Re: Anti-radiation article -Thoughts please!

1. Colorado: Due to high altitude and natural deposits of uranium, people who live in Colorado generally receive about 2.25 mSv per year (pages 87 and 88 Radioactivity in the Environment, Ronald L. Kathren, Harwood Academic Publishers, 1984). This compares to a range of from 0.75 to 1.10 mSv per year for most of the rest of the US population. Yet the cancer rate for the area around the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons facility is lower (90% of the US norm) than for the rest of the US ( Table 1-A.9, Cancer in Populations LIving Near Nuclear Facilities, Seymour Jablon, Zdenek Hrubec, John D. Boice, Jr., and B. J. Stone, US National Institutes of Health, July, 1990). This Rocky Flats area includes exposure to plutonium, as well as the natural sources. Note: The NIH study was done at the request of anti-nuke U. S. Senator Teddy Kennedy in an effort to demonstrate that there was a hazard similar to that described in the article. No such hazard was identified by the study. However anti-nukes have dishonestly used isolated findings from the study to falsely claim that some counties had higher cancer rates due to nuclear facilites. They did this by highlighting counties with cancer rates slightly higher than the norm, which would be expected due to normal statistical variations, and ignoring counties with cancer rates lower than the norm.

2. Kerala, India: "There are, however, several locations in the world where very high thorium and thorium daughter concentrations have been noted, giving rise to very high external natural radiation fields." (pages 65 and 66, Kathren) "These include the monazite sand areas of the Brazilian coast and the State of Kerala in India, and an area in the Soviet Union. Monazite is an insoluble rare earth mineral composed largely of the phosphates of cerium, lanthanum, and thorium. Monazite sands contain varying amounts of thorium, usually on the order of 10 per cent. The external dose rates associated with these sands are manyfold higher than normal; measurements in the monazite sand regions reveal levels up to several mrad/h (several tens of microGy/h), in sharp contrast to the approximately ten microrad per hour usually associated with natural terrestrial background. People living in these regions thus typically receive a background dose of several rads (several tens of milligrays) per year. Despite this high dose, which in many cases exceeds the maximum permissable levels for occupational exposure, no untoward effects have been documented in residents of the monazite sand areas." Information on studies of the Kerala population may be found in the RADSAFE Archives. Dr. Gofman has been aware of this exposure for about 30 years and at one time claimed that there had been no health effects observed because no one had looked for any. His current position should be available on his website. Kerala has recently become the darling of some "progressive" thinkers because the population is considered healtier and wealthier than the norm for India (eg, see Earth in the Balance, by Al Gore). They do not appear to be aware of the radiation levels. Remember that a woman is born with her eggs, so people who live in Kerala have been exposed for years before their birth.

4. Worker Exposure to Plutonium. A continuing detailed study of 26 workers exposed to plutonium (Fifty Years of Plutonium Exposure to the Manhatten Project Plutonium Workers: an Update, Geroge L. Voelz, James N. P. Lawrence, and Emily R. Johnson, Health Physics, 73(4):611-619; 1997) found that: "Their effective doses range from 0.1 to 7.2 Sv with a median value of 1.25 Sv. As of the end of 1994, 7 individuals have died compared with an expected 16 deaths based on mortality rates of U.S. white males in the general population. The standardized mortality ratio (SMR) is 0.43. When compared with 876 unexposed Los Alamos worker's of the same period, the plutonium worker's mortality rate was also not elevated (SMR = 0.77). The 19 living persons have diseases and physical changes characteristic of a male population with a median age of 72 y (range = 69 to 86 y). Eight of the twenty-six workers have been diagnosed as having one or more cancers, which is within the expected range. The underlying cause of death in three of the seven deceased persons was from cancer, namely cancer of prostate, lung, and bone. Mortality from all cancers was not statistically elevated."

The 70-year exposure period would be difficult to achieve without substantial individual effort, since no plants are expected to operate more than 50 years. That operational period would include many months of outages, so to maintain the 70-year exposure the individual would have to move near an operating plant while the "home" plant was shutdown. In addition, there have been few cases where any radiation dose above normal background has been detected near a nuclear plant.