Re: Radiation effects (toxicity)

[JMUCKERHEIDE@delphi.com]

Sorry about the delay, too much going on and I lost track of the message I
had saved.

Louis (glowboy@robot.nuceng.ufl.edu) wrote on June 9, 1994:

>Wade Patterson and other members of the radsafe community ---

>When I read your posting dealing with hormesis and then followed
>later by the posting on repair I could not help but reread the
>description given in the NCRP mailing about the Lauriston S. Taylor
>Lecture No. 17, Science, Radiation Protection and the NCRP, given
>by Dr. Warren K. Sinclair.
>
>        He next addresses the issue of a threshold for effects and
>        concludes that, "given the stochastic nature of the process,
>        it is sounder to accept the non-threshold hypothesis and
>        describe the risk as negligible at very low doses than to
>        argue for a threshold."

This is ok as far as it goes, but we do not "descibe the risk as negligible
at very low doses". The US is expending $ 1 Trillion to protect individuals
from these doses. This is the problem. The HP message is garbled. We see 
that in the political reaction to an NRC proposal for BRC that would limit
exposures to much less than "negligible" levels. We see proposals for levels
at sanitary disposal facilities, for patient exposures of 2 mr/hr, etc, etc.

We also see the inability to site "engineered facilities", with "high
integrity containers" of solidified wastes, and the cost of disposal having
risen by extortion to $350/ft3, and the So. Carolina extorting legislature
so buffaloed by this fiction that they shut down Barnwell (and losing
$50M/yr in extortion funds) anyway. What will we be paying when and if
individual/Compact state facilities come on line? How much nuclear
technology will have dried up? How many jobs will there be in 5 years.
Programs are in place to "minimize the use, and eliminate all unnecessary
use of radioactive materials". DuPont is funding alternative therapies, and
other applications, not arguing about the insanity of government regulation
and policy.

As many, including especially Nobel Laureate Rosalyn Yalow, have pointed out
in the HP Soc Newsletter and elsewhere, this is the fault of the HPs and
others who know better, supporting the political fiction that all such
levels are hazardous to people. This may be in the short term self interest
of those of us who are in the business of protecting the public, but there
are many applications of nuclear technology that are being abandoned.

Medical applications had kept themselves out of the issue for 20 years, now
both wastes and regulation are encroaching. Not everyone in HP can be
employed by the power plants, which will be around a while, even with
unnecessary, make work changes to Part 20 every few years. Even ineffective
utility managements, with some cost pressures beginning to be felt, will be
able to manage these programs with many fewer people within a few years.

Of course, the fallacy is that it is not a "given" that radiation-induced
cancer is a stochastic process. That is part of the fiction. 

Wade Patterson's refs provided, and other current research (and historical
materials suppressed in the past) show that carcinogenisis is not
stochastic, from various perspectives. 

Evidence of cell repair is everywhere. Research shows the 2-hit process, and
a role for free radicals in cancer, and for the stress proteins in repair.
The UNSCEAR has published a preliminary review of the adaptive mechanisms
for cell recovery. ALL destroy the stochastic process. (And besides, if the
stochastic process applied, it would have been demonstrable in effects in
biology to the wide variations of natural background radioactivity, and in
many other significantly exposed populations where it has never been seen
when looked for (explicitly ignored by the self-interested Federal radiation
establishment, controlling the BEIR). If you listen carefully to many
members involved in BEIR, they are telling us the real story in careful,
scientific terms and data, but there is inordinate pressure from the
funding/controlling bureaucracy, including the actual study and report
managers, and those who control the message to Congress and the public.

The human radium body-burden population would have shown it. Instead,
although there had been a commitment to follow this population for life,
especially for the lesser exposed populations, as it became clear that the
data showed a threshold above 1000 rads (alpha: QF=20? or just 10? - you
choose: 10,000 rem?), the Federal establishment suppressed annual reports in
1983 and got data stopped in 1986, and sent all papers to buried archives
in 1993. (There was a "conclusion" from the government's "biostatisticians"
that this population would not "expect" to get more than 1 additional cancer
so the funds to continue the program were "wasted" - this while public
concern and adverse response to radiation and radioactivity, and funds for
the purely impossible effort of trying to find cancer around nuclear
facilities etc. garnered $10s, if not $100s of millions, with wide
distribution and misrepresentation of possible adverse results.

Scientists not controlled by the Federal radiation control establishment are
beginning to publish more definitive results, and have greater influence on
policy. Also, the NAS/ National Research Council is tackling the problem of
undue bureaucratic influence in NAS reports. Control of BEIR, and other
strongholds of government control of the science, may be weakening. However,
since essentially all radiation scientists are funded and/or under control
of the Federal radiation bureaucracy, and having succeeded in establishing
their own funding and programs, there will much conflict and defensiveness
over the next few years. 

>Since hormesis and a threshold (isn't that what negligible means?)
>are out, what chance is there that repair will ever be taken into
>account?

Repair is beginning to be taken into account now. See the UNSCEAR paper on
adaptive mechanisms and responses.

That's not what "negligible" means, at least not how Sinclair meant it. He
did not mean "threshold", he meant to keep the linear model but that at low
levels that have no measurable effect, we should not take extraordinary
measures. But this isn't what's happening. 

But, with some science training and review of the literature, we will find
that there is no basis to "believe" in the fiction that data and scientific
evidence are "out". Review the work of the BELLE group (Biologic Effects
of Low Level Exposure) that is addressing the scientific data and evidence
for potentially beneficial effects of many chemical and radiation exposures
(after all, such data is why you get heavy metals and other toxins in your
vitamin pills and cereal - somebody had the brains to assess the role of
these minerals in nutrition, not just extrapolate linearly from high (toxic)
doses - because at the time no government agency saw its bureaucratic
self-interest in preventing human health. I hesitate to think what would
happen to nutritional research if today's FDA were in place then. (Kind of
like thinking about what our railroad and highway systems would look like if
today's NIMBY and control politics were in place then. Scary thought. And
this is the cornerstone of the nation's wealth!)

Regards,

Jim Muckerheide