What is striking about Lomborg, however, is that his selection of global problems, his criteria for judging their importance, and his proposed solution represent three entirely different and often clashing ideological realms: post-modernism, free market neo-cons, and the Marxist Left. How does one define these and how does Lomborg fit in?

Post-modernism: a denial of science and of “ultimate” truth, and of science’s validity in assessing scientific claims about environmental issues or other societal concerns.

Neo-con/free-marketeers: domination of the human economic system by free trade, the free market and de-regulation. (The obsession of the Left with “equality” and its belief in “economism,” ie, of economics being the leading determinant of human relations, is the mirror image)

Neo-Marxist Left: a deliberate selection of those issues directly affecting humanity while ignoring the threats to nonhuman species and planetary ecosystems.

Lomborg, a political analyst with no scientific credentials and whose work has been rejected by the leading Danish scientific institute, relies primarily on economists. It is not apparent that he has familiarized himself with credible, peer-reviewed climate research. He manifests the same bias that afflicts most economists: reducing the parameters of debate to economics and assigning monetary values to things whose value cannot be impartially determined. Lomborg’s solution is the classic one of economists, a kind of “last refuge of scoundrels” that fits in with their world view: the cost/benefit ratio. Like many other human systems, it is purely arbitrary.

This methodology cannot escape personal bias and, in Lomborg’s case, it stacks the deck in favour of what he considers the most important solution: free trade. In the end, prioritizing problems using (relative) monetary value is strikingly similar to the position of some environmentalists that we need to place a dollar value on nature’s systems and functions in order to prove their worth. Once you do that you have lost the argument by conceding the primacy of your adversary’s criteria.

Readers will immediately recognize the chief flaw in Lomborg’s analysis: that it reflects not only personal bias but an arbitrary measurement system and criteria that conform to a pre-existing ideology, namely free markets and capitalism. Needless to say, the whole physical world of science – nature, evolution, biology and human behaviour, not to mention the loss of biodiversity – plays no role in his analysis. (This is mirrored on the Left with its emphasis on social justice and inequality, where social justice would be the determinant of environmental policy)

It is important to clarify the relevance of the word “arbitrary.” Every human choice is arbitrary, in the sense that it is disputable and has alternatives. Ideologies clash in order to establish the dominance of their particular world view. The use of arbitration involves the resolution of two arbitrary views through some kind of compromise or reward (which is entirely irrelevant to scientific hypotheses, whose validity is determined by their success or failure to make correct predictions based on assumptions).

But are there criteria that are NON-arbitrary? I know of only two: the laws of physics and the process of evolution. In the case of environmental and ecological disputes, it is evolution, from which the discipline of ecology emerges, that should ideally set the parameters for making policy choices (or ethical and moral ones). This is the only way that bias and ideology can be shut out.

Lomborg’s list of priorities, like those of the extreme Left, places human welfare as the highest value. Nonhuman species, ecosystems and their services are absent. Preserving humanity and human society become – or rather, REMAIN – the sole concerns of those who claim to seek social justice and progress…or economic growth and profit.

Strangely, the free-marketeers and the Left become allies, though they differ in their priorities and in how they would impose their views. The free-marketeers already have their tools in place: global treaties and international financial institutions. The Left’s anticipated rulers would be the (self-identified) oppressed groups all over the world (or at least those who believe in socialism).

Thus, the precept of “economism” – regarding economics as the determinant of the rest of societal relations – dominates both Left and Right ideologies. The whole thrust of the Left and its social justice progeny has had a purely human-centred focus, which in turn changes environmental campaigns into campaigns for social justice, an irresistible attraction for liberals. Thus, the scientific underpinnings of the climate debate are effectively dismissed, as indeed they are by the right. Climate change becomes “climate justice,” science is dismissed as unsettled and arbitrary…as it is by Lomborg as well.

What Lomborg and Jordan Peterson, Canadian clinical psychologist and admirer of Lomborg, have yet to consider is that it is precisely this human orientation which has allowed the commodification of Nature and led to the global ecological crisis: an unsustainable exploitation of Nature reliant on ever-expanding material growth and consumption out of which all our environmental problems have arisen.

It should be noted that the humanities and social sciences have substantially contributed to this by separating the study of human behaviour from the study of other life forms and most egregiously excluding evolution. In this view, humans are exempt from the laws of Nature that govern other species. This view persists today in the perpetual, tiresome debate over Nature vs. Nurture. It has its origins in the cultural anthropologists and determinists who have long resisted incorporating evolution into their curricula. To counteract this we now have evolutionary psychology that does not shy away from acknowledging the biological roots of human behavior.

Those on the Right accuse those who question economic growth of being leftists or Marxists intent on overthrowing capitalism. It is quite vexing to see Peterson essentially accuse environmental activists of being a watermelon: “green on the outside, red on the inside.” There is no basis for this accusation. It is true of the regressive Left, which remains hostile to environmentalism and views environmental concerns with a Marxist perspective by redefining the climate change problem as an economic and political one at its core. But they are a tiny minority of the environmental community. Most of the environmental activists, scholars and colleagues I have encountered throughout my professional life are in fact unsympathetic to leftist or Marxist views.

A video discussion between Lomborg and Jordan Peterson exemplifies this anti-ecological fixation on human welfare, with no regard to other species and ecosystems, that is, to the over-arching crisis of biodiversity loss, which many scientists believe to be the most serious global crisis facing us. Lomborg’s strictly materialistic view of the crisis only holds if one erases science and Nature from the canvas, and if one ignores evolution, one of the two non-arbitrary criteria for judging the importance of environmental issues.

Why should the preservation of biodiversity be the most important choice? Why should evolution be the criterion for human moral choices and policymaking? Since the Big Bang and the appearance of life on our planet, the process of evolution has resulted in increasing complexity and speciation. Genetic diversity and behavioural diversity are what allow natural selection to operate.

But diversity is also the result of evolution as well as its prerequisite. The vector in evolution is DNA, carried in the human genome and that of all other life forms (with the exception of RNA viruses, whose genetic material is DNA’s “messenger”). This links us to the first primitive life forms as well as to all other living creatures. If there is anything like a holy scripture or doctrine that deserves respect, worship and preservation, it is the evolutionary process. And the destruction of its product, biodiversity, could aptly be called blasphemy, the vilification of things considered sacred.

Lomborg does not deal in such esoteric scientific concepts. His goal is “getting the biggest bang for the buck,” ie, selecting and prioritizing the problems where one can get the best results for the money spent – as opposed to spending money on what is considered (whether by scientists, government or the public) to be the greatest threat. For him, climate science is unsettled, and disputable.a postmodern view if ever there was one.

This is far from the case, however; both the overwhelming scientific consensus on the future impact of climate change as well as the concrete data, in which the negative trends move relentlessly in a dire direction, provide as secure a foundation for action as the trust that the sun will rise each morning. This casual dismissal of the scientific underpinnings of ecological problems mirrors the Left’s transliteration of climate change into “climate justice.” It rests on dangerous ground because it opens a path to all manner of arbitrary and authoritarian thought, from Left and Right.

In any event, this approach clearly benefits those who challenge the gravity of climate change, and whose opinions and remedies, not to mention political and economic affinities, then appear more persuasive. Exclusion of the natural world, ecology and biodiversity is revealed as ideological and arbitrary. As a critic of ideology and an evolutionist, Peterson should logically be rejecting Lomborg entirely.

In his video discussion with Lomborg, Peterson attributes much of the alarm over climate change to the leftist goal of abolishing capitalism. This is a surpassingly superficial analysis for Peterson but understandable given that the Left and the social justice movement are indeed co-opting environmentalism by redefining the crisis as “climate justice,” thus writing off (as Lomborg does) the demonstrable scientific basis for concern. It is regrettable that Peterson has fallen for this leftist ploy and that he does not trust the extensive research in biology and ecology enough to realize that most environmental activists’ concerns are substantiated by science in all respects.

Here are a few questions for both Lomborg and Peterson. Why should the cost-benefit ratio be the sole means of making policy judgments? Why should human welfare be the primary aim? Why not ask a different question: why should the preservation of planetary health and integrity, and of the evolutionary process, not be the criteria?

A view from “the eye of God” would give a different answer. That view would not see human beings as the most important species. Nor could it ignore the fact that humans have created palpable ecological crises that cause both human suffering and the extinction of other species, and which Lomborg, Peterson, and even Steven Pinker in his rosy depiction of human progress, ignore.

If, as some might claim, the view of God rules, from “the eye of God” there is no evidence for believing that humans are at the pinnacle of life forms. But both a believer and an atheist could rationally argue that God/Nature created DNA, life and the evolutionary process, and that preserving these was his/her intent and therefore, from a moral viewpoint, the most important purpose of humanity.

If there is any such thing as a sacred belief or doctrine, it would have to be based on the seeming “miracle” of life on Earth and the fact of the single origin of all life forms. The evolution of complexity, the function of DNA and RNA, and the interconnectedness of all life are arguably the most precious gifts we inherit. But the loss of biodiversity threatens this profound and explanatory truth.

Instead, Lomborg makes a positive economic outcome the highest goal, while ignoring the demonstrably negative effects of human-centred economics. In the end these are value judgements and they are not strengthened by statistics on how many lives could be saved if we spent more money on health and medical care than on curbing climate change (which is his main argument, with free trade as the mechanism).

Another oversight is the social impact of resource extraction and industry on indigenous peoples and lands, which has led to massive human rights violations and a loss of cultural diversity globally. In this respect, free trade has little to boast about and its flaws are now obvious, including its adverse environmental and social impact, destroying both ecosystems and the societies of indigenous people.

The loss of indigenous societies, languages and cultures is the human equivalent of extinguishing populations or species of nonhuman life forms. It is a loss of cultural diversity, that popular buzzword of the Left today. But the Left has no interest in the oppression of indigenous peoples because these societies are outside the ken of leftist ideology and their exploitation cannot be attributed to the US. Instead they celebrate the new Latin American authoritarians like Maduro and Morales, just as they celebrated Castro, Correa, and Chavez.

One of the clearest demonstrations of the link between ecology and social justice, and the most ignored, is that it is indigenous societies reliant on intact ecosystems who are the last protectors of biodiversity in the world. The loss of an indigenous culture means the loss of a defence against the globalized “free trade” that Lomborg thinks is the salvation of humanity. Cultural diversity represents the equivalent of biological diversity, both of which are crucial to both civilization and survival.

Peterson, anxious to not appear ideological, stresses the need to be agnostic about how we rank the greatest threats. This is, again, arbitrary because it means being agnostic about science. One does not have to believe in “scientism” (that science is the answer to all problems) in order to believe in its efficacy and relevance in making policy choices.

In one respect Lomborg is correct: uncurbed climate change will not destroy humanity or human civilization. It will cause human suffering and economic dislocation if not collapse, probably varying from region to region. But even if human civilization ended, there would be non-human life forms persisting and evolution would continue without us.

In sum, biodiversity is a prerequisite for evolution as well as its product. To reduce it is dangerous and blasphemous. That neither Lomborg nor Peterson has given critical thought to the dismantling of natural systems and species extinction is truly disturbing and, in the case of Peterson, inexplicable. Lomborg’s analysis and prescriptions are in the end pernicious and alien to the values and ethics that are needed to save both humanity and the planet. The economics-based ideologies of both Left and Right are intent on forcing us to choose between them. Economics remains the “dismal science.”

First published in Humanist Perspectives, Issue 210, Autumn 2019.

Right now, there is nothing laudable about any aspect of American politics and culture. The Thought Police are closing in on us. The media self-censors anything about Islamism. Our colleges are passing codes to protect the sensibilities of students who might be offended by strong opinions and demand a “safe space” (how about a prison cell?). Paleoliberals and blacks are beating the drum about our “racist society.” Our religious leaders, seeing the trend away from faith and church-going, bond together and declare secularism to be more dangerous than radical Islam. Transgender folks are smiled on for their personal choice of gender but a white woman who chooses her “race” as black is vilified (hey, wait a minute; don’t the liberals keep insisting that there is no such thing as race? Next there won’t be such a thing as gender. We’ll all be neutered and on our job application it will be illegal to have boxes marked Male or Female.)

Is there a bright spot? YES. One just appeared: Naomi Oreskes. Her book Merchants of Doubt, co-authored with Erik Conway, is one of the most thorough and revelatory books ever written about the deliberate corporate/free marketeer conspiracy to undermine science. And it names names too, most notably F. Fred Singer, a physicist and ex-environmentalist who went over to the dark (i.e. wealthy) side, and including the former head of the National Academy of Sciences and Rockefeller University, Frederick Seitz, William Nierenberg, Robert Jastrow and other black-hatted masters of mendacity. Singer’s vicious attacks on Roger Revelle, a pioneer in climate change science, pursued Revelle to his hospital bed where was being treated shortly before his fatal heart attack. Posthumously Singer published quotes from Revelle that he grossly edited to remove Revelle’s staunch support for anthropogenic climate change, and later filed a lawsuit against Justin Lancaster, a defender of Revelle who charged Singer with deliberately falsifying Revelle’s work. Singer prevailed in the suit which put a ten-year gag order on Lancaster, sealed the court documents and forced him to retract his claim.

The Oreskes/Conway book nails the “free market” corporate band of bandits, starting with the Cold War as an excuse for the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), or “Star Wars," moving on to the tobacco fight, acid rain, loss of the ozone layer, second-hand smoke, and now climate change. Every little fact, event and protagonist of these battles and their respective militia is in this book. It is a one-volume encyclopedia of how we got where we are today and how the anti-regulation forces managed to subvert the political process as well as the mass media which, in their ignorance of science, lent undeserved credibility to non-scientific and anti-scientific claims. I say without hesitation that if you have only time to read one book, THIS is the one. You will be discovering what has been going on for over half a century and what is still going on today over the climate change issue. For summer reading, it is as engrossing and thrilling as any murder mystery you could pick up on your way to the beach.

