[In Harrisburg, the day after the Three Mile Island accident began:]
When someone asked Dr. [George] Wald [Nobel Laureate in Physiology
and Medicine] whether the public should believe me or the spokesmen
for the utility who had just reassured them that there was no danger,
he answered that under such circumstances, one should always ask
oneself who has the greater financial interest, the industry or the
concerned scientist trying to warn the public. Under the present
circumstances, he personally would tend not to accept the reassurances
of the industry spokesmen and would tend to believe that there was
indeed reason for deep concern, as I had indicated. There was no safe
level of radiation, and the unborn and the young are clearly more
vulnerable than adults.
LOW-LEVEL RADIATION
FROM HIROSHIMA TO
THREE MILE ISLAND
Copyright (c) 1972, 1981 by Ernest J. Sternglass
McGraw-Hill Book Company
* * * * * * * *
This is the introduction to the complete text of the 1982 paperback edition of Dr. Ernest Sternglass's book, Secret Fallout, Low-Level Radiation from Hiroshima to Three Mile Island that will follow in 15 parts. There is a great deal discussed and examined in this book to substantiate the conclusion reached by Dr. Sternglass that low-level ionizing radiation created by the fallout from nuclear bomb testing and from nuclear power plants--both publicly acknowledged accidents like Three Mile Island as well as the routine, legal radioactive emissions in liquid and gaseous form--has exacted a very high toll on the quality of public health in the United States and around the world. With a great deal of supporting evidence and numerous examples, Sternglass presents the case that toxicity of low-level radioactive fallout is responsible for distinct and consistent increases in mortality rates as well as in cancers, leukemia, birth defects, rises in chronic diseases.
I have elected to included selected excerpts from the text for the remainder of this "introduction" so those people who may not be inclined to read the complete book, can nevertheless gain a better understanding of the information the author presents.
Dr. Ernest Sternglass
170 West End Avenue
Apartment # 27-H
New York City, NY 10023
212/362-1334
As always, for those interested, a PostScript version of this book is
also available to generate a "prettified", "page-defined" hardcopy form.
(See the download section in SF.html for PostScript copy of this book.)
-- ratitor
from the back jacket of the book:
Politics/HealthSECRET FALLOUT
LOW-LEVEL RADIATION FROM HIROSHIMA TO THREE-MILE ISLANDERNEST STERNGLASS
Introduction by George WaldIn Secret Fallout Dr. Ernest Sternglass, Professor of Radiation Physics at the University of Pittsburgh, presents the evidence he has for twenty years [since the early 1960s] battled to bring before the public--the cumulative, devastating effects of low-level radiation on our health.
In the early 1960s, when nuclear testing filled the rains with radioactivity, Dr. Sternglass discovered a related increase in fetal deaths, infant mortality, and certain kinds of cancer. His studies were disregarded, discredited, or suppressed--even though documents available under the Freedom of Information Act make clear that top-level government officials were aware of the accuracy of his findings.
Nuclear power plants became the topic of his studies in 1970, and he gathered data showing that nuclear emissions have resulted in increased genetic defects, mental retardation, and death among newborns, as well as death due to lung disease in all age groups. Nuclear power plants have nonetheless proliferated.
Dr. Sternglass made headlines in 1979 by a study linking the decline in Scholastic Aptitude Test scores that has puzzled educators to past atomic testing. Most recently, he has looked at the evidence of the aftereffects of the Three-Mile Island incident and found that, contrary to popular opinion, tragedy was not averted: Infant and fetal deaths rose dramatically in the months following the accident.
Secret Fallout is the story of a courageous scientist struggling to uncover the dangers of nuclear power; it is a shocking expose of the indifference and neglect of officials of the government and apologists for the nuclear industry. But most of all it is a stern warning that unless we face up to the damage we have already done we cannot prevent our future destruction.Dr. Ernest Sternglass is Professor of Radiology, specializing in radiological physics, at the University of Pittsburgh Medical School, as well as Adjunct Professor in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at Indiana University, Bloomington. He is past president of the Pittsburgh Chapter of the Federation of American Scientists, a Fellow of the American Physical Society, a member of the Radiological Society of North America and the American Association of Physicists in Medicine. He has testified on low-level radiation before the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy and many other groups both here and abroad.Dr. George Wald, Nobel Laureate in Physiology and Medicine, is Professor of Biology at Harvard.
from the Preface
WHEN I UNDERTOOK to write the first edition of this book, originally published in 1972 under the title Low-Level Radiation, my primary concern was with the health effects of worldwide fallout from nuclear weapons, particularly on the developing infant in the mother's womb.
At that time I also discussed the first evidence for possible health effects of routine releases of radioactivity from nuclear reactors in their ordinary day-to-day operation.
In the ten years that have intervened since then, my concerns about the safety of nuclear plants have unfortunately been reinforced far more than I could have anticipated. Not only in the accident at Three Mile Island, whose likely effects on human health are discussed in the present book, but also in the normal operations of many other nuclear plants, there is now growing evidence for rising infant mortality and damage to the newborn. In the decade that has passed, cancer rates increased most sharply in areas closest to the nuclear reactors whose radioactive gas releases were found to rise most strongly, following the earlier pattern of death rates among the newborn described in the original book. . . .
What emerges is that in order for major governments to be able to continue threatening the use of their ever-growing stockpiles of weapons to fight and win nuclear wars rather than merely to deter them, they must keep from their own people the severity of the biological damage already done to their children by past nuclear testing and the releases from nuclear reactors near their homes.
It is to focus attention on the need to end this hidden threat to the future of human life on this globe that this new edition has been prepared.
Ernest J. Sternglass
Pittsburgh
July 1980
A description of the symposium in 1969 dedicated to the biological effects of exposure to radiation and a description of Sternglass's learning that the most vulnerable human being is the developing embryo and fetus which can concentrate a tiny amount of a radioactive isotope tens of thousands of times more than a full-grown adult person.
Instead of the relatively minor radiation dose produced by this original amount distributed in the 70,000 grams of body weight typical of the adult, there would be a concentration 70,000 times greater in the early embryo. And added to this was the fact that the embryo was already hundreds of times more likely to develop cancer or other forms of biochemical damage than the much more resistant, fully mature adult, as paper after paper presented at the conference showed. Thus, the low external doses given by fallout to the body of an adult, doses on which the world's radiation protection agencies had based their assumption that fallout was harmless, were actually highly lethal doses for the early embryo.
from Chapter 12, "Counterattack at Hanford"
IN MAY 1969, for the first time in over fifteen years, as a result of growing concern among radiobiologists, there was to be a symposium dedicated to the effects of radiation on the developing mammal, including the human infant, both prior to and immediately after birth. . . . .
The evidence supporting unexpectedly severe effects on the early embryo and fetus from internal radiation sources continued to accumulate until the close of the conference. And afterward, when I was able to examine the original manuscript submitted by Dr. Moskalev, I found that his studies did in fact confirm the most crucial points at issue in the whole fallout controversy. His group had found that when various of the isotopes contained in fallout were fed to female animals during pregnancy, large fractions were transferred through the placenta to the developing fetus. For example, up to 38 percent was transferred in the case of strontium given to rats and up to 66 percent in the case of cesium given to a litter of dogs. Furthermore, the amounts reaching the developing fetus were many times greater for continuous, slow intake (such as occurs with fallout in food) than for a large single dose.
More significant, Moskalev had found a direct relationship between the size of the doses of isotopes given just before pregnancy and the percent of the offspring that died--even for doses as small as 4-billionths of a curie per gram of body weight. This dose was well within the range of doses from fallout delivered to the early human fetus by the accumulated strontium in the mothers' bones. Thus, the argument that there might not be any effects at all from long-term, low-level radiation as opposed to doses given all at once, like diagnostic X-rays, had now been disproven by direct experiments.
Moskalev's results also showed that, regardless of whether a given amount of isotopes was fed to a mouse weighing 20 grams or to a dog weighing many thousands of grams, approximately the same fraction of the total amount would always concentrate in the rapidly growing embryo. This was one reason why, in all species, the fetus was so much more sensitive to fallout radiation than the adult. A given tiny amount of an isotope in the body of an adult might be quite tolerable if it was evenly distributed throughout the 70,000 grams of an average woman's body weight. But if even only one one-hundredth of this amount in the mother's body goes to the embryo during the first two to four weeks of development, when the embryo weighs less than a hundredth of a gram, then the concentration of radioactivity in the embryonic tissue would be the same as if the entire original amount had been given to a 1-gram embryo. Instead of the relatively minor radiation dose produced by this original amount distributed in the 70,000 grams of body weight typical of the adult, there would be a concentration 70,000 times greater in the early embryo. And added to this was the fact that the embryo was already hundreds of times more likely to develop cancer or other forms of biochemical damage than the much more resistant, fully mature adult, as paper after paper presented at the conference showed. Thus, the low external doses given by fallout to the body of an adult, doses on which the world's radiation protection agencies had based their assumption that fallout was harmless, were actually highly lethal doses for the early embryo.
It was not our physics and technology that had been inadequate, but our knowledge of biological systems and their enormous ability to concentrate toxic agents. Just as in the case of DDT, it was not the amount distributed throughout the environment that was so serious. It was the selective concentration in the food chain and then in the newly forming organs of the rapidly developing young embryo. Since all higher animals, including man, must pass through this critically sensitive phase, it was clear that, unless the problem was widely recognized and acted upon, man could extinguish himself and all other animals, not through the effect of radiation on the adult, but through the effect on the weakest link in the chain of life--the unborn and the very young.
The Atomic Energy Commission's own claims that experiments on animals given strontium 90 in low doses caused no ill effects in their offspring was completely contradicted by one of the AEC's own chief medical scientists.
. . . It turned out to be Dr. John Gofman, Tamplin's supervisor, who was Director of the Biomedical Division of Livermore and an Associate Director of the laboratory. This was the man the AEC had placed in charge of all their radiobiological studies at Livermore back in 1963, when the hazard from internal fallout doses first aroused widespread public concern. For years Gofman had been studying the possible connection between radiation, chromosome defects, and cancer. He told the audience that he had investigated all the animal experiments carried out by the AEC, and in no case had they been designed to detect the kind of small reduction in birthweight and ability to fight infections that I had suggested as the likely cause for the increased infant mortality in man. He concluded that, to the best of his knowledge, there was not a single animal experiment that would contradict my hypothesis, and with that he sat down.
from chapter 13, "The Public's Right to Know"
NOT A WORD of the findings reported at Hanford appeared in the national press or the other public news media. No science writers had been present, and none of the wire services had covered the meeting, held in a remote part of the country. Yet in view of the accumulated evidence presented at Hanford, it was now clear that the sensitivity of the early embryo was so great that if a nuclear war ever broke out only the more resistant reptiles and insects would survive the lingering radiation.
. . . As to the reason why the AEC had urged NBC to cancel my appearance, Hugh Downs reported: "They say that their experiments with animals show that there is no damage to offspring at all from parent animals given strontium 90 in those low dosages that we get." This was in complete contradiction with the evidence submitted at Hanford by Moskalev and numerous other independent scientists. The explanation lay, as usual, in the manner in which the AEC studies were constructed.
