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Choose Your Experts: “Radiation Is Good for You” or “There’s No Safe Dose”

radioactive waste

By John LaForge

The old canard that “a little radiation exposure is good for you,” peddled by nuclear power advocates and nuclear waste generators, repeatedly needs refuting because the industry relentlessly downplays the dangers of radiation. It recently convinced the Environmental Protection Agency to weaken water pollution law and allow increased levels of radioactive poisons in our water.

Take David Ropeik writing in The Week, on Aug. 6 of all days, under the headline, “Should we really be so afraid of nuclear radiation?” Ropeik says, “The fear of ionizing (nuclear) radiation is deeply ingrained in the public psyche. For reasons partly historical and partly psychological, we simply assume that any exposure to ionizing radiation is dangerous.”

No David, the reasons are scientific and factual. No less than the National Academy of Sciences has concluded that any exposure to ionizing radiation is dangerous. The NAS has found repeatedly that there is no such thing as harmless radiation exposure, no “threshold” dose below which the exposure is safe.

No one need “simply assume” this. It’s a point of fact, made clear in the most comprehensive government studies of the dangers of radiation exposure, the National Academy’s seven BEIR reports (Biological Effects of Ionizing Radiation). Its most recent book-length study, “Health Risks from Exposure to Low Levels of Ionizing Radiation: BEIR VII,” was issued June 29, 2006. Consequently, every federal agency that regulates ionizing radiation warns that any exposure to radiation, no matter how small, increases one’s risk of cancer.

Based on BEIR’s repeated declarations that there is no exposure so low as to be harmless, the US Environmental Protection Agency says for example, “There is no firm basis for setting a ‘safe’ level of exposure above background ….” and, “Based on current scientific evidence, any exposure to radiation can be harmful (or can increase the risk of cancer). ….no radiation exposure is completely risk free.” The National Council on Radiation Protection says, “[E]very increment of radiation exposure produces an incremental increase in the risk of cancer.” The US Nuclear Regulatory Commission says, “[T]he radiation protection community conservatively assumes that any amount of radiation may pose some risk for causing cancer and hereditary effect, … any increase in dose, no matter how small, results in an incremental increase in risk.”

But nuclear power promoters like those at the University of Wisconsin, Madison’s engineering department, particularly retired professors Michael Corradini and Max Carbon (his real name), still peddle the officially debunked “hormesis” theory: that low-dose exposures act like inoculations and help people build immunity to the damage done by radiation’s effects on cells. The conjecture is even applied to fetuses, infants, children, girls and women, all of whom were reported in the BIER-VII to be far more vulnerable to radiation’s harmful effects than the rest of the population.

Dr. Carbon and Dr. Corradini have no background in health physics or medicine, and taught nuclear reactor engineering. Like business page columnists or nuclear industry investors, they know that the strengthening of radiation protection standards and strictly enforcing current anti-pollution laws will cost the nuclear industry hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars. So for decades these vested interests have worked to weaken the regulations using the nonsense that a little radiation exposure won’t hurt you, and may even help.

The National Academy’s BEIR VII report, at page 315, politely refutes the hormesis humbug:

“The possibility that low doses of radiation may have beneficial effects (a phenomenon often referred to as ‘hormesis’) has been the subject of considerable debate. Evidence for hormetic effects was reviewed, with emphasis on material published since the 1990 BEIR-V study on the health effects of exposure to low levels of ionizing radiation. … [T]he preponderance of available experimental information does not support the contention that low levels of ionizing radiation have a beneficial effect.” [Emphasis added]

The late Herbert L. Abrams was chairman of radiology at Harvard Medical School and a member of the National Academy’s committee that produced BIER VII. He said when it was published, “There appears to be no threshold below which exposure can be viewed as harmless.” So when deciding about radiation, choose your experts wisely. Do you want health advice from medical doctors or reactor engineers?

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High-Risk, Highly Radioactive Liquid Canadian Waste Bumbles into South Carolina

Partial Failure of Radiation Shielding

Summer Quarterly 2017

The first unprecedented and controversial shipment of high-risk, highly radioactive liquid waste from Canada arrived at the Savannah River Site (SRS), according to the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DNFSB). The handling of the first armed convoy faced problems at SRS due to inadequacies in a container designed to shield workers from radiation.

A DNFSB report found that, “After loading …, radiological protection (RP) [personnel] identified an unexpected hotspot on the side of the pig indicating that the pig was not providing adequate radiological shielding. RP labeled the hotspot before H-Canyon personnel relocated the pig so the hotspot would be facing the wall. H-Canyon personnel did not identify any similar issues on the other pigs and are planning to use the one spare ‘pig’ for future evolutions,” ‘pig’ being an in-house term for the outer hauling container.

