forge said:
Japan disaster is starting to disappear from media. Becoming harder to find news. (Until the next shock.)
I've noticed that too. There's still a little blurb in the morning talk radio I listen to but it's slowly being overshadowed by the air strikes in Libya.
I found this resource here:
_http://www.ratical.org/radiation/
I've read through some of it and there's a great deal of information on the subject of radiation and various books. There's section on the situation in Japan, hopefully they keep updating it.
I was curious about these claims about how "low levels" of radiation are not harmful to us and so far from reading through the site it seems quite the contrary...
I'll post some excerpts below on some things that stood out to me....
--------------------------------------------
Phone interview with Dr. Ernest J. Sternglass, physicist and author of
Secret Fallout, Low-Level Radiation from Hiroshima to Three Mile Island,
© 1981 by Ernest J. Sternglass, McGraw-Hill Book Company.
DTR: The book, Secret Fallout, is an update, as of 1982, of your 1972 book Low-Level Radiation and you had said the story just keeps going on and on. Of course there has been much more that has happened from 1982 up to the present along this same line of story.
EJS: That's right--Chernobyl happened since then.
DTR: Chernobyl was the biggest one. I was just watching a recent Frontline program called "The Politics of Power" in which they had then-Department of Energy Secretary Admiral James Watkins saying "Nobody died at Three Mile Island. No one was hurt outside of the reactor building."
EJS: Well, that of course is a total lie and it's the same coverup that took place after Chernobyl in the Soviet Union where they claimed that only about thirty-one people died as a result of the accident. It's on the same level because
all the governments felt it absolutely necessary to coverup the seriousness of the radioactive low-level releases that had taken place. These are of course low-level in terms of compared to what the fireman got and the people who were actually trying to fight the fires and contain the enormous disaster that took place.
But actually,
Three Mile Island caused hundreds of thousands, in fact millions of people in the U.S., to be exposed to the fallout that drifted all across the northern United States and which, in the following year, continued with releases during the venting process when they had to enter the contaminated building. And in the process many thousands of children died prematurely as I documented in the last part of Secret Fallout.
Since then this has all been further confirmed by a detailed study published by Dr. Jay M. Gould and Benjamin Goldman called Deadly Deceit published by Four Walls Eight Windows in which they examined the mortality rates and the cancer rates around the areas of Three Mile Island and found that the closer you got, the higher was the change in total mortality. And in fact not just from cancers but all types of conditions including heart disease, chronic conditions of all types, infectious diseases--all the kinds of things that are now being seen also downwind from the Chernobyl accident extending for hundreds and even thousands of miles across Russia and to Sweden, all across into the United States and all around the world.
So what has happened really is that both the follow-up of Three Mile Island that is documented in Deadly Deceit, and the recent revelations by Vladimir M. Chernousenko, the Ukrainian theoretical physicist who was put in charge of trying to protect the people of Kiev from the Chernobyl fallout and trying to in some way help to prevent further disasters--this man wrote a book, Chernobyl, Insight From The Inside, just published by Springer (in Berlin and New York)--in which he reveals how the Soviet government for years afterwards kept people ignorant of the true effects of what had happened.
What Chernousenko describes is the enormous, terrible effects on human life. For instance all the hundreds of men who were asked to go up on the roof next to the damaged reactor on another unit and to shovel down by hand with shovels the extremely high-level radioactive uranium fission product-loaded graphite debris and other things that had been thrown out of the burning reactor at Chernobyl. All of these people died subsequently--hundreds of them--in the army who volunteered to do this to save their country.
They estimate there were something in the order of thirteen to fifteen thousand people out of six hundred to eight hundred thousand--almost a million so-called individuals who were sent in to clean up and build the concrete containment shell, or the sarcophagus as they call it, around this reactor. Out of those hundreds of thousands of military recruits from Estonia and Lithuania that were sent down there without knowing what was happening, they say now something in the order of thirteen to fifteen thousand are already dead and seventy thousand are dying and have very severe disabilities, many of whom are dying of cancers and heart diseases and infectious diseases caused by the enormous exposure, by inhalation and ingestion, of all this material.
As Chernousenko said, By vastly the greatest disaster that ever took place in human history, instead of only a few percent of the radioactivity--out of the hundreds of tons of uranium and graphite that were contained in this--that eighty percent of the major radioactive nuclides of the reactor core, like strontium-90, iodine-131 and cesium-137, actually escaped and covered the world. He said in fact his estimate is that for every person in the world, one curie of radioactivity was released. Now one curie is a million million picocuries and we worry about one picocurie in the milk.
DTR: What are their half-lives?
EJS: Cesium-137 has a half-life of about thirty years. That's why the entire area is poisoned for decades and decades. Chernousenko estimates that 100,000 square kilometers was made uninhabitable--not the 30 square kilometer Zone defined by the authorities as the only area of interest or concern. The worst situation is always intake from the diet.
In other words, you get a certain amount from the stuff lying on the ground. But the dose to the body can be ten to a hundred times greater to key organs, depending on what the chemistry is. You can have a ten to a hundred times internal dose when you eat the food grown on the contaminated soil. And that's what the people still have to do.