Many of you may still be unconvinced about climate change, either about its human causes, its extent or its potential dangers. This is because you were deceived by the mass media who assumed that claims, studies and press releases signed by scientists with a Ph.D after their name were reliable and credible. This is essentially the same as giving credibility to creationists who have theology, economic or social studies degrees after their name. Any venture or proclamation can pull prominent names out of a hat. But all of us know that the magician’s rabbit is a trick. Unfortunately we - or rather the mass media - never took the trouble to examine the hat or the rabbit. Nor are the media equipped to analyze and critique the reports of the corporate stooges and biostitutes, the “Will lie for money" hired crooks, including scientists, who pocket their checks and make sure that their findings or commissioned reports support the a priori positions of those who signed the checks.

How does this mendacious merchandise get retailed? By many outlets, on both the Right and Left, the Right at the behest of the free market believers and the Left, in thrall to the post-modernist attacks on science and science-based social studies. Besides outright fraud in which academics and scientists were (and are) complicit in preparing or endorsing in-house studies by the actual purveyors of poison, there was the suppression of credible scientific studies (some actually prepared in-house by corporations) for decades until the discovery process in lawsuits uncovered them; this was jump-started by the tobacco industry. In addition, widespread misrepresentation or distortion of scientific studies, media manipulation of journalists as well as editors of leading newspapers (a wildly successful strategy), and not least the feverish exaggeration of the economic impact of regulation were integral parts of the tool box. Of special note was the last resort of asking pointless questions or introducing a new hypothesis. This simultaneously deflected critical inquiry and shifted the burden of proof onto the critics and the public rather than the other way around.

Oreskes and Conway have slashed open the hat and the rabbit and revealed the entrails of the odiferous assemblage called the “free marketeers,” whose campaign to undermine any and all government regulation in the name of “freedom” has never eased up. For them, denying honest science and creating their own science out of whole cloth is the only way to stave off creeping socialism. But wait. The story isn’t over. On the left side of the aisle is a different kind of merchant of doubt: Noam Chomsky. Chomsky’s modus operandi barely differs from one of the main strategies of the corporations, and in one key respect it mirrors it directly. It is the mastery of questions and the introduction of new hypotheses. Both of these are arguably the most effective way of avoiding outright lies and enhancing the credibility of your own positions. Being a master linguist, Chomsky’s hypothesizing mode is exquisitely fine-tuned and effective, and for the paleo-liberals and the left, especially the America haters, he was a god-sent messenger: scholar, academic, intellectual, researcher, at a prestigious university. A whole generation, maybe two or three, opened their eyes, ears and brain orifices and took in his line as leftist gospel.

But let’s go on now to a choice example of Chomsky’s use of hypothesis to obscure, distract and confuse. Here is an excerpt from an article that I wrote a few years ago, in which Chomsky took issue with Senator George McGovern over the atrocities committed by Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, both of whom Chomsky staunchly defended. Technically it is not an hypothesis but a “What if?” postulation, but the function and result are the same: raising a hypothetical alternate scenario to rebut his adversary….without having to either lie or present verifiable figures. This is truly one of the cleverest and most devious verbal deceptions ever invented (worthy of some lawyers though).

Here is the excerpt:

The biggest headache that Chomsky has created is the American left, or the SRLs, the Stark Raving Loonies. While he has never functioned as a political leader of the left, his writings and critique of the US have been picked up and disseminated as SRL doctrine, along with the leftist hate and vitriol, and most egregiously the championing of any and all tyrants who dared to oppose the US, no matter how violent and repressive they were on their home territory. Besides Nasrullah of Hezbollah, and Milosevic, the most prominent of these tyrants was Cambodia's Pol Pot, mastermind and master killer from the Khmer Rouge.

An Australian leftist upon whom Chomsky relied for much of his source material on southeast Asia, Ben Kiernan, used to write for the Maoist Melbourne Journal of Politics, but later recanted in an article in the Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, after learning that in Cambodia, between 1975 and 1979, Pol Pot was responsible for the murder of 21% of the population, about 1.67 million out of a total of 7.89 million. Not even China or the Soviet Union came close to this, especially since many of the deaths under Mao and Stalin were not direct murders but were due to well-documented and observed starvation, concentration camp mistreatment and hard labor.

Imagine the US government directly killing 55 million Americans and that will give you an idea of the scope of the Pol Pot atrocities. This was reported by Francois Ponchaud, from his personal experience there, in his book Cambodia Year Zero. But let's look at how Chomsky dealt with these widespread reports on Cambodian murders, both on their extent and their causes. Read this carefully so you can better appraise and get the full flavor of Chomsky's linguistic talents that have been mobilized in the interest of anti-American propaganda. In another time and place these talents would have served tyrants well.

In the Congressional Record of August 22, 1978, Sen. George McGovern, following up his congressional testimony urging intervention in Cambodia, referred to "genocidal conduct"by Cambodia leaders and several days later used the figure of two million murders. Chomsky then, in an very convoluted and hypothetical manner, in an attempt to discredit the claims of genocide and murder, made this comment regarding the intervention proposal: ( my caps)

NOR WOULD HE HAVE BEEN LIKELY TO PROPOSE THIS EXTREME MEASURE IF THE DEATHS IN CAMBODIA WERE NOT THE RESULT OF SYSTEMATIC SLAUGHTER AND STARVATION ORGANIZED BY THE STATE BUT RATHER ATTRIBUTABLE IN LARGE MEASURE TO PEASANT REVENGE, UNDISCIPLINED MILITARY UNITS OUT OF GOVERNMENT CONTROL, STARVATION AND DISEASE THAT ARE DIRECT CONSEQUENCES OF THE U.S. WAR, OR OTHER SUCH FACTORS” (After the Cataclysm, Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman, page 139).

Understanding that Chomsky's most notable achievements are as a linguist, the reader needs to give this statement closer scrutiny. He is resorting to the classic “What if?” tactic. Chomsky is not claiming outright (for obvious reasons; he has no evidence) that the killings WERE due to the above explanations of peasants, the military, starvation, etc. However, he has taken pains to posit the possibility, if not likelihood, that these are alternate explanations in order to discredit McGovern. Indeed, his explanations are very creative, to the point of being so credible that many readers will in fact give them serious consideration as explanations, thus allowing incautious and credulous followers of Chomsky to utilize his hypothesis for their own purposes. Astute readers will readily identify and appreciate the clever use of hypothesis - as opposed to fact. Leftists will of course make no such distinction.

Just prior to this, in fact, Chomsky cast similarly clever doubt on the two million deaths mentioned by McGovern, using once again a hypothetical smaller figure of 25,000 and thus suggesting again that the official numbers of deaths might be much smaller.

A reading of this entire chapter on Cambodia, which is 259 pages long in the book, will make eyes glaze over, filled as it is with reams of details and conclusions about Cambodia that are, depending on one's political sympathies, utterly unprovable because of the impossibility of checking each statement, or a brilliant dissection of massive propaganda produced by the American mililtary to shore up the myth of huge Cambodian massacres. This technique is brilliant and unmatchable, worthy of a linguistic expert, but its utilization is deeply troubling because in effect it calls the reader's bluff: "Here are a thousand facts; I dare you to disprove them." Given that it would take one person months, even years, to track down each claim Chomsky makes and find an irrefutable rebuttal to them, Chomsky has won the game hands down.

Here Chomsky wins the prize for Leftist Merchant of Doubt. It’s a brilliant performance that F. Fred Singer would appreciate, but it is no less reprehensible than the many dozens of examples that Oreskes and Conway provide in their immaculately documented and sourced book. Chomsky may not be perceived as destroying science but he is most certainly violating the precepts of honest research and critical analysis. In the face of flawed scientific hypotheses, scientists are forced to relinquish those that cannot be replicated (i.e. confirmed). In the case of political claims like those of Chomsky, an ideologically motivated political hypothesis is being put forward so as to give the impression that it has a factual foundation. But no such foundation exists. Chomsky is in effect asking us to accept his hypothesis without evidence or providing any means of DISPROVING IT. It is an opinion masquerading as a hypothesis. If it persuades someone that it is credible, it has in effect functioned as a lie. Were a scientist to follow Chomsky’s methodology, he would be kicked out of the science community permanently.

Another example of anti-science attitudes on the left comes from the academic world where post-modernists, Marxists and some feminists have indulged in serious mischief-making over the past quarter of a century, giving contrarians, cranks, muddled New Agers and conservatives more ammunition to denigrate the discipline of science.

In his essay “The Social Siege of Nature” (part of the 1995 collection, Reinventing Nature?), conservation biologist Michael Soule did a scathing critique of post-modernist deconstructionist thought, stating that it does serious damage to science, twisting it in the interest of ideology. He stresses that the cultural and social siege of nature comes from schools of thought with quite different ideologies, ranging from "conservative free market capitalists, humanists concerned with the emancipation and empowerment of certain social and ethnic groups, and others, including animal rights organizations.” The deconstructionists ….”deny that nature is real..or if there is anything we cannot know it because we are shut up in the concentric prisons of cultural bias and sensory apparatus.” Soule says that “the social objective of this movement is to demystify and dethrone the ‘hegemonic dominance’ of science” and to place it on “a level field that does not privilege any single approach..”. He concludes that “the nihilism and relativism of radically constructionist critiques of science …while popular in some academic circles, is sophomoric (and) harmful because…it undermines efforts to save wilderness and biodiversity.”

Finally, even in some progressive circles, it has become fashionable to blame everything on the Enlightenment, during which new technologies based on new science were eagerly deployed.

But the Enlightenment was more than technological progress and exploitation. It was the shedding of the shackles of the Catholic Church and the separation of religion and state as well as the explosion in freedom of inquiry that was showered upon human societies. To blame science and technology rather than the follies and failings of human beings and their imperfect institutions is patently absurd. In the end the protocols of science are (or should be) models for human endeavors: a realm of hypothesis, dissent, rebuttal and often proof, a product of our intellect and reason rather than a promotion of an a priori ideology. In contrast to moralizing Religion, Science cannot tell us what is right or wrong but it can tell us the consequences of the choices before us.

Suffice it to say it was fascinating and informative, and especially encouraging to see that everyone essentially agreed on the seriousness of the crises and the urgent need to come together to confront them. The bad news was that the presentations confirmed everyone's worst fears about the intractability and growth of the crises. But defeatism was not in the mix; another conference on strategy is planned for the fall and in 2014 they hope to present another all-day conference under the same sponsorship as the earlier ones in NYC and at the 1999 anti-WTO protest in Seattle.

Of special concern was and is genetic engineering and biotech (including the growing problem of the use of nanoparticles), and the inevitable crisis in food supplies that could, along with loss of biodiversity, be the most serious imminent crisis of all because it will affect most of the world. The food and agriculture issues were eloquently and forcefully presented by Wes Jackson, head of The Land Institute (he developed a perennial grain that will soon be available) and an amazing farmer from upstate New York, Severine Tscharner-Fleming, founder of The Greenhorns, who had all of us smacking our heads in amazement at her knowledge and energetic activism. Pat Mooney of ETC in Canada gave a power presentation on the nanoparticle threats of which no one is yet aware. Of special note was the eloquent clear presentation by economist Lisi Krall, of Syracuse University, demonstrating that yes, some economists can speak clear coherent English. Eileen Crist and Tom Butler took on the Anthropocene promoters (see below). And Richard Heinberg of the Post Carbon Institute and author of numerous books on energy, astounded with both a presentation on energy and a solo violin recital.

My presentation focused on the disturbing prevalence of anti-science attitudes of the general public, enhanced by the leftist and post modernist academics in our universities. Their senseless attacks on science and medicine have given science a bad name, and have also given credibility to the deniers of climate change, something that evolutionary biologist Michael Soule addressed in his important essay, The Social Siege of Science, as part of an essay collection, Reinventing Nature. I believe that these sentiments are potential obstacles to intelligent public discourse and policy making, to put it mildly. To put it strongly, we should all be scared stiff.

The recent flap over Napoleon Chagnon's book, Noble Savages, gave me the opportunity to address these reactionary forces emanating from the left. Among the purveyors of untruths must be included the Break Through Institute (Nordhaus and Shellenberger; see my web site for my critique of their reports), Stewart Brand of the Whole Earth Catalog, the original technophile and space colony guru, and Peter Kareiva, the chief scientist of the Nature Conservancy. Together these and others are promoting the notion of the Anthropocene, in which human needs trump the rest of the natural world, in a technocratic nightmare that is welcome news to corporations and polluters, who now have supposedly "credible" scientific experts on their side to defend their destruction of the natural world, its species and its resources.

(A lengthy paper by Alice Dreger about Chagnon is available for those who want more details on the Chagnon controversy, at Springerlink.com)

Here is what I wrote for the SF group:

The controversy over Napoleon Chagnon's book Noble Savages and his work among the Yanomami is not only fascinating for the insights into the political and ideological motivations of the cultural anthropology community but because it addresses the topic of evolution and where the human species fits in with the natural world.

In the field of science and technology today, there are some issues that have particular relevance to public policy in the environmental sphere and whose resolution one way or another will have a major impact on human societies and the natural world. One of these is genetic engineering and biotechnology. Another is the loss of biodiversity. Because of their gravity and implications for humanity and the natural world, it is doubly important that the ordinary citizen be informed and involved in these debates. But such involvement necessitates a basic understanding of the evolutionary process.

