From: dave@ratmandu.esd.sgi.com (dave "who can do? ratmandu!" ratcliffe)
Subject: Dr. Rosalie Bertell:  16 Million Radiation Deaths and Counting (1989)
Followup-To: sci.med.physics
Summary: in the long-term, we are killing ourselves as a species
Originator: daemon@pencil.cs.missouri.edu
Keywords: species addiction/denial/death, radiation, cellular/cytogenetic damage
Organization: Silicon Graphics, Inc.
Date: Wed, 18 Nov 1992 17:59:43 GMT


  The following excerpts are from a talk (full text begins 212 lines below) 
  given in L.A. in 1989 by Dr. Rosalie Bertell, President of the International 
  Institute of Concern for Public Health based in Toronto, Canada.  Using a
  slide show format to present the information, Dr. Bertell describes some of 
  the history and medical consequences of the new "fire" (nuclear energy) we 
  as a species have begun to play with since the 1940s.  Although we cannot 
  "see" the slides, the information presented is rich in detail and insight 
  about this unique crisis confronting us and our planet.  This issue of 
  radiative pollution--from nuclear testing fallout, from the routine 
  emmissions of nuclear (commercial or military) reactors, from the billions 
  of tons of uranium tailings left exposed at sites around the globe, from the
  massive amounts of low level and high level radioactive waste generated 
  every year for decades from hundreds of commerical, military and research 
  reactors around the globe--far from being the "passe" story the industry's 
  PR hacks and media assets constantly present it as, is the number-one 
  problem our children, grandchildren, great- grandchildren, great-great-
  grandchildren, ad infinitum, will have to deal with for at least the next 
  240,000 years.  The damage to the integrity of the gene pool--the children
  --is still being assessed as well as increased.  And all this has happened 
  in less than the past fifty years.  The challenge is paramount.  Denial 
  promises extinction of all our relations.
                                                                -- ratitor


        The solid waste that's left in the [nuclear power] plant, that 
     they don't just release, they put into trenches and bury them.  This 
     is a waste dump on the Columbia River.  They just bury it in the 
     trenches, there is no containment whatsoever.  Next.
        This was part of the Manhattan Project and I don't know if you can
     read the sign but it says "Don't Go Beyond Here Without A
     Respirator."  Now that chain fence is certainly a great protection.
     This is Canonsburg, Pennsylvania where they processed the ore from 
     Zaire--which used to be called the Belgian Congo--this was for the 
     Manhattan Project.  They also used Canadian ore.  And they processed 
     it here and they built a big lagoon for the waste, and it would never
     grow anything.  It was just a barren piece of land.  And you'll never
     guess what they decided to use it for since it didn't grow *anything*
     --even weeds.  They used it as the baseball diamond for the kids.
        When they passed the superfund legislation, this was number one on
     the list of places to be cleaned up on the superfund.  So they moved
     the baseball diamond away and they put up this chain-link fence, and
     they put up a big sign "Don't Go Beyond Here Without A Respirator,"
     and then decided they'd start cleaning up.  I understand it's a
     partial cleanup.
        When I was on the committee for the Environmental Protection
     Agency they had identified seventy-four *thousand* toxic waste dumps
     in the United States.  They had rated thirty-two *thousand* as severe
     health hazards, and this was number one on the list.  Next.
        Some of the waste makes its way into barrels and the barrels have
     an expected lifetime of thirty-five years.  Most of them leak before
     that.  The stuff they put inside--these radioactive materials--many
     of them have half lives of hundreds of thousands of years. . . .
        . . . the military began--even before Micronesia was given to the 
     United States as a Trust Territory--a *year* before that--they were 
     testing bombs.  And what happened from the people's point of view 
     were these artificial sunrises.  Next.
        Then in the rain that followed the radioactive fallout came down.
     On March 1st, 1954 they set off the first fifteen megaton bomb and
     the fallout came down on the Rongelap people who were about 150 miles
     away.  Next.
        This is a Rongelap child and that is a severe burn on the head
     where the fallout landed.  These are beta burns.  The people had
     suffered a *very* high dose of radiation and were *very* sick.  They
     were not evacuated for seventy-two hours although the military ships
     had been warned and moved out of the area.  They didn't warn the
     people. . . .
        These effects of radiation were *very well known* in 1945.  It was
     not obscure research but it was a Nobel prize that showed the genetic
     effects of radiation.  The Nobel prize was given in 1943.  So this
     was not obscure.
        The implications of it, though, I think have not yet been
     comprehended because what we're doing here is two things at the same
     time.  We're damaging the life-support system--the air, the water,
     the food, the land--and at the same time, we're damaging the gene
     pool or the children.  So we're producing people physically less able
     to cope, and we're giving them more to cope with.  And that's a death
     process.  And that's what I'm trying to talk about.  That in the
     *long-term*, we are killing ourselves as a species.  Next.
        The damage is invisible, and it's not immediate.  It's mostly cell
     damage and the insidious part of it is, it's the cells that are
     *slightly* damaged and left alive that will give us the most trouble.
     Because *they* show up as a deformed baby because the ovum or the
     sperm was deformed.  Or if it's a cell in the lungs, or in some other 
     part of the body, if it's left *alive* and damaged, it can produce a 
     cancer.  Cancer is not produced by *dead* cells.  So at high doses you 
     do a lot of tissue damage and you kill cells which don't cause as 
     much cancer as you do at low doses where you leave the cell alive, 
     you damage it, and it reproduces itself abnormally. . . .
        Much of what I've been showing is documentation of a very
     extraordinary societal addiction.  It's an addiction which is self-
     destructive, it's *wildly* excessive and it's eating up the 
     resources, both the brain drain and the money drain, and it's also 
     created a situation where the *victims* are afraid to confront the 
     people that are carrying out this addiction.  And we all seem to be 
     caught in it.  We're caught in it in one way or another either as 
     passive cooperators or as addicted.  But we're working together to 
     produce a society of death instead of a society of life and we don't 
     *have* to do that, we can change. . . .
        This is a graph that was prepared by the unions because when they
     got a military contract they knew that the numbers of jobs went down.
     It was not a help and what they discovered, or the way they went at
     it was to say If you had a billion dollars, how many jobs could you
     create?  And they found that in the military you could only create
     70,000 while in mass-transit the same billion dollars would have
     brought 90,000, in construction you could have had 105,000 jobs,
     daycare 120,000, medical care 140,000, education 180,000.
        The question is *not* Do you want jobs? but What kind of jobs do 
     you want?  You get the *least* number of jobs for your money in the
     military and you get the *least* payback into society because *none* 
     of the things are usable--I hope.  So there's little or no return 
     unless you want to *further* starve the developing world by trying to 
     sell your weapons to them.  But *certainly* they're not a market for 
     the nuclear. . . .
        Q:  This one says, The government says that we need to have
     nuclear power or else the U.S. will be at a loss for energy because
     of our massive consumption of power.  What feasible replacement could
     be used instead?
        RB:  I would sure love to know how much power the military is
     using.  I'd like *all* of it.  *All* of it, including the *massive*
     amounts of fuel used for these planes.  I remember when we had the 
     campaign against the B-1 bomber:  finding out that *one* B-1 bomber 
     used in *one* year as much fuel as would be comparable to running the
     mass transit systems in the ten largest cities in the United States.  
     There's something wrong with our energy system when it's not the 
     *people* who are using the energy.  I see more energy use in *Europe*
     and they're supposed to have *lower* per capita energy than the 
     United States.
        That's my first thing--I'd get rid of that.  Then I think the
     question has to be examined, Whether or not *all* energy has to come
     from electricity?  What we've been *told* is we have to have
     electricity.  You could actually pick up *seventy percent* of your
     space and water conditioning immediately with solar.  There's no
     reason to say you have to go solar, solar electric and then space
     heating or air conditioning.  They have wonderful direct solar air
     conditioning in Australia in Darwin.  Every house has it.  So we have
     *lots* of things we can do, the problems are in our head.



