From the washinton times

["Aaron Oakley" <aoakley@receptor.pharm.uwa.edu.au>]

Rachel Carson's curse

     If federal regulators announced tomorrow that airplane travel were a
cancer risk and that they would restrict it accordingly, lawmakers would
have them in front of congressional hearings faster than one could say
"frequent flyer." Just because airline passengers are exposed to more solar
radiation than their Earth-bound counterparts, most would agree, the feds
shouldn't consider plane trips a cause of cancer. But officials at the
Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) obsess about similarly minute health
"hazards" all the time, and they do so in ways that ultimately threaten, not
protect, human health.
     Today federal lawmakers are weighing a dispute between regulators and
the nuclear industry over just how safe a proposed repository for spent
nuclear fuel in Nevada has to be. The industry, consistent with
recommendations from the National Academy of Sciences, says it is enough to
limit annual exposure levels to, in effect, the dose one would receive on
five coast-to-coast, round-trip plane trips across the United States. But
EPA is insisting on limiting exposure to the equivalent of three trips and
possibly even lower. The agency wants to limit radiation exposure from
ground water at the site - not tap water - to the amount one would receive
from less than a coast-to-coast round trip.
     Nominally, at least, the debate in the Senate is about who should
impose the standards - the Environmental Protection Agency or the Nuclear
Regulatory Commission. The administration is insisting that EPA have the
power, and is threatening a veto otherwise. Sen. Frank Murkowski says he
fears, with some reason, that if EPA has sole responsibility to set the
radiation standard, it would set impossibly high criteria that would
effectively kill the plan for permanent storage at Nevada's Yucca Mountain.
The administration was supposed to have the repository open for business in
1998, but has been as obstructive as possible to an industry that Vice
President Al Gore considers insufficiently friendly to the environment. "I
hope we can come to a potential compromise, using the EPA standard," Energy
Secretary Bill Richardson says.
     The more important argument here is whether trace exposure to
radiation, of the kind one gets from cross-country plane trips, is worth an
argument. It sounds bizarre, a kind of academic exercise akin to counting
angels dancing on pin heads. One wonders if these people don't have
something more useful to do, like getting a drink at the soda machine or
emptying the trash basket. But it is precisely this kind of regulatory
regime with which Rachel Carson cursed the United States.
     Ms. Carson based her influential "novel," "Silent Spring," on the
fiction that exposure to disappearingly small amounts of man-made chemicals
and radiation might poison man and everything else on the globe. The author
was a biologist, not an expert in cancer research, and almost four decades
later there is still no scientific basis for her warnings. But in the name
of protecting the public, regulators now rely on her theory that there is no
threshold below which exposure to alleged carcinogens is safe. This, in
short, is the cancer-causing plane-trip theory.
     If the reasoning here seems strained, to put it mildly, the calculation
of the safety standards themselves is more dubious still. Because
researchers can't actually link cancer to trace radiation exposures, they
have to engage in some acrobatic calculations to arrive at the health risks
involved. By collecting data on the cancer fallout in Japan after the United
States dropped atomic bombs there in World War II, researchers were able to
establish a correlation between cancer and persons suffering high radiation
exposure. Then they extrapolated - guesstimated - the health effects of
Hiroshima to what those effects might be at radiation exposure levels a
fraction of that. The implicit assumption here is that if Hiroshima was
dangerous, then plane trips can't be safe either.
     Still following? Is anyone out there afraid of getting cancer from
flying from Washington to Los Angeles and back? Boredom, maybe. Bad food,
possibly. But cancer? From a scientific point of view, EPA's groundwater
standard is unwarranted. Complained the NAS in a letter to EPA last year,
the agency's proposal "will add little, if any, additional protection to
individuals or the general public from radiation releases from the
repository." EPA, it said, "must make more cogent scientific arguments to
justify the need for this standard."
     Although the health benefits are negligible, whether the one-trip
standard or the five-trip standard applies, the difference in costs in
trying to achieve the two is not. Chasing down every last molecule of
radiation is very expensive and could threaten the feasibility of the
repository and, ultimately, of the industry itself. Nuclear energy provides
a little more than 20 percent of this country's electricity. What would
replace it when the lights go out?
     It's also true, wrote William Hendee, a past president of the American
Association of Physicists in Medicine, in the 1996 American Enterprise
Institute book, "Risks, Costs and Lives Saved," that "Money spent to address
those suspected but unproven risks is not available to prevent or correct
problems such as industrial and domestic accidents, personal violence,
tobacco use, alcohol abuse, and other known threats to human health. Those
costs are the unfortunate consequences of misplaced fears and misused funds.
Although there is no way to quantify their consequences, the social
implications of such actions is enormous."
     So safety can be very dangerous. Rachel Carson and her disciples in
this administration deserve great credit for helping to make it so.
     E-mail:
     smithk@twtmail.com


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