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20 Radioactive Dangers We All Face |
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Did nuclear testing during the Cold War claim millions of lives? During the late 1950s and early 1960s, leading physicists and scientists of the day such as Linus Pauling and Andrei Sakharov predicted such a fate for humanity.
Andrei Sakharov, the 'father of the Soviet H-bomb,' predicted the acceleration of death of 0.5 to 1 million people per every 50 megatons of nuclear explosive power. According to his formula, the combined nuclear powers' aboveground atomic explosions (totaling 440 megatons) may claim the lives of 4.4 to 8.8 million people worldwide.
Linus Pauling, who won the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to halt nuclear testing, calculated that the radioactive fallout from nuclear testing up to 1962 will cause 80,000 to 18,000,000 genetic defects in children and embryonic, neonatala and childhood deaths. He calculated that for every 10 megatons, 3,500 to 780,000 children will be born with gross physical or mental defects or enough damage to result in early death. According to this formula, from all atmospheric testing through the present between 154,000 to 34,320,000 children may be suffering early death or gross mental or physical defects. (The effects of long-lived fallout, like Carbon-14 and Strontium-90, which will be in our air, water and food supplies and cause genetic defects and physical harm and death for generations, were included in Sakharov and Pauling's calculations.)
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Where did the U.S. test nuclear bombs? After the conclusion of World War II through the 'end' of the Cold War in 1992, the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) and its successor agencies conducted over 1,000 nuclear tests - underground, aboveground, under-sea, and in high altitude - at locations spanning the Western Hemisphere. Testing locations included a former U.S. territory in the Pacific, the South Atlantic, and about a dozen locations on the North American landmass from Amchika (Alaska) to Hattiesburg (Mississippi). Most of the nuclear testing was conducted at the Nevada Test Site, a Rhode-Island sized piece of land north of Las Vegas which was withdrawn from public use specifically for weapons-testing. Following five large nuclear tests conducted in the Pacific in the late 1940s, the AEC continued its program of atmospheric tests in Nevada beginning in January 1951. Nevada tests were categorized by Series (i.e, Plumbbob) and each shot had its own moniker (i.e., shot Smoky of the Plumbbob series). |
Were they right?
Did fallout from U.S., China, U.K., French and British nuclear testing through the 1990s claim millions of lives? Did the fallout that entered into the food chains of the total human population suffocate and prematurely end lives in such staggering numbers?
What do doctors and governments know? What did they suppress? What won't they tell us?
In the early 1980s, fallout was a hot topic in the U.S. A headline-grabbing federal lawsuit alleging that fallout caused cancers and leukemias in small towns in Utah and Nevada was peaking interest in Nevada fallout.
NCI study
So, in 1982 Congress ordered the National Cancer Institute (NCI) to conduct a study of the health impacts of radioactive Iodine-131 exposure from U.S. atmospheric atomic testing in the 1950s and 1960s (and some accidental vents of underground nuclear testing from 1961 through 1970) at the Nevada Test Site. Radioactive Iodine-131 comprised about 2 percent of the fallout from nuclear tests and fell out over large swaths of the United States from 1951 through the end of the Cold War. It fell on grass from coast to coast, was eaten by cows, then secreted in their milk and accumulated in the thyroid glands of milk-consuming children and adults; and many suspected that this Iodine-131 poisoning was causing thyroid cancer or other diseases. (read more in the boxed-feature 'Bio-accumulation of Iodine-131' below)
After an unbelievably long delay of about 14 years, the NCI in 1997 'released' the study. It included county-by-county estimates of average radioactive Iodine-131 doses to the thyroid for persons living or born in the contiguous United States during the time of the testing. In their report, the NCI predicted that between 10,000 and 75,000 people exposed in youth to widespread radioactive fallout (of Iodine 131) during the U.S. nuclear bomb tests might during their lives get radiation-linked thyroid cancer - roughly five to ten percent of which will be fatal. 1
The NCI fell short of establishing a 'link' between Iodine-131 and thyroid cancer. The NCI said there is suggestive, though not conclusive, evidence of the link. The NCI's official conclusion is that risk for thyroid cancer 'increases' with I-131 exposure.
For the study, the NCI relied extensively on gummed-film data used by the Atomic Energy Commission's Health and Safety Laboratory (AEC HASL). Yet this low-tech fallout collection method (a.k.a. 'sticky' film) had an extremely low collection efficiency and should have been deemed unusable for the basis of a taxpayer funded scientific study that took 14 years to complete2. Read about the gummed-film problem here.