                           *   *   *   *   *   *   *


               `Days Are Not Important Unless They Are Good Ones'


        In the dim night light of a hospital room, seven-year-old Jimmy was
     remembering the day on which he was told he had leukaemia.  He
     remembered his mother's tears, his father's bewildered anger, the
     alien feeling of the hospital environment.  Then his mind replayed the
     nausea and diarrhoea caused by radiation therapy and chemotherapy, his
     hair falling out and kids laughing at him, all the highs and lows over
     the last eight months' battle with a disease which was now demanding
     his total attention.  Then he knew his answer, and, mentally relieved,
     fell into a peaceful, refreshing sleep.
        Later that morning, when all the hospital ablutions were concluded,
     Jimmy's mother and father arrived with Dr K. whom Jimmy had learned to
     love and trust.  After the usual greetings and kidding around which
     had come to be a ritual, helping them all to cope with the tragic
     situation, Jimmy broke his news with unusual conviction and
     seriousness.  `I don't want to try the new medicine.  It will only
     give me more days, and I'll die anyway.  Days aren't important unless
     they're good ones.'
        The doctor quietly prepared for Jimmy to go home, counselling his
     parents on supportive medical care and assuring them he would be
     available for all possible emergencies.
        Jimmy died at home, surrounded by familiar objects, loving parents
     and a younger brother who couldn't understand what was happening.
     Jimmy died gently, utterly exhausted by having lost so much blood.
     His tissue had broken down completely, and he was bleeding from every
     body opening.  His bed looked like a battlefield.[1]
        This story about Jimmy is related to the subjects of national
     defence, economic development and energy policies.  Leukaemla is
     related to exposure to benzene[2] (a petroleum derivative), microwave
     radiation,[3] X-ray and nuclear fission products (radioactive
     chemicals emitted from nuclear-related industries).[4]  These in turn
     are part of strategies for national growth and development, as well as
     advances in the art of war.  Energy mix and a weapon strategy
     inseparably involve human consequences in terms of increased incidence
     of leukaemia, other cancers, neonatal and infant mortality, mental
     retardation, congenital malformations, genetic diseases and general
     health problems.


 [1] This is a typical leukaemia death, with tissue breakdown and massive
     internal haemorrhage.  Dr Elizabeth Kubler-Ross--well known for her
     counselling of the dying--often uses a similar story to stress the
     importance of home care for the dying.  Jimmy is a ficticious name,
     but this is the story of a real child treated at Roswell Park Memorial
     Institute in Buffalo, New York, USA.

 [2] U. Saffiotti and J. K. Wagoner (eds). "Occupational Carcinogenesis,"
     Annals of the New York Academy of Science, ANYAA9-271-1-516, New York,
     1976.
 
 [3] `Biological Effects and Measurement of Radio Frequency/Microwaves,'
     Symposium Proceedings, US Department of Health, Education and Welfare,
     HEW Publication (FDA) 77-8026, 1977.  Available from the World Health
     Organisation, United Nations.

 [4] `The Effects on Populations of Exposure to Low Levels of Ionising
     Radiation,' Report of the Committee on the Biological Effects of 
     Ionizing Radiation (BEIR), 1972.  Revised in 1979;  revised again in
     1980.  

           -- from "No Immediate Danger, Prognosis for a Radioactive Earth,"
              by Dr. Rosalie Bertell, (c) 1985, by The Book Publishing 
              Company, Summertown, Tennessee  38483.



 ______________________________________________________________________________

       16 Million Radiation Deaths and Counting--Why should we continue
    to destroy ourselves by this kind of mentality and this kind of process?


            Dr. Rosalie Bertell speaking at an event in Los Angeles
            put on by Women's Action for Nuclear Disarmament (WAND)
                      and Women's Strike for Peace (WSP)
                               March 11, 1989




