Ionizing Radiation and Health
I’m going to start by being very frank with you. I think that the nuclear industry is deceptive at best and downright fraudulent in fact when it says that it is “safe” and “clean”, the two adjectives repeated in its advertising.
Nothing that produces waste which lasts more than a hundred thousand times longer than the original energy production can be said to be “clean”.
That is not all. Mining produces surface tailings ponds that metamorphize into waste retention. The uranium must be transported thousands of kms, refined, and manufactured into fuel rods.
For most NPP, the fuel must also be concentrated (called being enriched) using a lot of electricity. None of the handling of the uranium ore or the manufacturing is completely clean so every location is subtly contaminated.
Branding “reprocessing” used fuel as “recycling? A lie. This uses highly corrosive acid to dissolve the old fuel thus creating a highly corrosive highly radioactive soup from which a 5% volume of plutonium and uranium-235 has been removed.
Meanwhile we are always being reassured that the amount of radioactivity that enters the environment from this dead-end technology is “safe” for human health.
What do we know?
From the discovery of x-rays and the discovery of radioactivity a year later, physicians and market forces were interacting with these new and highly exciting packets of energy, either as alpha and beta particles or as Gamma and x rays.
As quickly as four years later, the effects of focussing these forms of energy was known. Experimental physicists and physicians developed burns of their hands that did not heal, and eventually cancers.
The widespread use of radium in a softly glowing beverage came crashing to an end when a dentist identified it as the cause of cancers of the jaws of young women who painted watch dials.
In the early 1930’s, the International Radiolgical Standards Association built a monument to the lives of those that had died during the early years of experimenting with ionizing radiation in the health field. They estimated 300,000 deaths.
Still, heading into WWII and the Manhattan Project to build an atomic and hydrogen bombs, the United States and the USSR continued to use their own people as subjects in massive population experiments with radioactivity.
Even before WWII information sharing, the risks of exposure had been selectively applied to populations working with radiation. While radioactive exposure to skin was still considered to be safe as long as the skin recovered, warnings about long-term effects of handling substances of low radioactivity were known.
The Dene
In 1930, radium was discovered at on the Eastern shores of Great Bear Lake in NWT.
That same year Dene-Sahtu men were hired as “coolies” to transport the ore in burlap bags on their backs.
Canadian government publications warn of the serious health hazards associated with chronic exposure to small amounts of high-grade radioactive ores. The mine workers and ore carriers were not told.
One Department of Mines official wrote,” the ingestion of small amounts of radioactive dust or emanation (radon) over a long Period of time will cause a building up of radioactve material in the body, which eventually may have serious consequences.
“Lung cancer, bone necrosis, and rapid anaemia are possible diseases due to the deposition of radioactive substance in the cell tissue or bone structure of the body.”
Dr. S. C. Lind, was recognized as one of the outstanding radioactivity chemists of America. He believed that “precautions against ore dust should be considered in view of the concentration of the Great Bear Lake Pitchblende and the recent information of the large numbers of miners of the Bohemian Mines (in Czechoslovakia). (1932)
A 1991 federal aboriginal health survey found the Deline community reporting twice as much illness as any other Canadian indigenous community.
WWII
The Manhattan project proceeded with an awareness that ionizing radiation was not a good thing for human health and it tested the limits of exposure. Three men died using criticality experiments; they had been exposed to radiation in the realm of 3-5,000 MSv.
Most scientists believed that there was a lower dose at which no damage would occur; they knew, however that nausea and vomiting occurred at exposures in the realm of 50 MSv.
Terrible experiments rivaling anything carried out by the Nazis occurred – injections of plutonium-239 into patients considered “terminal”, irradiation of prisoners’ testicles, whole body exposure to intense radiation. Practically all of these experiments were done under the secrecy of war and no information was given to the patients.
But the war ended, followed by the cold war, the construction of nuclear bombs and then the atmospheric detonation of nuclear bombs and the construction of nuclear power plants to produce the explosives for the bombs. Studying human response to ionizing radiation continued nevertheless – more than 700 pregnant women were given radioactive iron to drink. They were not informed and did not give consent.