This point was to be confirmed a few months later in a most unexpected manner by a chief scientist at one of the AEC's own laboratories. I had received an invitation to present a paper on my other research work regarding the reduction of diagnostic X-ray doses at a meeting in San Francisco in October 1969. I was also asked whether I would be willing to debate my fallout thesis on the Berkeley campus with Dr. Arthur Tamplin, who had written a critique of my work that was about to be published in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, and to which I had just written a reply. Tamplin was a biophysicist at the nearby Livermore Laboratory, operated for the AEC by the University of California. During the question period following our debate, someone in the audience brought up the argument that AEC studies had found no significant increase in mortality among the offspring of experimental animals fed strontium 90 for long periods of time. Immediately, someone else in the audience stood up and asked to comment on this question. It turned out to be Dr. John Gofman, Tamplin's supervisor, who was Director of the Biomedical Division of Livermore and an Associate Director of the laboratory. This was the man the AEC had placed in charge of all their radiobiological studies at Livermore back in 1963, when the hazard from internal fallout doses first aroused widespread public concern. For years Gofman had been studying the possible connection between radiation, chromosome defects, and cancer. He told the audience that he had investigated all the animal experiments carried out by the AEC, and in no case had they been designed to detect the kind of small reduction in birthweight and ability to fight infections that I had suggested as the likely cause for the increased infant mortality in man. He concluded that, to the best of his knowledge, there was not a single animal experiment that would contradict my hypothesis, and with that he sat down.
Within less than a year, both Gofman and Tamplin publicly denounced as complete falsehood the position of the AEC as expressed by Sagan and Storer on the Today program, namely, that "the levels of radiation to which the American public was exposed from fallout have been harmless." As told by the two scientists themselves in the pages of The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, their public denunciation of the AEC's position on low-level radiation effects was precipitated by the attempt of the AEC's top management to force Tamplin to suppress his own independent calculations, made in his original critique of my findings, that perhaps as many as 8000 infant deaths per year might have taken place as a result of genetic damage from nuclear testing. Dr. Spofford English, the Assistant General Manager in charge of the AEC's entire research program, together with the head of the Division of Biology and Medicine, Dr. John Totter, as well as Dr. Leonard Sagan and Dr. John B. Storer, had indicated to Gofman that Tamplin should publish his critique minus his own estimate of the possible fetal and infant deaths, thus effectively keeping this information from the public.
As Gofman and Tamplin put it: "They wanted us by omission to support their incredible position as stated on the Today show, and to put Tamplin's estimate into a less widely read scholarly journal, where it would evidently not be seen by the scientific community at large, the general public, and their elected representatives in Congress."
Subsequently, Dr. Gofman resigned his position as Associate Director of the Livermore Laboratories, and all but one of Tamplin's research group of twelve people were taken away from him six months later. Both scientists have continued to testify before various congressional committees that there is no safe threshold of radiation exposure and that presently permitted radiation exposure levels must be cut back to virtually zero. They have proposed that no release whatsoever of radioactive materials into the environment should be permitted without a full, nonpartial, interdisciplinary examination of each situation. And they have assembled a vast body of data indicating that if the radiation doses now allowed by AEC regulations (an average of 170 millirads per year for the entire population and not more than 500 for any single individual) were to be received by the entire U.S. population as a result of peacetime uses of nuclear energy, there would be at least 32,000 and perhaps as many as 64,000 additional deaths each year from cancer and leukemia alone. And these figures did not even include fetal and infant mortality or any more subtle long-range effects on health.
Dr. Sternglass recounts how he came to understand the routine releases from nuclear power plants were themselves causing grave increases in measurable declines in public health--especially infant mortality. In 1964/65, "For the first time in the history of radiation standards the permissible doses to the public were raised rather than lowered . . . And this was done quietly by presidential executive order, for which no public hearing is required--despite the mounting evidence that there was no safe threshold dose of radiation as presented in August 1963 before the Joint Committee." An listing of instances of government suppression of information regarding various commerical power plant releases and their effects on human adult and infant mortality rates increasing and decreasing with the rise and fall of radiation levels from reactor releases culminating with the conclusion:
At long last, more than a quarter century after Hiroshima, studies of the health effects of fallout were being made by independent scientists outside the government such as Lave, Leinhardt and Kaye. But as I was not to learn until much later, neither the public nor the scientific community at large would be able to learn of these results. When the Carnegie-Mellon scientists submitted their paper to Science, Abelson refused to publish it, even though a similar paper by the same group linking ordinary air pollution to mortality increases using the same statistical techniques had been published by Science earlier.
The paper was finally accepted for publication in the much less widely read journal Radiation Data and Reports, published monthly by the Environmental Protection Agency. But the important findings of Lave, Leinhardt and Kaye never appeared in print. Just before publication, when the plates had already been prepared, the authors received word from the editor that objections from highly placed government officials forced them to destroy the plates. The article has never appeared in the scientific literature, and at the end of 1974, publication of Radiation Data and Reports ceased with the December issue after fifteen years of providing the only comprehensive source of data on radioactivity in the environment, following deep budget cuts in the Office of Radiation Programs ordered by the Nixon administration.
from chapter 14, "The Price of Secrecy"
AS LATE AS the spring of 1970, I believed that the radiation resulting from the normal operation of nuclear power plants was so low as to present no significant hazard to public health. This belief was based on the results of an old study of emissions from the first commercial nuclear electric power plant, located at Shippingport, Pennsylvania. Conducted almost ten years earlier, it had measured the radioactivity in the cooling water taken from the Ohio River both before and after it had passed through the plant. It found that the plant added so little radioactivity to the water that there were times when the chemically filtered water leaving the plant was actually less radioactive than the river water entering the plant--especially during periods of heavy fallout.
It therefore seemed reasonable to expect that if such low levels of radioactive waste releases had been achieved in 1957 in the very first nuclear power reactor built in this country, then the later, more advanced plants would release even less. But early in 1970 I discovered that this was not the case. In the published record of the hearings on the environmental effects of electric power generation, held by the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy in November 1969, there were tables supplied by the AEC listing the amounts of radioactivity discharged into the water and air by commercial nuclear power plants in the United States. Many plants were listed as actually releasing hundreds of thousands of times as much radioactivity into the air as others. For example, in 1967 two reactors had discharged as much as 700,000 curies, while another had released only 2.4 curies, or some 300,000 times less.
These were truly enormous quantities. Some of the many different isotopes contained in these gaseous and liquid discharges, such as cesium and strontium, were regarded as hazardous at levels as low as one ten-billionth of a curie per day in milk or food. A single curie of iodine 131 could make 10 billion quarts of milk unfit for continuous consumption, according even to the existing guidelines adopted by the federal government. Such large releases of radioactivity were in fact comparable to fallout from small tactical nuclear weapons. Although dilution in the air would reduce the hazard to people living more than fifty miles away from these plants, those living nearby were unknowingly accepting vastly greater risks to the health of their children.
Furthermore, the permissible levels listed for many of the reactors were enormous. For the Dresden reactor, located some fifty miles from Chicago, which had emitted 260,000 curies of radioactive gases in 1967, the permissible amount had been set at 22,000,000 curies per year by the AEC. Thus, in terms of permissible levels, the huge amount actually released could be, and was, cited by the power company as representing only about 1 percent of the maximum levels allowed. . . .
By 1959, the first large boiling-water reactor plant was completed at Dresden, Illinois, and in August of 1960, the first electricity from the 200-megawatt Dresden generators began to flow into the power grid of the Commonwealth Edison Company, serving the people of Chicago. The releases of radioactive gases into the atmosphere were relatively low in the first full year of operation, and so were the discharges of tritium, strontium 90, and other isotopes into the Illinois River. In 1961 only 0.158 percent of the maximum allowable amount had been released into the air, and even liquid wastes were held down to 6.3 percent of permitted levels. Compared to the amounts of radioactivity then being released into the water and the air by the renewed testing of nuclear weapons, this was certainly quite small.
But signs of trouble began to appear the very next year. By the end of 1962, corrosion had begun, and the amount of radioactive gas that had to be discharged into the air increased by almost ten times to 284,000 curies. Even the radioactivity discharged into the river rose more than three times. By 1963 emission of radioactive gases had been successfully brought back down to 71,600 curies by the replacement of leaking fuel rods, but the corrosion continued, and gaseous releases shot up to 521,000 curies in 1964.
No longer were the radiation doses to the surrounding population negligibly small compared to background radiation, as everyone had hoped. Annual average external doses to the population within a few miles of the plant could be estimated at 20 to 30 millirads by 1964. This was fast approaching the 88 millirads that the people in the area normally received from cosmic radiation and natural radioactivity in the soil, and it compared with what had been produced by weapons fallout.
It was becoming clear that the permissible levels of radiation from nuclear plants could not be lowered, as some scientists were beginning to urge, without having to shut the huge plant down only a few years after it had been built at a cost of well over a hundred million dollars. In fact, pressures were actually building up from industry and the military to raise the permissible discharges to the environment from nuclear activities, especially in the event of an accidental heavy release from a reactor or from fallout if weapons tests in the atmosphere were ever renewed. And so, in 1964 and 1965, the director of the Federal Radiation Council, Dr. Paul C. Tompkins, who had previously served as Deputy Director of the AEC's Office of Radiation Standards and Director of Research in the Bureau of Radiological Health of the U.S. Public Health Service, announced a twentyfold rise in the permissible amounts of the most hazardous isotopes in milk in the event of an accidental release. For the first time in the history of radiation standards the permissible doses to the public were raised rather than lowered, despite the mounting evidence that there was no safe threshold dose of radiation as presented in August 1963 before the Joint Committee. And this was done quietly by presidential executive order, for which no public hearing is required.
When in 1966 the gaseous discharges from the Dresden plant had climbed to 736,000 curies, or more than twenty times what they had been in 1961 and more than twenty million times more than Shippingport had released the same year, a decision was made to start replacing the corroding stainless-steel-jacketed fuel rods with more resistant, but also more expensive, zircalloy-clad fuel. By this time, the liquid releases, containing iodine, strontium, cesium, and other highly toxic elements, had risen to forty-three times their initial value, and, instead of being a small fraction of the permissible level, they had actually reached a full third of the AEC standards. Enormous quantities of these isotopes went into the Illinois River, flowing past Peoria, where the river water began to be used for drinking, and on to the Gulf of Mexico, concentrating thousands of times higher in the fish and in the birds that fed on them.
The example of Dresden clearly showed that it would not be possible to lower permissible radiation levels without having to shut down the whole series of boiling-water reactors that had now gone into operation all over the United States, each having cost some one hundred million dollars. And construction would have to be halted on dozens of even larger reactors in various stages of development throughout the United States and the rest of the world. . . .
There was thus little doubt that detectable health effects should have occurred in the areas surrounding the Dresden plant and other reactors. . . .
Since most of the fission products emitted by reactors are short-lived, persisting only for anywhere from a few days to a few months, it appeared that the effects on infant mortality would be sharp and immediate, just as had occurred with the short-lived isotopes in the case of fallout. There would probably be no significant residual effect, and so the rises and falls in infant mortality should correlate closely with the rises and falls in the reactor releases.
In October 1970 we examined the infant mortality rates in the counties around the Dresden reactor. In 1966, within a year after the emissions rose sharply from the relatively low value of 71,600 curies in 1963 to 610,000 curies in 1965, the infant mortality rate in Grundy County, where the reactor was located, and in adjacent Livingston County, jumped by 140 percent, or to more than twice its 1964 value. While only thirteen infants in these two counties had died in the year after the minimum radioactive emission, by 1966 this number had jumped to thirty. And the number of babies born live in these two counties actually decreased slightly from 1170 to 1082 in 1966, so that the jump in rates per 1000 births was actually even larger.
There could be little doubt about the statistical significance. Established statistical estimation techniques showed that the possibility of such a fluctuation being accidental was much less than one in 10,000. But this was not all. The students had gathered the data for all five counties surrounding Grundy County, as well as for a control group of six counties as far to the west and north of Grundy as possible within the state of Illinois, counties that bordered neither on the contaminated Illinois River nor on the Mississippi, where the effluent from other nuclear plants upstream in Minnesota and Wisconsin might lead to rises in mortality.
And when we carried out the comparison in the change of infant mortality rates for these two groups of rural counties of similar climate, medical care, and socio-economic character, the result was even more conclusive: While the mortality rates in the counties around the reactor had increased an average of 48 percent, the upwind control counties actually showed a decline of 2 percent in their average infant mortality rates.