Instead of endeavoring to reconstruct Americans' exposure to fallout through other methods (i.e. nationwide soil sampling), there seems to be only one reason why the NCI relied on this unreliable dataset. By deliberately using 'foggy' data, the NCI could use their mathematical conductor's wand to revise downwards the estimates of radiation-induced thyroid cancers. The NCI's final data results, regrettably, have provided a foundation for government follow-up studies and health-physics research on the fallout-cancer links through the present. Yet every blind re-iteration and reinterpretation of this data has further distanced the public from the knowledge that the NCI study was based on extremely shoddy data.
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Bioaccumulation of Iodine-131 It is crucial in any discussion about past fallout effects on humans to recognize that although the dusting of radioactive fallout over the entire United States during the Cold War directly gave rise to cancers, diseases, miscarriages, etc.., the worst affects arose due to the accumulation of fallout toxins in human organs. A similar phenomenon occurs with the bioaccumulation of mercury or PCB toxins in animals at the top of food chains. In the case of Cold War fallout, the thyroid gland was a terminus in a food 'chain of filters,' in which water-soluble radioactive elements produced in nuclear explosions traveled through the air into the grass, which was eaten by cows, secreted through milk, fed to humans, and pooled in their thyroid, and at virtually each step in the chain the concentrations of radioactivity increased. Each part of the chain further distilled certain radioactive fallout toxins so that humans, the 'feeders' at the top of the milk food chain, bore the greatest contamination burden. The question we ask here is: How much more concentrated was Iodine-131 in (milk-drinking) human thyroids compared with the levels present in downwinder air during atomic testing during the Cold War? (The Cold War ran from the 1940s through 1992; 1992 was the year when Nevada underground nuclear tests, which leaked frequently, finally stopped). To determine this bioaccumulative factor for Iodine-131, we have to identify the attributes of the chain. The first part of the chain is the air-grass dynamic. Iodine-131, which is a radioactive gas heavier than air, easily settles on vegetation (grass). During a 'fallout 'event, the grass keeps accumulating Iodine-131 fallout and (on a per kilogram dry weight basis) becomes several hundred to thousands times more radioactive than the air above (at ground level). A cow grazing the grass will accumulate the Iodine-131 in their stomach(s) and about 10% - on a daily basis1 - of the Iodine 131 in the cow's body from pasture feeding will be passed on to its milk, which amounts to roughly 25 liters daily. The milk contains slightly amplified Iodine-131 levels than the rest of the cow's body. (Since a lactating cow's milk output in liters weighs about 25 kilograms, that is about 5% of the cow's weight if that cow weighed around 500 kilograms. On a weight basis, the Iodine-131 that shows up in its milk is about two times more radioactive than found in other tissues or organs, other than its thyroid.) Further amplification of the Iodine-131 continues when the Iodine-131 is absorbed into the human body via milk consumption. There, the thyroid gland absorbs about 20% of the Iodine-131 in the milk. (That percentage is also called 'thyroid uptake.') The Iodine-131 is concentrated in the relatively small volume of the thyroid, which for an adult weighs only about 20 grams, but for a child weighs just 2 grams. On a per weight basis, the thyroid gland in adults weighs about 1/3000 of the entire human body - yet 20% of the radioiodine pools in that gland. In the transfer chain of Iodine-131 to milk, Iodine-131's rate of loss of radioactivity - it decays by half in 8 days but is still minutely radioactive even after two months - played a role. In many areas during the Cold War, milk was consumed by Americans the very or next day after it was milked, and even shelf-bought milk was radioactive, although somewhat less. When all is said and done, as a very rough estimate, the dose to the thyroid from drinking Iodine-131-contaminated cow's milk is about 1,000 times the dose from inhaling the same Iodine-131-contaminated air that descended on the cow's pasture grass. Perhaps the best phraseology of the above statement can be found in a 1976 article2 titled 'Social and Environmental Costs of Energy Systems' by two scientists working in Berkeley, Calif.; they wrote that: "Extensive studies of this chain have shown that if a human drinks milk (I liter per day) from a cow constantly grazing on grass exposed to iodine-131, his thyroid receives a dose about 1000 times greater than the thyroid dose received by merely breathing the same air." (The thyroid dose concentration level in some cases has been estimated higher - to a factor of 2,000 or 3,000.3) This bioaccumulation factor has more or less been the accepted value in scientific literature over many decades, although it has been sometimes less. (The above cycle of Iodine-131 poisoning may continue if the cow-milk-consuming-human adult passes the toxins through breast-feeding to their children.) So, what this all means is that milk-drinking-humans' thyroids were contaminated with Iodine-131 during several nuclear-testing-fallout episodes of the Cold War at roughly 1,000 times levels found in contaminated air, or leafy vegetables dusted with Iodine-131. Iodine-131 was one of the