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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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