It also requires a mind open to free inquiry and unpleasant truths.Above all it requires a view of the human species that does not set it apart from nonhuman nature or confer on it a superior status which will inevitably lead to an instrumental view of the earth as a fount of resources to be exploited solely for human benefit. In this respect the views of some recent thinkers are relevant; they have fatalistically accepted the adverse consequences of technology by downplaying their risks while simultaneously inventing a new technology-dominated rosy future in which all aspects of life on this planet are managed by humans rather than being allowed to follow their own evolutionary paths.

This view has deemed this brave new world the "Anthropocene", in which humanity dominates the earth however it sees fit. What is not discussed at length is just who will do the managing and with what criteria and purpose. Looking at our present situation, it appears likely that the same institutions, forces and motivations now governing the world will be the ones in charge. This is not a pretty picture nor is it acceptable, because it is these same groups and forces who have left in their wake the vast poverty and inequality in most nations of the world, not to mention dangerous technologies, pollution and destruction of habitat, ocean fisheries and species.

It is imperative that the criminals be blamed and named. But some on the left would smother the very thing we need to counteract and rebut these anti-nature forces: science. The post modern Marxist view of how we solve social injustice rests on an anti-science precept that views economic relations as the determinant of social progress and human interaction. These same forces have expanded this economic determinism into a broader cultural determinism so as to fight the long battle they initiated decades ago: the battle to sabotage the discipline of science and make it conform to their ideological model. Their sabotage targets scientists as being the culprits behind colonialism, racism, sexism, imperialism and all those who have inflicted harm on all the oppressed peoples of the world. Their complaints have not always been verbal; they have physically attacked respected scientists like Edward O. Wilson on several occasions (though he was not harmed).

These Marxists and post modernists have infected the social sciences to the extent that these academic disciplines have been put on the defensive and effectively prevented their own theories from getting a fair hearing, with some scientists like Chagnon and Wilson slandered personally, in an ideological orgy that closely echoes the purges of Stalin in the Soviet Union, where deviation from the official line could end in exile at best but more often in execution. The Stalinist line on evolution was created by Lysenko, who revived the notion of inheritance of acquired characteristics. Today's post modernist leftists may believe in evolution and natural selection but they have decided, by a vote rather than by scientific evidence, that humans are not subject to evolutionary pressures or laws but are in a special category where they are free from the constraints of Nature and thereby can create their own culture and values from scratch without a second thought about biology or evolution.

The logical outcome of this is of course that whoever is in power at any given time makes the rules, mandates the values and literally creates the culture......to his or her liking of course. It is a comfort to them to know that humans need not defer to Nature in any way. It is a double comfort to imagine that their (the left's) model for human society has the potential to control the earth and all its inhabitants. Now, not all cultural anthropologists may be thinking along these grandiose lines. But in their own limited sphere of the campus and academic research and publications, they have many possibilities of asserting and imposing their own ideology. This is what the cultural anthropologists attempted to do when they started smearing the work of Napoleon Chagnon, an evolutionary sociobiologist. Their slanders and lies are the modern manifestation of Stalinism, as today's debate over Chagnon's latest book proves.

This is a Science War of the most urgent kind. It is not just an obscure debate on the mating practices of bonobos. It goes to the heart of what we were given by the Enlightenment: the freedom of inquiry, of dissent, of hypothesis, of the very practice of science and in particular the science of evolution that is most needed to reconcile humans to their role in Nature and their future there, if they have it. The understanding of evolution is not that of pop science, of "Nature red in tooth and claw", but that is how these cultural determinists portray it, because it plays on the heartstrings of good compassionate liberals who commiserate with "primitive" peoples who they see as constantly struggling against colonialism....even when they are living out their lives, like the Yanomami, as they freely choose.

If we do not acknowledge the supreme importance of evolution, we can never solve the problems of ecological degradation. If we are to protect and restore the damaged ecosystems of the world as well as the damaged human systems, we will need to draw on our understanding of evolution. The pretense that humans, once they pulled away from their primate ancestors, could make the world in their image is at the intellectual and philosophical core of the global crisis. We must resist the term Anthropocene with all our might. And we can start this battle by supporting Napoleon Chagnon, who is on the front lines facing those who would destroy science in the name of their ideology.

Quite clearly it is not necessary to romanticize or embellish indigenous cultures with noble attributes in order to grant them their right to self-determination, cultural continuity and democratically controlled development. No one contests these rights. But the plain hard fact about the laws of nature and ecology is that they apply to rich and poor, powerful and powerless, privileged and oppressed, and that the violation of these laws produces ecological disaster, whether done in the name of social justice and equity, or done in the interests of foreign corporate domination and industrial growth. And today native cultures, modified as they have been by contact with the industrialized world, are often no more or less ethically and ecologically sensitive than any others. For instance, many native American tribes insist on whaling rights even though their tribes now utilize modern technology for the hunts and are fully integrated into a cash economy. In the US, some native American tribal reservations have dived headfirst into the egregious casino gambling inferno; others have welcomed the burial of nuclear reactor waste in exchange for monetary compensation.

While in some cases indigenous peoples have tried to resist the entreaties of industrial development and consumer trappings, they are often unable to. And if such native peoples fall into the industrial model trap, their populations will increase to the point that they will eventually surpass the capacity of their local environment to support their needs, and their activities will become as destructive as ours.

Guha makes a totally specious comparison regarding utilization of species and resources when he states that Hindus who worship cows do not require others to do so but that "those who cherish the elephant, seal, whale or tiger try to impose a worldwide prohibition on its killing." Needless to say, cows are not an endangered species! While we need not accept what marine mammal and fisheries commissions say about the population size of an endangered species without scrutiny, by the same token we need not accept the unsubstantiated "cultural" opinions of native peoples about the abundance of endangered species they hold sacred as a totem or utilize for subsistence.

In my experience on Long Island, an area reliant on commercial fishing and shell-fishing, I have seen local fishermen on one hand complaining about estuarine pollution and factory fishing causing fisheries depletion (as they have), and then getting up to oppose the imposition of fishing limits, claiming that their own experience and observation "prove" that the depletion is not so bad as to justify such limits. These fishermen need to present their own evidence, not just hearsay or popular culture, to show that fishery limits should not be imposed. When it comes to protection of endangered species and the global commons, there cannot be a double standard regarding scientific evidence. To assume that all indigenous and local cultures have all the correct information all the time, while assuming that ecologists act only in self-interest and do not care about human needs, is a very dangerous and indefensible position.

Incidentally, Guha notes that "tribals and tigers have co-existed for centuries," which may be technically true, and it is a cliche to say that reduced habitat puts pressure on tigers so they become a greater menace Local communities have always shot tigers and continue to do so but it matters more today because tigers, for whatever reason, are a severely reduced population. To infer that communities should be allowed to shoot tigers now just because they weren't responsible for its decline is precisely the kind of unthinking anti-science reaction that undermines the implementation of land use and settlement planning that could serve human needs as well as those of the tiger. Both the tiger and the community need preservation and protection, not for ecotourism but out of ecological and social justice exigency.

What is truly amazing in Guha's diatribe is how he blames the conservation biologists rather than the industrial growth society, transnational corporations and compliant Third World governments and elites for the destruction of habitat, species and ecosystems. Moreover, he seems unaware of, or disinterested in, the serious issue of habitat fragmentation, attacking the US belief now taken over by the Third World that wilderness has to be "big, continuous wilderness." Surely he is aware, or should be, of the many biogeography studies that have been conducted that show how fragmentation from suburban development, highways or other factors has reduced the populations of many species. As for human intervention or presence, only a few hard-core groups maintain such a purist stance now because it is both impractical and may not have any ecological justification (though one could certainly justify it in terms of sensitive ecosystems such as tundra, which is threatened in general by global warming).

It is always tempting to set up an extreme example in order to demolish it and promote a personal alternative viewpoint. Guha does precisely this, by inferring throughout that the conservation biology community is uniformly behind the notion of the "punitive guns and guards approach", which he says is "favoured by the majority of wildlife conservationists." I am truly sorry that these are the only ones he has met. Not all revered order systems are appropriate or necessarily ethical - or, more important, ecological. There are many cultural and nature traditions which involve far more intrusion upon Nature than "nature groves". These traditions, insofar as they reinforce both human rights and the rights of non-human Nature, need to be respected and preserved. But they must be judged by the same ethical and ecological criteria that we seek to apply to corporations, developers, hunters, and all the other despoilers.

The only "politically correct" answer we must finally acknowledge, is that which is ecologically consistent.

Source: The Ecologist, 1996.

I regularly debated pronuclear scientists, engineers, and utility executives on the issue. What disturbed me most was not that nuclear physicists were defending nuclear power but rather that they allowed the perversion of truth and the scientific method by citing "proof" of their claims in a most selective manner. They routinely ignored or tried to discredit independent and impartial studies if they cast nuclear power in a bad light, and they supported, without minimal scientific scrutiny, those studies that cast it in a good light. Their behavior, not their advocacy, sullied their public reputations.

As an example, Brookhaven National Laboratories and the Atomic Energy Commission suppressed for many years (until a Ralph Nader lawsuit forced it into the open) the results of the WASH-740 study that spelled out the full consequences of a nuclear accident. The point is that scientists do not forfeit their rights to participate in public debate, but they most certainly forfeit their right to be heard when they allow personal politics to suppress the problems created by their work.

In the late 1970s Friends of the Earth filed lawsuits against numerous Federal agencies for noncompliance with the National Environmental Policy Act, specifically the National Institute of Health's failure to do a risk assessment study before promulgating DNA research guidelines. Several biologists tried to get Friends of the Earth to drop its lawsuit.

Biological scientists are entitled— and are desperately needed—to illuminate the most critical ecological issues of our day, particularly the global biodiversity crisis. Were they to paint only the rosy picture (something Gregg Easterbrook, an editor at Atlantic Monthly, is attempting to do in his new book, "A Moment on the Earth"), they would be doing citizens a grave disservice. (Apparently Easterbrook thinks biological scientists should emulate certain nuclear physicists and refrain from airing the negative aspects of environmental degradation.)

However, scientists are still acting as if scientific evidence is all that is needed to persuade policymakers. This may have been the case in the 1970s and early 1980s, but we now have a very different breed of anti-environmentalists. This breed concedes that we have a problem, a crisis, and that we are going to lose wetlands, forests, species. However, they argue that these losses are really much less important than economic benefits, private property rights, and industrial production. In other words, they admit they don't care about the environmental crises or ultimate impact and that immediate human needs should always be considered before the long-term consequences.

Science is not going to be the deciding factor, or even a major player in the debate but rather the values, opinions, and politics of the players. Scientists will increasingly find that the issues will not be argued on their merits, and that the introduction of scientific evidence will simply be ignored.

Scientists, ask yourselves questions such as: Are we going to save wetlands or let farmers wreck them? Are we going to save grasslands or turn them over to ranchers? The debate will not revolve around the reasons we need wetlands or grasslands; it will revolve around political clout. Scientists need to get out of the lab and into the streets, figuratively and perhaps literally, to challenge just about every way that business and politics are conducted in this country. They need to get involved in political campaigns and the legislative process. They need to speak out, write, lobby, agitate, and advertise— as citizens, not scientists. And they need to do so not just because natural systems and species are being destroyed but because the political institutions, processes, laws, statutes, and regulatory mechanisms that brought us so much progress in the past are being deliberately dismantled, without regard for scientific truth.

It was the suppression of truth, the manipulation and subversion of the democratic process, the corruption of the licensing process, and deliberate economic distortion (the tens of billions of dollars in subsidies, for example) that enabled nuclear power to flourish. Considering that these abuses of the regulatory process occurred in an atmosphere far friendlier to the environment, we may be faced with far more aggressive and hostile measures that will undermine what is left of this process today.

Unfortunately, the failure of the large, Washington-based environmental groups to develop a firm environmental constituency means that citizens at the grassroots will have to pick up the ball. This is a good thing because the reclamation of democracy and the restoration of accountability should not be left to those in Washington. They are civic responsibilities of the first order. I fervently hope that scientists will join in this effort, as quickly and unreservedly as possible.

Source: Conservation Biology, Volume 9, No. 4, August 1995.

It also cost the life of the USSR's most talented plant breeder, Nikolai Vavilov. After a short lifetime of exhausting botanical travels around the world, over the rocky passes of Afghanistan and other remote places that took weeks and often human lives, receiving official honors and recognition, overseeing a brigade of dedicated researchers aspiring to modify foreign seeds and plants to adapt to northern climates, and study with leading geneticists like Thomas Morgan and William Bateson, Vavilov, formerly supported by Lenin, was shunted aside by Stalin with Lysenko's help, arrested and ultimately died in prison in 1943. Peter Pringle's "The Murder of Nikolai Vavilov" is one of the most compelling and instructive books extant and tells the full tragic story of Vavilov, unarguably one of the greatest scientists of the 20th century.

Lysenkoism appealed to Stalin and the Marxists because it conformed to the notion that all aspects of society could be designed by humans according to their social and political model. Just as Marxism regarded economic relations as determinants of other human relations, Lysenkoists saw Lamarckian theory as the parallel in science. Acquired characteristics - in this case human behavior - could be embedded and passed on to future generations according to the whim of whoever was in power. Nature, that is, evolution and genes, could be discarded as having no influence or relevance to humanity or society. Not surprisingly, this authoritarian view has been embraced within academia today by the post-modernists and cultural determinists in the social sciences (barely distinguishable from each other) who, antagonistic to Darwin while not rejecting him, insist that both human behavior AND science are "socially constructed". These views would have been quite at home in Russia under Stalin.

