[ RadSafe ] [Nuclear News] Dr. John Gofman, 88; warned of radiation risks (additional news coverage)

[Sandy Perle]

Index:  

Dr. John Gofman, 88; warned of radiation risks
SC Attorney general wants tougher standards for nuclear waste site
DU threatens thousands of lives in Basra; government turns blind eye 
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Dr. John Gofman, 88; warned of radiation risks

Los Angeles Times - Aug 27 - Dr. John W. Gofman, the medical 
physicist whose fight for what he considered scientific honesty in 
understanding the health effects of ionizing radiation made him a 
pariah to the nuclear power industry and the U.S. government, died of 
heart failure Aug. 15 at his home in San Francisco. He was 88.

Often called the father of the antinuclear movement, Gofman and his 
colleague at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Arthur R. 
Tamplin, developed data in 1969 showing that the risk from low doses 
of radiation was 20 times higher than the government said it was. 
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FOR THE RECORD:
An earlier version of this article said critics of nuclear technology 
say the risks have been ignored by an electric power industry that 
sees nuclear energy as a pollution-free alternative to nuclear fuels. 
As this version notes, proponents see nuclear energy as an 
alternative to fossil fuels. 
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Their publication of the data, despite strong efforts to censor it, 
led them to lose virtually all of their research funding and, 
eventually, their positions at the government laboratory. Most of 
their conclusions have subsequently been validated, but critics say 
the risks have been ignored by an electric power industry that sees 
nuclear energy as a pollution-free alternative to fossil fuels and by 
a medical industry that continues to use much larger amounts of 
radiation for medical tests than are required.

"He always stood up for the integrity of science," said Charles 
Weiner, professor emeritus of the history of science at the 
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "He was really an original 
voice" in the debate over the risks of nuclear power, "someone who 
was an insider in nuclear weapons production, who was very highly 
regarded by leaders in the field . . . and who brought credential, 
credibility and authority."

Until his death, Gofman's position continued to be that there is no 
safe level of exposure to ionizing radiation.

"Licensing a nuclear power plant is, in my view, licensing random 
premeditated murder," Gofman said in the 1982 book "Nuclear 
Witnesses: Insiders Speak Out."

"First of all, when you license a plant, you know what you are doing -
- so it's premeditated. You can't say, 'I didn't know.' Second, the 
evidence on radiation-producing cancer is beyond doubt. . . . It's 
not a question anymore: Radiation produces cancer, and the evidence 
is good all the way down to the lowest doses."

Gofman and Tamplin's data about the health effects of radiation -- 
and their revelations about the Atomic Energy Commission's attempts 
to silence them -- played a large role in the demise of that 
organization in 1974. The AEC was divided into two organizations: the 
Energy Research and Development Administration, whose goal was to 
promote the development of atomic energy, and the Nuclear Regulatory 
Commission, which was supposed to monitor the safety of the nuclear 
industry.

Gofman argued, however, that the changes were merely cosmetic and 
that the NRC continued to promote nuclear power to the detriment of 
the public at large.

In 1971, he helped found the Committee for Nuclear Responsibility, a 
San Francisco-based advocacy group that studies the health effects of 
ionizing radiation. During that decade, he and others unsuccessfully 
argued for a five-year moratorium on the construction of new nuclear 
power plants, arguing that the generation of massive quantities of 
radioactive waste made them a major health risk.

The 1979 accident at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania and the 1986 
Chernobyl meltdown in the Soviet Union proved to be much more 
powerful arguments against the industry, however, and construction of 
new facilities slowed dramatically. Although nuclear power today 
accounts for 20% of the electric power generated in the United 
States, the last new nuclear power plant to be completed was the 
Watts Bar 1 plant in Tennessee, which came online in 1997.

More recently, he has argued forcefully that radiation is overused in 
medicine, both for diagnosis and treatment, without a full 
consideration of the risks. He noted that some hospitals used as much 
as 100 times the required radiation for imaging. He also argued that 
CT scans were used too often when less dangerous approaches were 
available.

Many of Gofman's colleagues viewed his ultimate opposition to nuclear 
power as a long, strange journey for a scientist who had been 
intimately associated with the creation of the industry.

John William Gofman was born Sept. 21, 1918, in Cleveland, the son of 
Russian immigrants. After finishing high school during the Great 
Depression, he attended nearby Oberlin College and, despite the fact 
that admissions were formally closed, he talked his way in and 
wangled a scholarship.

After graduating, he enrolled in medical school at Cleveland's 
Western Reserve University. After a year, however, he took a leave of 
absence and enrolled in the chemistry program at UC Berkeley.

Upon his arrival there, Dean Gilbert Newton Lewis told Gofman that he 
wanted him to begin his research project "in the next week or two." 
After talking to several professors, he met with future Nobel 
laureate Glenn Seaborg, who suggested that he might examine whether 
uranium-233 could exist in nature.

Intrigued, Gofman signed on, and he and his colleagues produced four 
one-millionths of a gram of the isotope in the Berkeley cyclotron and 
proved that it would fission spontaneously.

He was also the co-discoverer of protactinium-232, uranium-232 and 
protactinium-233 during his graduate student years.

As a postdoctoral fellow at Berkeley, he was working on ways to 
isolate plutonium from uranium that had been bombarded with neutrons. 
Although the Manhattan Project was then building a massive plant in 
the Pacific Northwest to produce plutonium, at that time there was 
less than a quarter of a milligram of it in existence.

"There was so little plutonium that our research team had never even 
seen the element," he said later.