A truck and a container like the one used in an unprecedented high-risk experimental shipment of high-level radioactive waste in liquid form from Chalk River, Ontario to Savannah River, South Carolina.

 

In response to the report of faulty shielding of workers from radiation exposure, SRS Watch filed a Freedom of Information Act request for more information.

The waste is from medical isotope production at Chalk River National Labs in Ontario, and contains a host of highly radioactive fission products. Once processed to remove uranium in the 61-year-old “H-Canyon” complex, newly resulting waste is to be dumped into nearly antique waste tanks at SRS. The Canadian liquid waste consists of about 6,000 gallons stored in the so-called Fissile Solution Storage Tank at Chalk River, and is to be shipped using up to 150 overland transports via unspecified routes from Canada to SRS.

The US Energy Department kept this first shipment secret, as well as the radioactive hotspot that was discovered on the shipping cask, but watchdog groups alerted the press and public.

In February this year, environmental groups including SRS Watch, Beyond Nuclear and the Sierra Club lost a federal lawsuit urging DOE to prepare a full Environmental Impact Statement on the shipments. The court found no need for an in-depth analysis of transport risks, impacts of processing and disposal at SRS, or alternative methods of managing the waste in Canada. The groups argue that doing the “downblending” of the highly enriched uranium in the liquid waste in Canada, and then solidifying it there, is the best option from nuclear non-proliferation and environmental perspectives.

This government-backed downblending option has been proven viable with the processing of similar liquid nuclear waste in Indonesia.

“For both non-proliferation and environmental reasons, the best option remains management of this liquid high-level waste in Canada,” said Tom Clements, director of SRS Watch, an independent oversight group. “The unprecedented and unjustified import of the highly radioactive liquid waste from Canada to SRS will only place an additional burden on aging SRS waste tanks and slow down the urgent removal of waste from those tanks.”

“The incident with the handling of the Canadian waste on its arrival at SRS gives the … team a black eye for flubbing the very first shipment after years of preparation,” Clement said.

—Augusta Chronicle, May 15; and Savannah River Site Watch, May 16, 2017; NIRS. —JL

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Fukushima’s Radiation Will Poison Food “for Decades,” Study Finds

Three of the six reactors at Japan’s Fukushima-Daiichi complex were wrecked in March 2011 by an earthquake and tsunami. The destruction of emergency electric generators caused a “station blackout” which halted cooling water intake and circulation. Super-heated, out-of-control uranium fuel in reactors 1, 2, and 3 then boiled off cooling water, and some 300 tons of fuel “melted” and burned through the reactors’ core vessels, gouging so deep into underground sections of the structure that to this day operators aren’t sure where it is. Several explosions in reactor buildings and uncovered fuel rods caused the spewing of huge quantities of radioactive materials to the atmosphere, and the worst radioactive contamination of the Pacific Ocean ever recorded. Fukushima amounts to Whole-Earth poisoning.

Now, researchers say, radioactive isotopes that were spread across Japan (and beyond) by the meltdowns will continue to contaminate the food supply for a very long time.

According to a new study that focused on “radiocaesium” — as the British call cesium-134 and cesium-137 — “food in japan will be contaminated by low-level radioactivity for decades.” The official university announcement of this study neglected to specify that Fukushima’s cesium will persist in the food chain for thirty decades. It takes 10 radioactive half-lives for cesium-137 to decay to barium, and its half-life is about 30 years, so C-137 stays in the environment for roughly 300 years.

The study’s authors, Professor Jim Smith, of the University of Portsmouth, southwest of London, and Dr. Keiko Tagami, from the Japanese National Institute of Radiological Sciences, report that cesium-caused “radiation doses in the average diet in the Fukushima region are very low and do not present a significant health risk now or in the future.”

This phraseology deliberately conveys a sense of security — but a false one. Asserting that low doses of radiation pose no “significant” health risk sounds reassuring, but an equally factual framing of precisely the same finding is that small amounts of cesium in food pose a slightly increased risk of causing cancer.

This fact was acknowledged by Prof. Smith in the June 14 University of Portsmouth media advisory that announced his food contamination study, which was published in Science of the Total Environment. Because of above-ground atom bomb testing, Prof. Smith said, “Radioactive elements such as caesium-137, strontium-90 and carbon-14 contaminated the global environment, potentially causing hundreds of thousands of unseen cancer deaths.”