        It's nice to be here.  I've been to California before and I've
     spoken to audiences here before.  I think things have changed.  I
     guess it's twenty years now since I started to look at the soft
     underbelly of the whole military complex and I started to see that
     our way of surviving--our strategy for surviving--was killing us and
     killing everybody else.  It's like a death machine.  And I do think 
     much of it has been unmasked.
        The year 1988 marked a turning point when "Time" magazine was
     willing to go out on a limb and expose the weapons labs.  Probably
     you saw that issue there where they exposed what was happening at 
     Savannah River, at Fernald, Ohio, at Rocky Flats in Denver, and up at
     the Hanford reservation.  There are many other places like that.  Not
     only these, but this has been going on now for a long time.
        So I think the motivation is what I'm concerned about tonight.
     When you think everything's alright, you think you have a lot of time
     to get it together and decide what you're going to do and plan
     strategies or even just forget about it because things are okay the
     way they are.  And the government would like us to think we've had
     peace since 1945 but that's a lie.  It's been a time of tremendous
     surrogate wars and upheavals and wars against our own people because
     that's what killing is about.
        So the topic I'd like to deal with tonight is why should we
     continue to destroy ourselves by this kind of mentality and this kind
     of process?  I'd like to unmask a little bit of it.  So maybe it we
     could have the first slide.
        This a picture of the Rio Algom uranium mine.  Uranium mining is 
     mostly done on indigenous people's land.  In the United States we do 
     it on the Navajo and Hopi land.  We tried to do it up in the Black 
     Hills in the land of the Lakota.  It's done on Ojibwa land in Canada.
     Rio Algom is up near the Serpent River reserve.  This particular 
     uranium mine is just north of Lake Huron and the Georgian Bay.  It's 
     just one of many but I thought maybe a few pictures would tell you a
     little bit about what a uranium mine is like.
        The destruction of the environment caused by a uranium mine is
     quite unique.  If you take all the rock that's mined out of the
     earth, the only part that's usable is .03 percent.  So 99.97 percent
     of it is waste.  Next.
        This is one of the plants where the ore is refined.  They mine a
     lot of hard rock, less than six percent of it is ore.  Then that ore
     is sent to a mill and less than 0.05 percent of that ore is used--
     turned into uranium.  The other elements that occur with uranium in
     nature are radium, thorium, radioactive lead, bismuth and polonium.
     So you're talking about concentrated radioactive waste left at the
     mine site.  Next.
        This is a worker from Paducah, Kentucky, from Union Carbide.  You
     wouldn't know but he was fifty-two years old when this picture was
     taken.  He gave me a list of the men hired with him and the numbers
     that died of cancer.  It was between sixty and seventy percent of the
     men hired with him.  Next.
        This is one of the uranium tailings piles.  And that large
     artificially produced mountain there on the right is all radioactive
     material.  Now when it was under the ground in rock form it really
     was not that hazardous.  It's now crushed so it's much more
     bioavailable.  It washes down in the rain, it gets into the water,
     the irrigation and the food chain.  It also releases the radioactive
     gas, radon, which can travel quite a distance from the pile.  It
     requires six feet of dirt and clay to prevent the migration of that
     radon gas out of the pile.  Most piles are not covered at all.  Next.
        This is another uranium tailing pile.  It's also mixed with
     sulfuric acid.  They use sulfuric acid to leach out the uranium.
     This is in the beautiful Canadian north.  If you look down from an
     airplane you see the ground looking like this.  This is *not* snow.
     Next.
        Now this debris, which was under the earth, is lifted out of the
     earth and it gets into the whole ecosystem.  It travels quite great
     distances because if it dumps into, say Quirk (sp?) Lake by Eliot
     (sp?) Lake, it goes right down into the Great Lakes and the whole
     water system out the St. Lawrence River into the ocean.  It gets into
     the currents, it goes up into Greenland, the North Sea, Norway.  It's
     apt to end up anywhere.  Next.
        And eventually it gets into the food supply.  Often people ask me
     where should they live and I usually say where does your food come
     from?  Next.
        We're now able to ship the food all over the world.  So Wisconsin
     cheese is eaten in Europe;  you go to Malaysia and you find
     California oranges.  Next.
        Now we've taken this uranium out of the ground because it
     fissions;  because it releases a tremendous amount of energy.  This
     happens when the uranium spontaneously gives off a neutron.  It goes
     through a moderator, usually water which just slows it down a little
     bit (that's what those lines are), and then it hits another uranium
     atom and breaks it into smaller particles.
        This *doesn't happen* in nature because the uranium is so scarce
     that there's not another uranium atom nearby when it splits.  So in
     order to get this to happen spontaneously you have to get enriched
     uranium which is concentrated uranium-235 so there's another atom
     close enough so they can get a chain-reaction going.
        Now when you split that uranium you get two chemicals lower on the
     chemical chain, or smaller, and they occur in radioactive form.
     Next.
        What has happened now between the fissioning, or the breaking of
     an atom, and between releasing of neutrons that then go into the
     other surrounding chemicals in the environment, we have created
     between 400 and 600 radioactive chemicals--the whole chemical chart,
     all of our ordinary chemicals, but in radioactive form.  And when we
     say they're radioactive, we say they're unstable.  That means in the
     nucleus of the atom there are periodic explosions that give off an
     alpha particle or a beta particle or a gamma ray.
        Gamma is like X-ray, it's energy, photon energy, wave energy.  A
     beta is an electron.  It's an electrically charged particle, 
     extremely small, that comes off at a very explosive rate.  And an 
     alpha particle is very large--it's about 700 times bigger than a beta 
     particle.  It has double electrical charge.  If you were a cell, a 
     living, small cell, it's like a cannon ball.  It does a tremendous 
     amount of damage but in a very short track because it's big.
        Now we've created these chemicals and released them into our air
     and water and food and land.  Next.
        This is a nuclear power plant, this particular one is the
     Pickering plant on Lake Ontario.  Inside of a nuclear reactor we do
     this fissioning in a controlled manner and we produce all of these
     chemicals, some of which are contained and some of which are
     released.
        When you produce these between 400 and 600 chemicals they're in
     all different physical states so some are gasses, some are liquids,
     some are solids.  The gasses produced are all released.  It's not a
     *closed* system.  So routine operation releases all of the
     radioactive gasses.  Some gasses are held back because they decay
     into a radioactive solid.  They get rid of *all* liquid waste.  It's
     dumped into the local river or lake and the only thing there's any
     *attempt* to save is the solids.  Next.
        This is a "New York Times" cover which tried to say, We can
     handle the "peaceful atom," so you stand behind a lead door and
     leaded glass and use remote control equipment.  However in the real
     world--next slide:
        people go in and have to run these things.  If you've ever had a
     chest X-ray, you know that that cloth jumpsuit doesn't stop gamma
     rays.  You could get a chest X-ray and the zipper would show, but it
     would go right through the cloth.  If you notice he also has partial
     respirators.  A gas will go right through a respirator.  It'll keep
     out some of the solid particles but it's not going to keep gasses 
     out.  So while you can do some *partial* protection for workers, you 
     cannot totally protect them from the exposures in this industry.  
     Next.
        Besides that, the radioactive chemicals that are released get out
     in four different ways to the general public.  The first way is