Furthermore, with the prevailing westerly winds, the radioactive gas would drift eastward to Cook County, where Chicago was located, with a population of some five million. Since the radioactivity would have become much diluted with distance, only a small rise in mortality rates of a few percent would be likely. But since so many more children were born every year in Chicago than in Grundy County, the total number of additional deaths would be significant. And when we checked the figures, this is exactly what had taken place: Infant mortality in Cook County had gone up by 1.5 percent, during a time when in New York City it had declined by 6.7 percent.
Since some six million people lived within a radius of 50 to 60 miles from the Dresden reactor, and since the total population of Illinois was ten million, there should have been a significant rise in infant mortality for Illinois as a whole. And there was indeed--from an all-time low point of 23.9 in 1963 to a peak in 1966 of 25.6, in exact coincidence with the peak of gaseous emissions from the Dresden reactor. This was followed by a renewed decline in both recorded gaseous releases and infant mortality as the defective fuel rods were replaced.
With the advice of Dr. Morris DeGroot, head of the Statistics Department, Carnegie-Mellon University, who had become interested in the problem, we applied further statistical tests. The results were always the same: A significant rise and decline in infant mortality in Illinois compared to all other neighboring states in the northern U.S., correlating directly with the rise and decline of radioactive emissions from the Dresden reactor. Relative to Ohio, a few hundred miles to the east, where the infant mortality rate had been the same as in Illinois before the reactor had been started up in 1960, the excess infant deaths in Illinois for the years 1960-68 numbered close to 4000. And for each infant dying in the first year of life, it was well known that there were perhaps three to four that would live with serious genetic defects, crippling congenital malformations, and mental retardation, afflictions in many ways far worse than death in early infancy.
The largest numbers of deaths among the newborn infants were caused by asphyxia or respiratory distress, including hyaline membrane disease, long known to be associated with immaturity, and also general immaturity and "crib death." These were the very causes that had risen sharply all over the world during the period of nuclear testing and had only begun to decline again a few years after the test-ban treaty came into force. Yet here in Illinois, they were still increasing. And among the older infants, noninfectious respiratory disease deaths rose almost 90 percent, and bronchitis almost 50 percent, in the two years after 1964.
In fact, for all ages, there was a rapid rise in deaths due to such lung diseases as emphysema and bronchitis after the onset of the Dresden emissions. The rise was far greater than in more heavily polluted New York. In the ten years between 1949 and 1959, these death rates in Illinois increased by only 9 percent, but they rose by 75 percent in the short period from 1959, when the reactor was completed, to 1966, the last year for which data were available. This was more than eight times the previous annual rate of increase.
Thus, the radioactive gases released from reactor stacks, gases which had been widely regarded as relatively harmless, now appeared to be far more serious in their effects than had been anticipated. Although these gases do not concentrate and remain in the human body, they do dissolve readily in the bloodstream and especially in the fatty parts of many cell membranes when they are inhaled over periods of hours or days. And some of them transform themselves into the biologically damaging cesium, strontium, and yttrium inside the body. As a result, the internal radiation damage to the small air sacs of the lungs, which are lined with cells that produce a crucial fatty substance (lipid) that acts to keep these air sacs open when the air is exhaled, could be far more serious in causing respiratory damage than the external radiation dose from the radioactive gases outside the body.
There was still another way, more indirect but more efficient, in which small amounts of radioactivity could produce deaths from respiratory problems, especially in the newborn. Some of the radioactive chemicals produced by the fission of uranium--such as yttrium 90, the daughter product of strontium--were known to concentrate in the pituitary gland. And recent studies had revealed that the critical lipid needed to prevent the lung from collapsing was produced in special cells of the lung under the chemical control of the pituitary gland in the last few weeks of fetal development just before birth. Thus, even slight damage to the pituitary gland from radioactivity in the air or in the mother's diet could lead to a slight retardation in development, so that the lung would not be quite ready to function properly immediately after birth. And the result would be that otherwise apparently normal babies would be born underweight and would succumb to respiratory failure shortly after birth.
The rise in infant deaths from respiratory diseases associated with immaturity also indicated that the atmospheric reactor releases should be causing an increase in low-birthweight babies. This expectation was confirmed by the data for Grundy County, where the Dresden reactor was located. The number of low-birthweight babies born in this county rose and declined in exact synchronism with the measured gaseous emissions, the rises going as high as 140 percent. No such increases in the number of underweight babies took place in the six control counties more than 40 miles west of the reactor.
The sudden rise in emphysema and bronchitis all over the United States and other countries, noted by I. M. Moriyama, followed the onset of large-scale atmospheric releases of radioactive gas and dust in the early 1950s, also fitted the hypothesis that radioactivity in the air was causing lung damage. When we plotted the emphysema and bronchitis death rates for the states where ordinary air pollution was lowest but radioactivity in the air itself was highest, such as dry, dusty Wyoming, Utah, and New Mexico, where the winds picked up the radioactive dust again and again, we found that after declining in the 1940s, the respiratory death rates per 100,000 people suddenly began to rise sharply between 1946 and 1951, exceeding those in the much more polluted but higher-rainfall states of the east such as New York and Massachusetts, where the radioactivity was cleansed from the atmosphere and soaked into the ground by the rains. By the early 1960s, even in the heavily polluted coal-and steel-producing state of Pennsylvania, these types of respiratory deaths, normally attributed only to ordinary air pollution, were lower than in the clean mountain air of Wyoming.
Clearly, air pollution from ordinary fossil-fuel-burning power plants, which had doubled steadily every ten years for many decades, could therefore not be blamed for all of the alarming rise in lung disease deaths. Instead, all the evidence pointed to radioactive air pollution, both from fallout and from nuclear power plants, as the greatest single contributor to the rise in all types of chronic lung disease around the world, multiplying the effects of the other pollutants--including cigarettes, as in the case of the uranium miners.
Furthermore, there was one source of radioactive pollution that was potentially even more serious than the boiling-water reactors. This was the effluent from the nuclear-fuel processing plants. These plants recovered uranium from the spent reactor fuel elements, as well as plutonium, which could be sold back to the government for use in building bombs and missile warheads. In the process, radioactive gases and large amounts of other fission products were discharged into the air and adjacent rivers. Here all the efforts to prevent the escape of radioactivity from the reactors themselves were therefore completely nullified.
The students gathered the data for the first commercial fuel-reprocessing plant, located in West Valley, New York, some 25 miles south of Buffalo. . . .
There simply could be no further doubt as to the cause of the rising infant mortality around the West Valley plant: Measurements carried out by the Public Health Service and published in May 1970 showed that, aside from the dose produced by the krypton gases released into the air, doses as high as 250 millirads from cesium and 532 millirads from strontium would be received in a single year by any individuals who ate significant amounts of the area's heavily contaminated fish and deer. These were doses much greater than the 100 millirads normally received from natural background radiation. In fact, they far exceeded even the annual doses during the height of nuclear testing. And these dose calculations were only for the adult, and not for the much more sensitive fetus and infant, where the even more intensive concentration in various critical organs would make the doses far higher still.
. . . Similar situations existed around all the reactors we checked in various parts of the country. Even the small research-type reactors, such as the TRIGA, installed on college campuses and in laboratories all over the world, appeared to be capable of causing the same effect. When figures on the year-by-year emissions of the TRIGA reactor at Pennsylvania State College became available, we compared the infant mortality rates in the surrounding town, State College, with those in Lebanon City, a similar town some 100 miles to the east. State College showed precipitous rises and falls in infant mortality, corresponding closely with the rises and falls in emissions from the TRIGA. The State College rate went from 9.9 per 1000 births in 1963 to 24.7 in 1968. During the same period, the rate in Lebanon City, as well as in Pennsylvania as a whole, declined steadily from the peak reached during the atmospheric tests of 1961-62.
Since the population of State College was comparatively small, however, a remote possibility existed that these increases could be due to chance fluctuations. So we next examined infant mortality rates around the TRIGA on the University of Illinois campus in Urbana, where the population was much larger. From 1962, when the reactor commenced operation, through 1965, the year it reached full power, infant mortality increased by 300 percent. In this study, for the first time, we also had an opportunity to look at another category of possible radiation effects: deaths from congenital malformations. During the same period in Urbana these deaths increased by 600 percent, from 3.5 per 100,000 in 1962 to 23.5 in 1965. And in 1968, after the reactor was shut off, they turned downward to 6.6 per 100,000, while infant mortality showed a similar drop. In McLean County, which extended 20 to 60 miles northwest of Urbana and thus would not have been significantly exposed to the effluent, both categories of death declined steadily throughout the same period. The surprising strength of the effects from the TRIGA emissions, which were much lower than the emissions from the larger reactors we studied, could be explained by the fact that the TRIGAs were located right in the middle of densely populated areas. Therefore, the emissions would reach the developing infants in much more concentrated form, with much less time for the short-lived isotopes to lose their radioactivity.
It was the announced intention of the AEC, numerous public utilities, and the government that this country's energy needs would be supplied largely by nuclear-power reactors in the near future. Only fifteen or twenty such reactors were in actual operation, but more than a hundred were under construction or planned, as were the necessary number of fuel-reprocessing plants. But if our findings proved correct, then the entire program, with its phenomenally large investment of funds and scientific energy, would become virtually useless in its present form. Considering the apparent effects from normal operation of these plants, during which no more than one ten-millionth of their stored-up radioactivity had ever been discharged, a single large accidental release could be a national catastrophe of nuclear warfare dimensions. If the general public grasped this fact, then most people would probably consider the risk of this technology far too great to be accepted. But through all the years while reactor technology was being developed, the possible dangers of low-level radiation--either from fallout or from nuclear power plants--had been publicly minimized by the military, by industry, and by the health agencies that had given their stamp of approval to nuclear activities. The warning signs had been ignored or suppressed. And little or no funds had been made available for development of the potentially safer and more efficient alternatives to nuclear power, such as coal gassification or magnetohydrodynamics, which would permit the continued use of the still-enormous reserves of fossil fuels. Little or nothing was done to find means of harnessing the vast stores of geothermal energy in the crust of the earth, or the pollution-free energy of the sun. Yet there was little question that these alternative means of electric power production could have been successfully developed. . . .
Significantly, an independent statistical study of this subject was presented at a scientific meeting in July 1971 by Dr. Morris H. DeGroot, head of the Department of Mathematical Statistics at Carnegie-Mellon University. Dr. DeGroot found that infant mortality increases did take place in close correlation with releases of radioactivity from the heavily emitting reactors at Dresden, Illinois; Indian Point, New York; and Brookhaven, Long Island. Perhaps most important was his finding that in the area around the reactor at Shippingport, Pennsylvania--the only other reactor studied by Dr. DeGroot--there was no correlation between releases and changes in infant mortality. As the official release figures showed, the Shippingport reactor had the lowest gaseous emissions of any reactor in the country, since it was a non-commercial naval submarine type of plant.
But later in 1971, the most comprehensive independent study of all was completed. It was conducted by Dr. Lester B. Lave and his associates, Dr. Samuel Leinhardt and Martin B. Kaye, of the Graduate School of Business Administration at Carnegie-Mellon University. This was a study of fallout effects, but the results apply equally to reactor emissions. The three scientists concluded that, during the time period studied (1961-67), fallout appears to have been the single most important factor affecting fetal, infant, and adult mortality, more important than ordinary air pollution. Through the use of computerized statistical techniques they corrected their estimates to account for the effects of such variables as sulfur dioxide, socio-economic factors, background radiation, and others in 61 metropolitan areas of the United States. The principal findings and their implications may be briefly summarized as follows:
Infant mortality is strongly associated with levels of strontium 90 and cesium 137 in milk, especially the former. The association is such that for every single micromicrocurie of strontium 90 per liter of milk there is an increase of 12 infant deaths per 100,000 births. Since, during 1961-67, there was an average of 15.8 micromicrocuries per liter of milk in the U.S., then these findings indicate that during this period there were close to 7600 infant deaths every year due to fallout. For the world population, this would mean an extra 100,000 infant deaths per year. But during the peak of testing, these levels reached between 50 and 100 micromicrocuries per liter in many locations around the world, and as late as 1971 they were still between 5 and 15 in most parts of the northern hemisphere. And they then began to rise again following the large French and Chinese test series and the rapid growth in releases from nuclear reactors and fuel reprocessing plants.