DTR: Because it keeps building up?
EJS: No, because it concentrates in the organs, chemically. In other words, strontium, instead of being uniformly distributed throughout the tissue, all goes to the bone. So it irradiates bone marrow extremely efficiently and that has never happened before from natural sources. So the internal doses from strontium-90 and iodine-131 are really devastating us. And it's just as true for releases from Rancho Seco and from all the reactors--
all the doses they always mention that are so low--first of all they're not so low, they are generally in the few millirem range--but the dose to the bone marrow of a baby could be a hundred times greater because of the chemical composition and the concentration and the fact that the newly developing infant uses up and takes up the strontium so fast.
[...]
EJS: After 1951-52, especially when the hydrogen bomb tests began because they produced thousands of times as much fallout per explosion as these small bombs that were used before 1952. Because "megaton bomb" means a thousand kilotons and the Hiroshima bombs were only on the order of ten or fifteen kilotons. So we're talking about ten megaton bombs. In fact the Russians detonated a fifty-sixty megaton bomb in 1961, that's 500 to 600 times the amount of fission products released from the Hiroshima bomb in a single bomb, that broke the moratorium actually. That was one of the worst and most tragic, terrible things to do.
As a matter of fact it was Sakharov who had warned Kruschev not to explode any further megaton bombs because he had calculated that for every megaton detonated anywhere on the globe there would be between ten and twenty thousand future deaths--anywhere, no matter where the bomb was exploded.
Since then we've completely confirmed Sakharov's estimate--in fact it's actually underestimated by a factor of two to five--so that the deaths when you include all the subtle effects of being born underweight, which then leads to all kinds of early problems like congenital defects and learning disabilities, we detonated--and we literally had a nuclear war because most people don't realize this--but we detonated the equivalent of forty thousand Hiroshima-sized bombs in the atmosphere.
DTR: "We," just being the United States?
EJS: The United States and all of the nations in the world together, by the end of 1980, with the last nuclear bomb test by China in the atmosphere, the Natural Resources Defense Council estimates that the equivalent that 40,000 Hiroshima bombs were detonated in the world.
[...]
DTR: When you said Oyster Creek released more than Three Mile Island, how were you able to determine the levels?
EJS: Well, it so happens that in this country the NRC (the Nuclear Regulatory Commission) required the publication of the amounts released per year and this was published by the Brookhaven National Laboratory. And that's an annual report that's available to the public.
DTR: So you were able to get their figures.
EJS: Absolutely. Their own figures showed it--and that doesn't even show all the small accidents that were not recorded and all the other releases that went out with steam rather than through the monitored stacks. So we're dealing with enormous contamination of our environment and that is why the government has been so adamant about remaining secret and denying it all trying to blame it on ordinary chemicals, trying to blame everything on DDT, on pesticides, on every other possible material because they have been the worst polluters. In our world today, the governments are the worst polluters--not the chemical industry.
DTR: Oyster Creek is a newer kind--you said is a larger reactor?
EJS: It's the large reactor that was one of the first built by General Electric--a boiling water reactor with only a single loop--and it had many, many terrible problems with large exposures to the workers recorded. Many of the workers died prematurely. I testified in two cases involving workers who worked there. Their own data shows that they had enormous problems of corrosion and leakages and faulty fuel elements and troubles in their chemical cleanup systems. All this resulted in enormous releases.
[...]
DTR: Lie # 3: "No one was injured or died as a result of the Three Mile Island accident."
EJS: We now estimate a
few hundred thousand people have already died as a result of Three Mile Island and that in the United States alone, forty thousand people died from Chernobyl thousands of miles away. We believe--and Doctor Gofman and I agree--that millions of people will eventually die from the Chernobyl accident, prematurely.
DTR: Over time.
EJS: Over time. Over the next
twenty-thirty years.
[...]
DTR: They say, "Even if you lived right next door to a plant you would receive less that 0.1 millirem a year."
EJS: As I told you, the typical doses that actually have been reported in the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation--just the external dose--were as high as 30 or 50 millirem per year. For the case of the Connecticut reactor I calculated that the internal doses to the bone marrow to children were hundreds of millirems per year. So these are just total lies--simply like the same principal that Goebbels used in Germany that if you make a lie big enough the people will finally believe it.
DTR: Or cause "an average exposure of less that 1.5 millirem to people within fifty miles of the plant."
EJS: It's all false because you can take the milk from Oswego, New York, or from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and ship it into downtown Brooklyn and the Bronx, and then the people in the course of a year--a fetus might get thyroid doses of hundreds of millirems to the developing thyroid. Because there is no inverse decline with distance away from the plant when you transport it in a tank truck. Which by the way they don't consider in their environmental impact statements. I testified on this at the TVA hearings held by the opponents to reactors in Tennessee some years ago--it must have been somewhere in the middle seventies--in which I discovered that they leave out of their calculations of the population dose the radioactivity that comes out of the stack and gets on the land and is washed into the water like agricultural fertilizer so that they don't have to include the population downstream drinking the water as receiving any dose.