     through the stacks--not the cooling tower--but the stacks of the
     plant.  Released into the air, often in gaseous form, which after
     it's out in the cold air, decays into a solid and is deposited in the
     clouds.  And then when it rains or snows it comes down picked up by
     the plants and then again gets to the human table--we eat them.
        The second way is the liquid effluence which comes via the fish
     and the algae.  You can also pick it up directly through your skin--
     absorbed through the water--if you're swimming, or if you're boating-
     -anything that's gaseous that's dissolved in the water is released
     from the surface and you can breath it.
        The third way it gets to people is through the fuel transport in
     and out.  People who live along a transportation route are assumed
     automatically by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission to get the
     equivalent of two or three chest X-rays a year--just if you *live*
     along the transportation route.  That means no accident, no stopping,
     no nothing.
        The fourth way is direct exposure from the plant.  The plant over
     time becomes radioactive.  The pipes become radioactive, the building
     becomes radioactive.  And if they store the spent fuel rods on the
     plant then you can measure that outside of the plant.  You can
     measure the buildup of fuel rods.  We've done it.  There's one plant
     in particular, the Vermont Yankee, where the plant itself became so
     radioactive they had to put a second cement wall around the
     containment in order to prevent the gamma rays from going down to a
     school at the foot of the hill.  They were measurable *inside* the
     school.  Next.
        Now these chemicals, when they're out in the water and the food
     and the land, the body can't tell the difference between these
     chemicals and ordinary nutrients.  So it will treat the cesium as if
     it were potassium and it treats strontium-90 as if it were calcium
     and stores it in bone.  So it goes to different organs in the body.
     That's why the radioactive iodine is *so dangerous* because you store
     it in the thyroid gland.  So then those small explosions take place
     *inside* the body, *inside* these organs which are so important.  
     Next.
        The solid waste that's left in the plant, that they don't just
     release, they put into trenches and bury them.  This is a waste dump
     on the Columbia River.  They just bury it in the trenches, there is
     no containment whatsoever.  Next.
        This was part of the Manhattan Project and I don't know if you can
     read the sign but it says "Don't Go Beyond Here Without A
     Respirator."  Now that chain fence is certainly a great protection.
     This is Canonsburg, Pennsylvania where they processed the ore from 
     Zaire--which used to be called the Belgian Congo--this was for the 
     Manhattan Project.  They also used Canadian ore.  And they processed 
     it here and they built a big lagoon for the waste, and it would never
     grow anything.  It was just a barren piece of land.  And you'll never
     guess what they decided to use it for since it didn't grow *anything*
     --even weeds.  They used it as the baseball diamond for the kids.
        When they passed the superfund legislation, this was number one on
     the list of places to be cleaned up on the superfund.  So they moved
     the baseball diamond away and they put up this chain-link fence, and
     they put up a big sign "Don't Go Beyond Here Without A Respirator,"
     and then decided they'd start cleaning up.  I understand it's a
     partial cleanup.
        When I was on the committee for the Environmental Protection
     Agency they had identified seventy-four *thousand* toxic waste dumps
     in the United States.  They had rated thirty-two *thousand* as severe
     health hazards, and this was number one on the list.  Next.
        Some of the waste makes its way into barrels and the barrels have
     an expected lifetime of thirty-five years.  Most of them leak before
     that.  The stuff they put inside--these radioactive materials--many
     of them have half lives of hundreds of thousands of years.  Next.
        This is the so-called "tank farm" at Hanford.  I don't know if you
     can see what look like round disks--they look like puddles of water
     or something--but those are the tops of underground tanks which are
     full of radioactive liquid waste.  They're not even sure of what's in
     each one of those tanks.  I think there are 147 and at *least* a 
     third of them have already leaked.  They can't get them out of the 
     ground and they're not sure what's in them and they're afraid to 
     concentrate them because the sludge contains plutonium which might 
     become critical.  So this is the tank farm which now replaces the 
     desert up in Hanford.  Next.
        This is a so-called "low level" radioactive waste site.  This is
     radioactive garbage.  Again notice the chain-link fence.  You see
     most of this releases dust and fumes and it carries in the wind.  So
     you live thirty miles away and you don't *see* it, but you still get
     the effects.  Next.
        This is the way the British get rid of their waste.  In the back
     is the Windscale plant and these are two big pipes.  They come right
     out of the plant and they go out into the Irish Sea.  And they send
     the waste down this pipeline.  They had this pipe dream that the
     waste would go down into the bottom of the Irish Sea and stay there.
     They said it was very heavy waste so it would go right down and just
     stay on the bottom.  So a few summers ago it started coming up on the
     beaches.  You walk all along beautiful Cumbria Beach and there's
     plutonium in the sand.  They have epidemic of leukemia;  they have
     children with Down's Syndrome;  they have all kinds of problems and
     the beaches are not being used anymore.  Next.
        In addition to all *this* which is considered routine--so far what
     I'm talking about is normal procedures and no accidents.  Just in the
     nuclear *weapons* industry--this is not including the commercial
     accidents--between 1947 and 1977 there were 125 *major* accidents 
     with releases of radiation.  Most of them you've never heard 
     of--they're called broken arrows--and they've occurred all over the 
     world.
        One of the worst was in Spain where they spilled plutonium all
     over several farmer's fields.  One was up in Greenland with the crash
     of a B-52 with four hydrogen bombs on board.  Next.
        This is the hospital in Moscow--the Hospital Six when the firemen
     were, where several of them died where they had the transplants.  The
     Chernobyl accident got the first global coverage of an accident at
     the time--well maybe the second, Three Mile Island got a lot of
     coverage--but with the Chernobyl accident there was much more
     mobilization on even a grassroots level to actually measure levels of
     radiation and actually see what was happening.  Next.
        This is one of the sheep that was condemned in England.  Maybe you
     know that all of the sheep were forbidden to be taken to the market
     because a baby animal, or a baby human being, is growing at a rapid
     rate so when these radionuclides are around, they tend to incorporate
     more than an adult, in the same way that a child needs more calcium.
     A child will pick up more strontium-90, so will a lamb pick up more
     cesium and strontium-90.  Next.
        These are the reindeer from Sweden.  They called them the
     "Becquerel Reindeers" because all they heard about was how many
     becquerels of cesium were in them.  The meat inspector has a geiger
     counter in his hand and these reindeer set off the geiger counter.
     They didn't know what to do with them--what do you do with
     contaminated meat?  If you bury it, then the chemicals get into the
     land and they come up in the next crop.  If you dump them into the
     ocean then, again, the chemicals are released and they'll come back
     in the fish.  They have them in a very large freezer and they don't
     know what to do with them.  And where do you get another food supply
     when your food supply is contaminated?  Next.
        This is a very interesting map which I got from West Germany but
     it was done by the Oak Ridge National Lab.  And this is supposed to 
     be the fallout from Chernobyl in the United States.  Now it's really
     odd--especially if it were coming in on the west coast:  the rain is
     on the coast--not in Idaho.
        I don't know if you realize it, but there was a major accident at
     the Nevada test site in April of 1986 just before the Chernobyl