But in 1942, physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, who headed the 
Manhattan Project, came to Gofman and told him they needed half a 
milligram of plutonium immediately for crucial experiments that would 
determine the future direction of the project.

Gofman and his colleagues packed a ton of uranyl nitrate around the 
Berkeley cyclotron and irradiated it with neutrons day and night for 
six weeks. Then, working with 10-pound batches of the uranium, the 
team spent three weeks working around the clock to isolate half a 
cubic centimeter of liquid containing 1.2 milligrams of plutonium -- 
twice as much as they had expected.

Despite his later antinuclear stance, Gofman said, he had no guilt 
about his role in the development of the atomic bomb, citing the 
"human monstrosity" of Germany's Nazi regime.

After his work on plutonium was completed, Gofman returned to medical 
school at UC San Francisco. He received his medical degree in 1946.

He had some thoughts about the then-unknown links between hardening 
of the arteries and cholesterol in the bloodstream and decided to 
study lipoproteins, which are large molecules consisting of proteins 
tied to fats.

"I didn't want to work on anything less than a big medical problem," 
he said.

In his studies, he used an ultracentrifuge, a device that spun a 
solution at high speeds to produce layers of components of different 
molecular weights. But, like other researchers, he found that the 
lipoproteins could not be resolved into distinct layers -- a finding 
that led many researchers to speculate they were breaking down during 
the process.

Gofman found that adding salt to the solution would cause the 
lipoproteins to float and separate from the other proteins. "As a 
result of this discovery, we were able to open up a manner of looking 
at molecules no one even knew had existed [and] discover a whole 
series of new lipoproteins," he said.

He demonstrated the existence of high-density and low-density 
lipoproteins and showed their roles in the development of 
atherosclerosis.

His work was branded "the Gofman heresy." But in May of this year, 
the Journal of Clinical Lipidology reprinted his key paper and called 
it "an historically important present of concepts that underpin our 
field."

The approach has since been widely used throughout heart disease 
research and won him a share of the 1972 Stouffer Prize, which was 
then the highest American award in heart disease research.

After earning his M.D., he took teaching positions at both Berkeley 
and UC San Francisco.

By 1957, he decided he had had enough of heart disease research. "I'm 
not very good at dotting I's and crossing Ts," he said. "If it's not 
something really new and unknown, it's not something I want to do."

He shifted his research to study trace elements in human 
biochemistry. But in 1962 he got a call from John Foster, director of 
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, inviting him to set up a 
radiation biology laboratory there. With a budget of $3 million a 
year, he began studying potential hazards of radiation, but 
immediately began butting heads with Washington bureaucrats. He 
objected vehemently to a new program called Project Plowshare, which 
would use nuclear weapons for peaceful purposes. The AEC proposed 
building a new sea-level Panama Canal through Nicaragua, for example, 
by using 315 megatons of hydrogen bombs to blast out the soil. ,

The project was eventually halted by the nuclear test ban treaty, 
which forbade above-ground nuclear explosions.

He had aroused a great deal of enmity in Washington and by the early 
1970s had lost virtually all of his research grants. He retired 
formally in 1973 and spent the rest of his career writing books about 
the risks of medical radiation and continuing his research on nuclear 
hazards.

Gofman's wife, Dr. Helen Fahl Gofman, a pediatrician, died in 2004. 
He is survived by a son, Dr. John D. Gofman, an ophthalmologist, of 
Bellevue, Wash.
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SC Attorney general wants tougher standards for nuclear waste site
 
COLUMBIA, SC (AP) - Attorney General Henry McMaster is pressing for 
tougher groundwater monitoring standards at one of the nation's few 
low level nuclear waste facilities.

McMaster met Monday with the Department of Health and Environmental 
Control. He will meet later this week with Chem Nuclear, which 
operates the Barnwell County landfill under a 99-year-lease.

McMaster says the site has always been regulated using Nuclear 
Regulatory Commission standards. He says it should have to comply 
with the Environmental Protection Agency's standards for safe 
drinking water. He thinks the agency may come to the same conclusion.

DHEC spokesman Thom Berry says he can't confirm that. DHEC says no 
one lives directly in the path of the radioactive pollution from the 
landfill and tritium hasn't tainted drinking wells.

Chem Nuclear has been trying to reduce leaks by closing landfill 
trenches to keep rainwater out.
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Depleted uranium threatens thousands of lives in Basra; government 
turns blind eye 

2007-08-27 | Basra, Aug 27, (VOI) (UN Observer) - Radiation levels in 
selected regions of Iraq's southern province of Basra warn of 
imminent danger to thousands of local residents who might be more 
prone to cancer and birth deformities, according to Khajak Vartanian, 
an environmental radiation measurement specialist from the province.
"Basra has experienced an unprecedented rise in solid cancer cases 
during the past four years: 62 cases per 100,000 persons compared to 
35 in 1997", Vartanian explained.

Exposure to military depleted uranium (DU) pollution has not only 
increased solid cancer cases in the province, but caused severe birth 
deformities in newborn babies, he added. "Other cases of renal 
failure, skin disease, allergy, infertility and recurrent 
miscarriages were also attributed to DU pollution", he indicated, 
adding that most of the reported cases were close to the contaminated 
sites.

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Sander C. Perle
President
Global Dosimetry Solutions, Inc.
2652 McGaw Avenue
Irvine, CA 92614 

Tel: (949) 296-2306 / (888) 437-1714  Extension 2306
Fax:(949) 296-1144

E-Mail: sperle at dosimetry.com
E-Mail: sandyfl at cox.net 

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