By Chris Busby

CounterPunch, March 6, 2020

Nukewatch Quarterly Summer 2020

Here’s a good one. In 2011, at the time of the tsunami and the Fukushima triple reactor meltdowns and explosions, the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan was about 60 miles off the coast of Japan. The ship was directed to lend assistance in what was called Operation Tomodachi (friendship)—to provide assistance. What no one on board was told was that the reactors had exploded and a plume of highly radioactive material was blowing east from the site into the path of the vessel. Of course, when it was doused, all the radiation monitors on the carrier started screaming, and returning planes and helicopters that had flown support sorties were contaminated.

In 2014, I was engaged by some California attorneys to advise them in a law suit brought against Japan’s Tokyo Electric Power Co. and the US against reactor builder General Electric on behalf of sailors who served on the carrier. A significant number of the Ronald Reagan crew was reporting a wide range of weird illnesses including cancers, all of which they attributed to their service-related radiation exposure. Between 2014 and now, the court arguments were all about procedure, and about whether the case should be heard in Japan or in the vessel’s home port of San Diego, California. There was a lot of publicity[1]. Recently, a California judge decided that the case had to be heard in Japan. This is grossly unjust since Japanese and US law differs, and the sailors cannot afford to go to Japan or to hire Japanese lawyers, but not the focus of this report.

In 2014, following all the publicity about the cancers, a number of US Senators and others asked pertinent questions, and the Navy had to do something to answer the accusations that Fukushima radiation was killing those who sailed on Operation Tomodachi. It panicked. A big report was prepared by the US Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA), entitled: “Final Report to the Congressional Defense Committees in Response to the Joint Explanatory Statement Accompanying the Department of Defense Appropriations Act,” 2014, page 90, “Radiation Exposure”[2]. Never use one word when ten will do.

This report rambled on about how low the Fukushima doses were, how everyone acted wonderfully, and how all the radioactivity was rapidly cleaned up. The “dose reconstruction” showed that no one got more than a fraction of the “natural background” dose, and so forth. (The methodology for the dose reconstruction has since disappeared from the link given in the report.) But to prove that there were no excess cancers on the Ronald Reagan, the Navy took a step too far. It reported the results of its own epidemiological study which it carried out on the Ronald Reagan sailors. This study compared the illness yield (including cancers) of the 4,843 Ronald Reagan sailors with a matched control group of 65,269 sailors on US Navy nuclear-powered ships that were not anywhere near Fukushima. The period of analysis was from 2011 to 2013, about 3 years. This showed that there were more cancers in the control group over that period. The idea clearly was to knock on the head any suggestion that the radiation from Fukushima was the cause of the excess cancers and other illnesses that formed the basis of the court case. And this it apparently did.

The Navy’s move was to compare the matched “unexposed” control group with the Ronald Reagan group. There were 30% more cancers in the control group after adjusting for age. But what I did was compare the nuclear navy-wide control group with the national population, using data on cancer rates by age group from the SEER database[3]. The results show an astonishing 9.2-fold excess of cancer incidence in the sailors on nuclear-powered vessels. There were 121 cancers predicted on the basis of the national rates, and 1,119 reported by the DTRA study. For sailors aboard the Reagan, the excess cancer rate was about 6-fold, with 46 reported and 7.76 expected. Now this result is astonishing. I wrote my study for Cancer Investigation, a good scientific peer-reviewed journal, and it was published Feb. 25, 2020. You can find it on academia.edu[4].

What I discuss in the paper to explain the study’s results is that radiation protection legislation is wildly incorrect when dealing with internal contamination from radionuclides. The legal limits in the US and the West are based on the comparison of cancers in those exposed to acute external gamma ray doses to the Japanese A-Bomb survivors and cannot apply to internal exposures to substances which target DNA (uranium, strontium-90) or which provide huge local doses of ionization to some living cells but nothing at all to others (uranium particles, reactor discharge particles).

This study’s results are a big deal. Nine times the expected rates? What are they going to do? It’s the Navy’s own data that it stupidly released, and it shows that their own sailors on their vaunted nuclear-powered Navy ships are dying from cancer. You can bet the telephone lines are hot, and that we won’t see any coverage of this in the papers or on the tele. But the sailors themselves and the veterans? What will they think when they find this online but not reported?