Dr. Lave's group also found that mortality rates for the whole population--in other words, all causes of death among all ages--were also highly correlated with fallout levels. The calculations showed that there were 1.29 extra deaths per 100,000 people for each single micromicrocurie of strontium 90 per liter of milk. At the 1961-67 levels, this amounts to some 40,000 extra deaths each year in the United States, and thus some 600,000 among the world's population of over three billion people.
And during the fifteen-year period of heavy nuclear testing that began in the early 1950s, when the short-lived iodine and other isotopes were added to the strontium 90 in the milk, there would have been many millions of extra deaths.
At long last, more than a quarter century after Hiroshima, studies of the health effects of fallout were being made by independent scientists outside the government such as Lave, Leinhardt and Kaye. But as I was not to learn until much later, neither the public nor the scientific community at large would be able to learn of these results. When the Carnegie-Mellon scientists submitted their paper to Science, Abelson refused to publish it, even though a similar paper by the same group linking ordinary air pollution to mortality increases using the same statistical techniques had been published by Science earlier.
The paper was finally accepted for publication in the much less widely read journal Radiation Data and Reports, published monthly by the Environmental Protection Agency. But the important findings of Lave, Leinhardt and Kaye never appeared in print. Just before publication, when the plates had already been prepared, the authors received word from the editor that objections from highly placed government officials forced them to destroy the plates. The article has never appeared in the scientific literature, and at the end of 1974, publication of Radiation Data and Reports ceased with the December issue after fifteen years of providing the only comprehensive source of data on radioactivity in the environment, following deep budget cuts in the Office of Radiation Programs ordered by the Nixon administration.
Dr. Sternglass recounts how he came to learn that the official claim that the first commercial nuclear electric power plant, located at Shippingport, Pennsylvania had the lowest gaseous emissions of any reactor in the country, was false and that in fact there were clearly detectable increases not only in infant mortality but mortality at all ages in relation to the high readings of radioactivity both on the land and in the Ohio River. Sternglass describes learning about the studies of Dr. Abram Petkau who was "examining the basic processes whereby chemicals diffuse through cell membranes" and how Petkau's findings seemed to indicate that
the more protracted the radiation exposure was, the less total dose it took to break the membranes, completely contrary to the usual case of genetic damage, where it made no difference whether the radiation was given in one second, one day, one month, or one year. . . .
Thus, almost overnight, the entire foundation of all existing assumptions as to the likely action of very low, protracted exposures as compared to short exposures at Hiroshima or even from brief, low-level medical X-rays had been shaken. Instead of a protracted or more gentle exposure being less harmful than a short flash, it turned out that there were some conditions under which it could be the other way around: The low-level, low-rate exposure was more harmful to biological cells containing oxygen than the same exposure given at a high rate or in a very brief moment.
Unfortunately even with the grand jury appointed to investigate the situation at Shippingport, in the end the same outcome occurred as has happened time and time again throughout the United States:
Once again, the industry had managed to win the battle in the special courts set up by the AEC, which controlled the judges, the staff, and the rules of procedure for the benefit of the industry it was designed to promote and protect.
It was only the people that were the losers. . .
from chapter 15, "Fallout at Shippingport"
[ . . . ]
After weeks of graphing and analyzing the data with the help of colleagues, volunteers from local environmental organizations, and students at the university, there could be no doubt about the result: The data collected by the Duquesne Light Company's own hired team of experienced health physicists clearly indicated that the Shippingport plant must have been the source of radioactivity in the environment many thousands of times as great as had been claimed in the official reports to state and federal agencies. Instead of annual radiation doses of less than 0.5 millirems claimed by the utility, the combination of external radiation (measured by the dosimeters) and internal radiation (from the gases that were inhaled or ingested with the milk, the water, and the local meat and vegetables) was many hundreds of millirems per year. Indeed, this dosage exceeded the level of radiation that was received by the people of this area during the height of nuclear-weapons testing. Moreover, the scientists who had carried out these measurements had clearly failed to warn either the utility officials who had hired them, the public-health officials at the state or federal level, or the public, whose health and safety were being endangered by the secret fallout from the plant. . . .
Confronted with the evidence of very high levels of strontium 90, cesium 137, and iodine 131 in the area in 1971, while "zero" release had been officially reported, I began to wonder about earlier releases. The plant had been in operation since 1958, so in light of the unreliable claims by the company, I wondered if there might indeed have been long-term exposure to the people of Beaver County and nearby Allegheny County, in which the city of Pittsburgh was located. In particular, enough time had elapsed for leukemia and cancer to develop, so that one might for the first time be able to determine whether the operation of commercial nuclear plants did or did not lead to the same kind of cancer increases that I had begun to see following the start of nuclear-weapons tests in Nevada, the Pacific, and Siberia. . . .
There were apparently hundreds to thousands of times as many curies of highly toxic radioactivity in the Ohio River than were allowed by state and federal limits, designed to protect the health of the people using the Ohio for their drinking water. The radioactivity did not come from the direct liquid discharges, however, but through the run-off of unreported gaseous releases that had settled on the land.
Here, then, was at least one piece in the puzzle as to why not only infant mortality but mortality at all ages had been affected so strongly, despite the relatively small external radiation doses from gamma rays on the ground that irradiate the whole body uniformly. It was the airborne gaseous activity and the run-off into the rivers serving as drinking-water supplies that had apparently carried the more damaging short-lived beta-ray-emitting chemicals rapidly into the critical organs of the people, in addition to the other pathways via the milk, the vegetables, the fruits, the fish, and the meat that were most important for the long-lived strontium 90 and cesium 137. And although adults were more resistant to the biological damage than the developing fetus, they received the doses steadily over many years rather than just for a few months, by continuously drinking the water, inhaling the gases, and eating the food that was contaminated first by the fallout from the bomb tests, and then by the secret gaseous releases from the peaceful nuclear reactors along the rivers of the nation. . . .
There would soon be another kind of grand jury appointed to hear the differing claims of government officials and independent scientists who had stumbled upon information that was not meant to reach the ordinary citizen of our country.
Newspaper stories in the Pittsburgh area repeating the denial of large discharges from Shippingport and blaming the high readings either on fallout or on errors in the measurements were clearly indications of deep concern by the AEC, Duquesne Light, and N.U.S. All three organizations now knew that before long they would be facing hearings by an independent body of knowledgeable scientists. The bureaucrats and scientists in the AEC knew that this time the hearings would not be under their control, unlike the case of the usual licensing hearings, where both the hearing officers and the staff were appointed by the agency whose mandated task it was both to promote and regulate the safety of the nuclear industry.
But the full extent of the behind-the-scenes efforts to make the public believe that nothing had happened at Shippingport did not emerge until long after the hearings of the fact-finding commission had taken place at the end of July. The story was pieced together later in an article by a free-lance investigative writer, Joel Griffiths, and published in an article in the Beaver County Times on June 7, 1974, after the AEC had issued licenses for the operation and construction of the Beaver Valley Power Station Units I and II. . . .
None of this, of course, was known either to me or the members of the fact-finding commission when the hearings began on July 31, 1973 in the town of Aliquippa. The panel appointed by Governor Milton J. Shapp and chaired by Dr. Leonard Bachman, the Governor's Health Services Director, consisted of seven members in addition to the chairman, representing a broad range of disciplines and wide experience in matters related to public health. Only five of the panel members, however, were independent university-based scientists outside the state government, and only three of these had personal experience with studies of radiation effects in man. . . .
In the course of the questioning period that followed my presentation, I was asked how it was possible that such relatively small doses comparable to normal background levels could lead to such large changes in mortality rates, when it apparently took ten to a hundred times these levels to double the risk for the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In response I cited the startling results of a recent study published in the journal Health Physics in March of 1972 by a scientist working for the Canadian Atomic Energy Laboratories in Pinawa, Manitoba, Dr. Abram Petkau. Dr. Petkau had been examining the basic processes whereby chemicals diffuse through cell membranes. In the course of these studies, he had occasion to expose the membranes surrounded by water to a powerful X-ray machine, and observed that they would usually break after absorbing the relatively large dose of 3500 rads, the equivalent of some 35,000 years of normal background radiation.
This certainly seemed to be very reassuring with regard to any possible danger to vital portions of cells as a result of the much smaller doses in the environment from either natural or man-made sources. But then Dr. Petkau did something that no one else had tried before. He added a small amount of radioactive sodium salt to the water, such as occurs from fallout or reactor releases to a river, and measured the total absorbed dose before the membrane broke due to the low-level protracted radiation.
To his amazement, he found that instead of requiring a dose of 3500 rads, the membrane ruptured at an absorbed dose of three-quarters of one rad, or at a dose some 5000 times less than one rad, much less than was necessary to break it in a short, high-intensity burst of radiation such as had occurred at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Dr. Petkau repeated this experiment many times in order to be certain of this disturbing finding, and each time the result confirmed the initial discovery: the more protracted the radiation exposure was, the less total dose it took to break the membranes, completely contrary to the usual case of genetic damage, where it made no difference whether the radiation was given in one second, one day, one month, or one year.
By a further series of experiments, he finally began to understand what was taking place. Apparently a biological mechanism was involved in the case of membrane damage that was completely different from the usual direct hit of a particle on the DNA molecules in the center of the cell. It turned out that instead, a highly toxic, unstable form of ordinary oxygen normally found in cell fluids was created by the irradiation process, and that this so-called "free radical" was attracted to the cell membrane, where it initiated a chain reaction that gradually oxidized and thus weakened the molecules composing the membrane. And the lower the number of such "free radicals" present in the cell fluid at any given moment, the more efficient was the whole destructive process.
Thus, almost overnight, the entire foundation of all existing assumptions as to the likely action of very low, protracted exposures as compared to short exposures at Hiroshima or even from brief, low-level medical X-rays had been shaken. Instead of a protracted or more gentle exposure being less harmful than a short flash, it turned out that there were some conditions under which it could be the other way around: The low-level, low-rate exposure was more harmful to biological cells containing oxygen than the same exposure given at a high rate or in a very brief moment.
No longer was it the case that one could confidently calculate what would happen at very low, protracted environmental exposures from studies on cells or animals carried out at high doses given in a relatively short time. It was clear that the direct, linear relation between radiation dose and effect was no longer the most conservative assumption, for it was based on the implicit assumption that a given dose would always result in a given increase in risk, no matter whether the radiation was absorbed in one second or one year. Clearly, if Dr. Petkau's findings were to be confirmed by other experiments in the future, our whole present understanding of low-dose radiation effects would have to be revised, since small exposures might turn out to be far more harmful to living cells than we had ever realized.
Thus, I pleaded we should not reject evidence for much higher than expected infant and cancer mortality rates merely because that evidence did not seem to agree with our previous estimates based on high-level, high-rate exposures at Hiroshima and in various studies. I now believed that we had to be prepared to revise drastically our expectations as to what apparently innocuous low-level, chronic radiation exposures to critical cells and organs from environmental sources might do.
My own testimony was followed by that of Dr. Irving Bross, a well-known biostatistician from the Roswell Park Memorial Cancer Institute in Buffalo, New York, who had himself been studying the effect of low-level radiation on childhood leukemia for many years. In summarizing his findings Dr. Bross stated that there exists a wide range of individuals with very different degrees of sensitivity to radiation, depending upon their age and their past medical history.
