By John LaForge, Nukewatch staff Cover story, CounterPunch magazine, March 2014, Vol. 21. No. 2, pp. 10-14
Radiation Is a Carcinogen: Any Exposure Can Cause Cancer
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- French Scientists: Childhood Leukemia Spikes Near Nuclear Reactors
Radiation Is a Carcinogen: Any Exposure Can Cause CancerTRUTHOUT // Wednesday, 20 June 2012 / By John LaForge, Peace Voice There is no safe level of exposure to ionizing radiation, only legally "allowable" doses. Types of ionizing radiation include gamma rays, beta and alpha particles, and X-rays emitted by radioactive elements — like the iodine-131, cesium-137, strontium-90 and even plutonium-239 — that have been spewed into the air and the sea in huge quantities by the triple reactor meltdowns that began in Japan last year, and that are dispersed to the air, water and to dump sites in smaller amounts by the everyday operation of nuclear power and medicine. Legally permitted releases of radiation — from landfills, power reactors, research reactors, production reactors and accidents — increase the so-called "background" level of radiation to which the public is exposed. This is allowed in spite of the fact that every federal agency that regulates commercial or industrial releases and medical uses of radiation warns that any and all exposure to either external or internal doses, no matter how small, increases one's risk of cancer. The National Council on Radiation Protection says, "every increment of radiation exposure produces an incremental increase in the risk of cancer." The Department of Health and Human Services warns that "Ionizing radiation is invisible, high-frequency radiation that can damage the DNA or genes inside the body. Some patients who receive radiation to treat cancer or other conditions may be at increased cancer risk." Yet when a spill, a venting or even a large radiation disaster happens, government and industry spokespeople, as well as major news organizations, are quick to downplay or outright misstate the well-known and easily accessible facts about radiation's human health and environmental consequences. The second or third sentence in most nuclear "accident" reports often includes the phrase "no immediate danger" or "contamination not at harmful levels."
The Environmental Protection Agency says, "Based on current scientific evidence, any exposure to radiation can be harmful or can increase the risk of cancer.... Radiation is a carcinogen. It may also cause other adverse health effects, including genetic defects in the children of exposed parents or mental retardation in the children of mothers exposed during pregnancy." The National Academy of Sciences, in its seventh book-length report The Biological Effects of Ionizing Radiation, concludes likewise. Committee member Herbert Abrams of Harvard said, "There appears to be no threshold below which exposure can be viewed as harmless." The Department of Energy, which makes H-bombs and tons of radioactive waste, says about low level radiation, "... the major effect is a very slight increase in cancer risk." The Nuclear Regulatory Commission says, "... any amount of radiation may pose some risk for causing cancer and hereditary effect.... [A]ny increase in dose, no matter how small, results in an incremental increase in risk." Take a hint. From Fukushima's hot tuna, to the hot water dumped from Xcel's Monticello reactor, radiation's danger is immediate — although the harm may not appear for 10 to 30 years — and there's no harmless exposure. None. This piece was reprinted by Truthout with permission or license. It may not be reproduced in any form without permission or license from the source. _________ Reporting about the on-going disaster relentlessly repeats the minimization and trivialization of radiation risk that began March 11, 2011with the largest earthquake in Japanese history and the unprecedented tsunami that left over 26,000 people dead or missing and 80,000 living in shelters. Radioactive contamination of soil, tap water, rain water, baby food, groundwater, beef, fish, vegetables, animal feed and incinerator ash are almost always said to be of little or “no immediate” danger, which helps explain why Fukushima, today leaking some 300 tons of highly contaminated water to the Pacific every day, has faded from public consciousness. “An exposure of 100 millisieverts per year is considered the lowest level at which any increase in cancer risk is evident,” the Agence France Presse reported Oct. 6, 2011. But the any reporter should know that U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s official published position on radiation risk is that “any amount of radiation may pose some risk for causing cancer and hereditary effect, [and] … any increase in dose, no matter how small, results in an incremental increase in risk.” Contaminated spinach and milk “do not pose an immediate health threat,” according to Giles Snyder of NPR’s Weekend Edition, April 19, 2011. Yet the National Council on Radiation Protection declares that “every increment of radiation exposure produces an incremental increase in the risk of cancer.” An April 11 Forbes news report grossly misstated the U.S. EPA’s official public warning about radiation. Noting that a Phoenix, Arizona drinking water sample contained 3.2 pico-curies-per-liter of radioactive iodine-131 from Fukushima, and that the EPA’s maximum contaminant level is 3.0, the writer concluded: “EPA does not consider these levels to pose a health threat.” In fact, the EPA officially warns that “there is no level below which we can say an exposure poses no risk.” _______________ French Scientists: Childhood Leukemia Spikes Near Nuclear ReactorsBy John LaForge, Truthout, Feb 1, 2012French researchers have confirmed that childhood leukemia rates are shockingly elevated among children living near nuclear power reactors. The "International Journal of Cancer" has published in January a scientific study establishing a clear correlation between the frequency of acute childhood leukemia and proximity to nuclear power stations. The paper is titled, "Childhood leukemia around French nuclear power plants — the Geocap study, 2002-2007." This devastating report promises to do for France what a set of 2008 reports did for Germany — which recently legislated a total phase-out of all its power reactors by 2022 (sooner if the Greens get their way).
