        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. . . .
        None of this, of course, was known either to me or the members of
     the fact-finding commission when the hearings began on July 31, 1973
     in the town of Aliquippa.  The panel appointed by Governor Milton J.
     Shapp and chaired by Dr. Leonard Bachman, the Governor's Health
     Services Director, consisted of seven members in addition to the
     chairman, representing a broad range of disciplines and wide
     experience in matters related to public health.  Only five of the
     panel members, however, were independent university-based scientists
     outside the state government, and only three of these had personal
     experience with studies of radiation effects in man. . . .

        In the course of the questioning period that followed my
     presentation, I was asked how it was possible that such relatively
     small doses comparable to normal background levels could lead to such
     large changes in mortality rates, when it apparently took ten to a
     hundred times these levels to double the risk for the survivors of
     Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  In response I cited the startling results of
     a recent study published in the journal {Health Physics} in March of
     1972 by a scientist working for the Canadian Atomic Energy
     Laboratories in Pinawa, Manitoba, Dr. Abram Petkau.  Dr. Petkau had
     been examining the basic processes whereby chemicals diffuse through
     cell membranes.  In the course of these studies, he had occasion to
     expose the membranes surrounded by water to a powerful X-ray machine,
     and observed that they would usually break after absorbing the
     relatively large dose of 3500 rads, the equivalent of some 35,000
     years of normal background radiation.
        This certainly seemed to be very reassuring with regard to any
     possible danger to vital portions of cells as a result of the much
     smaller doses in the environment from either natural or man-made
     sources.  But then Dr. Petkau did something that no one else had tried
     before.  He added a small amount of radioactive sodium salt to the
     water, such as occurs from fallout or reactor releases to a river, and
     measured the total absorbed dose before the membrane broke due to the
     low-level protracted radiation.
        To his amazement, he found that instead of requiring a dose of 3500
     rads, the membrane ruptured at an absorbed dose of three-quarters of
     one rad, or at a dose some 5000 times less than one rad, much less
     than was necessary to break it in a short, high-intensity burst of
     radiation such as had occurred at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
        Dr. Petkau repeated this experiment many times in order to be
     certain of this disturbing finding, and each time the result confirmed
     the initial discovery:  the more protracted the radiation exposure
     was, the less total dose it took to break the membranes, completely
     contrary to the usual case of genetic damage, where it made no
     difference whether the radiation was given in one second, one day, one
     month, or one year.
        By a further series of experiments, he finally began to understand
     what was taking place.  Apparently a biological mechanism was involved
     in the case of membrane damage that was completely different from the
     usual direct hit of a particle on the DNA molecules in the center of
     the cell.  It turned out that instead, a highly toxic, unstable form
     of ordinary oxygen normally found in cell fluids was created by the
     irradiation process, and that this so-called "free radical" was
     attracted to the cell membrane, where it initiated a chain reaction
     that gradually oxidized and thus weakened the molecules composing the
     membrane.  And the lower the number of such "free radicals" present in
     the cell fluid at any given moment, the more efficient was the whole
     destructive process.
        Thus, almost overnight, the entire foundation of all existing
     assumptions as to the likely action of very low, protracted exposures
     as compared to short exposures at Hiroshima or even from brief, low-
     level medical X-rays had been shaken.  Instead of a protracted or more
     gentle exposure being less harmful than a short flash, it turned out
     that there were some conditions under which it could be the other way
     around:  The low-level, low-rate exposure was more harmful to
     biological cells containing oxygen than the same exposure given at a
     high rate or in a very brief moment.
        No longer was it the case that one could confidently calculate what
     would happen at very low, protracted environmental exposures from
     studies on cells or animals carried out at high doses given in a
     relatively short time.  It was clear that the direct, linear relation
     between radiation dose and effect was no longer the most conservative
     assumption, for it was based on the implicit assumption that a given
     dose would always result in a given increase in risk, no matter
     whether the radiation was absorbed in one second or one year.
     Clearly, if Dr. Petkau's findings were to be confirmed by other
     experiments in the future, our whole present understanding of low-dose
     radiation effects would have to be revised, since small exposures
     might turn out to be far more harmful to living cells than we had ever
     realized.
        Thus, I pleaded we should not reject evidence for much higher than
     expected infant and cancer mortality rates merely because that
     evidence did not seem to agree with our previous estimates based on
     high-level, high-rate exposures at Hiroshima and in various studies.
     I now believed that we had to be prepared to revise drastically our
     expectations as to what apparently innocuous low-level, chronic
     radiation exposures to critical cells and organs from environmental
     sources might do.
        My own testimony was followed by that of Dr. Irving Bross, a well-
     known biostatistician from the Roswell Park Memorial Cancer Institute
     in Buffalo, New York, who had himself been studying the effect of
     low-level radiation on childhood leukemia for many years.  In
     summarizing his findings Dr. Bross stated that there exists a wide
     range of individuals with very different degrees of sensitivity to
     radiation, depending upon their age and their past medical history.
        This fact alone would invalidate any estimate of the likely effect
     of small radiation exposures to a large human population, since these
     had been based on the average adult, obtained at high doses, and on
     the assumption of a linear relationship between dose and effect.  For
     a non-homogeneous group, the more resistant individuals such as
     healthy young adults would not show any significant effects, while
     either the very young or the very old and those with immune
     deficiencies, allergies, and other special conditions might show an
     unexpectedly large effect.  As Bross had put it in a letter to {The
     New York Times} published just a few weeks before he testified:  "It
     follows that procedures for calculating `safe levels' based on
     `average exposures' of `average individuals' are not going to protect
     the children or adults who need the protection most." . . .