     accident.  It was a hydrogen bomb explosion underground and their
     doors didn't close--they're supposed to close.  They're trying to
     catch the first X-ray off the hydrogen bomb for a laser weapon-beam
     for Star Wars.  Anyway the doors didn't close and the whole area
     filled with the debris from a hydrogen bomb.  So the Department of
     Energy applied for and gave itself a license to vent the debris from
     the hydrogen bomb.  And when they learned that the Soviet Union had
     an accident they vented quite rapidly from the Nevada test site.  And
     that's what that looks like to me.
        We have actual measurements from the Burlington, Canadian
     station--it's a government station and it's over on Lake Erie and
     Lake Ontario.  They measured the cesium and they identified it as
     coming from the Nevada test site--*not* as coming from Chernobyl.
     These look like point-sources.  They don't look like something coming
     from a very remote source and coming down with a rainfall that's
     widespread.  Next.
        This picture I put in so you could see an underground nuclear
     explosion in Nevada.  This was set off nine hundred feet below the
     surface of the desert.  This is the Baneberry event in 1970 and in
     the background are the Rocky Mountains.
        This is underground.  There's nothing at all in the Partial Test
     Ban Treaty [of 1963] that says you can't release radiation to the
     air--it just says you have to put the bomb underground.  In the
     official U.S. book telling you about their underground explosions,
     they list separately the ones that were deliberately designed to leak
     radiation to the air.  This is *after* all the calls for "Ban the
     Bomb," and `you've got to test underground,' and `stop spewing
     radiation into the air.'  They did them deliberately.
        Also eventually the underground radioactive debris will work into
     the California water supply.  The military has agreed that the
     water--the underground acquifers--will be non-potable--they're saying
     fifty years.  That means there's some down there already.  Next.
        The Nevada test site that we are blowing up is Shoshone Land.  
     This is the native people praying for the desert.  Next.
        These weapons were set off in many other places.  Besides 
     Hiroshima and Nagasaki, besides Almagordo where the first one was set
     off.  There have been more that sixteen hundred large ones 
     detonated--and this is not counting things that they call "safety 
     shots" and so on.  Next.
        The U.S. began in 1946, right after the war, setting them off in
     the Bikini atoll out in the Pacific.  An atoll is a chain of coral
     islands.  And they are built around the peak of an underwater
     mountain.  So in the center there, where the lagoon is, under the
     water is the peak of an underwater mountain and this coral grows
     around the top of the mountain.  And when it gets out of the water it
     collects sand.  These are sandy, desert islands.  They're not lush
     islands like French Polynesia.  Next.
        I think they look like bullseyes.  And the military began--even 
     before Micronesia was given to the United States as a Trust 
     Territory--a *year* before that--they were testing bombs.  And what 
     happened from the people's point of view were these artificial 
     sunrises.  Next.
        Then in the rain that followed the radioactive fallout came down.
     On March 1st, 1954 they set off the first fifteen megaton bomb and
     the fallout came down on the Rongelap people who were about 150 miles
     away.  Next.
        This is a Rongelap child and that is a severe burn on the head
     where the fallout landed.  These are beta burns.  The people had
     suffered a *very* high dose of radiation and were *very* sick.  They
     were not evacuated for seventy-two hours although the military ships
     had been warned and moved out of the area.  They didn't warn the
     people.  Next.
        For about the first four or five years, people either found it 
     impossible to become pregnant or they had miscarriages or
     stillbirths.  Then they had babies that were severely deformed.  This
     is a severe clubfoot.  Next.
        They also have a very high rate of Downs Syndrome.  We did a
     survey of three hundred Rongelap children last year in January.  Now
     this is, what?--1988 from 1954--you're talking about thirty-four
     years later out of the three hundred children there were three Downs
     Syndrome.  Now a *normal* ratio is one Downs Syndrome out of 660
     children.  We had three in three hundred children.  Notice also this
     child has no hand.  That's usually a problem in the in utero--it's a
     congenital malformation because of toxic material.  
        Those atoll's are *still* contaminated.  They *still* can measure 
     the radiation in the atolls--in the food--their breadfruit doesn't 
     grow anymore, they're not allowed to eat the crabs (coconut crabs), 
     the coconut trees are radioactive, the coconut meat and milk is 
     radioactive.  Next.
        This was the last evacuation of the Rongelap people and I think
     that that woman shows how the people feel.  They had to move off
     their atoll again in 1985 and they're still waiting to find out *if*
     the United States is going to clean it up.  Next.
        These effects of radiation were *very well known* in 1945.  It was
     not obscure research but it was a Nobel prize that showed the genetic
     effects of radiation.  The Nobel prize was given in 1943.  So this
     was not obscure.
        The implications of it, though, I think have not yet been
     comprehended because what we're doing here is two things at the same
     time.  We're damaging the life-support system--the air, the water,
     the food, the land--and at the same time, we're damaging the gene
     pool or the children.  So we're producing people physically less able
     to cope, and we're giving them more to cope with.  And that's a death
     process.  And that's what I'm trying to talk about.  That in the
     *long-term*, we are killing ourselves as a species.  Next.
        The damage is invisible, and it's not immediate.  It's mostly cell
     damage and the insidious part of it is, it's the cells that are
     *slightly* damaged and left alive that will give us the most trouble.
     Because *they* show up as a deformed baby because the ovum or the
     sperm was deformed.  Or if it's a cell in the lungs, or in some other 
     part of the body, if it's left *alive* and damaged, it can produce a 
     cancer.  Cancer is not produced by *dead* cells.  So at high doses you 
     do a lot of tissue damage and you kill cells which don't cause as 
     much cancer as you do at low doses where you leave the cell alive, 
     you damage it, and it reproduces itself abnormally.  Next.
        I wanted to show you a few things that you can see that aren't so
     gross as you see out in the Marshall Islands, or if you go to the
     Indigenous people in the Navajo reserve, or you look downwind of
     Nevada.  But I wanted to show you what happens in a place like
     Wisconsin where they have state-of-the-art nuclear power plants.
     These are plants that have never had accidents--we're not talking
     about Three Mile Island--and I wanted to show what happens on the
     very fragile part of the population--the babies that are born that
     are under twenty-five hundred grams, or under about five-and-a-half
     pounds.  Because these babies are *very* sensitive.  They are very
     sensitive to the environment.  They often have respiratory problems
     and how good their environment *is*, will determine whether they
     survive or not.
        So this time is 1963 to 1966.  Notice the green areas:  those are 
     the milk-collecting stations where we had actual measurements of how 
     much radioactive strontium, cesium and iodine, was in the milk.  Those
     percents are the rate of infant death relative to the state rate.  So 
     up at the top there, in Rice Lake, they had a *worse* infant mortality 
     rate--thirteen percent higher than the state rate--whereas down in 
     La Crosse--number 4--it was six percent *lower* than, or *better* than, 
     the state rate.  That's what the minus means.  Now the light-green 
     areas later have nuclear power plants.  The dark-green areas are more 
     remote.  Next.
        This is 1967 to 1970 and it's the same area.  But late in '69 they
     opened the first reactor and you can see the rate changed in La Crosse
     from six percent *below* the state rate to three percent *above*.  
     Again, this is a rural area.  That's peculiar in--[end of side A of 
     tape 1 happens here.]

