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Re: [Phys-l] Nuclear Reactors (was: Global Temperatures)

At 09:24 -0400 04/09/2009, Spinozalens@aol.com wrote:

In a message dated 4/7/2009 1:44:16 AM Eastern Daylight Time, hhaskell@mindspring.com writes:

It is also important to realize that the oft-heard statement that "no
one died at TMI" is simply myth. No one was killed outright by what
happened, but the radiation released (both intentional and
unintentional) was larger than was ever made public (see "A
Reevaluation of Cancer Incidence Near the Three Mile Island Nuclear
Plant: The Collision of Evidence and Assumptions," by Steve Wing,
David Richardson, Donna Armstrong and Douglas Crawford-Brown,
published in "Environmental Health Perspectives," January 1997. All
four are with the School of Public Health at the University of NC,
Chapel Hill), and as a result there have been and will continue to be
deaths from radiation induced cancer among those living in the area
at the time. The problem is, of course, that we don't know who those
people are, because cancers don't leave a fingerprint behind
indicating what caused them, but we do know that cancer incidence nd
death rates among the population in the vicinity of TMI in 1979 are
and will continue to be higher than they would be had TMI not
occurred.

Have similar studies been done for populations around coal plants which emit
lots of cancer causing radiation due to the presence of radioactive isotopes
in coal not to mention the cancer causing chemicals? The difference between
Nuclear energy and coal is that there might be a release from a nuclear plant
with associated health risks but for coal its an ironclad guarantee. Also
its coal that threatens our future on this planet, not Nuclear power, since
Coal is a Carbon rich fuel.

I don't know if they have, but it would be interesting to do some if they haven't.

It's a no brainer that the best options , if they can be made to work
economically, are solar and wind, but if the alternatives are coal or nuclear, I
would suggest Coal is the one to crusade against.

I would pretty much agree with this, but it's a close call

I also rather doubt the claim of the reports you mention. Given that about
40 percent or so (I think this is the right number but its ballpark in any
case) die from cancer its easy to generate data which make claims like this. I
suspect using the same logic a study around coal plants could produce the same
claim.

These studies are very difficult to conduct, because the population is continually shifting and it is very difficult to determine the doses people receive. Also, it is true that these effects are on the margin. That is, they don't increase the cancer rates very much, and it is impossible to tell which cancers are radiation induced and which are not. It is probably true that almost all cancers are either radiation or chemically induced. Most of the professionals in this field that I talk to assert that spontaneous cancers are very rare. Before the industrial revolution, cancer was a rare disease, and it was probably nearly all induced by the background radiation that we all live with--cosmic rays, radon, and just the general stuff that we all carry around in our bodies. But since radiation was not known about before the industrial revolution, we can't really go back and figure that out, except for the fact that there was precious little around at that time that could cause the kind of cell damage that induces cancer except the background radiation, which at the time was probably about all there was, except for those people working or living in the areas where mining was going on that was digging up ores that were later found to contain uranium and its daughter elements, and perhaps those who lived or visited those areas where natural hot springs were heated by radioactivity. I don't know if anyone has ever attempted to see if cancer rates were higher in those places or in regions at very high altitudes (Peru, for instance, or the Himalayan regions). Again, I seriously doubt if any such studies have been made simply because they would be extremely difficult and expensive to do, and I'm not sure what we could do with the findings of such studies.

The accident in the former Soviet Union is an altogether different case, here the health effects are not in question, that accident released a very large amount of fission products and transuranic isotopes to the environment. This
did not happen at TMI.

True, but waiting for the Chernobyls to tell us what the health effects of ionizing radiation are on humans is like searching for you lost car keys under the street lamp, even though you lost them near our car, which happens to be parked in the dark.

What we know about radiation is that there is no "safe" dose. We all live with the background dose, and we can't do much about that, but anything else that comes around, including diagnostic x-rays, simply adds to that dose and thus increases the cancer risk.

Medical radiation, including x-rays, have to be weighed as to their diagnostic or therapeutic value compared with the increased cancer risk the patient is exposed to. Most of the time, the call is clear--the x-ray or other radiation has a benefit that well exceeds the additional cancer risk, but that's not always true. I remember when I was a kid, the fluoroscopes that were in every shoe store, where you could look at your feet in the shoes you tried on to see how well they fit. They were also a great toy, and my brother and I spent a lot of time sticking our feet in that device so we could watch our bones move as we wiggled our toes. Mothers thought they were great, because they occupied one child while the other one got fitted for the new shoes. This was not a wise use of that technology and when someone figured out that making sure your new shoes fit was not worth the additional cancer risk to the store's customers, no matter how low it was, those fluoroscopes disappeared from shoe stores almost overnight.

But that was clearly a frivolous use of a potentially dangerous technology. Other uses her just as dangerous, even if they were ostensibly for a useful purpose. Alice Stewart, a British physician was asked, shortly after the end of WWII to investigate what appeared to be a troubling increase in the incidence of childhood leukemia, something which had been rather rare in the UK before the war. She obtained the medical records, or interviewed the mothers of almost every child who had been borne in the UK since about 1932 (I may have this date wrong--the book I'd need to check it has been packed up and won't be available for several months, until we get settled in our new house). In sifting through this mountain of data she discovered a disturbing correlation between the leukemia cases and mothers who had been abdominally x-rayed during their pregnancy. Eventually she was able to establish a causal link between those almost routine x-rays during the 30s and early 40s and childhood leukemia. Of course the radiological community in the UK, and to a bit lesser extent the US, fought those results tooth and nail, but eventually, they were accepted and routine abdominal x-rays of pregnant women were discontinued and the childhood leukemia rate gradually fell back to it previous level. The problem was that the furious opposition to here finding from the medical establishment kept effective action from being taken for nearly two decades, undoubtedly leading to thousands of unnecessary cases of childhood leukemia. An excellent account of this can be found in the Biography of Alice Stewart, "The Women Who Knew Too Much," by Gayle Greene (Univ. of Michigan Press, 1999).

The estimation of the effects of low and uncertain doses of ionizing radiation is a complex subject, but much work has been done by epidemiologists. A few years back John Gofman (a physicist as well as a physician specializing in epidemiology and radiology) wrote what is the definitive text on the effects of ionizing radiation on human health ("Radiation and Human Health," Pantheon press, 1983). The book is a bit dated now, and lots of more accurate new data is available, but Gofman spells out very clearly how one can estimate the number of excess cancers one can expect from any given dose of radiation. It is chilling to figure out, from what is often thought of as a "negligible dose," how many excess cancers can be expected over the about 40-year span of time during which those cancers will develop, especially if that dose is administered to a large number of people (such as by fallout from the atomic tests, or leakage from nuclear power plants, and perhaps even the exhaust gases from a coal-fired power plant, although Gofman does not look at that particular problem in his book). Although the data he based his findings on may be out of date, his methodology is sound. Steve Wing has based his analysis of TMI on Gofman's methods, so I think the results he presents are probably reasonably accurate. I'll have more to say about this in a future post.

Hugh

--
Hugh Haskell
mailto:hugh@ieer.org
mailto:hhaskell@mindspring,.com

So-called "global warming" is just a secret ploy by wacko tree-huggers to make America energy independent, clean our air and water, improve the fuel efficiency of our vehicles, kick-start 21st-century industries, and make our cities safer. Don't let them get away with it!!

Chip Giller, Founder, Grist.org