This fact alone would invalidate any estimate of the likely effect of small radiation exposures to a large human population, since these had been based on the average adult, obtained at high doses, and on the assumption of a linear relationship between dose and effect. For a non-homogeneous group, the more resistant individuals such as healthy young adults would not show any significant effects, while either the very young or the very old and those with immune deficiencies, allergies, and other special conditions might show an unexpectedly large effect. As Bross had put it in a letter to The New York Times published just a few weeks before he testified: "It follows that procedures for calculating `safe levels' based on `average exposures' of `average individuals' are not going to protect the children or adults who need the protection most." . . .
As Anna Mayo, who covered the proceedings for The Village Voice, put it in an article published a few months later, "it was all redolent of--you guessed it--Watergate. In the audience, environmentalists gnashed their teeth, wishing that the Shippingport horrors could have been exposed on national television. If Duquesne Light would cover up, would not Con Ed, LILCO, or Commonwealth Edison do the same if Indian Point, Shoreham, or Dresden were at stake?"
Indeed a great deal was at stake: In 1973 some thirty-eight new nuclear reactors were in the process of being ordered, the largest number ever in one year, each representing a potential business of about a billion dollars. And it was the stated aim of the Nixon administration and the nuclear industry to see a thousand of these reactors operating near the cities of our nation by the end of the century. It would indeed be difficult for any human beings not to have minimized the danger when a thousand billion dollars were at stake. . . .
Once again, the industry had managed to win the battle in the special courts set up by the AEC, which controlled the judges, the staff, and the rules of procedure for the benefit of the industry it was designed to promote and protect.
It was only the people that were the losers. Two years after the licenses were granted and five years after the high radiation levels had been measured by the N.U.S. Corporation, with the same time delay as in Hiroshima, the cancer rates in Beaver County and Pittsburgh climbed to a second peak. They rose a full 23 percent in Beaver County and an unprecedented 9 percent in Pittsburgh in the course of only three years: The rise to an all-time high of 304.8 per 100,000 population took place after a generation of costly efforts to reduce the ordinary pollution from fossil fuels in the air and chemicals in the water.
But the heaviest price of all was to be paid by the men who worked at Shippingport, as I was to learn at another kind of hearing at Aliquippa seven years later.
When preparing testimony for a hearing before a workmen's compensation referee in behalf of the family of a man who had died of bone-marrow-type leukemia while working at the Beaver Valley nuclear plant next to the old Shippingport reactor, I was shown the death certificates of twenty-one other operating engineers who had died between 1970 and 1979. All of them had been working with pumps and other heavy equipment to clean up the radioactive spills and move the radioactive wastes on the site. Out of these twenty-two men, ten had died of cancer, more than twice the number normally expected.
Even more significantly, four of these ten were of the bone-marrow-related type, namely multiple myeloma and myelogenous leukemia, known to be most readily induced by radiation, when less than one in twenty cancers of this type would have been expected.
The men who worked at Shippingport were only too well acquainted with these facts. There was a common saying among them: high pay and early death.
Yet there was also a sign of hope for the future. After Shippingport was shut down by an explosion of hydrogen gas in its electrical generator early in 1974, infant mortality in the town of Aliquippa declined to an all-time low of only 11.3 deaths per thousand babies born in 1976.
If the public could only learn these facts as the nation entered the third century of its revolution against the arbitrary authority of another distant government careless of the inalienable human rights to life and liberty, even the tragic tide of rising cancer and damage to the unborn could eventually be reversed.
Dr. Sternglass recounts how in 1975 he began to wonder about how a decline in SAT scores, dropping since the mid-sixties, could drop an entire 10 points in one year--1975--and how he came to the conclusion that this was related to the damage to children still in the womb or of very young age after birth:
Following this Sternglass reflects on the potential results of such debilitating effects on children's cognitive abilities:Clearly, if the effects were serious enough to lead to a rise in infant mortality and congenital defects back in 1957, as I knew had taken place, then for every baby that died shortly after birth, there must have been many who were minimally brain-damaged or whose cognitive growth may not have reached its full potential.
The children that could not read or cope with mathematics and science would drop out of school and become permanently unemployable. And these young people would feel increasingly resentful toward those whom they blamed for their failure: their teachers, their parents, and their political leaders. Even worse, they would blame themselves and suffer from low self-esteem.
Many of the unemployed and discouraged young people would drift into crime, vastly raising the level of violence and fear in the cities. Not knowing what caused their problems, they would increasingly resort to drugs and alcohol to overcome their sense of failure and hopelessness, raising the rate of juvenile suicide and crime still further.
from chapter 16, "The Minds of the Children"
[ . . . ]
In the spring of 1971 our group gathered the data for radioactivity in the air, in the milk, and on the ground both before and after the Baneberry test. This was then correlated with the mortality figures for infants born following the explosion, as reported in the U.S. Monthly Vital Statistics. In all of the states where the total radioactivity rose highest--Idaho, Montana, Oregon, Nevada, Washington, Nebraska, and as far away as Minnesota and Maine--infant mortality also rose sharply during the first three months after the test. Across the rest of the U.S., the pattern of general decline continued.
It was shortly after reading another story in the papers about how the United States and the Soviet Union had failed to agree once again on a treaty to halt all underground nuclear tests that my attention was caught by an article in The New York Times about an apparently unrelated subject. The report dealt with the fact that in 1975 the scores in the nationwide Scholastic Aptitude Tests had dropped by the largest amount in two decades. While there had been a more or less steady decline in both the verbal and the mathematical scores since the mid-1960s, generally by no more than 2 or 3 points, the average verbal scores had suddenly dropped 10 points in a single year. Since our son was taking the S.A.T. tests that year, I read the article with more than casual interest.
Suddenly the question flashed through my mind: When were these young people born or in their mother's womb? Most of them were 18 years old when they graduated from high school. What was 18 taken from 1975? It was 1957, the year when the largest amount of radioactive fallout ever measured descended on the United States from the highest kilotonnage of nuclear weapons ever detonated in Nevada. Just as in the case of the Baneberry test, the radioactive iodines must have gone to the thyroids of the infants in their mother's womb, where it would retard their growth and development ever so slightly so that it was not readily noticeable, and only when the children were tested 17 to 18 years later on a nationwide scale would it show up in a sharp drop in intellectual performance.
Clearly, if the effects were serious enough to lead to a rise in infant mortality and congenital defects back in 1957, as I knew had taken place, then for every baby that died shortly after birth, there must have been many who were minimally brain-damaged or whose cognitive growth may not have reached its full potential.
I remembered from the 1969 Hanford symposium that this was exactly what had happened to the young children on the Marshall Islands after the radioactive cloud from the "Bravo" hydrogen-bomb test in 1954 had accidentally showered the island of Rongelap, 150 miles away, with fresh fallout. As reported by Conard at that meeting, in the following fifteen years, all the children developed thyroid disease of one form or another and showed severe growth retardation, both in their bodies and the size of their brains.
But the thought was really too disturbing to contemplate in all its enormous implications. Perhaps it was just a coincidence and nothing more. After all, as the Times story made clear, there were so many other possible factors that could have been involved, including a deterioration of the schools, more disadvantaged students taking the tests, more urban problems, and the whole upheaval of the Vietnam war. Even too much television viewing had been blamed for the drop in reading ability, as well as a general decline in motivation among young people. But I was glad that I had urged my wife and all our friends to give powdered milk to their children during their years of infancy, in which the short-lived iodine 131 had had a chance to decay away.
. . . as soon as I opened the letter with the data I knew that the hypothesis was once again supported by the evidence: By far the greatest drop between 1974 and 1976 had indeed occurred in the state with the highest levels of radio-iodine in the milk, namely Utah, and the smallest drop was recorded for the midwestern state of Ohio, largely to the south of the drifting clouds of fallout that had passed over Minnesota, Michigan, New York, southern Ontario Province in Canada and northern New England. The magnitude of the effect was difficult to believe, but here in the letter from the College Board were the hard numbers: Utah had dropped 26 points and Ohio only 2.
There was just no way that such an enormous difference in the sudden drop could be explained solely by socio-economic factors, differences in the quality of teachers, school curricula, television viewing, amount of cigarette smoking, drug use, alcohol consumption, or other gradually changing physical factors in the environment such as air pollution or pesticides.
In fact, if smoking, alcohol, and drug taking during pregnancy had been a factor, Utah, with its large Mormon population, should have declined less and not more than Ohio and New York. But it was the other way around: The population with lower cigarette consumption, alcohol, and drug problems during pregnancy had the greater decline in Scholastic Aptitude scores by many times the normal statistical fluctuation of 2 to 3 points.
Nor could differences in the genetic factors of the two populations be blamed: They were both predominantly white, and in fact the Mormons had originally come from the East and Midwest. Besides, genetic or inherited factors would lead to long-term differences, not the sudden changes that had taken place. Tragically, it now appears that we had unwittingly carried out an experiment with ourselves as guinea pigs on a worldwide scale. This discovery made me more determined than ever to do everything in my power to make sure that the terribly costly lesson would be learned before mankind would make further and perhaps more irreversible mistakes with fallout from nuclear war or nuclear reactor accidents, in which the radioactivity equivalent to a thousand Hiroshima bombs might suddenly be released over vast areas the size of entire states or nations. . . .
It was only too evident that if the radioactivity in the environment led to early infant mortality, childhood cancer, thyroid damage, and underweight births, then also the learning ability of the surviving children might never develop its full potential.
And it would be the steady decline in the ability to read and reason and not so much the rising cancer rates in old age that would be the real seed for the self-destruction of a modern technological society. The children that could not read or cope with mathematics and science would drop out of school and become permanently unemployable. And these young people would feel increasingly resentful toward those whom they blamed for their failure: their teachers, their parents, and their political leaders. Even worse, they would blame themselves and suffer from low self-esteem.
Many of the unemployed and discouraged young people would drift into crime, vastly raising the level of violence and fear in the cities. Not knowing what caused their problems, they would increasingly resort to drugs and alcohol to overcome their sense of failure and hopelessness, raising the rate of juvenile suicide and crime still further.
Not being aware of the subtle thyroid damage with its resultant lethargy, parents would blame the teachers, and teachers would blame the parents for the increasing loss of interest, discipline, reading ability, and general motivation of the students. Vast sums of money would be spent in efforts to help the slow learners and the many handicapped students suddenly flooding the schools, draining the resources of society at the very time when there would not be enough highly skilled, resourceful, and inventive young people produced to improve the teaching and raise the productivity of factories, businesses, and farms. At the same time, the cost of health care would spiral as more and more developed early chronic disabilities, a situation that would lead to increasing absenteeism from offices, schools, and factories, and thus further reduce the output of goods and services while expectations continued to rise.
As productivity dropped while the need for costly special education and disability payments rose, the vast amount of borrowing that government would have to do to provide for the rapidly growing number of unemployed, handicapped, and sick would drive up the rate of inflation more and more. To keep ahead of the inflation, as well as to dampen its flames, the banks would have to raise their interest rates so as not to lose money by lending. Industrial machinery could not be modernized because borrowing the money would become too costly. The factories and farms would fall still further behind in their ability to meet the growing demand for manufactured goods and food, further adding to the pressures of inflation.
At the same time, the smaller supply of capable and creative young people needed to fill the jobs as engineers, scientists, doctors, nurses, computer specialists, teachers, managers, and officers for the increasingly sophisticated factories, offices, schools, hospitals, and military services would drive up salaries, adding still more fuel to the inflationary fires. More and more plants would be forced to shut down because they could not compete with more modern factories in other countries whose young workers were more productive because these countries were not in the direct path of the fresh fallout from Nevada and therefore less heavily exposed to short-lived iodine. Also a greater fraction of the reduced supply of talented and inventive young people would be absorbed in the unproductive tasks of developing ever more complex and costly nuclear-weapons systems and reactors, thus further weakening the economic situation of the nation as it was forced to import ever larger amounts of civilian goods and machinery from other countries.