      . . . was a very dumb place to build it in other words.  If you look 
     over on Lake Michigan, in December of 1970 they opened two reactors 
     there.  Those are each five hundred megawatt.  You can see that area 
     of Green Bay is about five percent above the state rate.  And this is 
     what it's been for the twenty years that they've kept the records.  
     It's been four to five percent above the state rate.  This is a highly 
     industrialized area.  Next.
        Now this is the full-blown nuclear age.  If you look at Green Bay,
     the reactors there, this is the first five years of brand new state-
     of-the-art reactors with no accident.  The area there at Green Bay is
     now twenty-eight percent above the state rate.  This is
     *statistically* significant.  The death rate has increased whereas
     all over the United States generally, the rates are coming down.
        The same thing happened in Eau Clair which was downwind of
     Minnesota.  That's the Monticello plant up at the top.  I don't know
     if you noticed that on the U.S. map earlier, but that one's on there
     too.  That's a dirty plant that Monticello one.  And then there are
     two down there at Red Wing.  Those are each five hundred megawatt and
     the wind is from the west and it's going right to Eau Clair which is 
     a rural area.  And Genoa there at La Crosse--that's now up to eight 
     percent above the state rate.  These six reactors are each five 
     hundred megawatt.  The Genoa one is a fifty megawatt.  
        What happened here in Wisconsin in these first five years of brand 
     new operating plants was that there were over a hundred *excess* 
     infant deaths.  These are over and above the number you would expect 
     based on the state record.  We checked out all kinds of things:  the 
     fossil-fuel plants, the wood-and-pulp industry which is in Wassau 
     mostly, the coal-fired power plants, the chemical industry, the 
     maternal child health care, the availability of special infant care 
     units, of distance to the hospital, and so on.  We looked at measles 
     epidemics.  We looked at anything anybody mentioned that could have 
     brought about such an effect.  But the only thing it correlates with 
     are the *routine*, *permissible* gaseous releases from the power 
     plant.  Next.
        I put a baby in because when I went out to the Marshall Islands,
     one of the women looked at me and she said, "You know, statistics are
     people with the tears wiped away."  So I put picture in so we'd
     remember what we're talking about here.  Next.
        Now you might ask why are we doing all this to ourselves?  Because
     basically the whole military-industrial complex is operating at such
     a level that the only ones who are in the dark are the American
     people and the Soviet people.  So we're doing this to our *own* 
     people.  Which is a really strange kind of thing.
        We're also wrecking the economy by what we're doing because the
     main product of this whole dirty industry is unusable.  It's like a
     person decided they'd build chairs for their livelihood, but they
     just build chairs and put them in the garage, and they never sell
     any.  It's pretty bad economics.
        Where do they get the bottomless source of money to keep doing
     this?  They get it from the taxpayer.  And what does it result in?
     The rise of prices and interest rates and inflation, and all kinds of
     economic problems.
        In fact the basic U.S. strategy against the Soviet Union is to so
     push the arms race and the space race that you break the Soviet
     economy.  Because they *think* the Soviet economy will break before 
     the U.S. economy.  So it's a deliberate economy-breaking policy.  And 
     yet so many people walk around and think that the arms race produces 
     jobs.  Next.
        These nuclear submarines, besides being expensive, ride around in
     our supermarket:  they discharge in coastal waters.  I was out in
     Hawaii.  The nuclear navy goes in and out of Pearl Harbor.  Also the
     Bumblebee fish company fishes the tuna fish from Pearl Harbor area.
     They bring it in and they can it in Hawaii.  I actually went to the
     Department of Noise and Radiation of the State of Hawaii and I asked
     them if they tested the tuna fish.  And they told me they didn't have
     to because none of it was sold in the state of Hawaii--it all was
     shipped in to the west coast.  I don't know where they catch the
     others but I've never eaten Bumblebee since.  Next.
        The *money* that goes into this--this slide is outdated and I made
     it a year ago--it's now one and a half *million* dollars a *minute* is
     spent on this stuff.  Next.
        What the money is *not* spent on is education, health, the arts,
     social services, rapid transit, all kinds of things.  Next.
        These are expensive.  You can build a lot of hospitals for this.
     If you also notice these blastoff rockets, they do a lot more to the
     atmosphere than your underarm deodorant.  Next.
        These kinds of polluting industries are never the target of the
     environmental action.  We don't even *talk* about the ones that make
     the weapons.  Next.
        This is the one we talk about.  This is a coal-fired power plant
     and it's disgusting, in our air.  But the question that we never ask
     is What's the potential for cleanup?  You can *clean up this* quite 
     more readily than you can clean up the discharges from the nuclear 
     plants.
        Also what's *totally* forgotten in this acid rain problem is the
     effect of nuclear weapon testing and reprocessing plants in creating
     acid rain.  It's a secondary effect because these beta particles act
     like lightning.  They react with the nitrogen and the water in the
     air and they produce nitrates and nitric acid.  Next.
        The rocket program--especially what they call the orbit
     maneuvering system--has been dumping carbon dioxide and carbon
     monoxide *right in* the ozone layer.  We never *hear* about *that*. 
     We never hear about what the military is doing.
        Since 1985 they've been doing deliberate experiments on the
     ionosphere.  They've depleted the ionosphere *deliberately* over
     *millions* of square miles, and depleted it up to sixty percent.
        They also did experiments in 1984 and 1985 over Tazmania which is
     south of Australia.  They did these over Hobart and they were
     supposedly creating a hole in the ionosphere so that the telescopes
     at Hobart would be able to see the stars without any ionosphere in
     the way.  This was a secret military shuttle experiment over
     Australia in 1985.  It was the summer of 198*6* that they announced
     the hole in the ozone layer.
        Now if you're going to dump carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide in
     the ionosphere which is *above* the stratosphere, that's heavy--it
     falls--and it falls into the upper stratosphere which is where the
     ozone layer is.  All of the information is not out yet.  We're trying
     to get it because a lot of it is classified.  But there's certainly
     enough to know that this business of the ozone layer is certainly
     *not* a reason to switch to nuclear power.  Next.
        This is a reminder of *who* is in the Antarctic.  Next.
        Much of what I've been showing is documentation of a very
     extraordinary societal addiction.  It's an addiction which is self-
     destructive, it's *wildly* excessive and it's eating up the 
     resources, both the brain drain and the money drain, and it's also 
     created a situation where the *victims* are afraid to confront the 
     people that are carrying out this addiction.  And we all seem to be 
     caught in it.  We're caught in it in one way or another either as 
     passive cooperators or as addicted.  But we're working together to 
     produce a society of death instead of a society of life and we don't 
     *have* to do that, we can change.  Next.
        The things that *aren't* being done are on the right.  And the
     things that *are* being done and that are taking place *mostly* in
     secret all around us are on the left.  Next.
        This is a graph that was prepared by the unions because when they
     got a military contract they knew that the numbers of jobs went down.
     It was not a help and what they discovered, or the way they went at
     it was to say If you had a billion dollars, how many jobs could you
     create?  And they found that in the military you could only create
     70,000 while in mass-transit the same billion dollars would have
     brought 90,000, in construction you could have had 105,000 jobs,
     daycare 120,000, medical care 140,000, education 180,000.
        The question is *not* Do you want jobs? but What kind of jobs do 
     you want?  You get the *least* number of jobs for your money in the
     military and you get the *least* payback into society because *none* 
     of the things are usable--I hope.  So there's little or no return 
     unless you want to *further* starve the developing world by trying to 
     sell your weapons to them.  But *certainly* they're not a market for 
     the nuclear.  Next.
        The future is going to lie with the children, not with the bombs.
     Next.
        You can live a *relatively* long time without food, but not 
     without water, and not without air.  Next.
        This land is precious and we are witnessing the junking of
     America.  Next.
        Next.
        These are *irreplaceable*.  Next
        It's *beautiful* earth.  It's a beautiful *recycling* earth and
     we're putting garbage into it and I mean *toxic*, *hazardous* waste.  
     We might *think* we're getting away with it but eventually it will 
     come back.  It will come back in the food, it will come back in the 
     fish, it will come back and be a part of our bodies.  It will be 
     certainly coming back for our children, our grandchildren, our great-
     grandchildren.  Or as the native people say, What will it do to my 
     great-grandchildren's great-grandchildren?   They take responsibility 
     for *six* generations.  And we seem to be only looking at *one*.  
     Next.
        They're *waiting* for our answers.  Next.
        Next.
        Next.
        We *do* have ways.  One is the United Nations.  But we have to put
     some support behind it and we have to find out about it.  The U.S. is
     doing everything possible to destroy the U.N. right now.  Next.
        This is the World Court.  And when the U.S. joined the world court
     in 1945, in 1946 they added a clause and they said they will only be
     subject to the World Court in matters that are *not internal* affairs
     of the United States and if there's a dispute over whether or not
     it's an *internal affair of the United States* the United States will
     decide.  There is no court that can operate under *those* kinds of
     terms.  When the Iran hostage crisis occurred, and the United States
     tried to take Iran to the World Court, Iran used the U.S. amendment
     and they said It's an *internal* affair and therefore the court has 
     no jurisdiction.
        So it *comes home to roost*.  If we're going to *share* this 
     planet, we have to *share* this planet.  If we're going to be the 
     bully, or the tough guy on the block and have it all our own way 
     because we have the biggest bombs, then we can expect to destroy 
     ourselves.  Next.
        Next.
        I hope when the end comes for all of us it will be good and we can
     say We're leaving an *intact* world for the next generation.  Thank
     you.