        As Anna Mayo, who covered the proceedings for {The Village Voice},
     put it in an article published a few months later, "it was all
     redolent of--you guessed it--Watergate.  In the audience,
     environmentalists gnashed their teeth, wishing that the Shippingport
     horrors could have been exposed on national television.  If Duquesne
     Light would cover up, would not Con Ed, LILCO, or Commonwealth Edison
     do the same if Indian Point, Shoreham, or Dresden were at stake?"
        Indeed a great deal was at stake:  In 1973 some thirty-eight new
     nuclear reactors were in the process of being ordered, the largest
     number ever in one year, each representing a potential business of
     about a billion dollars.  And it was the stated aim of the Nixon
     administration and the nuclear industry to see a thousand of these
     reactors operating near the cities of our nation by the end of the
     century.  It would indeed be difficult for any human beings not to
     have minimized the danger when a thousand billion dollars were at
     stake. . . .

        Once again, the industry had managed to win the battle in the
     special courts set up by the AEC, which controlled the judges, the
     staff, and the rules of procedure for the benefit of the industry it
     was designed to promote and protect.
        It was only the people that were the losers.  Two years after the
     licenses were granted and five years after the high radiation levels
     had been measured by the N.U.S. Corporation, with the same time delay
     as in Hiroshima, the cancer rates in Beaver County and Pittsburgh
     climbed to a second peak.  They rose a full 23 percent in Beaver
     County and an unprecedented 9 percent in Pittsburgh in the course of
     only three years:  The rise to an all-time high of 304.8 per 100,000
     population took place after a generation of costly efforts to reduce
     the ordinary pollution from fossil fuels in the air and chemicals in
     the water.
        But the heaviest price of all was to be paid by the men who worked
     at Shippingport, as I was to learn at another kind of hearing at
     Aliquippa seven years later.
        When preparing testimony for a hearing before a workmen's
     compensation referee in behalf of the family of a man who had died of
     bone-marrow-type leukemia while working at the Beaver Valley nuclear
     plant next to the old Shippingport reactor, I was shown the death
     certificates of twenty-one other operating engineers who had died
     between 1970 and 1979.  All of them had been working with pumps and
     other heavy equipment to clean up the radioactive spills and move the
     radioactive wastes on the site.  Out of these twenty-two men, ten had
     died of cancer, more than twice the number normally expected.
        Even more significantly, four of these ten were of the bone-
     marrow-related type, namely multiple myeloma and myelogenous leukemia,
     known to be most readily induced by radiation, when less than one in
     twenty cancers of this type would have been expected.
        The men who worked at Shippingport were only too well acquainted
     with these facts.  There was a common saying among them:  high pay and
     early death.
        Yet there was also a sign of hope for the future.  After
     Shippingport was shut down by an explosion of hydrogen gas in its
     electrical generator early in 1974, infant mortality in the town of
     Aliquippa declined to an all-time low of only 11.3 deaths per thousand
     babies born in 1976.
        If the public could only learn these facts as the nation entered
     the third century of its revolution against the arbitrary authority of
     another distant government careless of the inalienable human rights to
     life and liberty, even the tragic tide of rising cancer and damage to
     the unborn could eventually be reversed.






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