most damaging toxins from Nevada testing fallout, though certainly not the only severely damaging one. The super-accumulation of this radiological substance in the thyroid organ did a lot of damage. In 1997, the National Cancer Institute predicted that between 10,000 and 75,000 people exposed in youth to widespread radioactive fallout of Iodine 131 during the U.S. nuclear bomb tests might during their lives get radiation-linked thyroid cancer - roughly five to ten percent of which will be fatal. Idealist believes even those estimate ranges are too low. Iodine-131 isn't found in nature. Iodine-131 can only be 'manufactured' (and 'dumped' or 'emitted' into the environment) by nuclear processes and experiments. There is no safe exposure to anything radioactive, including radioiodine. Any bodily exposure above zero (exposure) to a radiological substance results in genetic deformities or cancers in a population. Once you go above zero-exposure, there is risk. Yet millions of innocent persons during Cold War testing in the U.S. and worldwide were literally and also accidentally experimented upon with this dangerous radiochemical, and dozens of others. Take strontium-90, which gets mistaken for calcium and builds into the bone and teeth, especially in infants. Strontium-90, which makes up about 3% of fallout, also bio-accumulates in milk. (Most of the strontium-90 that poisoned our food supplies came from huge hydrogen bomb testing in Russia and the Pacific; for more, read about global fallout). Utah District Court Justice Bruce Jenkins wrote in his 489-page decision in the case of Irene ALLEN, et al., Plaintiffs, v. UNITED STATES of America: "Cattle absorb 25 to 30 percent of the ingested strontium, with about 25 per cent reaching the bone. A few days after entrance of radiostrontium into the body, about 99 percent of the remaining amount will be in the bones." Jenkins cited a UNSCEAR Report (1977) that stated '“In general, it may be said that 90Sr in the diet comes mainly from milk products, grain products, fruit and vegetables,”...milk products contributing about 30 percent of the strontium-90 transfer from food in the areas studied.' Iodine-131 (and other radionuclides like Strontium-90) is still being released: by nuclear power plants permitted by 'As Low As Reasonably Achievable' radiation-standards; and by weapons production plants. Even hospitals release radioxenon and/or radioiodine into their community's air, and their patients' bodies! Why haven't we learned? 1 For every part per square meter containing Iodine-131 in pasture grass, about 10-20% of the Iodine 131 is incorporated, on a per liter basis, in cow's milk. (A cow eats about 22 pounds of dry matter in grass (or about 150 pounds of normal 85%-water containing grass) per day during the grazing season.) This percentage is usually denoted as the 'transfer co-efficient,' or the fraction of an animal's total daily intake of Iodine-131 that is transferred to each liter of milk per day. Past U.S. government estimates gave the value of 0.4% per liter, which coincides with the 10% number: since a cow can generate about 25 liters per day, 0.4% per liter equates with a daily transfer rate of 10%. 2 The authors, piecing together conclusions from previous studies in Iodine-131, noted that cows grazing under an air concentration of 1 PicoCuries per cubic meter of Iodine-131 would eventually yield milk with 700-1200 PicoCuries per Liter; and that if one liter of 400 PicoCuries per Liter milk was drunk by an infant, he/she would receive a dose of 2.1 Rem per year. Article from 'Annual Review of Energy,' 1976, 1:553-580, by Robert J. Budnitz and John P. Holdren 3 Evaluation of Iodine-131 Releases from the Oak Ridge Reservation Public Health Assessment, March 2008 - http://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/HAC/pha/oakridgeI131_022508/I%20131%20Final_02_25_08_508.pdf Goat's and sheep's milk contains approximately 10 times the concentration of radioiodine found in cow's milk. Some facts 1 liter of milk weighs about 1 kilogram A child's thyroid weighs about 2 grams, adult thyroids weigh about 20 grams The U.S. NCI puts the thyroid uptake rate at 25%. Children absorb more radioactive iodine due to their iodine deficiency About 10-20% of the Iodine-131 in the cow's milk ends up in the humans' thyroid glands. For a sample of scientific terminology about the I-131 filter-chain, see below: 'Taking account of all the parameters given above, an integrated air concentration of 1 Bq a m-3 of 131I or 129I would result in an integrated milk concentration for 131I of 160 Bq a 1-1 and for 129I of 870 Bq a 1-1.' 'An integrated air concentration of 1 pCi/d/m3 of 131I or 129I would thus result in an integrated milk concentration for I131 of 175 pCi per day and for I129 of 960 pCi per day.' |
2002 NCI/CDC followup study
A follow-up study ordered by Congress - that was withheld for about six months before the draft was released in early 2002 - studied the fallout from Cold War nuclear tests carried out by the US (in Nevada and the Pacific), Britain, France and the Soviet Union. The National Cancer Institute and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study concluded that at least 15,000 people in the U.S. died as a result of global nuclear testing and an estimated 80,000 people who lived or were born in the US between 1951-2000 have contracted or will contract cancer as a result of global nuclear tests. Cancer occurrences from internal radiation sources such as carbon-14, tritium and cesium-137 would produce an estimated 6,000 cancers, half of which would be fatal.
