All the revisions were moving in the wrong direction because they now indicated that low doses of radiation could kill far more people than anyone had previously thought possible the very conclusion to which Thomas Mancuso s work had been pointing since 1977. . . . The new data, said Dr. Arthur Upton, former Director of the National Cancer Institute, greatly strengthened the argument that there is no safe level of exposure to radiation. In 1978, Dr. William Lochstet of Pennsylvania State University argued that the operation of a single uranium mine could result in 8.5 million deaths over time, and Dr. Robert O. Pohl of Cornell told the NRC that the potential health effects from mill tailings could completely dwarf those from the rest of the nuclear fuel cycle and add significantly to the worldwide toll of deaths and mutations. Page 234 re Three Mile Island, Killing our Own Seo Takeshi said the data for the crucial period of March 31 to April 1 were not reliable. There's been a campaign since 1951 to convince the public that low-level radiation is harmless.
People have a right to know what's happening to human health. . . .
The patriotic thing to do is to get it all out into the open. Let people know what's happening. The leukemia rate is high at both ends of the age scale. Very young children, whose immune system is not yet operating fully, are vulnerable to it, as are the elderly. Leukemia rate reaches a low point at age fifteen and then it gradually goes up for the rest of life. . . .