But Vavilov's history has a lesson for our time, when a new secular ideology threatens to undermine humanity's ability to construct ecologically sustainable and socially just food systems. Socialist ideology killed Vavilov but today it is that embraced by the promoters of genetically modified food crops that threatens to send agrobiology back into the Dark Ages. This ideology is not anti-Darwin or anti-evolution but in its implications are subversive of both science and public policy. This new era, called the Anthropocene, diverges from the precept that human society's institutions should conform to ecological and evolutionary precepts and instead celebrates the power to manipulate and manage Nature and genes for purely human purposes. It takes its inspiration from Stewart Brand, who famously said: "We are as gods and might as well get good at it.” Its current and strongest supporters include the Nordhaus/Shellenberger team behind the BreakThrough Institute and Peter Kareiva, chief scientist for The Nature Conservancy.

Recent NY Times Op-Eds by supporters of GMO food crops are not new or unexpected. Big Pharma and the agro-business conglomerates are churning out manifestos to charm consumers which alarm those who deplore famine and hunger and are committed to social justice, in the belief that human rights include the right to food. These are just demands but they are being sidelined by unsubstantiated promises and speculations about the capacity of genetic modification to meet the growing food needs of what is already a disastrously overpopulated world.

The unproven claims about GMO crops' ability to relieve world hunger are in some sense claims of desperation. American consumers are demanding labels on GMO food, which would effectively end GMOS, and Europeans in one fit of wisdom are rejecting GMO imports from the US and elsewhere. As consumers clamor for chemical-free and locally sourced produce instead of mass food markets, GMOs have become anathema to informed consumers.

Big Pharma and Big Ag have their work cut out for them and their publicists are working 24/7 to present a smiley-faced technology that will appear healthy while relieving the guilt of affluent nations over the plight of starving Africans. There is nothing like a good liberal cause to soften the hearts of American consumers....but in this case the GMO purveyors are betting on the wrong horse.

Bluntly, agribusiness and the GMO proponents are the Lysenkos of our time, squashing science-based ecological solutions that threaten their control. Thus they busy themselves denigrating small-scale local agriculture, traditional hybridization (which has served humanity quite well for thousands of years without poisoning people), and labor-intensive naturally fertilized crops based on sound soil practices, all of which were, at least originally, developed to serve local and regional markets. Today, the importation of out-of-season produce from thousands of miles away, monocrop culture, herbicide and pesticide dousing, and energy-intensive processing, packaging and distribution systems to serve mass markets have turned most of the developed world's food supply into artifacts. Real Food becomes rarer and more expensive, available only to the wealthy. What more damning conclusion could anyone reach about the failure of the industrial food supply?

The GMO defenders are doing what Lysenko and Stalin did to Russia. In the service of a corporate ideology in which they become the czars of the world's fundamental foods, rather than the farmers, peasants and subsistence communities struggling against all odds, the GMO people purvey not just genes for breakfast but a model that will put them in control of the very substance of life. It is a ruthless, merciless fight, this manipulation of science and human compassion, one that, if not rejected as Lysenkoism was, will set back and perhaps undermine everything we thought we had learned about evolution and ecology. GMO food technology must be stopped in its tracks as quickly as possible. The stakes - the health of humans and the planet as well as democracy - are too high to risk.

Source: New English Review, May 2014.

At the back of the room, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), the sponsor of the meeting, had a table displaying printed information for attendees. At the front of the table rested a small angular piece of black glassy material, looking much like a hybrid between coal and glass. The explanatory material stated that this black lump represented the future and final state of "high-level" (an intense radiation source that requires heavy shielding) wastes from the commercial nuclear power program in this country.

This black lump turns up regularly at DOE traveling shows across the country, but it really contains no actual radioactive substances. It is merely a gimmick designed to calm the public into accepting the DOE myth that a solution to the radioactive waste problem is at hand. And myth it most certainly is—the myth that the long-sought "solution" to the waste problem, that Achilles' heel plaguing the nuclear industry and the government, merely needs some funding and decisive action to be implemented.

The reality is quite different, especially after one reads between the lines of official government proclamations and consults the studies conducted by the U.S. Comptroller General, the California Energy Resources Commission, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and others. While the government persists in claiming that a solution exists, nowhere does it claim that there is a demonstrated solution. One can easily postulate that waste can be solidified, that a relatively impermeable container can be constructed, and that a geological medium can be found to effectively isolate the material from the biosphere and human contact for the requisite geologic time periods—up to perhaps a half-million years. These are, however, only concepts of waste disposal, of which there is a surfeit. The actual state of the art is primitive: no commercial spent fuel or high-level waste has yet been solidified in this country; no impermeable container has been manufactured; and the mad scramble to find a deep-earth repository continues despite multiple failures in the past.

The real goal of these efforts should be successful isolation of the radioactive materials from the biosphere, primarily from water, people, and natural resource deposits that may be useful to future generations. But as things stand now, there are not even any environmental, health, geologic, seismic, or technical criteria for radioactive waste storage and isolation. Briefly, this means that no one even knows all the questions that must be asked and answered in order to find solutions. Without these questions and the range of answers, it is illogical, unreasonable, and possibly insane to go on making more wastes.

If one were to judge the problem strictly on existing studies and evidence, there would be no basis for concluding that a solution will ever be found. There is now no way of predicting the long-term stability of the waste (in its presumably solidified form), of the container, of the geologic medium, or of future social conditions, much less the complex radiological, thermal, chemical, and physical interactions of all these components, because we have not had any experience with these materials and problems. The government has already postponed by three years—from 1985 to 1988, and possibly 1993—the date for opening its first two permanent waste repositories; that the DOE can cite any date at all is amazing, since the Nuclear Regulatory Commission admits that not one of the eight favored technological alternatives for waste disposal has been demonstrated. Nevertheless, the government is anxious to find some ostensible solution so that the nuclear industry can move ahead without public strictures or concern. This could result in a premature, insufficiently tested "solution" merely to allay public fears.

That these fears are inhabiting the nuclear industry is quite clear, as evidenced both by a recent Harris Poll in New York State where citizens opposed waste storage in the state by four to one, and by the legislation enacted or being considered by over twenty states to ban waste repositories or to require legislative action before they can be built. Indeed, the entire California reactor program may be at an end now because of a state law prohibiting reactor construction until a waste solution has been demonstrated and certified by the federal government.

Fancy Poison

High-level radioactive wastes include both a liquid residue from reprocessing reactor fuel and irradiated or "spent" fuel rods periodically removed from reactors. In reprocessing, the fuel rods (which contain millions of curies of the products of fission, such as strontium-90 and cesium-137) are chopped up and chemicals are used to leach out the plutonium and unfissioned uranium. What remains behind is a highly corrosive toxic solution containing all the fission products, which have an approximately thirty-year half-life (half of a given quantity decays to other elements in thirty years; half of the remaining quantity decays in another thirty years, and so forth) and must be isolated from people and the biosphere for up to twenty half-lives, or 600 years. In addition, the liquid wastes contain traces of heavier elements, sometimes called actinides, which include plutonium (which has a half-life of 24,400 years), americium, curium, and neptunium. These elements emit radiation less penetrating than that of the fission products but are highly carcinogenic if inhaled or ingested. Some are extremely long-lived and require isolation for up to 500,000 years.

Today, in the absence of commercial reprocessing, spent fuel rods coming out of reactors are stored in pools of water nearby; thus the fuel rods, containing all the fission products plus unfissioned uranium plus the actinides, are, in effect, high-level radioactive wastes, protected only by metal casing and the water. The fuel rods have high beta and gamma radioactivity, which is very penetrating, and they also have high temperatures; these two factors compound the difficulties of containment and isolation.

Most of the existing stocks of waste—about 75 million gallons in liquid form—are from the military plutonium production program; of these, 600,000 gallons are now stored at the Nuclear Fuel Services plant at West Valley, New York. In addition, spent fuel rods are being stored in pools at commercial reactors, many of which will have to close down within five years when the pools are full. Although most of the existing wastes are from the military program, the commercial wastes are far more toxic. Existing commercial wastes and spent fuel rods are perhaps 100 times more toxic in their concentration of fission products than military wastes and probably are equal in total radioactivity to the quantities produced in the military program. It is small comfort to hear the government say that all commercial wastes could be stored in an area the size of a football field, when one realizes that permissible human tolerance of fission products is measured in millionths of a curie and that the commercial waste program will ultimately involve the production, handling, transportation, and storage of billions of curies of fission products. Furthermore, in their present form spent fuel rods and highly radioactive wastes cannot be stored in tightly packed formations because of the heat of radioactive decay. Under ideal conditions, up to 75,000 waste canisters, stored far apart to permit cooling, might be needed by the end of the century.

It has been estimated that a fifty percent release of the strontium-90 in one large light-water reactor could, if evenly dispersed, contaminate the entire annual freshwater runoff of the lower forty eight states to six times the maximum permissible concentration. Moreover, there could be as many as 476,000 fuel rods by the year 2000, but storage is available now for only about 1 percent of these. This, then, is the problem: the technical challenge of finding ways to treat wastes, materials to encapsulate them, and a site insured against future geophysical processes that might rupture the repository or permit leaching of radioactive materials into water. In addition, there is the sociopolitical problem of insuring continuity and stability of institutions to guard the site from future exploration, sabotage, or war.

It is instructive to look at one aspect of the problem: geologic isolation. The U.S. Geological Survey is involved in a program aimed at making two national repositories operative by the 1980s. It is studying various geologic media, such as salt and shale, to determine how problems of groundwater, heat transfer, geopressure, and earthquakes might affect waste isolation. The chief sites being studied are salt formations in New Mexico, New York, and several other states, with the New Mexico site proposed for the initial project. It would include storage for military and commercial wastes and construction of a large depot for at least 1,000 spent fuel rods. Similar plans are being considered for the Nuclear Fuel Services site at West Valley, New York.

The initial plan is to engineer to retrieve the wastes within a fifty-year period and then go for nonretrievable deep burial—two schemes with distinct and unique disadvantages. For example, initial exploration, drilling, and trial emplacement of waste canisters could weaken the substratum and make it too weak for permanent burial; this is especially true for salt formations, which the government seems to be emphasizing despite growing doubts in the scientific community. From the geologist's point of view, the major problems are possible physical changes from erosion and other geological processes that could cause wastes to migrate into groundwater. A recent U.S. Geological Survey paper examines the major gaps in geological knowledge that must be filled before waste burial can even be considered. Addressing the interactions of waste, the host medium, and the mine dug into it, the report states: "Many of the interactions are not well understood, and this lack of understanding contributes considerable uncertainty to evaluations of the risk of geologic disposal of high-level waste." Three barriers are assumed to prevent radioactivity leaching and migrating: the solid physical form of the waste; the container, presumably a metal that will eventually corrode; and the geologic medium itself, which ideally should be totally free of water, stable for long geologic periods, and not in proximity to natural resources, resources that have already been explored, thus weakening the surrounding area, and that might be exploited by future generations, which could accidentally penetrate a repository or waste canister.

Eight Potential Turkeys

A report published in 1976 by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission gives a remarkably honest appraisal of the eight major alternatives for waste disposal. The report bluntly states that 'technology has not been demonstrated" for any except the present method, i.e., storing liquid wastes in steel tanks. Some solidification has been done on a laboratory scale, but none of this involved acidic commercial highly radioactive wastes or spent fuel. The most recent plans for treating high-level commercial wastes merely call for simulated solidification, and/or conversion into glass; however, no actual solidification of commercial wastes has yet taken place in this country. Solidification plans are pure theory, and there is no reason to accept assurances that effective solidification will be achieved.

The acidic wastes at West Valley and at Hanford, Washington, were neutralized in order to slow down corrosion of the tanks. This was done after more than 100,000 gallons leaked out at Hanford four years ago. But neutralization creates new problems. It creates a thick sludge of fission products at the bottom of the tanks. No one knows how to get the stuff out, and there has even been talk of chopping up the tanks, sludge and all, and disposing of it in one mass. As for the small amounts of partially treated military wastes at Hanford, there appear to be difficulties with converting this ultimately to a glass form. In short, there has been some ad hoc treatment of wastes to deal with emergencies such as tank corrosion and leakage, but there still is no demonstrated technology for waste treatment and solidification. Nor is there any existing container that can guarantee nonleaching and noncorrosion for at least the requisite 600 years needed for the fission products, let alone the hundreds of thousands of years needed for the heavier radioactive elements.

Thus, we must place our faith in the geology of the final repository, whether it be in salt, granite, shale, or the sea bottom. Here lies the greatest challenge—to find that location which has been seismically and geologically stable for hundreds of thousands, even millions, of years; which offers sufficient proof, if such is possible, that it will remain equally stable in the future; and which satisfactorily demonstrates that it can contain the wastes after the canisters erode in about a hundred years. This is indeed a tall order to fill. In fact, the parameters of successful waste isolation for geologic time periods are not yet known. No one even knows if all the relevant questions have been asked.

The U.S. Geological Survey report says that the act of creating a repository and placing waste therein will "initiate complex processes that cannot, at present, be predicted with certainty." It is assumed that computer models will be used to estimate the repository stability, but the Geological Survey comments that some components of the models are inherently unpredictable at present and are likely to change at different times. Because of these uncertainties, there will be not a single answer but rather "a spectrum of alternative outcomes, each based on a set of uncertain assumptions about the future," which will have to be assessed in the context of social and economic needs and human expectations.

Some of the specific technical concerns cited by the Geologic Survey are: permeability of the surrounding medium; adsorption qualities of the salt or rock; characteristics of subsurface geology and possible groundwater, shear zones, faults, abandoned excavations, and small undetectable faults or fracture systems; disturbances created by digging the repository; chemical disturbances caused by introduction of wastes; thermal stresses from the wastes which, in turn, create greater mechanical and chemical stresses; effective resealing of the repository opening after the waste is in place; migration of groundwater to the repository because of heat; effects of salt water on waste components; creation of new waste forms through radioactive decay and chemical changes; mechanical and chemical changes in the rock or salt that could reduce thc strength of the repository; thermal expansion and contraction that could fracture brittle rock; breakdown of wastebearing minerals and subsequent release of water or gases; interaction of minerals, gases, and the waste because of elevated temperatures; changes in permeability caused by the movement of hot liquids, leading to changes in volume and stress underground; etc.