As I thought about this scenario, I wondered how much of this had already begun to happen, as juvenile crime and suicide suddenly doubled and tripled in the mid-1970s among the children born in the late 1950s all over the U.S. and in northern industrial countries, where the fresh fallout had come down most heavily. The end of weapons testing in Nevada had led to a halt in the decline of intellectual ability among those tested eighteen years later, especially those born well after 1963, when bomb testing ended. There were now fewer children born blind and deaf showing up in the statistics, and there were fewer leukemia cases, brain tumors, and suicides among children and adolescents. Fewer crimes were being committed by young people under 18 years old than during the mid-1970s, when the intellectual achievement scores had dropped most rapidly, although the latest crime statistics showed a second large jump in 1979, corresponding to the second series of heavy atmospheric bomb tests 17 to 18 years earlier in 1961-1962.
The chapter on Three Mile Island provides a revealing view into the closed world of suppressed and censored information the U.S. government had kept a tight lid on since the late fifties about the true health costs from exposure to radioactive fallout. Sternglass laments the fact that if the information had been made available to the public and the scientific community, "the enormous financial commitment to a trillion dollars' worth of nuclear plants" might never have been made. As it was, the public was not informed of such fundamental risks because it might have "endangered the ambitious program of rapidly building a whole new generation of gigantic nuclear reactors all over the nation, each ten times as large as Shippingport, which were about to be considered for licensing. Among these were to be the plants of Beaver Valley, Millstone, and Three Mile Island." The tragic irony--that Three Mile Island itself was in part able to be built because the public was not aware of or informed about the potential dangers it and reactors like it presented--is that individuals in the U.S. government knew the serious nature of radioactive fallout from government studies, and yet they felt the "national interest" superceded the health of the people. Truely, censorship is the descent of darkness.
Nearly 40,000 pages of files dealing with radiation revealed a disturbing story of deception perpetrated in the national interest. Not surprisingly, the full consequences of this deception for the nation's health were never adequately examined.
Reading the list of what Curry discovered made me realize something that I had only begun to suspect in recent years, namely that some individuals in the government knew long before I had stumbled upon it accidentally how serious the fallout from weapons testing really was. As early as 1959, a study found higher levels of radioactive strontium 90 in the bones of younger children in the fallout zone. And, as Curry added, "coincidentally a Utah state epidemiologist found this year that children living in the zone during the weapons testing had 2.5 times as much leukemia as children before and after the testing program.". . .
As Curry's story made clear, this was to be the end of the report that might have given the public and the scientific community a timely warning of the unexpected seriousness of the planned normal and accidental releases of low-level radiation before the enormous financial commitment to a trillion dollars' worth of nuclear plants had been made by the nation's utilities. . . .
As Curry's story made clear, the AEC was determined to prevent the publication of the Weiss study, which would of course have fully substantiated the concerns of scientists such as Linus Pauling, Barry Commoner, Eric Reiss, E. B. Lewis, Jack Schubert, Ralph Lapp, myself, and many others who had warned of the possible rise in congenital defects, thyroid cancer, and especially childhood leukemia only a few years earlier. But our concerns had largely ended with the signing of the test-ban treaty by Kennedy and Khrushchev in the fall of 1963, just before Kennedy was assassinated. The release of the Weiss study would clearly have evoked renewed opposition from the scientific community and the public to the vast military and civilian programs that were being planned by the Pentagon, the AEC, and the nuclear industry for the use of bombs to dig canals and for vastly increasing the radioactivity in the environment from the production of weapons and the routine releases from giant commercial nuclear power plants.
The next part of the story in the Washington Post was therefore the inevitable next step in a Greek tragedy that would eventually lead to Three Mile Island and the crisis that a stunned nation would face when the promised source of cheap, clean, and economical nuclear power to replace the imported oil would suddenly turn into a national nightmare on their television screens
from chapter 17, "Incident at Three Mile Island"
[ . . . ]
The telephone rang again, and this time it was someone from the Mobilization for Survival in Philadelphia, asking me whether I would be willing to go to a press conference in Harrisburg the next day together with Dr. George Wald of Harvard University. The purpose of this conference would be to present an alternative source of information for the people in the area on the potential health hazards from the accident. (So far, the people in the area had received nothing more than the bland reassurances being offered by the utility and the spokesman for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the government organization formed from the old AEC when it was reorganized a few years ago).
The thought passed through my mind that by tomorrow, Harrisburg might not be a very healthy place to bring a lot of reporters together for a news conference, but I tentatively agreed to go, provided there were no further serious or unforeseen developments. In the meantime, I would have to try to gather as much information as possible about just what was going on in the reactor. I needed to have a clearer feeling for the nature of the danger that the people in Harrisburg were facing. . . .
The news conference was already in progress when I arrived. There were a surprisingly large number of reporters with microphones, tape recorders, and television cameras crowded into the relatively small meeting room, with Dr. George Wald of Harvard sitting at a table toward one end.
I apologized for being late, and then took out my survey meter to measure the radiation rate in the room. The reading was still three to four times normal, or essentially the same as outside. Clearly, the walls of the building did not provide any significant protection. Most likely, it was the gamma radiation from the radioactive gas that was by now at the same level as outside the building. Even closing the windows would have been futile at this point.
The intensity of the questions from the reporters reflected the great concern that existed, and I felt acutely the great difficulty of having to explain, without causing a panic, the seriousness of the situation that already existed for the pregnant women and infants. I explained that at the moment, the radiation levels were not serious enough for the normal, healthy adult as long as they would not increase because of further releases. Asked what I would recommend in the light of my knowledge of the situation, I said that at the very least, pregnant women and young children should be urged to leave the area within a few miles of the reactor because of the likelihood of continuing releases of radioactive iodine that would concentrate in the fetal thyroid as well as in that of the infants and young children.
By limiting my recommendation in this manner, I hoped that there would not be any sudden rush toward a mass evacuation of the whole population, which might cause serious traffic jams and accidents. I was primarily concerned with preventing panic, especially since according to my latest information, there was apparently no immediate threat of a complete melt-down. And since the greatest danger existed for the unborn and very young, at least they would not be exposed any further, although at that point I did not know whether most of the dose had already been received, or whether there would in fact be any further large releases.
I also urged that pregnant women and young children should not drink fresh milk or local water for the next few weeks, until detailed measurements could be carried out to determine the precise levels of radioactivity. The most immediate hazard was clearly from the inhalation of the fresh radioactive gases by expectant mothers, which would lead in a matter of hours to significant amounts of radioactive iodine transmitted through the blood stream to the placenta and from there to the developing infant's small thyroid gland.
When someone asked Dr. Wald whether the public should believe me or the spokesmen for the utility who had just reassured them that there was no danger, he answered that under such circumstances, one should always ask oneself who has the greater financial interest, the industry or the concerned scientist trying to warn the public. Under the present circumstances, he personally would tend not to accept the reassurances of the industry spokesmen and would tend to believe that there was indeed reason for deep concern, as I had indicated. There was no safe level of radiation, and the unborn and the young are clearly more vulnerable than adults. . . .
Here then was the long bitter story emerging at last, just as it was being repeated--not in the case of fallout from nuclear-weapons tests carried out in the national interest at distant test sites in the Pacific and the Nevada desert, but in the case of invisible releases from peaceful nuclear reactors near the nation's cities, in the private interest of an industry spawned by the secret military atom.
Nearly 40,000 pages of files dealing with radiation revealed a disturbing story of deception perpetrated in the national interest. Not surprisingly, the full consequences of this deception for the nation's health were never adequately examined.
Reading the list of what Curry discovered made me realize something that I had only begun to suspect in recent years, namely that some individuals in the government knew long before I had stumbled upon it accidentally how serious the fallout from weapons testing really was. As early as 1959, a study found higher levels of radioactive strontium 90 in the bones of younger children in the fallout zone. And, as Curry added, "coincidentally a Utah state epidemiologist found this year that children living in the zone during the weapons testing had 2.5 times as much leukemia as children before and after the testing program." This was the study by Dr. Joseph L. Lyon, published in the New England Journal of Medicine just a few weeks before Three Mile Island.
But what shocked me even more was Curry's account of a much earlier government study suggesting a link between fallout and leukemia that was begun even before I had submitted my first article to Science dealing with this possibility, back in 1963. Apparently, a 1959-60 spurt in leukemia in the southwestern Utah counties of Washington and Iron had been noticed by Edward S. Weiss of the Public Health Service, and he had immediately suspected fallout. The study, which showed that the two counties experienced 9 more leukemia cases than the 19 statistically expected, was essentially completed by July 1965, when Weiss submitted it for publication in a Health Service journal. . . .
Not only would the study have jeopardized the commission's program at the Nevada Test Site for using strings of hydrogen bombs to build a new Panama Canal and to test designs for anti-ballistic-missile warheads in the atmosphere, but as I learned later, it might also have endangered the ambitious program of rapidly building a whole new generation of gigantic nuclear reactors all over the nation, each ten times as large as Shippingport, which were about to be considered for licensing. Among these were to be the plants of Beaver Valley, Millstone, and Three Mile Island.
As Curry's story made clear, this was to be the end of the report that might have given the public and the scientific community a timely warning of the unexpected seriousness of the planned normal and accidental releases of low-level radiation before the enormous financial commitment to a trillion dollars' worth of nuclear plants had been made by the nation's utilities.
In fact, it was clearly no coincidence that at exactly this time, namely the years 1964 and 1965, the Johnson White House had ordered a twentyfold increase in the permissible levels of iodine 131 and strontium 90 in the milk before it needed to be withdrawn from the market. (This fact came to light in the course of hearings by the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy on Radiation Standards held in 1965.) And it was also the time when the Johnson administration had made a secret commitment to a major involvement of American armed forces in Vietnam, where tactical nuclear weapons might have to be threatened or used if the Chinese should enter the conflict, as they had in Korea. That was clearly not the time to alarm the American people about the possible risk of leukemia, thyroid disease, and congenital defects among newborn children from the clouds of radioactive fallout that were certain to drift back over the United States if these weapons were ever used.
As Curry's story made clear, the AEC was determined to prevent the publication of the Weiss study, which would of course have fully substantiated the concerns of scientists such as Linus Pauling, Barry Commoner, Eric Reiss, E. B. Lewis, Jack Schubert, Ralph Lapp, myself, and many others who had warned of the possible rise in congenital defects, thyroid cancer, and especially childhood leukemia only a few years earlier. But our concerns had largely ended with the signing of the test-ban treaty by Kennedy and Khrushchev in the fall of 1963, just before Kennedy was assassinated. The release of the Weiss study would clearly have evoked renewed opposition from the scientific community and the public to the vast military and civilian programs that were being planned by the Pentagon, the AEC, and the nuclear industry for the use of bombs to dig canals and for vastly increasing the radioactivity in the environment from the production of weapons and the routine releases from giant commercial nuclear power plants.
The next part of the story in the Washington Post was therefore the inevitable next step in a Greek tragedy that would eventually lead to Three Mile Island and the crisis that a stunned nation would face when the promised source of cheap, clean, and economical nuclear power to replace the imported oil would suddenly turn into a national nightmare on their television screens:
The next day, Sept. 10, Ink sent to the surgeon general a critique containing criticisms of the study's scientific basis which were made public in January with the Weiss report. The letter did not, however, make any reference to the AEC's concerns about damage suits, adverse publicity or its effect on the testing program.
Meanwhile, the Public Health Service was gearing up to announce the thyroid study and to disclose the leukemia study. Weiss' study was formally prepared and dated Sept. 14. Two days later, the thyroid study was announced, but there was no mention of the leukemia findings.
One Health Service document suggests that the service itself may have even suppressed the study temporarily to avoid excessive press coverage of the thyroid study. "All of this interest," an official wrote of the congressional and press concern for fallout studies, "will be intensified if publication of the leukemia portion of the study occurs before the [thyroid] project begins."
Earlier, the Health Service had decided to minimize any publicity of the thyroid study.