Studies of nuclear workers have been the new battleground for this chess game since it became apparent in the last few years that the Japanese A-Bomb studies were dishonestly manipulated and ignored internal exposures to fallout and rainout [5]. We have seen a number of attempts to kill the argument about low-dose radiation and health using nuclear worker studies. There was the Lancet publication in 2015 [6]. There was the disgraceful Royal Society publication last year. The late Alexei Yablokov and I wrote to the Lancet [7] asking to point out in the journal that the Lancet’s articles reassuring everyone that the science of radiation risk was secure were written by nuclear industry scientists and were unreliable. The Lancet refused. I wrote to the Royal Society. It also refused to publish anything.

Nuclear workers work outside at a nuclear site where the discharges get dispersed. Nuclear Navy sailors work in a tin can that also houses the reactors. Nuclear worker studies are based on data that is provided by the nuclear industry to show there are no cancers. The Navy’s DTRA study had to show higher overall cancer rates in order to swamp the numbers of cancers among sailors on board the Ronald Reagan. But to do this, and to extend the chess analogy, the Navy brought out its Queen—its cancer statistics—and it was taken.

Thankfully, this story shows that regarding internal radiation exposure, there are two “last frontiers”: the scientific peer-review literature, and the courts. I am also helping represent the widow of a UK nuclear Navy submariner who was a reactor-servicing technician and who died from cancer. Let’s see what the Scottish courts makes of my paper. Read it yourself and have a laugh. If you are a Navy sailor on a nuclear-powered ship, be very frightened. Write to your Senator. Kick up a fuss.

—Professor Chris Busby is the chief scientific advisor of the Low Level Radiation Campaign.

Notes

[1] https://www.courthousenews.com/us-sailors-face-grim-diagnoses-after-fukushima-mission/

[2] Radiation Exposure Report — Health.mil www.health.mil › Reference-Center › Reports › 2014/06/19 › Radiation Exposure Report

[3] https://seer.cancer.gov/data/

[4] Cancer Investigation, Vol. 38, Issue 3; https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/07357907.2020.1731526?journalCode=icnv20

[5] https://www.genetics.org/content/204/4/1627

[6] https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2017.1070

[7] https://independentwho.org/en/our-demands-to-who/

Nukewatch Winter Quarterly 2019-2020

By Cindy Folkers

Hundreds of thousands of people—athletes, officials, media, and spectators—will flood into Japan for the 2020 Olympics. But radiation exposure dangers from the Fukushima nuclear catastrophe have not ended since the meltdowns and explosions spread radioactive contamination over large areas reaching down to Tokyo and beyond. Soon after the start of the meltdowns in 2011, experts began warning of exposure to radioactive micro-particles or “hot particles”—a type of particle that poses a danger unaccounted for by regulatory agencies. In order to understand the special danger posed by these particles at the Olympics and beyond, we must first understand the current state of radiation exposure standards.

Hot Particles Don’t Fit Current Exposure Models

For decades, protection from radiation exposure has been based on understanding how doses are delivered to the human body. Are the doses high or low? Inside or outside the body? If a dose is internal, which organ is it impacting? Is the dose given all at one time, or over a longer time? Additional consideration should be given to who is receiving the exposure: men, women, children, fetuses—although protection based on age, gender and pregnancy falls short.

The difficulty with hot particles, which can travel great distances, is that they don’t deliver doses in the way experts expect. Current exposure assumptions hold that radionuclides settling in the body, i.e. through inhalation or ingestion, deliver a low dose to surrounding cells where they lodge. But these models are not truly reflecting the damage that is occurring. For instance, precise distribution of many radionuclides within the body eludes experts. And radiation doses delivered inside cells, which may seem low to an entire body, are large doses when just single cells or groupings of cells receive them. Hot particles deliver a much larger dose than what is considered “low.” And once they are inhaled or ingested, they deliver it specifically to the (often unpredictable) area of the body where they lodge.