No less an authority than the late John Gofman, MD, Ph.D., one of the first scientists to produce plutonium, and Professor Emeritus of molecular and cell biology at the University of California, spent 50 years warning about the threat posed by low doses of radiation. In May 1999, Gofman wrote, “By any reasonable standard of biomedical proof, there is no safe dose, which means that just one decaying radioactive atom can produce permanent mutation in a cell’s genetic molecules. My own work showed this in 1990 for X rays, gamma rays, and beta particles.”

The Fukushima-borne cesium in Japan’s food supply, and in the food-web of the entire Pacific Ocean, emits both beta and gamma radiation. Unfortunately, it will bio-accumulate and bio-concentrate for 300 years, potentially causing, as Dr. Gofman if not Dr. Smith might say, hundreds of thousands of unseen cancer deaths. — John LaForge 

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Government “Low-balls” Likelihood and Radiation Effects of Reactor Waste Fuel Fires — Study

A radiation disaster, worse than the 2011 Fukushima-Daiichi catastrophe in Japan, could hit the United States because of ignored risks, according to a startling new study from Princeton University. The US Nuclear Regulatory Agency (NRC) has greatly underestimated the risk of major radiation releases from a reactor waste fuel fire. Such reactor fuel fire could erupt in the event of a “station blackout”—the loss of off-site and emergency electric power—and the consequent boiling off of cooling water in waste fuel pools.

The wrecked waste fuel pool at Japan’s Fukushima-Daiichi reactor No. 3, pictured in March 2013, two years after hydrogen explosions destroyed its outer shell. 

Frank von Hipple, a nuclear security expert at Princeton, and the historian Michael Schoeppner, are the study’s coauthors. The dispersed radioactive contamination from such a fire “would be an unprecedented peacetime catastrophe,” the authors conclude in their paper.

Von Hipple and Schoeppner argue that the NRC’s gross minimization of risk is the result of corporate and political interference. “The NRC has been pressured by the nuclear industry, directly, and through Congress, to low-ball the potential consequences of a fire because of concerns that increased costs could result in shutting down more nuclear power plants,” von Hipple told Science Daily. “We’re talking about trillion-dollar consequences,” he said.

Waste uranium fuel rods, often called “spent fuel,” are kept in cooling pools near reactors for several years. Although still very hot, they can then be moved into so-called “dry cask” storage. While nuclear reactors themselves have emergency, back-up generators to circulate cooling water inside the “reactor core” (these generators were wrecked at Fukushima), US waste fuel pools do not have back-up, emergency  power. The pools are especially vulnerable to station blackouts.

Cooling pool water is normally pumped from a nearby lake, river or sea, and must constantly circulate and cover the waste fuel, which is the hottest and most radioactive material in the commercial nuclear industry. (Waste fuel from Navy propulsion reactors is reportedly more deadly.) Any loss of on-site electric power—like happened at Fukushima—can stop cooling water circulation, causing the water to boil away, and expose the fuel rods. Such loss of coolant can ignite a fuel fire and cause catastrophic amounts of radiation to be released.

Waste Fuel Fire Barely Avoided in Fukushima

 The world watched dreadfully in March 2011 as the station blackout at Fukushima-Daiichi threatened to cause this sort of fuel fire. The earthquake and tsunami cut off all cooling water-pumping and circulation. At a congressional hearing March 16, 2011, six days into the triple meltdowns, the head of the NRC, Gregory Jaczko, said in a Congressional hearing in Washington that all the water was gone from one of Fukushima’s waste fuel pools. Although Jaczko was mistaken, the nightmare was possible, likely even, and observers counted the hours until cooling water boiled off and a fuel fire would ignite.

An in-tact cooling pool in Japan, with one “assembly” of waste fuel rods being moved in the 20-foot covering of water which keeps the hot irradiated uranium from catching fire.

The NRC has estimated, for example, that a major waste fuel pool fire at the Peach Bottom station in Pennsylvania would force the evacuation of 3.46 million people from 12,000 square miles, reports Richard Stone writing in Science magazine May 24. But the Princeton researchers, who say they used a better computer modeling system, estimate that such a disaster would force 18 million people to evacuate from the surrounding 39,000 square miles.

Von Hipple’s and Schoeppner’s report followed, by only one week, a study from the US National Academies of Sciences that urges the United States to make improvements at its waste fuel pools. The NAS’ study recommends that the NRC and reactor operators upgrade monitoring of the waste pools—most do not even have a waste pool water-level monitor in the operator control rooms!—and improve the means of topping up water levels during an accident.