The result was that the Weiss study was not released and in 1966 was still under review and revision. It was never released.
It was now clear what Surgeon General Jesse L. Steinfeld had referred to when he answered an inquiry from Representative William S. Moorehead back in 1969. Moorehead wanted to know what had happened to the promised large-scale epidemiological studies on thyroid cancer, leukemia, and congenital defects in relation to fallout radiation requested by Congressmen Holifield and Price after the August 1963 hearings on low-level radiation. Steinfeld had written that the feasibility studies for such a program led to a decision that "a national program was not indicated" and that "the feasibility studies were not published." Those were the studies of Edward S. Weiss, a Public Health Service Officer who had tried to protect the lives and health of the people of the United States in accordance with his professional oath.
And as inexorable as that fateful decision was to suppress the truth about the biological effects of the worldwide fallout from nuclear-weapons testing in the interest of national security, it would now be necessary for the government to keep from the people of this country and the rest of the world the truth about what I knew would surely happen in the wake of the drifting fallout clouds from Three Mile Island.
In the aftermath of Three Mile Island, more concrete examples of government deception and silence about the danger to human health from the radioactive clouds escaping from TMI. But instead of protecting the health of the people, the government was attempting to protect the continued myth of the viability of the nuclear industry.
Once again, as in the case of the Nevada tests, it was essential to keep such knowledge from the public and the scientific community at large. The NRC, the EPA, and all the other federal and state agencies knew full well that the doses were comparable with those experienced by the people of Utah, Montana, Wyoming, and the other states across the northern United States as far as New York and New England during the period of the Nevada tests, or for releases from some of the largest and most heavily emitting reactors, such as Millstone in New London, Connecticut, over a period of a year or two.
If, indeed, there should once again be sudden rises in infant mortality in areas where the radioactive clouds had drifted and the public should learn of them when the televised nightmare of Three Mile Island was still fresh on everyone's mind, this public knowledge would threaten the government's and the nuclear industry's vast program to build a thousand of these giant reactors by the end of the century near all the major cities, and would result in costly damage suits, exactly as in the case of the Nevada tests. . . .
from chapter 18, "Too Little Information Too Late"
THE TRUTH WAS more difficult to suppress this time than it had been in the atmosphere of fear engendered in the cold war of the McCarthy years, the Cuban missile crisis, and the Vietnam war. Nonetheless, an attempt to keep the facts from the people was clearly being made. . . .
Here it was: the NRC knew that the true doses were not just a few millirems to the people in the area, as had been claimed at the Kennedy hearings, with maximum values of the order of 75 to 100 millirems nearest to the plant.
They knew just as I did that the greatest dose arose not from the external gamma radiation measured by a survey meter or a film badge, but from the internal beta radiation from the inhaled fission gases and particles in the lung, the thyroid, and the other critical organs that concentrate the different substances according to their various chemical properties. So when the external gamma-dose rate on the ground was of the order of 1 to 2 millirems per hour, the true dose rate to the lung and other critical organs could be as much as 50 to 100 times greater, or of the same general magnitude as the 120 millirems per hour Hendrie himself had just mentioned.
But they also knew, as I did, that if they ever were to order the full evacuation that should have been ordered long before, it would not only have caused a panic among the completely confused and unprepared population, it would also have been the end of the nuclear industry, whether or not the core would ever go to a complete melt-down.
And so more precious time in which to save lives was being lost by recommending only that people should stay indoors, as was clear from the taped conversation with Governor Thornburgh. At that very moment Governor Thornburgh was under enormous pressures from those wanting to protect this important Pennsylvania industry on the one hand, and his Secretary of Health, Gordon MacLeod, on the other hand, who was at that very time urging that at least the pregnant women and young children should be evacuated. . . .
No wonder the NRC staff did not want to let the public know that they knew exactly in which direction the most radioactive clouds had moved, since this information could then be used to tie any later localized rises in fetal deaths, infant mortality, and cancer to the radioactive gas clouds from Three Mile Island. . . .
Once again, as in the case of the Nevada tests, it was essential to keep such knowledge from the public and the scientific community at large. The NRC, the EPA, and all the other federal and state agencies knew full well that the doses were comparable with those experienced by the people of Utah, Montana, Wyoming, and the other states across the northern United States as far as New York and New England during the period of the Nevada tests, or for releases from some of the largest and most heavily emitting reactors, such as Millstone in New London, Connecticut, over a period of a year or two.
If, indeed, there should once again be sudden rises in infant mortality in areas where the radioactive clouds had drifted and the public should learn of them when the televised nightmare of Three Mile Island was still fresh on everyone's mind, this public knowledge would threaten the government's and the nuclear industry's vast program to build a thousand of these giant reactors by the end of the century near all the major cities, and would result in costly damage suits, exactly as in the case of the Nevada tests. . . .
In mid-August, the latest monthly report from the U.S. Center for Health Statistics for the month of May arrived in the library. Calculating the rates of infant deaths per 1000 live births, I found what I had expected. Instead of declining from the winter high, infant mortality in Pennsylvania had gone up following the accident at the end of March. Compared to 147 deaths in February and 141 in March, there had been 166 in April and 198 in May, an unprecedented rise of 40 percent. Yet, the number of births had actually declined from 13,589 in March to 13,201 in May. Thus the rate of infant deaths per 1000 live births had increased even more, namely by 44 percent, from 10.4 in March to 15.0 in May.
Yet, at the same time, the rate for the United States as a whole between March and May had declined 11 percent as it normally did, dropping from 14.1 to 12.6 per 1000 live births. . . .
In the final chapter Sternglass describes the continuing efforts by U.S. government officials to suppress the true health costs and effects of low-level radioactive fallout from Three Mile Island as well as large emissions from nuclear power plants. In the case of TMI's aftermath, the overriding concern was to put an absolute clamp on any information coming out of the Harrisburg area or areas downwind which would undermine the government's claim that no one had died or was injured as a result of the meltdown.
It was as if an iron curtain had descended around the Harrisburg area, sealing off the people of the rest of the United States and the world from the news that would have warned them of a totally unexpected severe effect of low-level fallout. But neither the nuclear industry, the military, nor the state and federal governments committed to nuclear power wanted them to know. What so many people had feared would happen in a society committed to nuclear power had in fact taken place. The most important of all our civil rights, the freedom to learn of matters affecting our lives and those of our children through a free press, was being secretly subverted by an enormously powerful nuclear industry and a military establishment that had spawned and nurtured it, all in the interest of national security. . .
Thus, still another set of official data confirmed my original findings as well as the data MacLeod had forced into the open, and I knew that Tokuhata's attempt to mislead the public in the pages of the Times would eventually backfire, still further increasing the tragic mistrust of the public for its institutions. . . .
Secrecy and censorship are the cancers killing this society and its ability to respond to dangers and threats to health promulgated by technologies the true risks and costs of which are hidden and kept secret from the public by their own government.
In our rapidly changing science-based society, it is the freedom to investigate and communicate important scientific or public health findings quickly and widely--no matter how disturbing or controversial--that is the key element in the protective system needed to alert a society to potentially dangerous developments before they become irreversibly destructive.
The rapid growth of a powerful military and commercial nuclear technology was largely unchecked by the normal protective processes of free communication and public discussion. As a result, the unique economic and political forces of the industrial, military, and scientific organizations to which the atom gave birth are like a malignant cancer in our society, unrecognized and unchecked while it developed under the cover of secrecy to its present enormous size. If we continue to allow our government, which brought this technology into being for purposes of national security, to continue in its efforts to aid and abet the suppression of the freedom of publication in this vital area, then the crucial early warning system that our society needs to survive will have been destroyed. . . .
from chapter 19, "The Present Danger"
--[ . . . ]
The nation could survive if there were a few more infants that died shortly before or after birth. It could even survive if there were many more adults who would die of cancer or heart disease at age seventy rather than at eighty. But no nation could survive in the long run if it continuously damaged the mental ability of its newborn children, especially in an age where verbal and mathematical skills were increasingly essential to the functioning of a high-technology society. And since fewer children were being born, and the advances of modern medicine had increased greatly their chances of survival to adulthood even if they were physically and mentally handicapped, it would not take much more than a few generations for a nation with nuclear plants near its cities or sources of milk and water to destroy its health, its productivity, and thus its ability to compete with others who used less biologically damaging ways to meet their needs for energy. . . .
Thus it was no surprise that the EPA as well as the NRC issued statements after my reports had been sent to State Representative Anderson and Congressman Christopher Dodd, in whose district the Millstone Plant was located, which claimed that the high strontium 90 and cesium 137 levels in the milk near this plant were due to fallout and could not be attributed to releases from the plant. The EPA and NRC never even attempted to explain why the levels of these radioactive substances should increase as one approached the stack from every direction.
Instead, these government agencies, on whom the public depended for the protection of its health and safety, tried to mislead the public. They claimed that there was little strontium 89 present along with the strontium 90, as is always the case when fresh fission products escape into the environment, and that therefore the strontium 90 could not be due to plant releases.
But what the nonspecialist could not have known is that strontium 89 has a very short half-life of only 50 days compared with 30 years for strontium 90. While the long-lived strontium 90 continues to build up in the soil around the plant, the strontium 89 rapidly decays away. Thus, when the cows return to pasture in the spring and summer, the milk shows predominantly the accumulated strontium 90, and very little of the short-lived strontium 89.
In fact, it is just as in the case of a coal-burning plant, where both steam and dust are emitted from the stack. Clearly, one would not expect to see the surrounding area covered with water, which evaporates rapidly just as short-lived isotopes disappear. Instead, one would expect to find a high level of ashes accumulating, decreasing with the distance away in every direction, just like the long-lived strontium 90 particles in the soil and milk around a nuclear plant.
But the nuclear scientists and engineers in these agencies, taking advantage of the widespread lack of scientific knowledge among the general public, its representatives, and even the heads of their own bureaucratic organizations, acted to protect the national interest as they saw it. Thus, they used their expertise to mislead the public, firmly believing that the need for energy independence or the willingness to use nuclear weapons far outweighed any conceivable small impact on human health. . . .
I had been approached by ABC to appear on the show Good Morning America to present my findings, which were apparently in sharp contrast to the conclusion of the Kemeny report, a draft of which was read to me by the producer. According to this draft, which had a discussion of potential health effects that was confined to only a couple of pages, the only effects were psychological, with no detectable increases expected on infant mortality or cancer rates. In effect, the Kemeny Commission had accepted the optimistic report by the NRC, the EPA, and HEW a few days after the accident [at TMI].
Apparently no efforts had been made to look at the actual statistics on infant mortality and miscarriages that had shown significant rises as early as May and June, four to five months before the final draft was being prepared in September and October. Yet, if the commissioners had wanted to, they could easily have obtained the same data I had been able to find in the records of local hospitals and the reports of the U.S. Center for Health Statistics for every state in the United States. If there really had been no increase in stillbirths and infant deaths, this would surely have been the best way to reassure the people of Harrisburg and the rest of the world living near nuclear reactors, once and for all ending the concern about nuclear power, silencing the critics, and freeing the industry from the uncertainty that was leading to its rapid decline in the wake of Three Mile Island.
But this was clearly not the course chosen. The actual data would have shown an increase in mortality rates near the plant during the summer months, while they declined in nearby areas not reached by the plume so carefully recorded in the utility's own internal reports available to the Kemeny Commission. Such a pattern would have been as difficult to explain away as the peaks of strontium 90 infant mortality and cancer increases around Shippingport and Millstone in the past, hardly reassuring for a public that had by now learned to distrust deeply the public statement of utility officials and government scientists whenever it came to the health effects of low-level radiation from bomb fallout or nuclear facilities.
Not being able to allow the truth to emerge, the government and the industry resorted once again to the familiar tactics of suppression and attempts to discredit the critics, as I would learn in the days following the official release of the Kemeny Report in early November.