All operating reactors routinely spew radioactive gases like xenon, krypton and the radioactive form of hydrogen known as tritium. These gases are allowed to be released under licenses issued by federal government agencies. Allowable limits on these radioactive poisons were suggested to governments and regulatory agencies by the giant utilities that own the reactors and by reactor operators themselves. This is because their reactors can't even function without regularly releasing radioactive liquids and gases, releases required to control pressure, temperature and vibrations inside the gigantic systems. (See: "Routine Radioactive Releases from Nuclear Power Plants in the United States: What Are the Dangers?" from BeyondNuclear.org, 2009) In Germany, results of the 2008 KiKK studies - a German acronym for Childhood Cancer in the Vicinity of Nuclear Power Plants - were published in both the International Journal of Cancer (Vol. 122) and the European Journal of Cancer (Vol. 44). These 25-year-long studies found higher incidences of cancers and a stronger association with reactor installations than all previous reports. The main findings were a 60 percent increase in solid cancers and a 117 percent increase in leukemia among young children living near all 16 large German nuclear facilities between 1980 and 2003. These shocking studies - along with persistent radioactive contamination of Germany from the Chernobyl catastrophe - are largely responsible for the depth and breadth of anti-nuclear public opinion all across Germany. Similar leukemia spikes have been found around US reactors (European Journal of Cancer Care, Vol. 16, 2007). Researchers at the Medical University of South Carolina analyzed 17 research papers covering 136 reactor sites in the UK, Canada, France, the US, Germany, Japan and Spain. The incidence of leukemia in children under age nine
When the US public owns up to the dangers of nuclear power, we, too, can get around to its replacement and phase out. Nuclear Power: On Life Support But Already Dead, Nov. 2013 By John LaForge Why do Congressional representatives, TV pundits, FOX and even CNN promote nuclear power? As American University researcher Judy Pasternak and her students have documented, the nuclear industry spent $645 million over 10 years lobbying Capitol Hill, and another $63 million in campaign contributions. Between 1999 and 2008, over $64 went to successfully manufacture the “fact” that nuclear power is “carbon free” and can help fend off climate chaos. Independent scientists and researchers like Arjun Makhijani, President of Institute for Environmental and Energy Research, Amory Lovins, President of Rocky Mountain Institute, and economists like Jeremy Rifkin disagree. Being free of corporate handcuffs and the market imperative of short term profit making, they have all demonstrated how a nuclear “renaissance” — to replace the 400 old units now rattling apart worldwide, and get to a total of 1,600 that Lovins says are needed for a minimum impact on climate change — would require that we build three new reactors every 30 days for 40 years. The impossibility of such a reactor-building blitz is evident all around us. Vermont Yankee, Kewaunee in Wisc., and San Onofre in Calif. are all down to decommissioning before their licenses expired. The owners of the Comanche Peak station 40 miles southwest of Fort Worth just announced the cancellation of their long-awaited expansion. TXU, Inc. intended to double its poison footprint and had asked the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for a license to run four reactors where it now has two. But as Univ. of Texas engineering professor Ross Baldick told The Dallas Morning News, “Currently, it’s just not competitive with gas. Nuclear’s capital costs are so high you can’t win on it.” Switzerland will phase out all five of its reactors by 2034 and Germany will mothball its 17 by 2025. Italy has renewed its pre-Fukushima promise to go nuclear-free, and Taiwan is on the verge of a phase-out announcement. Venezuela and Israel, both of which had nuclear power plans, have decided against. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told CNN in 2011, “I think we’ll skip the nuclear.” Utilities & Corporate Giants Abandoning Nukes Scientific American reported last year that Bill Johnson, CEO of Progress Energy, one of the nuclear utilities filing for a construction license but with no plans to actually build a reactor in the near future, said in 2012, “Nuclear can’t compete today.” Forbes reported in 2012 that John Rowe, the recently retired CEO of Exelon Corporation — which owns more reactors than any other utility in the US, 22 — had said, “… let me also state unequivocally that new ones [reactors] don’t make any sense right now…. It just isn’t economic, and it’s not economic within a foreseeable time frame.” Jeffrey Immelt, CEO of the most powerful reactor builder and advocate in the country — General Electric — said four years before Fukushima, “If you were a utility CEO and looked at your world today, you would just do gas and wind. ... You would never do nuclear. The economics are overwhelming.” Siemens corporation, Europe’s largest engineering conglomerate, announced in 2011 that it would stop building power reactors anywhere in the world. The firm built all 17 of Germany’s reactors and was the first giant company to announce such departure. Then in June 2012, Germany’s gas and electricity behemoth RWE announced that it too was quitting the reactor biz altogether — and instead investing in solar power. The largest utility in Germany, RWE, with 72,000 employees and 17 million customers, had until then been one of the most vehement defenders of nuclear power. Now that Fukushima is costing its owners and the state of Japan a minimum of $350 billion, and tainting the whole of the Pacific Ocean with long-lived radioactive materials, real players in big electricity sound anti-nuclear. Unlike Congressional hogs feeding at the utility lobbying trough, or commercial television executives who feed off utility advertising checks, Wall Street is not going to buy into today’s the radiation gushers. Twenty-three reactors in the U.S. are identical to the three melted, spewing General Electric Mark-1 wrecks at Fukushima. No, big investors must smirk at the snake oil sloganeering spouted in documentary hoaxes like “Pandora’s Promise” about “safe new reactor designs.” They recall the stinging deception of electricity from reactors “too cheap to meter.” And they can’t forget the cover of Forbes magazine in 1985 thundering: “The failure of the U.S. nuclear power program ranks as the largest managerial disaster in business history, a disaster on a monumental scale.…” Only add to Forbes’ condemnation — and to nuclear power’s epitaph — that it’s also history’s largest and most monumental environmental disaster. — John LaForge is a co-director of Nukewatch and edits its quarterly newsletter. Download 385.92 Kb. Share with your friends:
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