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["Ted Rockwell" <tedrock@CPCUG.ORG>]

Friends:



I am sending the following letter to the Nuclear News letters-editor.

Whether or not it is published, I thought you might be interested in the

concerns I raise.

___________________

I am shocked (but not surprised) that an NRC Commissioner would say, after

the millions spent on evaluating health effects of low-dose radiation that

“The bulk of our knowledge about these human radiation health effects is

derived from studies of the survivors of the atomic bombs.”  From a

scientific standpoint, it is hard to imagine a less suitable population.

(Uranium miners, another LNT favorite, are a close second, with their diesel

fumes, silica dust and stressful activity.)  Radiation doses from the bomb

are poorly known, the dose rate gave no time for the body’s normal defenses

to work, stress and other confounding conditions were at the extreme.  Isn’t

that why DOE did the ten-year multimillion dollar Nuclear Shipyard Workers

Study, with individually-badged workers compared with other, non-irradiated,

shipyard workers in similar trades?  And shouldn’t we also use the 10,000

apartment dwellers in Taiwan who were unwittingly exposed for nearly 20

years by Co-60 contaminated rebar (maximum dose about one Sievert during the

first year) ?  And the many excellent studies of populations in locations of

high natural radiation?  And how about the radium dial painters, whose

individual radium body burdens are well known?



But these situations all gave “wrong answers.”  They showed, as predicted

from biology, that low-dose radiation stimulates the body’s defenses and

actually reduces cancer mortality by a highly significant amount.   So you

will not see them used in the six-year study report just released as

NCRP-136, sponsored by NRC.  The shipyard study was dismissed as having a

“healthy worker” artifact, which it clearly does not.  The AEC program to

study cancer rate variation with natural background radiation was abruptly

cancelled in its infancy, as was the follow-up of the individual radium dial

painters.  I’ve heard vague, generic arguments about problems with

epidemiological studies, but isn’t it interesting that they nearly all give

robust evidence in the same direction, which is also consistent with other

biological data?



There are literally hundreds of excellent peer-reviewed scientific reports

that consistently show this beneficial effect of low-dose radiation.  These

reports have been formally presented to the advisory groups and the NRC. Yet

none of this evidence is taken into consideration in setting radiation

policy.  We are told we must stay with the LNT, for which the best that can

be said by its strongest advocates (NCRP-121, p. 45) is that although “few

experimental studies and essentially no human data can be said to prove or

even to provide direct support for the concept…a linear non-threshold dose

response relationship cannot be excluded.”  Commissioner Dicus says even in

this article, “radiation health effects in humans at these low levels have

not been demonstrated.”



So there you have it:  The data say: no deleterious effects at low dose, and

amply demonstrated beneficial effects.  Why must we keep hanging on to the

LNT, with its unlimited ALARA requirement and its ridiculous collective dose

notion?  As Dick Feynmann (among others) said:  No theory, however

attractive, should be maintained if it is contradicted by the data.  And the

LNT is not even an attractive theory!

_________________________



Ted Rockwell



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