[ RadSafe ] Salsman warning

Sun Apr 11 17:22:08 CDT 2010

Mike,

    You wrote, " Does anyone know if it has been possible to differentiate between the effect of smoking and alpha exposure in the miners?" This issue is compounded by the fact that smoking has it's own associated alpha exposure, see http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/01/opinion/01proctor.html - Puffing on Polonium.  Polonium 210 is present in both tobacco and as a decay daughter of Uranium; its present in Uranium mines.  I would presume that the most effective means of determining the comparative health effect is to compare lung cancer rates between non-smoker and smokers who are Uranium miners.  I believe that the following articles were written in regards to just such as studies, see http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11007458 - Radon progeny exposure and lung cancer risk among non-smoking uranium miners, and http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19959947 Accounting for smoking in the radon-related lung cancer risk among German uranium miners:
 results of a nested case-control study.  The conclusion of the German study, which as written up in Health Physics was: "This stability of the radon-related lung cancer risks with and without adjustment for smoking suggests that smoking does not act as a major confounder in this study and presumably also not in the cohort study".

   Given the relatively high incidence rate, when compared to non-smokers, of lung cancer among smokers in the general population, its very interesting that the effect of smoking among miner "does not act as a major confounder".  What, if anything, does this say about the potential health effects in the general population from Radon gas exposure at home and at work?  Is the effect enough to warrant remediation of existing building and inclusion of preventative methods in new construction?  I would say based on my anecdotal observations that few building owners or builders give much thought to Radon gas.  A colleague of mine has complained over the years about what he felt were an excess of Radon related articles in the Health Physics Journal.  Our society has placed a great emphasis on quitting smoking because of the adverse health consequences.  Are we missing a potentially greater danger that is silently seeping into our homes?
Roy Herren 

________________________________
From: Mike Quastel <maay100 at bgu.ac.il>
To: ROY HERREN <royherren2005 at yahoo.com>
Cc: radsafe at health.phys.iit.edu
Sent: Sun, April 11, 2010 5:19:02 AM
Subject: Re: [ RadSafe ] Salsman warning

    I recall that when I worked with the radiation protection branch of Health Canada in the 1970’s, we were interested in the health hazard to uranium miners. At that time the problem of radon exposure to the miners was confounded by the fact that they all smoked heavily. Since then I’ve been a nuclear medicine clinician and am not up in the relevant literature. Does anyone know if it has been possible to differentiate between the effect of smoking and alpha exposure in the miners?

On Apr 11, 2010, at 12:36 AM, ROY HERREN wrote:

>  James concern brings to mind a rather infamous incident from the 1970's at a Nuclear facility in Pennsylvania.  If I remember the near Urban myth like details of the story correctly, it seems that at the end of a work shift a worker was found to be contaminated.  After much unsuccessful research over several day as to the work related cause of the contamination, a survey was taken of the worker upon immediate arrival at the work site from his home at the beginning of his shift before he started work.  The worker was found to be contaminated from a source other than work...  What was that source of contamination?  Was it coal fly ash?  No, it was from naturally occurring Radon gas daughter products.  It seems that the worker had weather proofed his home so well that naturally occurring Radon  gas that was released from the soil under his house had built up in the house to a much greater extent that would otherwise naturally occur.
> 
>    My point in bringing up this story is to point out that rather than worrying about Uranium, perhaps our greater concern in regards to environmental radiation sources and emissions should be with the daughter products from Uranium decay.  What was it that Marie Sklodowska Curie discovered in a type of coal called pitchblende?  See  http://www.aip.org/history/curie/resbr2.htm  "She had to treat very large quantities of pitchblende, a ton of which the Curies received as a donation from the Austrian government" and "it took Marie over three years to isolate one tenth of a gram of pure radium chloride".  She received a Nobel prize in Chemistry in 1911 for her discovery of Polonium and Radium.  To this day Physicists in the United States still measure radioactivity in the unit named in her honor, the Curie (Ci), 3.7 X 10^10 disintegrations per second (the rate of decay of 1 gram of Radium).
> 
>    I believe that another posting Dan pointed out that Radon gas is believe to be the main source of Uranium miners lung cancer.  See http://physics.nist.gov/GenInt/Curie/schema.html and  http://physics.nist.gov/GenInt/Curie/Images/uraniumseries.gif
> 
>    In conclusion, I think there are other related issues of greater health concern than coal fly ash.  We have a long social history of tolerance of the coal related issues which has lead to the acceptance of the risk vs. benefit, e.g. long term potential health problems (a valid issue) vs. freezing to death on a long cold winter night.  It isn't a mystery as to why the peoples of cold climates adapted coal as an energy resource.  The mystery, in my humble opinion, is when will we scientifically evolve and move past utilization of this resource?
> 
> Roy Herren
> 
> 
> 
> 
> ________________________________
> From: Doug Huffman <doug.huffman at wildblue.net>
> To: radsafe at health.phys.iit.edu
> Sent: Tue, April 6, 2010 12:41:37 PM
> Subject: Re: [ RadSafe ] Salsman warning
> 
> In re windpower; the avoided cost of electricity here on this isolated
> Island is US$0.06 per KiloWatt-hour, that is the cost of electrical
> power only without the infrastructure costs.  You do the arithmetic.
> 
> As to the rest of your assertions, you are making the assertions, it is
> your burden to prove them but not ours to disprove them.
> 
> On 4/6/2010 14:27, James Salsman wrote:
>> On Tue, Apr 6, 2010 at 11:55 AM, Doug Aitken
>> <jdaitken at sugar-land.oilfield.slb.com>  wrote:
>>> 
>>> You pose a rhetorical question about the suppression of information in the
>>> Health Physics Society literature about the toxicity of uranium.
>> 
>> It is not a rhetorical question.
>> 
>>> And your apparent reason is that you have found multiple documents in other
>>> (medical literature) sources regarding the topic, but only two documents
>>> related to this in the HPS database.
>> 
>> As far as I can tell, there are no documents on the HPS web site which
>> accurately describe the carcinogenicity of uranium consistent with
>> what is reported in any peer reviewed literature reviews of the past
>> four decades.  Can anyone prove me wrong?
>> 
>>> the great leap of illogical
>>> connection between coal ash, the nuclear fuel chain and the use of depleted
>>> uranium as pyrophoric incendiary munitions just emphasizes your agenda....
>> 
>> I wonder what you think my agenda is.  I'm strongly in favor of
>> research reactors and nuclear reactors for medical isotope production,
>> but I don't think nuclear power has ever been as economical as wind
>> power and (pumped storage) hydroelectricity.  I'm strongly opposed to
>> uranyl contamination, whether it is from coal fly ash, depleted
>> uranium munitions, or is naturally occurring.  Those are not radical
>> viewpoints.  In fact, it's possible that individually, they all may be
>> majority viewpoints.  Is there any evidence they are not?
>> 
>> Is it possible that some in the HPS have become so accustomed to
>> defending the use of pyrophoric depleted uranium munitions that they
>> aren't willing or able to articulate the extent to which coal ash
>> presents a more serious uranium contamination problem than nuclear
>> reactor waste?
>> 
>> Sincerely,
>> James Salsman
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