The federal government has mainly been researching the use of thick salt formations, primarily in New Mexico and New York, not because salt is necessarily the best medium (it may well be the worst because of corrosiveness, nearby uncharted gas and oil drill holes, and the association with potentially valuable minerals like potash), but because more is known about salt than other formations. The site in New Mexico was chosen because of its low population, aridity, large open areas, and, not coincidentally, because a good proportion of jobs in the state are provided by the government weapons center at Los Alamos or at the government funded Sandia Laboratories in Albuquerque. This led the Department of Energy to expect a warm welcome for the waste project, but the DOE was wrong. For the Department did not tell anyone in advance that the site would include intermediate and high-level commercial wastes, as well as one thousand spent fuel rods from reactors in other parts of the country. This deception provoked an angry response from citizens and local legislators alike, and it sparked the introduction of a bill in the state legislature to give the state a veto over any repository siting. A citizens' information project on the implications of the project has been organized by the Southwest Research and Information Center in Albuquerque, and out of it have come some important technical findings.

Simultaneously, federal studies of the salt beds in New York (as well as in Ohio and Michigan) are moving ahead with the tacit blessing of New York's Governor Hugh Carey, who professes opposition to a repository but refuses to sponsor corresponding legislation. Union Carbide has done a preliminary survey of what a New York repository would entail, and exploratory drilling in the Finger Lakes region may take place soon. The special attraction of central New York State is not its scenery, however, but its proximity to the closed Nuclear Fuel Services plant at West Valley. The Department of Energy is seriously considering use of the site as a demonstration facility and "interim" storage site for spent fuel. The former owner and operator of Nuclear Fuel Services, which is a subsidiary of Getty Oil, has told DOE that it could easily expand its spent fuel storage capacity threefold. Finally, since a permanent repository for high-level wastes is many decades in the future, the accumulation of spent fuel rods is currently a serious problem which could conceivably lead to reactor shutdowns by 1983. As a result, the DOE is now proposing to construct above ground spent fuel pools for the rods, at new sites called Away-From-Reactor facilities, of which West Valley may be one.

Such fuel pools, instead of containing solidified, contained, and geologically isolated wastes, would consist of high-level fuel rods containing millions of curies of extremely hazardous fission products. These would be protected only by thin metallic cladding and would be stored above ground in pools of water. Getting these rods from all the reactors in the Northeast to the new sites will involve dozens of shipments each year on crowded highways and through towns and cities, with constant risk of accident, collision, fire, or sabotage; one accident could expose thousands, even millions of people, to lethal doses of radiation.

The truth is that there is a total lack of experience in dealing with waste disposal. What little experience the government has had has been uniformly disastrous: experimental drilling in salt formations in Kansas revealed many oil and gas drill holes; similar discoveries in New Mexico led to early relocation of the proposed facility there; in Hanford, Washington, leakage of up to 150,000 gallons of liquid wastes took place on several occasions, and plutonium-239 in trenches there had to be dispersed to prevent initiation of a chain reaction and explosion; at Maxey Flats, Kentucky, plutonium migrated several miles in the subsoil in less than two years; as mentioned before, neutralization of Hanford and West Valley wastes has created an unmanageable radioactive slurry that may be impossible to solidify.

Because of the unanswered questions, no realistic estimate of waste disposal costs can be made. The government talks of $13 billion to deal with all the wastes through the year 2000, but ultimately costs will have to reflect societal decisions on engineering standards and environmental criteria for waste. These could mean openended cost escalation. Now the DOE hopes to institute a one-time user fee, wherein utilities pay the government an initial fee and then are absolved of responsibility and financial liability.

The legal obstacles to a waste repository are formidable. The U.S. government and New York State are haggling over what to do with West Valley and who will pay; state residents who wish to see the site decommissioned and dismantled are facing a juggernaut of state officials, federal legislators, nuclear industry executives, and the DOE, all of whom are determined to continue the site as a major nuclear facility. Illinois is suing the federal government to prevent storage of any more waste at the Sheffield site. California has legislated a nuclear moratorium to be in effect until a waste disposal technology has been demonstrated, and citizen movements in other states are heading in the same direction. In New York State, the Citizens' Project on Radioactive Waste, which opposes all forms of waste storage in the state, now has over thirty-five member groups representing nearly 130,000 people. The organization recently presented petitions to the governor to ban interim and permanent waste storage in the state. Also, several bills banning out-of-state waste storage, requiring legislative approval for any repository and halting nuclear licensing until a waste solution is found, are pending in New York.

In the face of glaring gaps in technical knowledge, it seems eminently reasonable to urge that U.S. reactors be phased out until an effective solution to the waste problem has been demonstrated. Recommendations to this effect have already been made by the President's Council on Environmental Quality, a House subcommittee, and by the director of Ontario Hydro in Canada. The use of nuclear power requires demonstrable proof that the problem of waste has in fact been solved. It is only a matter of time until this policy is adopted nationally; whether it will be done peacefully, utilizing existing public forums and institutions, is another question.

Source: Business & Society Review, # 26, summer 1978.

If any issue has the power to shut down the nuclear industry, it is the disposal of radioactive wastes. To the general public it poses a more insidious and intractable threat than any other aspect of the nuclear fuel cycle. Hostility to dumping plans continues to mount, and is hitting the industry where it hurts.

In August, the Brookhaven National Laboratory, Long Island, announced that unless bans on the transport of nuclear waste through New York City and New London were lifted, it would be forced to shut down. Unable to ship the spent fuel elements from its experimental High Flux Beam reactor for reprocessing in South Carolina, the laboratory now finds its existing storage facilities dangerously close to overflowing. Brookhaven's problems reflect the extent to which the waste disposal issue has become the Achilles' Heel of the nuclear power programme. Earlier this year, for example, the California State Legislature vetoed plans for the $3 billion Sundesert nuclear power plant after the San Diego Gas and Electric Company had failed to convince them that adequate waste disposal facilities were available. That veto resulted in a nuclear moratorium in California–a lead that has since been followed by several other states. Indeed the depth of public hostility over the waste issue was revealed by a Harris Poll published last Spring: whilst residents in New York State opposed the siting of a reactor near their homes by two to one, they opposed the storage of radioactive waste anywhere in the state by an overwhelming four to one.

In the face of such widespread opposition, the nuclear industry's survival clearly depends on convincing the public that it can not only contain but also isolate the wastes indefinitely. That distinction is important, for whilst it is easy to propose methods of waste solidification, encapsulation and geological burial, it is difficult, if not impossible, to demonstrate effective long-term isolation. Yet failure to do so could well bring a national moratorium on the development of nuclear power. The industry's past record of waste management hardly inspires confidence. Almost without exception, the storage of wastes has been marked by clumsy handling, incompetent inspection procedures and shoddy containment practices. Staggeringly large amounts of high and low-level wastes–in addition to plutonium–have already been leaked (sometimes intentionally) into the soil and water, resulting in irreversible damage to both public health and the environment. What then is the extent of the USA's waste problem? And how likely is it to be solved?

Uranium Mill Tailings

Milling operations crush the uranium ore, separating the uranium-238 and its small uranium-235 component from the rest of the ore and leaving posterity to deal with vast quantities of finely powdered tailing that emit the same dangerous radioisotopes as uranium itself: thorium-230 and radon-226. The latter decays to gaseous radon-222 whose radon daughters are alpha emitters which cause lung cancer if inhaled. Since the thorium-230 that gives rise to the radon has a half-life of 80,000 years (and itself arises from uranium-238 with a half-life of 4.5 billion years) these tailing will continue to give our descendents does of alpha radiation for countless generations.

From 1948 to 1968, when uranium was mined for military and commercial purposes, about six thousand miners in the US were 'significantly and needlessly exposed to radioactive gases present in the air of uranium mines' (Rand Corporation). Several hundred have since died of lung cancer and the US Public Health Service estimate that a further eleven hundred deaths can be expected. In Canada dust levels in uranium mines near Ontario were consistently above the industry's safety guidelines over a period of fifteen years; nothing was done to curtail them. Over 100 million tons of mill tailings are presently stored in huge piles above ground in the Western States and some have leached into rivers used for drinking water or have simply blown away. Incredible as it now seems, there were many cases when they were simply given away; builders used them in foundations for schools, homes, roads and public buildings, until in the 1970s it was discovered that the inhabitants of these buildings were receiving the equivalent of up to 500 chest X-rays each year from the radon gas seeping up through the floor. Many foundations were dug up and carted away , but by then much damage had been done. As for the US government, it totally ignored the health hazards of radon in its reactor licensing procedures until Robert Pohl, a Cornell University physicist, forced it to admit that they had been underestimated by a factor of 100,000.

The solution to the tailings problem is well-known: burial to a depth of 100 feet (roughly the depth of the original body of ore) so that radon gas, with a half-life of 3.8 days, can decay before reaching the surface. Since this would drastically increase the costs of commercial nuclear power, the government plans instead to turn all tailings over to the state legislatures and is trying to enact laws absolving itself from all damage to health caused by tailings, including those already accumulated.

High-level Wastes

High-level wastes, mainly consisting of spent fuel elements and acid wastes (in some cases neutralized) left over from reprocessing, emit intense radiation that requires heavy shielding. The waste elements of greatest concern are the fission products, chiefly strontium-90, cesium-137, iodine-129 and technetium-99. Iodine-129 has a half-life of 10 million years; strontium-90 of 38 years; cesium-137 of 30 years; and technetium-99 of 200,000 years.

At present the volume of high-level wastes from commercial reactors is only a fraction of that previously generated by the military, largely through their plutonium production programme at Hanford, Washington. (It is estimated that by the 1980s the military alone will have produced nearly half a million tons of high-level wastes measured in solid form). Yet in terms of the radiation hazard they represent, commercial wastes are far more dangerous: per unit of volume, fission products from the commercial programme are one hundred times greater in radiotoxicity than those produced by the military programme. At the end of 1977, the inventory of curies of important nuclides generated from military and commercial operations was about equal, by 1985, the total inventory of fission products in high-level wastes alone is expected to be 100 million curies, mostly derived from the commercial programme. One microcurie is considered the maximum permissible body dose.

The Hanford tanks, with about 71 million gallons of neutralized high-level liquid wastes (some in salt cake or sludge form) have a dismal history. Over the thirty years of military activities, 450,000 gallons of high-level waste have leaked into the soil and in some areas into the ground water beneath the reservation which adjoins the Columbia River. The leaks were largely due to the tanks being corroded by acid wastes, as well as criminally lax inspection and monitoring techniques. The largest single leak–115,000 gallons–contained nearly 270,000 curies of ruthenium-107, 40,000 curies of cesium-137, 4 curies of plutonium-239, 0.6 curies of americium-241 and 13,000 curies of strontium-90. Tritium and ruthenium have both been detected in the water table; strontium-90 and iodine-131 were found in the Columbia River itself; and large amounts of plutonium, stored in outside trenches, have had to be dug up and dispersed because the government feared a spontaneous explosion. Plutonium-239 also percolated into the covered cribs outside and recent studies indicate that the concentration of plutonium in the sediment beneath the cribs is as high as 0.5 microcuries per gramme–five thousand times the maximum permissible concentration in the soil. After the leaks, the wastes were neutralized but this produced a fission product slurry on the bottom of the tank which no one knows how to remove. The high-level wastes in the Hanford tanks contain up to 10,000 curies of radioactivity per gallon.

Low-level Wastes

Low-level wastes can either be liquid or solid, and include clothing, filters, tools and other material contaminated with plutonium and other transuranics. They have been buried in six shallow burial grounds dotted across the United States. At the Nuclear Fuel Services site at West Valley, New York, radioactive material leached into the nearby creeks that feed Lake Erie after some of the burial trenches were flooded with water; later a study undertaken by the Wood's Hole Biological Laboratory revealed that traces of curium-244 had been found in both Lake Erie and Lake Ontario. At Hanford, low-level wastes are deliberately percolated into the soil. At Maxey Flats, Kentucky, plutonium from burial trenches was found to have migrated in the soil to a distance of two miles within a few years of dumping, confounding the experts who claimed that absorption by soil particles would prevent such movement. A recent study in Science (June 30th, 1978) reports that trace quantities of certain radionuclides (primarily cobalt-60, but also isotopes of plutonium, thorium and cesium) are migrating from both solid and liquid waste disposal pits at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), Tennessee–despite the predominant bedrock of the burial ground being Conasauga shale, which is supposed to have an extremely high absorption capacity for most fission products. The cobalt-60 had been transported into the groundwater from the burial trenches in an organic form. The researchers, James Duguid of Battelle-Columbus Laboratory and Jeffrey Means and David Crerar from Princeton University, pointed out that organic chelates used in decontamination operations (not only at ORNL but at nuclear establishments throughout the world) in combination with natural organic acids in the soil, reduce the capacity of the soil to absorb radionuclides. Still worse, chelates increase the uptake of the numerous trace elements by plants, and thus increase the possibility of certain radionuclides–notably plutonium-239 and americium-241–entering the human food chain.

In addition, there have been innumerable losses of low-level wastes through transportation accidents. Last spring, for example, 40,000 pounds of yellow cake (uranium oxide) were spilt when a truck carrying it in metal drums collided with three horses on a deserted Colorado road, and overturned, rupturing the containers and spewing the contents a foot deep across the road.