                            Questions and Responses

        Q:  Why was Wisconsin chosen as the example?
        RB:  The reason I chose Wisconsin was not because it was a bad
     state but because they had the *best* records, public health records.
     In Wisconsin *all* of the public health records are on computer, and
     every year the records are published in a book.  In order to do the
     study *I* did you not only need to get the infant mortality rate but
     you have to know what the *birth* weight of the infant was.
     Wisconsin is one of just a handful of states where they have linked
     records.  A death certificate does not contain birth weight.  So you
     have to have computerized records and you have to have record linkage
     and you have to have a state that publishes the records before you
     can even *ask* this question.
        *Most* of the states in the United States do *not* keep good 
     health records.  In *most* of them you couldn't even *ask* sensible 
     questions.  You pay all your money for vital statistics and they 
     don't answer your questions and you can't get the information.
        I must say too though, to my regret, after this study was
     published, the state of Wisconsin stopped publishing separate death
     rates for the low birth weight infants.  Their excuse was they didn't
     have enough money to continue to do it.  So they now don't publish it
     anymore.  That's another way to make the problems go away.  You don't
     look at them and you don't publish them.
        Q:  To what degree can toxic nuclear contaminated sites be cleaned
     up?
        RB:  That's a good question and I think that's one that is being
     asked generally, like What kind of a cleanup can you demand?  We're
     facing that now with the Rongelap people.  They want to go back to
     their homeland and it's still severely contaminated.  It's very hard
     to tell people they can't go back.  And *how* do you clean it up and
     what do you do?
        I think it was 20/20 showed the Bikini people:  they've been given
     the option of taking off I think it's the first four feet of soil on
     the whole atoll.  Now that means uprooting every tree, every bush,
     everything on the atoll.  When they take it off where do you put it?
     What do you do with it?  Probably dump it out in the ocean which is
     then going to contaminate the food chain, the bottom eaters and the
     big turtles that go on the sea bed.
        But the King, one of the elders of the Bikini tribe, said that he
     wanted *that* kind of cleanup.  Even though it meant starting from
     scratch, beginning new palm trees, but he said There's nothing else
     that's fair to our children.  
        We have done incredible damage and we can't wipe it away tomorrow.
     It's going to be a *big* job and a *long* job.  I think that *our* 
     generation is going to have to carry the brunt of it because we're 
     the cause of it.  I don't think *delaying* it is going to help.  And 
     I *don't* think we can clean it up totally.  But I think we can 
     *certainly* *reduce* the level of destruction.
        I'd like to say one more thing to that.  I think it's a very
     important question.  As a medical person I pose to myself, What would
     you do with a young person who comes in and has been on drugs?  You
     *can't take away* the damage that person has done to himself or
     herself.  But you can *maximize* the health that's left and you can 
     try to help the body to compensate.  The *worst* thing you could do 
     is give up on the person and say, Well you're hopeless, go out and do 
     what you want.  I don't think *anybody* would say that so we can't 
     say that to the earth.  But we do have to maximize what health is 
     left and we do have to be realistic.
        Q:  This one says, The government says that we need to have
     nuclear power or else the U.S. will be at a loss for energy because
     of our massive consumption of power.  What feasible replacement could
     be used instead?
        RB:  I would sure love to know how much power the military is
     using.  I'd like *all* of it.  *All* of it, including the *massive*
     amounts of fuel used for these planes.  I remember when we had the 
     campaign against the B-1 bomber:  finding out that *one* B-1 bomber 
     used in *one* year as much fuel as would be comparable to running the
     mass transit systems in the ten largest cities in the United States.  
     There's something wrong with our energy system when it's not the 
     *people* who are using the energy.  I see more energy use in *Europe*
     and they're supposed to have *lower* per capita energy than the 
     United States.
        That's my first thing--I'd get rid of that.  Then I think the
     question has to be examined, Whether or not *all* energy has to come
     from electricity?  What we've been *told* is we have to have
     electricity.  You could actually pick up *seventy percent* of your
     space and water conditioning immediately with solar.  There's no
     reason to say you have to go solar, solar electric and then space
     heating or air conditioning.  They have wonderful direct solar air
     conditioning in Australia in Darwin.  Every house has it.  So we have
     *lots* of things we can do, the problems are in our head.
        Q:  There's a question here about the Rand Corporation, that I
     mentioned it in my book, and How would you describe the Rand role in
     the nuclear arms race?
        RB:  The Rand Corporation *fuels* the arms race.  They *motivate* 
     the military to purchase new equipment.  They are a *think* tank.  
     And they sit down and they decide that the army for instance needs 
     something.  And then they decide how *vulnerable* they are.  And they 
     tell the generals how *vulnerable* they are that they *need* this new 
     system that somebody's thought up that will prevent a window of
     *vulnerability*.  And of course the military likes new things and
     once you buy something for the army you have to buy something for the
     navy and then you have to buy something for the air corps.  Because
     they compete with one another.
        So the Rand Corporation *plans* the war fighting.  They run the 
     so-called war "games."  They operate under *worst-possible* 
     circumstances.  They assume the worst will happen and then they try 
     to keep everybody running.  It's really an arms "chase."  It's not an 
     arms race.  And they fuel it.  They fuel it deliberatively and 
     manipulatively.
        Q:  This is a loaded question:  Is there a link between the Nevada
     tests and the California earthquakes, or a link between radiation and
     AIDS?
        RB:  The Nevada tests--*most* of the Nevada tests register about
     five on a Richter scale.  So they *are* earthquakes.  The *seismic*
     difference between a test, a nuclear underground test, and an
     ordinary earthquake is noted *not* in the original blast, which by 
     the way can knock a worker of a ladder in Las Vegas--they send out
     warnings when they are going to set off the blast so there aren't
     outside workers up high and killed--but the way you tell the
     difference between a nuclear blast and an ordinary earthquake is in
     the aftershock.  So in an ordinary earthquake if you had let's say
     six on a Richter scale the aftershock would probably be about a five.
     It goes down one order of magnitude.  Whereas at the Nevada test site
     if you had a six on the Richter scale for the blast the aftershock
     would be about a four.  It goes down two orders of magnitude.  That's
     the main difference.
        The nuclear tests can certainly trigger earthquakes.  I was always
     suspicious of the Guatemala earthquake and also of the one in
     Columbia that happened a few years back on Holy Thursday when the
     church collapsed.  Do you remember that?  Right after I saw that on
     the TV I telephoned the Nevada test site to find out what was going
     on.  They had had a series of tests that week--one every day.  So I
     think some of them are causing earthquakes.  It would be a *major*
     research undertaking to find out which ones were and which one's
     weren't.
        The relationship between radiation and AIDS is another one where
     we need more information.  But it's very clear that radioactive
     material incorporated into bone and lymph tissue undermines your
     ability to fight infections.  It's not at all coincidental, in my
     opinion, that the people now suffering the AIDS epidemic are also the
     people born between 1951 and 1963 when they did the above-ground
     weapon-testing in Nevada, and they did the testing in the Pacific in
     the atmosphere.  So there *probably* is a connection to it but we
     don't know all the answers to it.  Nor are we asking the questions.
        Q:  I have heard that the radioactive water left from the accident
     at Three Mile Island will be boiled off in order to dispose of it.
     What is your opinion of this--is it safe?
        RB:  What would you do with the water?  The contaminated water
     that was dumped into the Susquehanna River ended up in the water
     supply of Lancaster in Baltimore.  It goes down into the Chesapeake
     Bay and comes back in your nice seafood from the Chesapeake Bay.
        If you put it in the ground it comes up in the next crop--it's
     nutrients.
        Boiling it off in order to dispose of it, you will make some of it
     airborne, you will concentrate some of the heavier solids.  Certainly
     anything where if you're beyond it's boiling point--something like
     cesium would go off with the steam.  Cesium would be lost.  Cesium is
     lost from reprocessing plants.  Cesium is lost with the waste
     disposal method of turning everything into glass--glassification or
     vitrification.  They heat it to a high temperature and they lose the
     cesium.
        Either that or we put in it barrels that can be repackaged every
     generation.  So we make the growth industry of the future toxic
     waste, we teach our children how to repackage the waste, and we just
     do it forever.  Every generation puts it in new barrels.  And we keep
     that up now for the rest of the history of the planet.
        Q:  How much radiation exposure will you receive for a one-week
     stay at the Nevada test site?
        RB:  I can't tell you.  I really can't tell you.  You never know-
     -most of those underground blasts leak to the air.  Most of them do.