The study only included tests conducted from 1951 through 1962 and therefore excluded releases from U.S. underground nuclear testing through the 1990s, most French atmospheric testing in the Pacific, and a handful of nuclear devices detonated by the U.S. prior to 1951 (in the Pacific, New Mexico, and the bombings on Hiroshima and Nagasaki).
Also, the release of the final version of the study was significantly delayed; the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) refused to release the final version or make policy recommendations until it was reviewed by the National Academy of Sciences, which occurred in February 2003. HHS, after much insistence of grassroots groups, finally released the full version of the report upon officially 'transmitting the report' to Congress on January 25, 2006.
The follow-up study was not intended to fully examine dose risks or even determine those risks arising from exposure to all radioactive isotopes in fallout. As the CDC has stated on its website, the 2002 study was a collaborative effort between it and the NCI to make "crude estimates of doses and health risks from exposure...from nuclear weapons tests...throughout the world."
With regard to its conclusions about exposure and risk from global fallout, the CDC writes that its "scientists were not able to measure how much radiation exposure each individual person received, because much of the information needed to calculate a person’s dose, and the associated health risk is unavailable."
Fallout cover-up
In short, the U.S. governmental health agencies studied only one fallout radioisotope out of hundreds. They only studied one health condition (thyroid cancer) out of dozens and dozens. And they only provided the taxpayer with the capability to calculate risk from just Iodine-131 exposure to the thyroid. Yet zirconium-95, carbon-14, strontium-90, and cesium-137 made up 76 percent of the total 'residual' radioactive fallout3 from most nuclear tests and these were never studied. (Most of these isotopes are still in our environment at 'hot' levels and some are far more dangerous than Iodine-131.)
The implications of more studies could mean tremendous advances in cancer diagnosis and treatment models. It could even lead towards the development of a personal 'fallout fingerprint.' Without these studies, there will never be a conclusive science linking fallout to many non-thyroid cancers downwind.
All of this begs the question: why hasn't the U.S. government attempted to complete studies on the health impacts of other radioactive elements in the fallout?
One individual wrote in their letter to the editor of The Spectrum, published in October 2005:
'The longer the government takes to determine the effects of spraying countless Americans with poisonous fallout, the fewer survivors there will be to compensate for their sacrifice. The longer the government can stall on offering more information about the effects of radiation poisoning, the farther along the research and testing of this needless next generation of nukes is allowed to progress.'
Fallout study 'fallout'
The U.S. government has been under fire from downwinder groups since the release of both studies. Those groups argue that the U.S. government has not acted responsibly on its own findings and that global victims need a global compensation system. The Institute for Energy and Environmental Research (IEER), which issued many critical comments on the rigor of the 2002 NCI/CDC study, later pleaded for a Global Truth Commission to be set up by the U.N. that would examine in detail the harm that has been inflicted upon the people of the world by nuclear weapons production and testing. That has not been done. Nor has the expansion nationwide of the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act, which only provides downwinder compensation to people who have one of a small number of illnesses living in just two-dozen rural counties in NV, UT and AZ during certain historical time periods: more on our RECA page.
More astonishing came the news in 2003 when the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), a group of scientific experts, concluded that, upon reviewing the report of the 2002 NCI/CDC study and the scientific methods used, no further study into global fallout should be done.
Were Sakharov, Pauling right?
The lack of rigor in U.S. governmental health studies into fallout may have resulted in a severe low-balling of the estimates of cancers and deaths attributable to nuclear testing.
