A dose of reality, continued

["Peter G. Crane" <pgcrane@erols.com>]

I have not been in a hurry to pick up the potassium iodide thread, since 
my last posting produced -- to my surprise -- so heated a response from 
PAMS718 (Patricia M. Sullivan on the listserv, Patricia Milligan at the 
NRC).  Given all the unpleasantness and incivility infecting RADSAFE of 
late, it seemed advisable to let things cool down. 

I'm not going to rehash or revisit that exchange; anyone who wants to 
look up the messages can do so.  Rather, the point of this message is 
different:  that PAMS718 has, unwittingly I'm sure, confirmed my 
assertion that the NRC staff has inflated the cost of a nationwide 
program to make KI available at every nuclear site.  The NRC 
Commissioners in turn have provided this inaccurate information to the 
Congress.

In 1999, after an oversight hearing, the NRC was asked by a 
Congressional committee what a nationwide KI program would cost.  The 
NRC responded that in 1998, the NRC staff had estimated the cost at 
$3.25 million.  Since this figure was about an order of magnitude higher 
than what the NRC staff had estimated only four years earlier, I asked 
the basis of the calculation:  how many pills, and at what price per 
pill?

More than four months later, I received a non-responsive reply from 
Bill Travers, the head of the NRC staff, that simply enclosed the 1998 
NRC staff paper from which the $3.25 million figure was taken.  A week 
or so later, however, I got an embarrassed followup letter, also from 
Bill Travers.  There had been a mathematical error, he said.  It appears 
that the staff had multiplied 70 sites by 80,000 people (the number of 
persons within a 10-mile radius of the average plant) and come up with a 
figure of 6,500,000.  This figure was then multiplied by $.50 -- two 
pills per person, at $.25 per pill -- to arrive at a figure of $3.25 
million.  The correct figure, Mr. Travers told me, was $2.8 million.

The point of all this is not to deride the NRC's arithmetic skills. 
Rather, the question is, why was the estimate based on TWO pills?  We 
know that one pill is effective in blocking the thyroid; we also know 
from the Polish experience during Chernobyl that one pill is safe when 
distributed on a mass basis (18 million doses).

This is where PAMS718's last posting is so helpful.  She concluded her 
statement by saying that KI could hardly be described as a "safe" 
medicine, since WHO recommends "single dose use only."

Whether that is a reasonable measure of a drug's safety is beside the 
point.  What is very much to the point, however, is that the NRC has 
given Congress cost estimates based on two pills at $.25 each, when it 
should have used figures based on ONE pill per person.  Moreover, KI is 
currently being sold commercially in the U.S., in packages in which each 
pill is individually foil wrapped, at considerably below $.25 per pill 
-- $.18 per pill or less.

In short, the NRC staff has exaggerated the cost of a KI program by a 
factor of 2.5 to 3, perhaps even more, and has provided this information 
to the Commissioners for forwarding to the Congress.  

In its answers to the Congress, the staff estimated that it had spent 
$2.6 million studying the KI issue.  (The amount spent by the 
Commissioners and their staffs was not provided.)  It thus seems clear 
that the NRC staff has spent vastly more money trying to stave off the 
stockpiling of KI than the KI itself would cost.  As the list of 
blunders and misstatements on KI lengthens, one can only hope that 
sooner or later, the Commission will put its house in order.

Peter Crane, pgcrane@erols.com
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