Aged Reactors

What does one do with a nuclear power station that has reached the end of its life? What is the best way to get rid of the fifteen to twenty per cent of its contents that is still highly radioactive? As yet no one knows the ultimate technical, financial and health costs of complete reactor decommissioning. So far the twenty reactors that have been closed down in the western world have all been prototypes which have only been in operation for relatively short periods. Their radioactivity levels are only a fraction of the levels forecast for the large commercial reactors due to be closed down in the next twenty years. Even so, when a small research reactor was recently dismantled (under water to minimize radiation exposure) the cost of the operation was about equal to the cost of its construction.

Dismantling a commercial plant may cost anywhere from $31 million to more than $100 million in 1977 dollars–between three and ten percent of the $1 billion capital cost, predicts a recent U.S. Congress report, Nuclear Power Costs. Those figures do not include the perpetual care costs for tending the rubble from the plant which contains radioactive nickle that may remain hazardous for up to 1.5 million years.

Reactors are dismantled in three stages: mothballing, entombment and complete removal–a process that for a large reactor may take anything from fifty to a hundred years. Only five prototype plants have gone beyond the mothballing stage, at which the plant is kept intact but the reactor is sealed off with anti-contamination barriers. In the second and third stage, reports The Economist (May 6th, 1978) 'workers will need to remove from a typical magnox reactor radioactive parts consisting of 2,500 tonnes of mild steel, 100 tonnes of stainless steel, and 2,500 tonnes of graphite. The inner layer of the concrete shield around the plant will also be radioactive to a depth of 1.5 metres. All this must be dismantled, shipped and stored.' It may well be that the US government merely intends to 'mothball' all reactors. If so, the American landscape will some day be dotted with monuments, even entire zones, requiring perpetual surveillance. Although an EEC committee is looking into the problem, nobody yet knows how a reactor will be dismantled in the case of an emergency.

The Disposal Dilemma

For the ordinary citizen, caught up in the waste disposal controversy, separating myth from reality is extremely difficult. The government persists in asserting that a solution is in hand and simply needs some hard decisions and hard money to be implemented. Yet one need only refer to some of the government's own studies to realize that what exists are not demonstrated technologies but merely concepts of waste handling, containment and burial. In fact the more research that is done into methods of waste disposal, the more scientists are realizing the extent of the gaps in their knowledge. A recent report, prepared by the Office of Science and Technology Policy, admits that 'the knowledge and technological base available today is not yet sufficient to permit complete confidence in the safety of any particular repository design or the suitability of any particular site.'

No commercial waste has yet been solidified in the U.S. and although some fission products have been solidified into glass blocks in France, it has since been revealed that they have already begun to leach. Not surprisingly vitrification has come under attack; 'In the opinion of the materials community, glass is relatively unstable and thermodynamically bad–in short it "chews up" easily', says Rustum Roy, Director of the US National Academy of Science's Committee on Radioactive Waste Management, whose highly critical report was published in August.

As yet no satisfactory terminal geological repository has been located. Indeed the deadline set by the government for deep-earth isolation has already been postponed until the early 1990s, and many believe that it will be further postponed until the beginning of the next century. The government's main disposal strategy at present is a rather pathetic plan to construct two Away-From-Reactor (AFR) sites–effectively oversize ponds in which spent fuel elements can be temporarily stored. Without these AFRs the nation's reactors, already rapidly exhausting their own fuel ponds, will soon have to shut down.

In fact, the AFR policy is merely a return to an earlier, discredited concept of waste disposal known as Retrievable Surface Storage (RSS) which was intended to keep spent fuel within easy reach for eventual reprocessing. At the time the RSS method was severely criticized by many Federal Agencies which feared that it could well become a permanent solution. Those fears are now confirmed; with permanent burial a distant chimera, the RSS, in the guise of AFRs, will be the sole means of waste disposal for the foreseeable future–a series of high-level waste repositories above ground, but without the multiple barriers of geological sites to contain the radioactivity. Not surprisingly critics of nuclear power see the decision to opt for AFRs as an admission that a permanent solution is remote. Or is it a cynical and none too subtle move not to solve or even ease the waste problem, but to prop up a failing industry?

In a desperate attempt to calm public fears by digging a hole in the ground and getting some waste in there fast to demonstrate a 'solution', a plan for a terminal repository–the Waste Isolation Pilot Project (WIPP)–is being pushed through in New Mexico. At first the State (whose largest employers are the Los Alamos weapons laboratory and the Sandia Laboratory) welcomed the project but withdrew their support when they discovered that they would receive not only low- and high-level military wastes but high-level commercial wastes and 1,000 spent fuel assemblies as well. Even formerly enthusiastic officials are now balking at the idea and one of them has introduced legislation in Congress designed to give states the right of veto over waste repositories. Many other Senators would also like to give their states guaranteed right of veto on which the government could never renege. But whilst the DOE claims that it will honor any state refusal to accept waste, it clearly could not tolerate such refusals from all fifty states. Understandably, Secretary of Energy James Schlesinger is not keen to give the states a statutory right of veto: 'I think the matter would be best left unresolved,' he told a House Committee on Internal Affairs. 'It is a grey area of the law and I think that it is more convenient to leave it there rather than trying to define it too precisely.'

Salt Deposits

Many of the government's efforts at deep-earth burial have gone into the exploration of salt formations, primarily in New Mexico, Louisiana, New York, Ohio and Michigan. Salt was generally viewed as the most promising of all geological media, mainly because of its plasticity which, it was believed, could help seal the repository. As recently as 1976, officials from the Energy Research and Development Administration (ERDA–now the Department of Energy) were predicting confidently that burial in salt would require 'only straightforward technological and engineering development'. Now, however, salt is seen to have major drawbacks, all of which have been minimized by the industry: it is highly corrosive, not entirely free of water as had been assumed, and is usually located in areas of oil, gas and potash which could mean that there are uncharted drilling holes that would weaken the integrity of the salt formation. (Precisely that happened at Lyons, Kansas, where the Oak Ridge National Laboratory was storing spent fuel in 1965. In 1970, the government announced that Lyons would be the first Federal waste repository, but over the next few years old oil and gas holes were discovered near the site and the plans were abandoned).

The use of salt deposits has come in for strong criticism from both the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) and the U.S. Geological survey (USGS). The OSTP report that whilst salt is the best understood of all geological media and 'with conservative engineering' might be an acceptable repository, it has unique problems: 'Because of salt's highly corrosive nature, currently planned waste containers would seem to be breached and substantially corroded by all but the very driest salt within months to years.' They add that salt is soluble and 'does not provide the absorptive qualities of other rocks nor is it benign to interactions with the waste and container'. These, it states, could prove 'troublesome' in the event of a canister breaking. The OSTP also stresses the great gaps in technical knowledge of waste disposal.

The same point is taken up in the USGS's recent circular on geological disposal: 'Many of the interactions (between waste, canister and geological medium) are not well understood, and this lack of understanding contributes considerable uncertainty to evaluations of the risks of geological disposal of high-level waste.' The circular also pinpoints three major problems that are likely to occur in salt formations: disturbance of the medium caused by the actual mining; chemical disturbances created by introducing new fluids not in chemical equilibrium with the salt; thermal disturbances from hot wastes that will in turn compound the two other problems. It also expresses concern for unknown geological faults, ground water conduits and abandoned excavations–all of which could allow water into the repository. In addition, hot canisters tend to attract brine towards them.

Salt was not the only geological medium the USGS was worried about; in rock deposits chemical change due to the introduced thermal energy, could lead to thermal expansion and contraction that would fracture the canisters. This thermal energy could also break down hydrated minerals and form new ones, with significant increases in the permeability of the rock. 'Given the current state of our knowledge,' warns the USGS, 'the uncertainties associated with hot wastes that interact chemically and mechanically with the rock and fluid system appear very high.'

In June a brutally honest report from the US Environmental Protection Agency gave what may be the death blow to the use of salt for disposal. This report explodes the common belief that many salts do not contain water; close inspection of even the driest salts reveals 'significant amounts of water in fluid inclusions and intergranular boundaries.' The waste canisters are 'likely to be bathed in water soon after emplacement' and, worse still, the moisture will actually cause the crystals to burst at temperatures half that of the canister. As for the canister itself, the report states that 'no tests…have shown that any of the candidate metals will resist corrosion by the salt solutions that are likely to be at the canister surface for a significantly long time. Under these circumstances it is likely that the canister could be breached within time scales of a decade or less.'

Conclusion

Neither the government nor the nuclear industry will countenance discussion of a nuclear moratorium until waste isolation technology has been demonstrated, nor will they admit that continued production of wastes could conceivably make the situation worse. They respond that even if the industry shuts down, we will still have large amounts of waste to deal with. This is an argument which totally misses the point; not only is it easier to deal with a fixed quantity of wastes than with a quantity ten times as large; but also there may be very few–perhaps only one–geologically acceptable burial sites in the US. Only a limited amount of waste could then be accommodated, and continued production will require additional burial sites that may be totally unsatisfactory.

The key questions are: how much is the problem compounded by not stopping waste production? How many tons of uranium tailings will blow in the wind? How many more thousands of annual truck and rail shipments of uranium and spent fuel will be needed? How many more derailment accidents will there be? How many additional AFRs must be built? And how many permanent burial sites?

If after twenty years of nuclear power no single example of effective containment has been demonstrated, what hope is there of future success? Can there possibly be any justification for allowing the nuclear industry to go on manufacturing waste products whose potential for destruction neither scientists nor government can begin to calculate? Can it be permitted to prop itself up with the myth rather than the reality of safe waste disposal?

Sources

• Radioactive Wastes at the Hanford Reservation: A Technical Review (National Research Council - National Academy of Sciences, 1978)

• Geological Disposal of High-Level Radioactive Wastes: Earth Science Perspectives. (US Geological Survey Circular 779)

• Nuclear Energy's Dilemma: Disposing of Hazardous Radioactive Wastes Safely. (Controller General report to Congress 9/9/77)

• Alternative Processes for Managing Existing Commercial High-Level Radioactive Wastes (NUREG-0043, Nuclear Regulatory Commission. April 1976, by Battelle Pacific NorthWest Laboratory)

• Status of Nuclear Fuel Reprocessing, Spent Fuel Storage and High-Level Waste Disposal (California Energy Resources Conservation and Development Commission, 1978)

• Report of the Task Force for Review of Nuclear Waste Management. (US Dept. of Energy, February 1978)

Source: New Ecologist, Number 6, Nov/Dec 1978.

Two kinds of smoke detectors are on the market: photoelectric and ionization. The former is most suited to detecting slow, smoldering fires, the most likely ones to occur in dwellings. The latter is more suited for rapidly burning fires, and some people install a combination for extra safety. However, in New York City, inasmuch as the ionizing types are about 50 percent of the cost of the photoelectric, landlords, who must pay the upfront cost and installation, are choosing the radioactive type. Unfortunately, the New York City law as written does not require the landlord to offer tenants an option; the most serious drawback, however, is that the law makes no provision for ultimate disposal of the ionizing device, and this is where the public health hazard enters.

The ionizing detector contains 1 microgram of the transuranic element americium-241, a by-product of nuclear fission and military reactors, which arises from plutonium-241. Like other transuranics, it emits gamma radiation, which can penetrate the casing of the detector; since the device requires regular cleaning, this casing must be removed by tenants at home, exposing them to as much as 12 millirems of gamma radiation, which is similar to X-rays. But the americium-241 also emits alpha particles, which are extremely toxic and carcinogenic if inhaled or ingested in miniscule quantities. Once ingested by humans, americium concentrates in the liver, kidney, spleen and in skeletal tissue. Although in theory the americium is "locked" into a metallic and ceramic base, the detector could be damaged or breached if improperly manufactured, handled or disposed of. It is, in fact, the disposal question that has aroused thousands of New York City residents to refuse installation of the ionizing smoke detectors and insist on photoelectrics.

The Disposal Problem

The detector has a ten-year lifetime, after which it must be disposed of. The problem is that no transuranic radioactive waste disposal sites exist in this country. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is instructing people (including those who are removing them and replacing them with photoelectrics) to throw them in their garbage or in their incinerator. The result could be severe abrasion of the container and contents, resulting in dispersal of alpha particles from land-fills. Originally, the NRC was going to require that they be returned to the manufacturer after their useful life, but this was unenforceable (and useless since the manufacturer has no disposal or burial site in any case). So this provision was removed. Right now, according to The New York Times, 40 million ionizing smoke detectors are in use across the country, all of which will ultimately be disposed of in landfills or incinerators and thereby pose a distinct hazard of lung cancer to literally millions of Americans. According to one nuclear physicist, the amount of americium-241 in each detector is more than one thousand times the quantity needed to significantly increase the risk of lung cancer to an individual. In New York City alone, 1.5 million tenants could in theory have ionizing detectors installed—and many of those will be removing them as they learn of the dangers and putting them in their garbage or incinerators.

Another way the government deals with radioactive waste is by declassifying or redefining it. In the 1979 Interagency Review Group report on radioactive waste management, the NRC and the Department of Energy proposed to classify transuranic waste out of existence by defining it as all waste containing 100 nanocuries per gram of transuranics instead of the present definition of 10 nanocuries per gram. Under this new arrangement, materials containing up to and including 99 nanocuries per gram would thus no longer be transuranics and could be disposed of with other less hazardous radioactive waste instead of in special transuranic repositories.

Clearly the distribution and dissemination of alpha emitters and other radioactive materials in widely used consumer items and thence into the air represent an unprecedented health hazard. The government has many plans afoot to try and relieve the pressure from growing quantities of radioactive wastes and by-products, all of which will contribute to an increase in the general level of radioactivity in the global environment. This is a deadly business, for the trend since life appeared on earth has been in the direction of decreased radioactivity. Life did not appear until there was a significant ozone layer to block out solar and cosmic radiation; radioactivity creates random havoc in the somatic and genetic material of living things by creating unstable charged ions. Random changes are seldom if ever beneficial. Humans are especially susceptible to radiation, much more than insects or plants, for example, where natural selection can weed out dangerous mutations extremely quickly. Humans, however, because of the advent of drugs, reduction of disease, and better medical care, live to reproduce and perpetuate mutations and defects.