     They frequently release the radioactive gases.  The earth traps the
     particulates.  Some of them now are being done in mines, they hire
     miners, and they do it *deep* into the ground.  Some of those are not
     releasing *much* to the air--except in an accident like the Mighty
     Oak one.
        So how much is contaminated from the past?  I don't know, but
     there were over a hundred bombs set off in the air.  So the debris
     from a hundred bombs is there on the desert.
        Q:  Critics claim that by exposing children to arms race and other
     nuclear issues we are needlessly frightening them and exposing them
     to partisan politics.  How do you suggest educating and stimulating
     interest in nuclear issues within the public educational system
     without scaring the children.
        RB:  I don't think it's our *talking* about the nuclear that
     scares the children, I think it's the *nuclear* that scares the
     children.  There's a wonderful comedian in Canada called Bob Bossun.
     He lives in Vancouver and he has a medicine show on How to Stop a
     Nuclear War.  He's marvelous.  He can entertain you for two hours and
     you just sit there and laugh but you also learn a lot.  But one of
     the things he says is, What shall I tell my children about nuclear
     war?  Tell them what you're doing to stop it.  Okay, that's what you
     tell them.
        Q:  Has there been a measurable increase in the average background
     radiation of the earth?
        RB:  That's the $64,000 question.  When I looked back to see what
     was *said* to be the radiation level--just in North America--it 
     *used* to be that we got sixty millirem a year background radiation- 
     -that was the measurement.  Then it went up to about a hundred.  And 
     then I heard a hundred and twenty and they're now saying two hundred.
        Now there are some reasons for it.  That first number, sixty,
     didn't have radon gas in it.  Radon gas is generally released by
     uranium mining and it now bathes all of North America and it's
     pocketed more in some places than others.  Also our construction has
     dug into ore beds and we've released a lot of radiation.
        So some of it's due to that.  But there is also a crazy jargon you
     have to deal with.  `Natural background radiation' means *anything*
     that is not literally *man-made*--that's not sexist--that means men
     made it.  "Natural" background radiation though includes things like
     uranium mining because they didn't make the uranium.  But they took
     it out of the ground, where it was not exposing people, and
     pulverized it and put it on top of the ground, but it's still 
     `natural background.'  So if you want to be really *precise* you call 
     it `technologically enhanced natural background radiation.'
        So you've got *this* jargon to deal with.  Then besides that,
     *background* radiation includes fission products but they have 
     limits.  So only *fresh* fission products are usually pounded.  
     And anything that's been out of a nuclear bomb for more than a year 
     or released from a nuclear plant for more than a year, is called 
     `background radiation.'  It's no longer "fresh fission."  So if you 
     license one nuclear power plant, and you've got two on the property, 
     the second one can be called "background" radiation while you license 
     the first one.
        So there's all kinds of tricky legal jargon.  You can't--*I* can't
     get a straight-forward answer to a very straight-forward question.
     You deserve an answer but I can't give it to you.
        Q:  Is food irradiation a device to create a market for
     radioactive waste, and thereby bail out the moribund nuclear energy
     industry while converting a waste disposal problem into a money-
     making asset?
        RB:  Well certainly food irradiation is an unacceptable way to
     treat food to start with.  *Why* people are doing it, I've heard many 
     reasons.  I think using the waste and trying to make money off of it 
     is an old Wall Street trick--if you can sell your waste, you're ahead.
        But there are other reasons.  The military has been desirous of the
     plutonium from the commercial fuel rods ever since they closed West
     Valley in 1972.  There *was* on the books a law that said that the
     military *cannot take* fuel rods from the commercial industry.  After
     the recent election of Bush, in the lame-duck period where Reagan was
     still president, he signed an Executive Order saying that the
     commercial nuclear industry fuel rods could be commandeered by the
     military in case of national emergency.  And there's no definition of
     "national emergency."  I might not be telling you the exact words,
     but this is what it amounts to.
        The underlying reason that some people ascribe to this push for
     food irradiation is that the scale of it, and the number of
     facilities, will demand that the commercial fuel rods be reprocessed
     to get the cesium-137 to run the food irradiation plants.  It's on a
     *huge* scale.  Now once you allow reprocessing of commercial fuel
     rods, there's no way to prevent the diversion of plutonium into the
     weapons industry.  And as you know all of the weapons industry is
     shut down right now.  The most critical thing is the tritium.  But
     it's a good thing.  You *should* clap.
        Q:  Please discuss the effect of radiation on genetic structure of
     DNA and its affect on diseases of aging.
        RB:  Those are two different things.  There is such a thing as
     cellular genetic or cytogenetic damage and that's basically what 
     radiation does in the body.  It destroys the DNA which is the protein 
     in the nucleus of the cell that gives the cell the information on 
     whatever it's supposed to be doing in the body.  So for instance, if 
     that cell is making a particular hormone and you change the DNA then 
     it produces a faulty hormone that won't do what it was supposed to do.
        For example in adult-onset diabetes, many people who are diabetic
     have a lot of insulin.  If you tested them for insulin in the body
     they'd have a normal or even an above-normal amount but it doesn't
     bring down the blood sugar.  So what it means is at some point in
     their life the insulin changed, or mutated, and while it was able to
     bring down the blood sugar when they were younger, after that point
     of mutation, or mutation of the cells producing the insulin, it's now
     ineffective--it's not working.  So you have to have an injection of
     insulin to bring down the blood sugar.
        The same thing happens with antibodies.  A person becomes allergic
     to something and you say, `Well I always could do this but suddenly
     I'm now allergic to it.'  Then either it's a new substance in your
     environment and you don't have any protection for it, or else the
     antibody has mutated or the cells producing the antibody have mutated
     and you find it's not effective anymore.  So you experience allergy.
     You could experience not being able to digest certain foods that you
     used to be able to.  So that's the enzymes affected.
        Then the other DNA damage would be to knock out the resting
     mechanism of the cell and then the cell reproduces--and it usually
     rests afterwards, and then it reproduces, and rests.  But if you
     knock out the resting mechanism, it reproduces, reproduces,
     reproduces, and you get a tumor.  That's what it is, it's a runaway
     growth.  The cell doesn't have a resting state.  It's just a wild
     growth of too many cells in one--[tape side ends here].
      . . . body-breakdown process.  So the more natural background
     radiation there is a part of it.  And the most obvious thing that
     happens to us is we grow old.  At sixty you don't really feel the
     same as you did at twenty, there's a difference.  The biofeedback
     mechanisms become less trustworthy and eventually you succumb because
     you cannot cope with your environment and the bacterial and viral and
     other chronic disabilities that come, you can't cope anymore.  And we
     die, and that's a normal cycle.  But you can make the cycle go faster
     with more radiation exposure.  So it's an acceleration of the aging
     process.
        O.K., What can we do? is too big a question to answer at this
     point but I'm going to tell you the story about Moses putting his
     foot in the water.  When he wanted to cross the Red Sea it looked
     pretty formidable, and as long as he stood on the bank and wished he 
     was on the other side, nothing happened.  But if you read the Bible
     carefully, you'll find that he had to put his foot in the water and
     then it parted.
        So my advice is to please put your foot in the water and you'll
     wish you had a hundred people to help you because there's *lots* to
     be done out there.  We're making a new way to live on this planet and
     we're forming a global village.  If you want to be part of it,
     there's LOTS of work to be done.  It can be done no matter what your
     expertize is it's needed because the global needs construction, the
     global village needs medical care, the global village needs social
     workers, it needs electricians, it needs writers, it needs dancers,
     it needs everything.  Everything.  Only think about what it would be
     like if you did it in the whole world and not just locally.  Thank
     you.



        For more information about all this please contact:
         
           
          The International Institute of Concern For Public Health
          830 Bathurst Street
          Toronto, Canada     M5R3G1
          416/533-7351


          Committee for Nuclear Responsibility  (Dr. John Gofman's group)
          P.O. Box 421993
          San Francisco, CA  94142-1993
          415/776-8299


          Radiation and Public Health Project   (Dr. Jay Gould's group)
          302 W. 86th St.
          New York City, NY   10024
          212/496-6787
          212/362-0348 [fax]



--
                                              daveus rattus   

                                    yer friendly neighborhood ratman

                                KOYAANISQATSI

    ko.yaa.nis.qatsi (from the Hopi Language)  n.  1. crazy life.  2. life
        in turmoil.  3. life out of balance.  4. life disintegrating.  
          5. a state of life that calls for another way of living.