I am going to say this and
get a lot of grief, I am sure. Decisions should NEVER be made on the
basis of perceived risk! Make a decision that way, and you will be
sorry. Treating perception like reality is not only a cottage industry
for anti-nukes, it is downright stupid and dangerous. Perceived risk
might result in some faintly interesting sociological studies but that's about
it.
Example: if asbestos had been used above the 60th floor of
the World Trade Center, the buildings might possibly have stood more than an
hour, and many lives might have been saved. But EPA applied the linear
non-threshold theory to asbestos (this was the "perception") and
prohibited its use (at least that is my understanding).
If people
perceive a risk much different from the realistically estimated risk, let's
just tell them they are wrong. I recognize that DOE and NRC pander to
perceived risk, but that doesn't mean everyone has to.
Ruth Weiner, Ph. D.
ruthweiner@aol.com
=====================
This
bit about the non-use of asbestos at the WTC seems to have originated with a
distasteful 14 September 2001 op-ed piece Steve Milloy wrote for
FoxNews.com. Milloy's piece and a 15-16 September follow-up are
available at Milloy's website, www.junkscience.com.
Milloy alleged that in 1971 New York City outlawed the use of spray-on
asbestos insulation in construction in the city. He said that asbestos
had been used up to the 64th floor of the WTC North Tower. Other
materials were substituted for the balance of 1 WTC and all of 2 WTC.
Milloy offers that "not everyone was convinced they would work as well".
His only named "not everyone" was Herbert Levine, President of Asbestospray,
who he quotes as saying "if a fire breaks out above the 64th floor, that
building will fall down". Milloy says that instead of the WTC tower
structural steel insulation protecting the buildings for 4 hours, per
specification, they collapsed in 56 minutes and one and a half hours. He
attributes many deaths in the buildings to the shorter time to collapse, for
which he blames the NYC regulators.
The
only named individuals cited by Milloy were Levine, now deceased, and Harvard
physics professor Richard Wilson. I asked Wilson whether Milloy had
correctly represented his thoughts. He replied, "Unlike
most responsible reporters he did not check his writing with me for accuracy
of fact. I have looked at the website to which you refer, www.junkscience.com,
and the facts seem about right, although I disagree with some of the opinions
based upon the facts." Wilson continued, expressing the opinion that
asbestos insulation might be 25% better that its replacement and offering that
settled policy in high-rise fires was to use helicopters to spray foam on the
fire to cool it down and to remove people from the
roof.
Much
of what Milloy wrote in his op-ed piece and some of what Wilson wrote in his
email to me seemed suspect, so I did some research.
If
you look at what Marks' Standard Handbook for Mechanical Engineers and the
Fire Protection Handbook have to say about structural steel insulation, it
becomes clear that there is nothing magical about asbestos in this
application. It was used because it was less expensive that the other
spray-on materials and cheaper to apply than the non-spray-on
alternatives. Other materials, specifically mineral wools, have
equivalent or better insulation properties.
However well the insulation would perform in a "normal" fire, the
airplane impact certainly damaged the insulation on several floors and the
intensity of the jet fuel fire was much greater than anything considered in
the design of the building. The South Tower was struck at lower floors
and failed earlier, as engineering intuition would
suggest.
If
you read the NYTimes heartbreaking obituaries of the WTC victims, it becomes
pretty clear that most of the victims were on floors above the airplane
impacts and were unable to evacuate down the stairwells past the fire-involved
floors. The doors to the roof were locked, partly because of a
long-standing power struggle between the NYFD and NYPD. The police have
the helicopters and the fire department has argued that high-rise fires should
be fought by fire-fighters inside the building. This dispute was
discussed in a WSJ or NYT article that I don't have available at the
moment. The article noted that there are two technical and one social
complication supporting non-use of helicopters. The fire can create high
turbulence around the roof and the fire plume may have too little oxygen to
allow the engines to function. The social problem is crowd control, if
several hundred or thousand people are on the roof awaiting rescue. A
few dozens of people have been successfully rescued from roofs in serious, but
altogether less catastrophic, high-rise fires.
A NY
Times 18 Sept story by James Glanz and Andrew Revkin looked into the asbestos
insulation issues. They found that the WTC builders stopped using
asbestos 40 floors up in the north tower; the 1969 decision was made by the
NY/NJ Port Authority in response to developing epidemiological information on
the connection of asbestos with mesothelioma. NY City extended the ban
to all construction in the city in 1971. The NY Times article says that
both the asbestos and the non-asbestos insulations were supplied by United
States Mineral, where Milloy says that Levine's company Asbestospray supplied
the asbestos insulation.
The
newly-created EPA doesn't seem to have been involved in any way in any of the
WTC decisions.
Milloy's allegations seem to have become instant conservative,
anti-regulatory myth, bringing to mind Twain's aphorism that a lie or a
half-truth can get half-way around the world while the truth is putting on its
shoes.
Best
regards.
Jim
Dukelow
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
Richland, WA
These comments are mine and have not been reviewed and/or approved by
my management or by the U.S. Department of
Energy.