Metals and Isotopes

What are the government's other plans? First, a decision is expected shortly from the NRC on its proposal to lift the licensing requirements for smelting of radioactive metals like technetium-99 and low-enriched uranium. Should this be permitted, such metals could then be alloyed with non-radioactive ones and made into consumer items like toys, coins, toasters, and other items of household commerce. (If you get enough of these in your kitchen, maybe you could save on electricity by shutting off your lights.) What will the industry and government get out of this? Well, otherwise, huge amounts of metallic scrap from uranium enrichment plants—over 40,000 metric tons—would have to be regarded as radioactive waste and buried; if allowed to be smelted and alloyed, however, it can be sold by the industry for tens of millions of dollars. The next obvious question, health problems aside, is what the industry will propose when it comes to decommissioning reactors. Will they recycle those and make new reactor vessels? It all sounds like a sinister King Midas story, where everything the nuclear industry touches turns not to gold but becomes radioactive; it is no wonder they want to get it off their hands and give us all a little piece.

Another recent regulation enacted by the NRC was the deregulation of certain amounts of radioisotopes used in laboratories and research, like carbon-14 and tritium (H3), which are used as tracers mixed with solvents like toluene, in quantities up to nearly half a million gallons each year. Until now, such materials were (in theory) supposed to be stored in closed containers and disposed of in low-level waste repositories. However, the new rule will permit these materials to be flushed down toilets or put in ordinary landfills with normal household garbage, where they will be free to leach out with liquids and chemicals down into the soil, and where they will eventually contaminate drinking water as has already happened all over the country. The reason for this is economics pure and simple. Disposal of these wastes requires 400,000 cubic yards of space, at a cost of over $13 million annually. By permitting small quantities, up to .05 microcuries at a time, to be disposed of in local landfills and sewage systems, the government and the nuclear industry will be saving vast quantities of money and land.

Poisoning the Environment

Having covered nearly all their bases on radioactive waste disposal, the government's next plan is to incinerate it, in company with other toxic chemical and biological wastes. One upstate New York utility, Niagara-Mohawk, has applied for permission to build such an incinerator, and another is planned for the University of Connecticut campus at Storrs, Connecticut, and two more reportedly exist in Massachusetts. While incineration reduces volume, it in no way reduces radioactivity. On the contrary, it can contribute to more rapid dispersal of radioactive materials, accompanied by other lethal materials—a kind of domestic chemical warfare where we, not our enemies, are the victims.

Put in the context of renewed interest in direct ocean dumping of radioactive wastes, this becomes a grisly scenario for the future. The "frog in hot water" metaphor is appropriate here. It has been observed that a frog dropped in boiling water immediately leaps out of the pot, but one placed in a pot of cold water which is slowly brought to the boil cooks to death. In a sense, a nuclear war could be compared to the boiling water: a sudden conflagration and it's all over. But the incremental poisoning of the biosphere by increasing radioactivity, produced in commercial fuel cycles, in laboratories and hospitals for medical purposes and research, and in the weapons program, is at least as deadly and far more insidious.

For a long time, the government and the nuclear industry tried to pretend that they were going to contain radioactive wastes and materials, and that only a small proportion would actually be released. Aside from the very real health hazard that even small continual releases represent, this pretense has now been abandoned in favor of the theory that "the solution to pollution is dilution." Unfortunately, dilution of radioactivity in no way reduces its danger, due to the long half-lives of many radioisotopes, its persistence and accumulation in biological and physical systems, and the fact that its effects are cumulative and irreversible. What dilution and dispersal mean, quite simply, is that they will disguise for all practical purposes for the statistically certain cancers and genetic defects in the population at large by making the sources of such matters untraceable.

There is little difference between the releases— intentional or not—of toxic chemical wastes into landfills, air and water, and those of radioactivity. The medical problems we are seeing now from toxic wastes are the result of improper disposal of synthetic organics and other poisons over the past three to four decades. There is no doubt that from now on we will start to see the delayed effects of radioactive waste disposal and nuclear fuel cycle operation, in the form of increased cancer, birth defects, and genetic disorders. The radioactive time bomb is exploding slowly but surely, and the prevention of global nuclear war, while important in itself, may do little to avert long-term radiological poisoning of the biosphere.

Cancer Risks From Smoke Detectors

• Average americium-241 per smoke detector: 1 microcurie

• Maximum number of lung cancer doses per microcurie: 78

• Number of ionizing smoke detectors in the United States: 40,000,000

• Number of potential lung cancers: 3,120,000,000

• Cancers (assuming only 1 part in 1,000 actually inhaled): 3,120,000

• Cancers (assuming only 1 part in 1,000,000 actually inhaled): 3,120

Source: Business and Society Review, 1978.

The staff of Food and Water, Inc., having reviewed a memo entitled "The Processing/Preservation of Food with Ionizing Radiation" which was conveyed to Assemblyman John Kelly under a cover letter from Public Strategies, Inc., and dated February 5, 1987, and having examined pertinent governmental regulations and scientific literature on the subject of food irradiation, concludes the following:

1. Food radiation provides no discernible benefits that are not now available to consumers via cheaper, safer methods.
   

2. There is an agreement that irradiation destroys crucial vitamins.
   

3. Approximately 10% of the radiolytic products produced in foodstuffs by irradiation do not exist in non-irradiated foods; the long-term impact on health of these "Unique Radiolytic Products" is unknown because no proper studies have yet been done.
   

4. Irradiation stimulates production of dangerous, sometimes lethal, pathogens and their toxins, such as botulin and aflatoxin.
   

5. Because irradiation destroys familiar odors, textures, and appearances associated with decay, consumers could suffer illness or fatality from eating spoiled foods.
   

6. Irradiation is a post-harvest treatment; therefore, the use of pre-harvest pesticides, herbicides and fungicides is not eliminated.
   

7. No analytical method is now available for detecting whether a food has been irradiated, or how many times it has been re-irradiated.
   

8. Irradiation will increase, not decrease, food costs and may cause economic damage to U.S farmers.
   

9. The handling, transportation, and storage of millions of curies of radioactive source materials required for irradiation threaten communities, workers and the environment.
   

10. No demonstrated safe disposal facilities are in operation for the isolation of radioactive wastes from food irradiation facilities.
    

11. Viable alternatives exist and are in use for all the proposed purposes of irradiation.
    

12. No need for food irradiation has been demonstrated, yet the U.S. Department of Energy and FDA are actively promoting its commercialization.
    

13. Serious safety violations have occurred at all licensed New Jersey irradiators, resulting in license suspension and criminal charges.
    

14. Ionizing radiation in any amount poses somatic and genetic risks.

Background to Food Irradiation

When the United States entered the Atomic Age at the close of World War II, there was great hope for the beneficial uses of nuclear energy. The Atomic Energy Act of 1954 stated a national policy with respect to atomic energy that remains in federal law today:

Atomic energy is capable of application for peaceful as well as military purposes. It is therefore declared to be the policy of the United States that -

a. the development, use, and control of atomic energy shall be directed so as to make the maximum contribution to the general welfare, subject at all times to the paramount objective of making the maximum contribution to the common defense and security; and

b. the development, use, and control of atomic energy shall be directed so as to promote world peace, improve the general welfare, increase the standard of living, and strengthen free competition in private enterprise. (42 U.S.C. 2011)

Among the early projects for "beating swords into plowshares" were proposals for nuclear-powered airplane engines, nuclear-powered automobiles, and a variety of engineering uses of atomic explosives to create deep water harbors, dig a new Panama Canal, and recover oil and natural gas locked in shale rock - and the hope of irradiating food to extend its storage life, to control insect infestations, and to alter ripening times.

What was not fully understood during the 1950"s and 1960"s, however, was the nature of damage to human health and genetics that could result from radiation exposures. The long-term effects of the atomic bomb - first leukemias, then cancers and other life-shortening effects - did not begin to appear until the expiration of the "latency period" that follows the damage at the time of exposure. Some diseases did not make their clinically observable appearances for ten or twenty years following the exposure.

Epidemiological studies of the Japanese survivors of the atomic bombs, of the Marshall Islanders and U.S. service personnel and civilians who were irradiated during atmospheric nuclear tests, and of groups exposed to substantial radiation doses in the course of medical treatments required many years of careful analysis before the nature and extent of the effects of ionizing radiation began to be assessed. Subsequent research is identifying the occurrence of radiation damage at levels far lower than were originally predicted from the various activities that produce or utilize radioactive materials. Medical and epidemiological experts today therefore recommend extreme caution about allowing any additional increases in the exposure of workers and the public to ionizing radiation.

Food irradiation experiments were conducted during the 1950"s, however, among military personnel. The U.S. Army conducted non-scientific feeding experiments utilizing irradiated foods in the diets of soldiers. The cited advantages included sterilization, preservation, and disinfestation. Irradiation of bacon was, in fact, permitted by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 1963 (See Federal Register, 28 FR 1465), but, in 1968, the FDA rescinded its approval, stating that the sponsor had "not met its burden for demonstrating safety" (33 FR 12055: 33 FR 15416). During the 1960"s, FDA also granted petitions for irradiation in order to inspect certain foods, to control insect infestation of wheat and wheat flour, and to inhibit sprouting in white potatoes. (See 21 CFR 179.21, 179.22, and 179.24.)

The current FDA support for food irradiation began in 1979, and regulations were then proposed on the initiative of the FDA Commissioner in 1981 (46 FR 18922). FDA adopted the existing irradiation regulations for fresh fruits and vegetables, pork and spices on April 18, 1986 (51 FR 13376). Currently, petitions to extend irradiation to meat in addition to pork are under FDA review. After April 18, 1988, no written labels stating that a food has been irradiated will be required by FDA regulations.

Why Food Irradiation Is a Hazardous Technology

The forms of ionizing radiation used to irradiate are not so benign and life-giving as the sun. The history of our development of atomic fission and fusion for weapons and for commercial purposes has shown us that exposures to x-rays and to radioactive gases and particulate sources cause serious, often long-delayed injury to human beings in the form of cancer, leukemia, other diseases associated with immune deficiency, and adverse genetic effects.

Our species, like all life on earth, has evolved in what is often described as a "sea of naturally occurring background radiation." In its naturally occurring quantities from cosmic and terrestrial sources, ionizing radiation cannot be "good" or "bad". It"s simply there. When unstable elements, such as uranium, thorium, and radium, decay, they give off energy. Radiation, in the form of gamma rays or alpha and beta particles, can penetrate living tissues, causing disruptions and injury at the cellular level, or death to the cell. A damaged cell may subsequently reproduce defectively or out of control, giving rise to a malignant tumor. If radioactive materials are ingested or inhaled and remain within the body, these internal emitters will decay within an individual"s body, potentially causing damage to organs, bone, bone marrow, or the genetic material. Responsible geneticists, biologists and medical doctors therefore recognize that any exposure to ionizing radiation, including naturally occurring ones, carry a risk of damage. Some exposures can be avoided; some cannot. There is general agreement that most radiation-induced mutations are harmful, not beneficial. Some cellular repair may occur when a cell is damaged by irradiation, but little is yet known about the imperfections of the repaired cell.

Although scientists have studied the effects of radiation on living things intensively, they are only now, after nearly a century, beginning to be able to discern the ways in which ionizing radiation actually affects human beings at low doses or at low dose rates (i.e., protracted exposures over a long time). We have much to learn about the pathways of long-lived radioactive materials which are released into our environment; about biological concentration in the various organisms that make up our human food chain; and about the sensitivity of the very young and the very old to exposures at or near background radiation levels. We have much to learn about cancer causation, and even more to learn about its cure.

Recent research shows, for example, that exposure of an embryo during its first months of development to terrestrial gamma radiation at naturally occurring background levels appears to be the primary cause of childhood cancer and leukemia deaths. This association has been masked in the past because pre-cancerous and pre-leukemic children tended to succumb to the infectious diseases of childhood, diseases which we now control with antibiotics and vaccines. Since the late 1950"s, such children have been enabled to live long enough that the malignancies, with latency periods of five to ten or more years, have an opportunity to develop and to be the cause of death. (G.W. Kneale and A.M. Stewart, "Childhood Cancers in the U.K. and their Relation to Background Radiation," Proceedings of the International Conference on Biological Effects of Ionizing Radiation, London, December, 1986.)

These findings - in addition to our inability to prevent nuclear accidents (Chernobyl, Three Mile Island) or to dispose safely of radioactive wastes - are now causing many experts to rethink our radiation exposure standards for the public. Recent reconsideration of data on the survivors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombs suggests that radiation protection standards, which are based on that body of data, may be non-conservative. Some former irradiation proponents now urge that we exercise extreme caution about extending our commitments to additional nuclear technology that would expand the widespread uses of large amounts of highly radioactive isotopes.

It is thus not a question of "subduing the forces of nature," or of recognizing nuclear energy as "only another natural force that technology can tame," as the Public Strategies paper states. We are learning to be less reckless about introducing pollutants wholesale into our environment. Because we have evolved at certain, very specific levels of naturally occurring background environmental radioactivity, it is only prudent to exercise great care about increasing those levels. The total amounts of radioactivity in the environment depend upon the number of sources of exposure to these known carcinogenic and mutagenic contaminants.

We are, after all, essentially composed of the foods we eat and the water we drink. As a society, therefore, and under law, we have a grave responsibility (not always carefully exercised) to protect the quality of the environment for ourselves and for future generations. (National Environmental Policy Act of 1969, "NEPA," at 42 U.S.C. 4321 et seq.). In the absence of prudence by the Federal government, which remains legally mandated to promote nuclear energy, the States bear responsibility for protection of the welfare of their citizens.

