Re: congressional testimony by Steve Wing

[Al Tschaeche <antatnsu@pacbell.net>]

Please see comments below.

ruth_weiner wrote:

> Franz, I appreciate your message but will only comment on the part that
> refers to Gofman.  Gofman was indeed a well-published and quite well
> respected scientist (biochemist, I believe) and did work under AEC auspices.
> In the approximate period 1955-1970, a great deal of secrecy as well as
> hyperbole surrounded the entire nuclear endeavor in the U. S. and various
> pronuclear agencies and organizations, including the AEC, did overstate the
> benefits of nuclear power and publicly underestimate any adverse
> environmental and health effects.

I know of no significant overstatements by the AEC of the benefits of nuclear
power.  Could you please cite some?  Please don't use the "too cheap to meter"
one because that never was an official AEC statement.  It would be nice to have
some nuclear plants in San Diego right now.  Our electrical costs have more than
doubled since last year because of deregulation and the lack of new electrical
generating stations in California.  Some people have lost their jobs and
businesses have gone bust because of the high electrical costs.  The electrical
generating companies' profits are rising.  The antis are getting what they
wanted:  brownouts and blackouts.  But the majority of the rest of us sure are
hurting.  Even if new generating plants are proposed, the antis oppose them,
delay them, and make them more costly than needed.  I predict that electrical
reregulation is the only answer.

Also, I know of no significant understatements by the AEC about adverse
environmental and health effects of the "entire nuclear endeavor".  Again would
you please cite some.

Taking all things into account, it is my experience that the "entire nuclear
endeavor" from bombs to medical radionuclides has had a net benefit for humanity
and a negligible effect on the environment compared to many other technological
"improvements" humans have concocted.  All in all, my experience tells me that
the "entire nuclear endeavor" has been safe, even given the, sometimes large,
off site releases of certain radionuclides such as I-131.

> (I might point out that during this same
> period automobile manufacturers claimed that there was nothing in car
> exhaust because it was invisible.  They even put this on TV until the
> Federal Trade Commission made them remove it.)

I am not sure a comparison between cars that kill tens of thousands of people a
year and whose untreated until recently, exhaust  created smog that has clearly
injured many people.  The "entire nuclear endeavor" has never routinely killed
tens of thousands or even tens of people per year and its effluents from normal
operations have never been demonstrated to have killed anyone, or even injured
them.

> The AEC was both regulator and promoter of nuclear power, and was also the
> agency responsible for nuclear weapons design and manufacture, so
> inadvertently the whole business was surrounded by secrecy, and people who
> asked questions -- perfectly straightforward questions -- about reactors and
> safety and so on were looked at suspiciously.

Actually, those who knew how to ask the right questions in the right manner
about the non-weapons-related nuclear endeavor have always received the
appropriate information, although not always without a bit of a struggle.  I
wonder what data you have that tells us the AEC looked "suspiciously" at those
who asked questions about non weapons related nuclear items.

> In that atmosphere, Gofman
> was initially something of a one-man "truth squad."  Unfortunately, he went
> overboard in the other direction and even after the breakup of the AEC in
> 1974 and the release of a great deal of monitoring data by DOE in 1985, he
> kept up the same old accusations against nuclear power, DOE, etc and
> exaggerated the dangers of radiation increasingly to the point where his
> books are, in places, pretty ridiculous.

I couldn't agree more.  I was intimately involved with Gofman and Tamplin in the
late 60s and 70s, meaning I read their writings, listened to their
presentations, discussed those writings and presentations with others in the
nuclear industry and saw his work for what it was:  an anti nuclear tirade.  All
of his projected cancer deaths used the most pessimistic of assumptions and, of
course the LNTH or the super LNTH to extrapolate deaths.  He maintains today
that one "speck" of plutonium in ones lungs will, without question, kill that
person eventually, even though there are "specks" of plutonium in almost
everyone's lungs from the fallout from weapons testing and the burnup of one of
the TRGs that used Pu238 as the heat source.  If his prediction were correct
most of us would be dead by now.

> I have never understood how someone like Gofman who has a very respectable
> scientific background could distort as he does.

How could K.Z. Morgan, who started the profession of health physics, and many
others, do the same thing?  It might be worth a PhD Thesis to do a psychological
study to find out why such things happen.

I trust you can supply the citations requested.  I really would like to see
them.  Al Tschaeche antatnsu@pacbell.net

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