[...]
full article:
_http://www.ratical.org/radiation/inetSeries/ejs1192.html
----------------------------------------------------
Gofman on the health effects of radiation: "There is no safe threshold"
Gofman: Secretary Hazel O'Leary is undoubtedly the first breath of fresh air that we've seen in the atomic era. I think what she's doing is great and I hope millions -- hundreds of millions of people back her -- because she's going to face a ferocious opposition. It's going to be like a nuclear firestorm in opposition to her, because she's doing something constructive. I have for 25 years been an intense critic of the Department of Energy. I say this because Hazel O'Leary stands for compassion, candor, and credibility -- not because I've changed my mind about the DOE, which I think is one of the worst organizations in the history of our government. Unless it's cleaned out we're going to have worse things in the future. The human experimentation that has been done is bad, and it's good that that's being cleared away. But for 25 years the DOE has not shown any concern for the health of Americans. Their concern has been for the health of the DOE. Their falsehoods concerning the hazards of ionizing radiation have put not thousands of people at risk, not millions of people, but billions of people.
Synapse: What if Clinton doesn't back O'Leary in the days to come?
Gofman: The worst-case scenario is this. Ever since its inception, the Atomic Energy Commission -- then called ERDA, then called DOE -- has had one thing in mind: "Our program is sacrosanct." And they recognize, as I've recognized, that their entire program will live or die based upon one thing. If the public should come to learn the truth about ionizing radiation, nuclear energy and the atomic energy program of DOE is going to be dead. Because the people of this country -- and other countries -- are not going to tolerate what it implies. The key thing -- it's everything in the DOE program -- is: "We must prove that low doses of radiation are not harmful." They have been conducting a Josef Goebels propaganda war, saying there's a safe dose when there has never been any valid evidence for a safe dose of radiation. Yet the DOE and others continue to talk about their "zero-risk model."
After Chernobyl, I estimated that there were going to be 475,000 fatal cancers throughout Europe -- with another 475,000 cancers that are not fatal. That estimate was based on the dose released on the various countries of fallout from Cesium-137. The DOE put out a report in 1987 and I don't think it's any credit to the University of California that part of this report was done in the Livermore Lab, where I once worked, and part in Davis -- saying "our zero-risk model says that at these low doses, nothing will happen, because low doses are safe."
How would a safe level of radiation come about? It could come about in theory if the biological repair mechanisms -- which exist and which will repair DNA and chromosomes -- work perfectly. Then a low dose of radiation might be totally repaired. The problem, though, is that the repair mechanisms don't work perfectly. There are those lesions in DNA and chromosomes that are unrepairable. There are those where the repair mechanisms don't get to the site and so they go unrepaired. And there are those lesions where the repair mechanisms simply cause misrepair. We can say that between 50 and 90 percent of the damage done by ionizing radiation is repaired perfectly. What we are then seeing is harm done by the residual 10 or 40 or 50 percent that is not repaired perfectly.
The evidence that the repair mechanism is not perfect is very solid today. What we wanted to have was evidence that as you go down to very low doses -- a rad, or a tenth of a rad -- is that going to produce cancer? Determining the answer by standard epidemiological studies would take millions of people, and we don't have that. So it creates a field day for the DOE to say, "Well, we don't know." But I looked very carefully in 1986 for any studies that could shed light on that all-important question. And I presented that evidence at the American Chemical Society meeting in Anaheim.
The lowest dose of ionizing radiation is one nuclear track through one cell. You can't have a fraction of a dose of that sort. Either a track goes through the nucleus and affects it, or it doesn't.
Synapse: That the lowest doses will produce cancer?
Gofman: The answer is this: ionizing radiation is not like a poison out of a bottle where you can dilute it and dilute it. The lowest dose of ionizing radiation is one nuclear track through one cell. You can't have a fraction of a dose of that sort. Either a track goes through the nucleus and affects it, or it doesn't. So I said "What evidence do we have concerning one, or two or three or four or six or 10 tracks?" And I came up with nine studies of cancer being produced where we're dealing with up to maybe eight or 10 tracks per cell. Four involved breast cancer. With those studies, as far as I'm concerned, it's not a question of "We don't know." The DOE has never refuted this evidence. They just ignore it, because it's inconvenient. We can now say, there cannot be a safe dose of radiation. There is no safe threshold. If this truth is known, then any permitted radiation is a permit to commit murder.
What other things does the DOE use as crutches? "Well, maybe if you give the radiation slowly it won't hurt as much as if you give it all at once." Now if you have one track through a cell producing cancer, what is the meaning of 'slowly?' You have the track or you don't. It comes in on Tuesday or it comes in on Saturday. To talk about slow delivery of one track through the nucleus is ludicrous. But they do it anyway.
There is a more radical fringe that says, "A little radiation is good for you. And all this stuff about radiation causing harm is bad for society because it's going to prevent the program we think should be instituted, and that program is to give everybody in the country radiation every day as a new vitamin." This program is called hormesis. "A little radiation will give your immune system a kick and help you resist cancer and infectious disease." The chief exponent is a man named Thomas Luckey, formerly of the University of Missouri. He bemoans the fact that we can't get this program into high gear.
[...]
_http://www.ratical.org/radiation/CNR/synapse.html