Hot Particles Make Already Unpredictable Damage Worse

Not only can hot particle doses be unpredictable—so can the damage. Called “stochastic,” damage from radiation exposure may occur at all doses [no matter how small]. The higher the dose is, the greater the chance is that damage will happen. However, the severity of the damage is independent of the dose; that is even low doses of radiation can result in severe consequences. Sometimes these consequences take decades to manifest, but for times of life when fast growth is occurring—such as pregnancy or childhood—the damage may show up in a much shorter time frame.

Since all parts of the human body develop from single cells during pregnancy, the severity of a “radiation hit” during this development can be devastating for mother and child, yet governments and the nuclear industry never consider these exposures as having an official radiation impact. Therefore, NO safe dose CAN exist. Stochastic risk, coupled with the additional unpredictable and unaccounted-for risk from radioactive micro-particles, can lead to impacts that are more dangerous and difficult to quantify with currently used methods.

Olympics 2020 and Beyond

Clearly, as Japan prepares to host the 2020 Olympics, the danger posed by exposure to radioactive micro-particles should be considered, in addition to known and better understood radio-cesium contamination. While most of the radioactive particle dust has settled, it can be easily re-suspended by activities such as digging or running, and by rain, wind, snow, and flooding. Health officials in Japan continually fail to act and stop ongoing radioactive exposures. This lack of governmental action puts all residents of Japan at risk, and also any athletes, spectators and visitors that participate in the Olympics.

Currently, the torch relay is scheduled to begin with a special display of the “Flame of Recovery,” as the torch passes through still-contaminated areas of Fukushima Prefecture. Then, the “Grand Start,” the Japanese leg of the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Torch Relay, will occur at “J. Village,” the former disaster response headquarters used during the initial nuclear meltdowns in 2011. It is 12.4 miles from Fukushima-1 wreckage site, and resides close to acres of radioactive topsoil and other material stored in bags. The bags and the cranes moving them are visible on satellite maps dated 2019. After starting in Fukushima, the torch will travel to all remaining prefectures of Japan. Further, there is indication that J. Village (now called National Training Center) is being retrofitted as a practice area for baseball, softball, and soccer. Games hosted in Fukushima Prefecture aren’t the only exposure concern, as radioisotopes have traveled far from the ruined cores of Fukushima’s reactors. Radionuclides from the meltdowns were found in Tokyo’s metropolitan area as late as 2016 and would increase and decrease, researchers observed, based on rainfall and run-off. One “high activity radioactively-hot dust particle” traveled from Fukushima’s ruined core, to a house in Nagoya, Japan—270 miles away.

In our normal lives, each one of us breathes in a modest amount of dust daily. People are also exposed through contaminated food, ingestion of dusts and soil, or through skin contact. Endurance athletes are at a higher risk, since they often eat much more—and take in more breaths per minute—than an average athlete or a person at rest. And, biologically, due to developing cells, children and pregnant women are at a much higher risk from radiation exposure than men. Many Olympic and Paralympic athletes are of childbearing age or adolescents.

Contamination in Japan has not gone away and neither should our awareness. While most of the athletes, coaches and spectators will leave Japan, the contamination remains, impacting generations of people who will have to contend with this danger for much longer than the eight-plus years they have already been through.

Japan’s government policy of dismissing radiation’s dangers, and normalizing exposure to radioactivity, is part of an attempt to resettle people in areas that would allow an external dose of 2 rem per year. Prior to the Fukushima meltdowns, this level was considered high-risk to the general population. This is not an acceptable level of exposure. The radioactive micro-particles found in areas with even lower background levels indicate a significant risk that Japan and governments around the world who support nuclear technologies are covering up. Merely understanding and quantifying these hot particles is not enough. Governments must protect people from exposure everywhere in the world, not just in Japan. The danger of radioactive micro-particles should be added to a long list of reasons why nuclear technology is not safe and should no longer be used.

Thanks to Arnie and Maggie Gundersen at Fairewinds Energy Education for technical and editorial input.

— Cindy Folkers is on the staff of Beyond Nuclear where she specializes in radiation impacts on health, Congress watch, energy legislation, climate change, and federal subsidies. She handles the group’s administrative operations, and wrote this report for the group’s website.