In 1991, International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW) published their study, "Radioactive Heaven and Earth.'' In the study, the group estimated that by the year 2000 there would be a total of 430,000 cancer deaths worldwide - some of which already would have occurred - from the various radioactive elements in the fallout. The director of the commission claimed that roughly half of the cancer deaths expected by 2000 may come from testing at the Nevada Test Site. The study went on to say that the atomic tests created long-lived radioactive particles scattered over vast distances that continue to spread through the food chain and will continue to cause cancer and death. "The long-lived radioactive residues of atmospheric testing, such as plutonium-239, cesium-137 and strontium-90 still pollute the Earth, increasing cancer risk.....small portions of which are continually being incorporated into our food supply.'' Over the centuries to come, the group estimated that 2.4 million people will die from cancer as a result of the legacy of atmospheric testing.
More
chilling is the estimate of casualties by Rosalie Bertell, author
of the classic book 'No Immediate Danger.' She used in her
calculations the official
'radiation risk' estimates published in 1991 by the International
Commission on Radiological Protection (ICRP), and the total radiation
exposure data to the global population calculated by the UN Scientific
Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR) in 1993.
Bertell calculated 358 million cancers that would stem from nuclear bomb production and
testing. Cited in a 2001 article
in 'The Ecologist,' Bertell adds to this number hundreds of millions
more genetically damaged and diseased people and children born with what
are called 'teratogenic effects,' and 500 million babies lost as stillbirths because they were
exposed to radiation whilst still in the womb, but are not counted as
'official' radiation victims.
Who is right? The U.S. National Cancer Institute and Centers for Disease Control? Or the scientists mentioned above?
Is the rising incidence of cancers and onset of new auto-immune, neurological and congenital diseases during the past few decades related to fallout? Have your kin and friends, and co-workers and ancestors succumbed to fallout poisoning? Are your current health problems related to fallout exposure?
Perhaps the answer won't show itself firstly via science. Perhaps the battle for the truth about fallout and the lives it has claimed won't come about through statistics and formulas and scientific studies.
Perhaps, like in old Europe, science, at times, becomes confounded by our communal reluctance to accept certain truths. Perhaps there is a mental step on the ladder of understanding that we as a society need to climb before we are able to see the light of truth. Read more about this in our essay ''Our Nuclear Future."
Links:
Opeds about downwinder studies
Radiation Exposure Compensation Act
Global fallout and Strontium-90 in milk
Has a nuclear war come and gone? (flash player required)
Additional reading: Excerpted quotes from Dr. F. Owen Hoffman's testimony regarding the 1997 NCI study.
1 The study, titled 'Estimated Exposures and Thyroid Doses Received by the American People from Iodine- 131 in Fallout Following Nevada Atmospheric Nuclear Bomb Tests,' has for years been poorly maintained in its online form: many links, including the original URLs to the report and those links from other agency websites, as well as certain portions and appendixes of the NCI online report, are now dead links. Also, the entire data set (annexes and sub-annexes) is completely missing.
2The results of the study, which was ordered by Congress in 1982, were known as early as 1989 and compiled in a final draft report by 1993 but the report was held from the public for four additional years until 1997. Tremendous media pressure in the summer of 1997 led to the report's publication that year. A Congressional hearing on the matter of the report's delay was held in 1998, and the final version of the report was published in 1999.
3 Other radionuclides identified by Richard Miller, world renowned toxic exposures expert, that should be studied include Be7,Au198, Au199, Mn54, Co60, Fe59, Ag109, Nb95, Nb95m, Sr89, Sr90, Y90, Y91, Pb103, U239, U240, Am241, Cm242, Zr95, Rh106-Ru106, Ce144-Pr144, I-130, I-132, I133, I135, Na24 and Tb161
a Neonatal deaths means deaths of babies during their first month. Low birthweight is the largest cause of neonatal death. Immune deficiency diseases brought upon by a radioactive diet include the cardiovascular, lymphoid or oncological types; this means that low-level radiation in the body can cause (lead to) immune 'defeat' in the form of pneumonia, tuberculosis, heart and blood disorders, septicemia, etc.... Also, as viruses mutate more rapidly from increased environmental radiation, adults with impaired immune systems can more readily succumb to communicable viruses, like STDs, like the mutating AIDS virus. (Information extracted from Jay Gould's review of nuclear physicist Vladimir Chernousenko's book 'Chernobyl: Insight from the Inside' that appeared in the March 15, 1993, issue of The Nation.
Idealist's public document archives: 1. 
2.
'The
greatest irony of our atmospheric nuclear testing program is that
the only
victims of U.S. nuclear arms since World War II have been our own people.'
- Forgotten
Guinea Pigs Report, 1980
In 1986, the U.S. Dept. of Energy used the cover of the Chernobyl fallout cloud over the United States to release huge amounts of radiation into the air from a failed underground Nevada nuclear test. It was called Mighty Oak.
learn more on our global fallout page
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