Another way to reduce the risk of waste fuel fires is to hurry the transfer of fuel from the cooling pools to dry casks. “As recently as 2013, the NRC concluded that the projected benefits do not justify the roughly $4 billion cost of a wholesale transfer. But the national academies’ study concludes that the benefits of expedited transfer to dry casks are five-fold greater than NRC has calculated,” Stone reported in Science.

The paper, “Nuclear safety regulation in the post-Fukushima era,” was published May 26 in Science. —John LaForge

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Nuclear Whack-a-Mole Brings Canadian Rad Waste to the US

Confronting radioactive waste seems like a Whack-a-Mole game. The nuclear industry pops up with a new dumping or dispersal scheme just when the opposition slows or halts the last one.

After millions of citizens pushed Canada’s Environment Minister to question and delay plans for an underground radiation dump right next to Lake Huron (this fight is not over yet), the Canadian companies UniTech and PermaFix now make news with plans to ship radioactive waste from Canada to the United States. UniTech wants to truck ten-thousand tons of it across the border using five different border crossings.

Ten-thousand tons is a lot of material; one equivalent is a Navy Heavy Cruiser which is two football fields long, four stories high, and 60 feet wide. Cut up into trailer-sized chunks, think of thousands of truckloads of dirty bombs moving throughout the country around lakes and rivers, through cities and towns, and over bridges for years and years. Can you say Homeland Security?

Both UniTech and PermaFix have applied to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) for licenses to “export” and “import” thousands of truckloads of “radioactive-contaminated tools, metals and other solid materials.” The vagueness of the applications, with nondescript references to “tools,” “metals,” “other solid materials,” and the curious mention of “incremental amounts of special nuclear material”– is only partly cleared up by a list of 48 different radio-isotopes that will contaminate the “materials.”

These so-called “low-level” wastes are not benign. The allowed “special” materials will include plutonium, strontium, cobalt-60, americium, and neptunium, which are some of the deadliest and most long-lasting poisons on Earth and the worst to come from nuclear power. These and the other 43 identified poisons give off radioactive alpha particles, beta particles, or gamma rays — or some combination — to one degree or another. It’s this “radiation” that makes the waste deadly, because exposure or inhaling or ingesting it can cause heart disease, immune system dysfunction, cancers and leukemias. The effects are cumulative too, so adding more radiation to the exposures we’ve already had shortens our lives even more.

UniTech has already won an NRC “export” license allowing it to ship wastes into the US. (The plan to ship some of it back across the border to Canada is still being contested with the NRC and may end up in court.) Some of UniTech’s waste will be trucked to waste-handling factories in Tennessee, Illinois, and Pennsylvania for “processing.” The bulk of the waste is coming from Canadian nuclear reactors and laboratories.

Shuffle board, bumper cars, demolition derby: pick a metaphor

The proposed US “processing” is, according to UniTech’s license, for: “…segregation, survey, decontamination, unrestricted release, beneficial reuse.” Kay Cumbow, Secretary of the Great Lakes Environmental Alliance, warns that “unrestricted release” means the waste can be dumped in ordinary municipal landfills, and “beneficial reuse” means that contaminated metals can be used in regular smelters like ordinary recycling and ultimately used in consumer products like jungle gyms, frypans, nails and silverware.

This gigantic shell game warrants deeper investigation because waste resulting from the processing and declared “un-usuable” is to be shipped back into Canada, adding another lengthy round of handling and transport risks.

If all this sounds absolutely cray-cray, you may be a precautionary or a prudent person. Dr. Gordon Edwards, President of the Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility, says that the processing can be done in Canada, so there is no need for the program at all. There must be a substantial financial interest involved in order to voluntarily compound the United States’ own waste containment dilemmas by adding thousands of additional risks.

Pierre Sadik, of US Public Interest Research Group has pointed out that the Department of Energy and the nuclear industry try to create the impression that the transport of radioactive waste has been entirely safe. But this is bunk. A 1996 report by the State of Nevada documented 72 rad waste transport accidents in the US over 50 years.

Sadik reported that four accidents involved radioactive material contamination beyond the vehicle; four involved contamination confined to the vehicle; 13 involved traffic accidents with no release or contamination; 49 involved accidental container surface contamination. The waste’s radiation can escape through container leaks, poor shielding, or during truck crashes or fires,

Thanks to the unsung effort of watchdogs like Diane D’Arrigo and May Olson of Nuclear Information and Resource Service, US citizens have successfully rejected previous attempts to deregulate rad waste and allow it into the scrap metal business. Federal attempts to declare some radioactive waste “below regulatory concern” have repeatedly been halted as completely unacceptable. But the Whack-a-Mole game won’t let up. –– John LaForge

 

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