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Re: Tooth Fairy (Project) Comes to Hackensack University Medical Center
On Thu, 13 Nov 2003 10:59:41 -0500, Thomas M Lashley
<lashleyt@DTEENERGY.COM> wrote:
> That's 500 bucks a tooth!..........man I'm in the wrong business!!
>
> "Williamson, Matthew/Medical Physics" wrote:
>
>> Researchers with the study - called the Tooth Fairy Project - have
>> received a $25,000 grant from the state Legislature to collect at least
>> 50 baby teeth from New Jersey's young cancer patients, and to test the
>> teeth for levels of strontium 90.....
===================
Hi all:
The post by Peter Genzer, of a news article on this subject, notes a
statement by the NJ Governor at the announcement ceremony of the grant to
the TFP that:
"The grant money will fund advertising for the Tooth Fairy Project and
the cost of collecting the teeth in New Jersey and testing them at a
laboratory in Waterloo, Ontario, he said."
The question is how much will be spent on "advertising" [PR/promoting the
unproven claims of harm from nuclear plant emissions] to advance the goals
of the Tooth Fairy Project vs. what will be spent on analyses of tooth
samples?
As I've pointed out before in earlier posts to Radsafe about the TFP, the
routine emissions of Sr-90 from any nuclear power plant are insufficient to
even maintain the existing environmental inventory of Sr-90 in the
terrestrial or aquatic environment from earlier bomb test fallout in the
1960s, never mind increase exposure to any person living in the vicinity.
Each year the megacuries of Sr-90 which remain in the environment from open
air testing of nuclear weapons by the US and the Soviets which ended in
1963, decay by an amount that far exceeds the sum of all emissions from US
nuclear power plants in the present or anytime in the past.
At the conclusion of open air testing, and after essentially all the bomb
test activity in the stratosphere had come to earth by about 1968, the Sr-
90 deposition in the terrestrial environment across the US averaged very
approximately about 50 milliCi/km^2 almost anywhere in the US. Do the math.
Today there are very roughly on average 22 milliCi/km^2 of Sr-90 across the
US, which would decline due to decay by about 0.7 milliCi/km^2 this year.
Releases from today's nuclear plant operations CANNOT KEEP THE CURRENT SR-9
environmental inventory constant never mind increase overall exposure from
Sr-90.
The basic premise of the Tooth Fairy project that a few micro-Ci or milli-
Ci of Sr-90 release per year from any one nuclear power plant is increasing
Sr-90 exposure and cancer risk to children in the general environment near
a facility today, given the much, much greater [but still trivial] amount
of Sr-90 in the environment and diet from residual Sr-90 in the environment
from prior bomb test fallout, is simply absurd, unscientific, and a fraud
intended to promote an anti-nuclear agenda. The TFP is simply agenda
science at its worst.
Stewart Farber, MS Public Health
Consulting Scientist
[203] 367-0791
================
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