I was supposed to appear on Good Morning America the day after the Kemeny Commission report was published. All arrangements had been made when I received a phone call from the producer saying that the format of the show would have to be changed, that they would need to find someone who would represent the industry and government point of view to debate me, and that this would mean a day's delay in my appearance. The following morning, I received another call from the producer, who said that they had found someone who would represent the other side, and that the program was now scheduled for 8:15 A.M. the next day. My tickets had been paid for, the hotel room in New York reserved, and a limousine ordered to pick me up and take me to the studio.
But the opportunity to present the other side of the story to a nationwide audience in answer to the bland assurance of the Kemeny Commission broadcast the day before never came. Just a few hours before I was scheduled to leave for New York, a call came from ABC saying that there was a last-minute change in the schedule, and that they had to cancel my appearance. I remembered the enormous pressures that had been exerted by the Atomic Energy Commission on the producers of the NBC Today show back in 1969 when I was scheduled to appear to talk about the effects of bomb fallout on infant mortality. But this time, it seemed likely to me that the pressure came from a commercial nuclear industry fighting for its life, and apparently these forces were too powerful even for a large television network such as ABC. . . .
A news conference had been arranged by a local citizens' group in Harrisburg for noon, following my scheduled appearance on Good Morning America, and so instead of flying to New York, I took the plane to Harrisburg early the next day. It was the same flight I had taken the morning of the first news conference, when the radioactive gases were causing my survey meter to give me the warning of the large gas releases that the industry did not want to become known.
The news conference took place in the same small room of the Friends' Meeting House where the first one had been called on the second day of the accident. . . .
Television cameras representing the major networks had been present; some of the network reporters interviewed me separately immediately following the news conference. But neither that evening nor the next day was there any mention of these disturbing findings either on the local news in Pittsburgh or on any of the national television news programs. There were a few very brief local radio news items, but not a word of the news conference appeared in any Pittsburgh or Philadelphia papers.
It was as if an iron curtain had descended around the Harrisburg area, sealing off the people of the rest of the United States and the world from the news that would have warned them of a totally unexpected severe effect of low-level fallout. But neither the nuclear industry, the military, nor the state and federal governments committed to nuclear power wanted them to know. What so many people had feared would happen in a society committed to nuclear power had in fact taken place. The most important of all our civil rights, the freedom to learn of matters affecting our lives and those of our children through a free press, was being secretly subverted by an enormously powerful nuclear industry and a military establishment that had spawned and nurtured it, all in the interest of national security.
Since in our society there are so many independent magazines, newspapers, radio stations, and news services, unlike in a monolithic society such as the Soviet Union, there is no way to insure absolutely that a determined "dissident" scientist armed with publicly available government data can be prevented from having his message eventually reach the people. Therefore, the best way to prevent wide dissemination of undesirable information is to destroy the credibility of any individual seeking to reach the public and the scientific community at large. In this way, the message would either not be transmitted by wary news media or it would not be believed, especially if it was not reported in sufficient detail. This was, in fact, the tactic that was adopted following the news conference in Harrisburg. . .
Thus, still another set of official data confirmed my original findings as well as the data MacLeod had forced into the open, and I knew that Tokuhata's attempt to mislead the public in the pages of the Times would eventually backfire, still further increasing the tragic mistrust of the public for its institutions. . . .
Yet the state's news release signed by Muller, as quoted in the UPI story, concluded as follows:
After careful study of all available information, we continue to find no evidence to date that radiation from the nuclear power plant resulted in increased number of fetal, neonatal or infant deaths.
Neither the UPI nor The New York Times had fulfilled their normal journalistic responsibility to the public to obtain comments from those who could have pointed out the misleading nature of the news release. In a matter of such great concern and importance for the future health and well-being of the children of Harrisburg and the entire world, was this too much to ask for?
Ironically, the willingness of The New York Times and the UPI to lend themselves to the attempt to cover up the full dimensions of the deaths at Three Mile Island was to be proven futile within a few months, as a result of the persistence of two television news reporters who became disturbed when they discovered a series of inconsistencies and anomalies in the tables of statistics released by the Pennsylvania Health Department in May of 1980. . . .
. . . Apparently it had not occurred to either one of us that the data released might actually have been doctored in some manner when we first heard of the May 1980 news release issued by MacLeod's successor. It seemed incredible that someone might want to do something so glaring, yet when we examined the figures further, a whole series of gross inconsistencies emerged, all tending to reduce the number of deaths during the critical summer months when the U.S. Monthly Vital Statistics had shown the greatest rise of infant deaths both in Pennsylvania and upstate New York relative to the United States as a whole. . . .
The damage done to the developing infants at Three Mile Island will not be as easily swept away as a single public-health official, more concerned about trying to protect human life and health than a powerful technology gone out of human control.
I knew only too well how often this had happened before without the knowledge of the public. I knew how the budgets of public-health agencies, such as those of New York State, had been cut in order to stop the publication of the detailed annual health statistics that would allow other conscientious officials or independent investigators to alert the public to the danger of emissions from newly built nuclear reactors or fallout from distant nuclear detonations. The fragmentary summaries of data that replaced the detailed reports beginning in 1970 were a very inadequate substitute. I also knew that the budget of the EPA had been cut by the Nixon administration to force an end to the publication of Radiation Health Data and Reports in 1974. That was the year after the nuclear industry and the agencies that promoted it had learned from the Shippingport hearings how the detailed monthly data on strontium 90 gathered by the states could be used to pinpoint the new sources of radioactivity in the milk. Used intelligently, such detailed data might lead to costly damage suits, just as in the case for the fallout from Nevada.
After those who were primarily concerned about public health had been forced out of the NRC and EPA, it was a simple step to end the previously required monitoring of strontium 90 by the nuclear plants, ostensibly as an economy measure. Interestingly, however, the end of monitoring came in 1979, the same year in which the permissible doses to critical organs from the nuclear fuel cycle were reduced by a factor of twenty. Those scientists who knew that strontium 90 gave the greatest dose per picocurie of all substances released by nuclear bombs or nuclear reactors would no longer be able to protect the public precisely because the most crucial data was no longer being collected. And those few who wanted to warn the public risked the destruction of their scientific reputation and careers.
As I explained to Pawlick at the end of our interview, one of the greatest unanticipated threats of low-level radiation to the human body comes from its action on normal, life-giving oxygen molecules, turning them into powerful toxic agents. Among the most important systems they attack are the immune defenses of the body, which detect and destroy not only foreign bodies such as viruses and bacteria, but also ordinary cells that have somehow gotten out of normal control. These are the so-called malignant cancer cells, which multiply rapidly until they become so numerous that they inhibit the normal functions of vital organs, a condition that eventually leads to the death of the organisms as a whole.
In this sense, there is a close analogy between the human body and a complex human society. They can both be destroyed by outside forces, or they can destroy themselves if they lose the ability to recognize "super-normal" individuals with an unusual ability to propagate their kind in an unchecked manner.
In our rapidly changing science-based society, it is the freedom to investigate and communicate important scientific or public health findings quickly and widely--no matter how disturbing or controversial--that is the key element in the protective system needed to alert a society to potentially dangerous developments before they become irreversibly destructive.
The rapid growth of a powerful military and commercial nuclear technology was largely unchecked by the normal protective processes of free communication and public discussion. As a result, the unique economic and political forces of the industrial, military, and scientific organizations to which the atom gave birth are like a malignant cancer in our society, unrecognized and unchecked while it developed under the cover of secrecy to its present enormous size. If we continue to allow our government, which brought this technology into being for purposes of national security, to continue in its efforts to aid and abet the suppression of the freedom of publication in this vital area, then the crucial early warning system that our society needs to survive will have been destroyed.
In the name of national security, our scientists and engineers have created Frankenstein's monster, capable of destroying life in this world. Ironically, in order to realize the dream of ending all wars and developing the peaceful atom that would atone for the horror of Hiroshima and make up to mankind for the threat of destruction that would forever hang over the world in the years to come, they needed to ally themselves with the military, political, and economic interests that alone could supply the enormous financial resources needed to realize their dream. Indeed, Eisenhower had tried to warn the nation of this danger at the end of his presidency.
The alliance of science and technology with the military and political forces is, of course, as old as civilization itself, since only through the fear of powerful enemies would the public provide the necessary funds to develop costly new technologies, all the way from better steel for swords to gigantic missile systems capable of pinpoint accuracy in delivering nuclear bombs to their targets.
But when the testing of nuclear weapons and the leakage from commercial reactors were found to have unanticipated serious biological effects on the population, it became necessary to secretly subvert the very freedom of publication and continued correction of errors on which the success of modern science and technology itself has been based.
In their understandable desire to see the blessings of the peaceful atom come about in their lifetime, and concerned not to endanger the sources of capital for the research and development essential for the advancement of science and technology required by modern society, those involved with the development, promotion, and regulation of nuclear technology and the protection of public health were too often willing to participate in the effort to hide the consequences of nuclear testing or normal and accidental releases from nuclear reactors, especially when the requirements of national security were cited to them in periods of international tension.
Ironically, the need to believe that peaceful applications of the atom were possible played into the hands of those in the military who wanted to use nuclear weapons in limited wars, since both required the assumption that low-level radiation from distant, worldwide fallout or from nuclear plants was essentially harmless. Thus, the most concerned and idealistic scientists who had worked on the bomb and who later dedicated themselves to the realization of the peaceful benefits of the atom, because they were willing to believe the harmlessness of very small amounts of radiation and the negligible magnitude of the doses from nuclear reactor operations, were in effect contributing to the increased likelihood of nuclear war.
Thus, the deeply felt hope for safe, clean, and economical nuclear power kindled by the nuclear scientists tragically aided the plans of leaders of the nuclear nations to find ways to use nuclear weapons in all types of military confrontations. Only the continuing denial of the seriousness of worldwide fallout would give credibility to these threats.
Only a few months before Three Mile Island, James Reston, writing in The New York Times, asked what "the present danger" facing our nation really was:
Is it a military threat from the Soviet Union or an economic threat from some of our allies who are outworking and outproducing us?
In short, is the threat external or internal? What worries the world about the United States today: that it is spending only 117.3 billion dollars this year on defense--the highest peacetime military budget in our history? Or that the United States is spending more of its economic and moral capital than ever before and losing confidence in itself and the confidence of the free world?
Reston went on to quote Lincoln from an address given in Springfield, Illinois, on January 27, 1837. Lincoln's words now take on a particularly strong relevance:
At what point shall we Americans expect the approach of danger? By what means shall we fortify against it? Shall we expect some trans-Atlantic military giant to step the ocean and crush us at a blow? Never! All the armies of Europe, Asia, and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth (our own excepted) in their military chest with a Bonaparte for a commander, could not by force take a drink from the Ohio or make track on the Blue Ridge in a trial of a thousand years.
And then came this most strangely prophetic passage:
At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us it must spring up amongst us: it cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of free men we must live through all time or die by suicide.
As Reston concluded, "it could be, of course, that Mr. Lincoln is out of date in this nuclear world, but at least his point is worth debating. The `present danger' may be the failure to debate what it really is."
But when vital information is secretly kept from free people, they are no longer free, and there can be no meaningful debate of the most crucial problem facing our nation and the rest of the people of this world, namely whether we shall learn how to live through all time by finding a way to end the nuclear cancer threatening our nation, or die by nuclear suicide.
If we have any moral or ethical obligations at all as human beings, they surely include the obligation to insure the survival of our species and thus the opportunity for our children and their descendants to develop to the fullest the miraculous potential of the human mind. As the French philosopher-scientist Jean Rostand has phrased it so eloquently on behalf of humanity as a whole, "The duty to survive gives us the right to know."
"It is not enough for a handful of experts
to attempt the solution of a problem,
to solve it and then to apply it.
The restriction of knowledge to an elite group
destroys the spirit of society
and leads to its intellectual impoverishment."
-- Albert Einstein