Atmospheric Testing
Several scientists were a little concerned about the fallout from nuclear testing and the effects upon people.
Linus Pauling estimated that almost half a million children would be affected. Herman Muller, he of fruit fly fame, said that there was no level of radioactivity that was safe.
Then Ernest Sternglass upset everyone by describing a loss of 300,000 children in the generations exposed to atmospheric testing.
How he made this estimation: Following state health records, Sternglass noted that from the dates at which statistics were recorded, in the 1930’s, each year recorded more and more healthy one year olds – healthier kids, sulpha drugs for infections, healthy mothers. Then, the year after the beginning of atmospheric testing, the annual increase stops. The 300,000 missing one year olds are calculated from the difference between the expected number of one year olds and the actual. Where were these children?
The Atomic Energy Commission of the USA gave the figures to John Goffman with that question; his colleague re-did the calculations and came up with a figure of a missing 4000 children.
The AEC was not happy. Their message to Gofman was that the number had to be zero. Which is what they published.
Baby tooth Project
Two iterations – the first occurred in the cold war era, simply assessing the amount of strontium 90 in baby teeth. When strontium-90 was found and JFK knew about it, atmospheric testing ceased temporarily.
The follow-up study was done in the early 2000’s
Dr. Alice Stewart in the UK
Dr. Rosalie Bertell in the Tri-State Study in the USA
Thyroid Cancer from Chernobyl
Background radiation – Swiss study
There are a number of studies that have been opportunistic – people have been irradiated for their illnesses and then followed for side effects:
Ankylosing Spondylitis – a painful inflammation of the joints between the pelvic bones and the spine. Patients were followed for 11 years starting five years after a course of treatment. All cancers of the chest and abdomen were increased in incidence among the population of 6,838 people. The greatest increase was in pancreatic cancer – an increase of 60%.
TB was treated with chest fluoroscopy in a widespread series of patients in Nova Scotia ending in the 1950’s. A follow-up study published in 1969 showed that breast cancer was radiologically inducible.
Israeli children, 2,215 of them, were irradiated for tinea capitus (ringworm) of the scalp. When followed up years later, there were eight brain tumors among the irradiated children and none in a control group of 1,395 children.
In a 1979 study of the same irradiated children, there were found to be 7 tumors of the salivary glands in the exposed children, one tumor in the unexposed.
Kikk Study of children around twelve nuclear power plants in Germany showed that there was a consistent increase in incidence of leukemia among children – that increased the closer the child was to the power plant. The researchers concluded that children had a larger chance of suffering from leukemia if they were closer to a NPP – but that they didn’t know why because, based upon what they knew about the NPP, that simply shouldn’t be so.
How could they deny their own findings? They accepted the nuclear power average radioactive release from the PP over three months as exposure of the child, ignoring that the child would have spent part of the time in the uterus. Fetuses have special sensitivity to radiation. They also ignored that fact that the amount of radiation released that the NPP provided was an average – while the practice of the NPP operators was to release radioactive gasses including tritium whenever the pressure became too great, not in a continuous fashion so the “average” consisted of small bursts of radioactivity.
Brachytherapy and external targeted radiation. Use of these will increase the risk for other cancers by 8%. Most people will accept the use of the radionuclide for the treatment of their cancer but are they told?[1]
PET scans or MIBI scans: There is an increase of 3% per 100 mSv exposures.
Finally, nuclear proponents like to bring our attention to our continual exposure to background radiation as proof that radiation, if not good for us, at least is not dramatically harmful.
Not quite true. The Swiss did a study looking at all types of cancers in populations exposed to different levels of background radiation and found that for almost all cancers, as the background exposure increased, so did the incidences of cancer.
So what are the health effects to humans and all other living things of having more nuclear power stations, making more bombs and making more radioactive waste lasting more than 250,000 years.
By what right does our generation have to condemn the future to this gradually measurable new reality of radioactivity?