Uses of Ionizing Radiation

The ionizing radiation sources now used for food irradiation and sterilization (cobalt-60) and proposed for the future (cesium-137) are man-made radioisotopes that come from the nuclear fission process. Although ordinary background radiation from cosmic rays and terrestrial sources is unavoidable (and is both harmful and beneficial, as we have seen), the radioisotopes from nuclear reactor operation or from high-level radioactive wastes are intensely radioactive and require constant shielding and permanent isolation from people and the environment for the full duration of their hazardous decay time.

The decay time, referred to as "hazardous life," is the number of half-lives required to render a radioactive quantity innocuous, and ranges from a few seconds to many millions of years. Some of the most biologically dangerous fission products from nuclear reactors do not exist in nature. The production and utilization of these artificial isotopes represent potential hazards to the biosphere many orders of magnitude greater even than background radiation. It is the generation, storage, transport, handling, and ultimate safe disposal of these man-made radioactive materials, and of the materials they contaminate during industrial processes such as food irradiation, that are of grave concern to physicians and public health officials. The fact that these activities are proposed for "peaceful uses of atomic energy" in no way lessens or mitigates their inherent biological dangers.

Infra-red food heating and photography, radar, television, electric light, and microwave cooking, cited in the Public Strategies paper as forms of electro-magnetic energy that we already utilize in our daily lives, are markedly different from the ionizing radiation proposed by the food irradiation industry, nor are these technologies entirely risk-free. Medical x-rays and radioisotopes are important diagnostic and therapeutic tools for the detection and treatment of certain diseases.Conscientious doctors agree that their benefits for an individual patient must be weighed against the serious risks they pose. Sound public health practice today urges avoidance of exposures to ionizing radiation unless there is a commensurate benefit to the individual who is exposed.

Although cobalt-60 is presently used for commercial irradiation purposes, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) is vigorously promoting, through direct subsidies and artificially low prices, the sale of cesium-137. DOE describes its promotional role thus:

Specific food irradiation activities being supported by the DOE include research, feasibility studies and development of full-scale irradiation facilities....(which) are being designed and constructed to accomplish the technology transfer goals of the BUP (Byproducts Utilization Program). These facilities will serve as a validation of cesium irradiation technology.... ("Technology Update and Future Initiatives," U.S. Department of Energy, Byproducts Utilization Program, 1985.)

Cesium-137 is a fission product, with a 30-year half-life; it is considered one of the most biologically hazardous of all radioisotopes. It is a major component of radioactive wastes. The largest source of cesium is at the Hanford, Washington nuclear weapons facility, where it was separated out during waste reprocessing, as a by-product of plutonium extraction for weapons. A single irradiating facility may use 3-10 million curies of cesium-137 as its source material. Says DOE:

Since 1974, the ADC/ERDA/DOE has encapsulated 77 million curies of cesium-137. This supply is a small fraction of the total amount of cesium potentially available from all sources over the next twenty years. Most of the isotope is contained in spent fuel rods from commercial power reactors that are currently being stored onsite at these facilities....

...any major utilization of irradiation in the food industry is precluded in the near term. In order to assure that the promise of food irradiation technology is realized, the DOE is investigating options for increasing the supplies of radiation sources. (U.S. DOE, Byproducts Utilization Program, supra.)

In addition, there are large inventories of unreprocessed military and civilian reactor wastes containing between one and two billion curies of cesium. A full-fledged food irradiation industry would undoubtedly create strong pressure on DOE to reprocess these wastes in order to extract the cesium. The Secretary of Energy has testified before Congress that the Energy Department has no objection to a resumption of commercial spent fuel reprocessing by private industry (DOE testimony, U.S. Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee hearings, January 29, 1987).

Although irradiated materials do not ordinarily become radioactive, machine-generated electron or x-ray irradiators could give higher energy doses that are capable of inducing radioactivity in certain foods, especially those containing trace metals. Thus, in a multiple-use irradiation facility, equipment used to sterilize medical equipment and to irradiate food, could, if improperly calibrated or operated, theoretically induce radioactivity accidentally in some foods.

We emphasize, however, that the statements in the Public Strategies document (p.4) that the "radiation within the chamber itself dissipated immediately upon completion of the process" and that "anyone may safely enter the chamber" are inaccurate and seriously misleading. The radiation source, cobalt or cesium, emits gamma rays that penetrate whatever is in the chamber as long as the source is uncovered. In a properly constructed and operated irradiation chamber, the source material is carefully shielded when not in use and the chamber does not leak. But malfunction and human error can lead to worker exposure. This occurred at the Radiation Technology, Inc. facility in Rockaway Township, New Jersey; a faulty interlock was allowed to remain unrepaired and led to a severe worker overdose reportedly monitored at 222 rads, a sublethal dose. (See 51 Federal Register 23612, June 30, 1986.)

Doubly misleading is the statement in the public strategies document (p.8) that the shielding pool water "does not even get hot." It cannot be too strongly emphasized that thermal heat is not the issue; the issue is radioactivity. The shielding pool water does become radioactive, and in event of accidental leakage, as took place in the Isomedix and International Nutronics cases (see p.15 of this document), the entire area could become radioactive and require decontamination or removal of contaminated materials, as in fact was required at Isomedix.

The unidentified author(s) of the Public Strategies document either misunderstand the problem of radiation safety, or are deceptive, in their claims (p. 8) that "radiation is so low in these plants that a shielding pool of water suffices to absorb all the energy from the cobalt when not in use" and that "the radiation utilized in this process dissipates when the cobalt returns to its protective pool of water." (emphasis added) Spent fuel rods from commercial nuclear reactors are also stored under water, because they must be kept cool to prevent the intensely radioactive spent fuel from melting, undergoing a chain reaction, and releasing its radioactivity.

Gamma radiation is extremely penetrating energy; it can pass through steel and concrete walls. It is precisely the potential for the loss of shielding, be it water or concrete, that makes irradiation facilities inherently dangerous. The radioactivity of the cobalt or cesium source material does not disappear or dissipate when the source is not in use; rather, the radioactivity is prevented from passing beyond the chamber by the water of the shielding pool and by the concrete walls of the chamber. Integrity of that shielding pool and the constant presence of adequate cooling water are essential to prevent radioactive releases.

Contrary to the claim that the chamber "can easily withstand ....even the crash of a jumbo jet," it should be noted that the containment building of the Three Mile Island nuclear reactor was not designed to withstand the crash of a jumbo jet. The federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission exercises far less stringent construction requirements for irradiation facilities than for nuclear power reactors.

Technological Risks

The impending use of ionizing radiation for food irradiation does not eliminate, but rather compounds, already existing problems of worker safety, nutrition, pesticide poisoning, and environmental protection. The transport, handling, and disposal of many millions of curies of intensely radioactive isotopes anywhere, and particularly in densely populated areas like New Jersey, pose additional threats to communities which are already plagued with toxic waste dumps, nuclear reactors, other hazardous industries, and polluted groundwater.

What Public Strategies memo (p.1) describes as a "deeply human impulse" to "subdue the forces of Nature" has all too frequently produced instead inhuman consequences. This has been true particularly in cases where legislators and regulators did not demand prior proof of safety or information on alternatives to a hazardous technology. Public Strategies cavalierly dismisses legitimate public concerns with apparent contempt, and seems to elevate its version of science on a highly controversial subject to a position beyond public scrutiny or criticism. Responsible consumer, public health, and environmental officials and organizations, far from condemning science or technology, focus instead on large, societal implications and long-term consequences of specific technological innovations; they raise important questions about the quality, adequacies, and underlying assumptions of scientific studies. They attempt to avoid unpleasant after-the-fact surprises.

Some corporations and their scientists, conversely, have tried to portray such citizens and officials as uninformed, while they themselves conceal or understate the negative aspects or omissions in their supporting research. For example, in the case of nuclear energy, both nuclear scientists and the government in the past have gone to great lengths to discount or conceal the dangers of low-level radiation. Some have gone so far as to experiment with ionizing radiation on human beings: on soldiers, prisoners, hospital patients, even children. (See "American Nuclear Guinea Pigs: Three Decades of Radiation Experiments on U.S. Citizens," A Subcommittee Staff Report for the Subcommittee on Energy Conservation and Power, Committee on Energy and Commerce, U.S. House of Representatives, October, 1986.)

It is only now, following the 10 to 30-year latency periods, that the consequences of low-level radiation exposures are turning up in the form of cancers, leukemias, and genetic defects. Governmental standards and risk estimates and regulatory procedures are proving to be entirely inadequate to protect either workers or the public from radiation exposures. Will food radiation be allowed to repeat this historic pattern of unfounded optimism on the part of proponents of nuclear technologies?

Accidents and Violations

Serious violations at irradiation facilities, resulting in severe worker radiation overexposure and environmental contamination, have already occurred here in New Jersey at all three major irradiators: Radiation Technology, Isomedix, and International Nutronix. Between March and June, 1986, Radiation Technology"s license was twice suspended by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). The agency said:

The recent investigation findings, indicating that the violations originally described in the March 3, 1986 suspension order were willful and that numerous management and operations personnel willfully provided false information to the NRC, demonstrate a pattern of wrongdoing so pervasive that the NRC no longer has reasonable assurance....that the Licensee will comply with NRC requirements and that the public health and safety, including the safety of the Licensee"s employees, will be protected if this Licensee is permitted to continue to conduct licensed activities. If at the time the license was issued the NRC had known that such a pattern would develop, the license would not have been issued. (51 Federal Register 23613, June 30, 1986.)

The NRC also cited Radiation Technology for "defeating required safety interlocks" and for continuing irradiator operations "following the malfunction of the personnel access door interlock system." (See 51 FR 23612-3.) Irradiator operation continued with the inoperable interlock for approximately one week until identified by the NRC.

Also notable is that Radiation Technology refused to cooperate with regulatory and inspection officials, according to the Food and Drug Administration"s Public Health Service. The FDA report stated, "The firm management refused inspection of product storage area," and noted further that the inspector was physically restrained from inspecting a storage and processing area behind a floor-to-ceiling curtain. Radiation Technology, according to FDA, also refused to provide a list of drug products and customers to the inspector or to allow him to review the processing and customer records. FDA found serious discrepancies in record keeping and was permitted to see the facility only after getting a court order. (See FDA, Public Health Service, Internal Reports, released under Freedom of Information Act request.)

The State of New Jersey found that "Radiation Technology is exclusively responsible for the groundwater contamination at and about their property." (New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection, Division of Water Resources, Site Evaluation Report, Radiation Technology, Inc., August 13, 1984.)

International Nutronix was cited by the NRC and later charged in court for nine violations, including failure to report a December, 1982 leak; conspiracy to cover up the leak; falsifying reports; improper decontamination procedures, and dumping of contaminated water into a shower stall from which it then ran into the sewer system. International Nutronix filed for bankruptcy three days after the company was indicted by a Federal Grand jury in Newark; one defendant, Eugene O"Sullivan, former vice-president of the company, was once a member of the Atomic Energy Commission (Newark Star-Ledger, October 21, 1986).

The Isomedix plant in Parsippany was contaminated during the period 1976-1980; the contamination problem was reported by employees. A cobalt rod ruptured, and the clean-up water was poured down the toilet. Both the toilet and the drain pipes were later found to be radioactive as was the concrete around a shielding pond, which later had to be physically removed because of its radioactivity. "Probe asked of Irradiation Plant," New Jersey Daily Record, May 3, 1981.)

Regulatory abuses have also been reported in foreign shipping of irradiated food. Bacterially contaminated prawns, which had been refused entry into the United Kingdom, were sent to the Netherlands for irradiation to conceal decay odor and appearance, were re-imported to the U.K., and were sold there illegally. Some U.K. shippers also knowingly imported contaminated foods which they knew would be refused entry. After one shipment was rejected, the shipper collected the insurance for his "unfit" cargo, bought back the food at a low price and irradiated it to "clean it up" in order to illegally re-import the same shipment. (Super Marketing, United Kingdom, July 11, 1986.)

Toxicity

Certain limited uses of artificial food additives,such as nitrates, have been approved with appropriate warning labels following research to establish some basis for estimating their hazards. The FDA has taken an entirely different approach, however, in permitting the consumption of foods containing "Unique Radiolytic Products" ("URP"), not found in non-irradiated foods, in the absence of definitive research on their extent, effects on human health, or synergistic effects in combination with other factors. There is substantial concern among many in the scientific community about what some have termed an irrational and irresponsible decision by the FDA to proceed with a food irradiation Final Rule without first acquiring studies of URP"s and their effects on human diet and health. FDA itself seems to share these concerns. In 1980, the FDA"s Bureau of Foods Irradiated Foods Committee stated:

Ionizing radiation results in the formation of free radicals, which are characteristically unstable and very reactive chemical intermediates....The radiolysis data available....are insufficient to completely catalog the identity and quantity of each radiolytic product formed in any particular irradiated food.... (S)ome 10% of this particular subset of radiolytic products are in fact Unique Radiolytic Products. (Recommendations for Evaluating the Safety of Irradiated Foods, Irradiated Food Committee, Bureau of Foods, FDA. Final Report, July, 1980. BFIFC)

Independent scientists agree that radiation-induced chemical changes may result in the formation of new chemical compounds during irradiation. The extent to which these products might be toxic is not, however, well known, according to Drs. Noel F. Sommer and F. Gordon Mitchell of the University of California at Davis. Dr. Geraldine Dettman, Biosafety and Radiation Safety Officer, Brown University, said, in comments on a proposed FDA food irradiation regulation in 1984:

Although the cells will be killed by radiation at 100,000 rads, and sprouting thus inhibited, all enzymes will not be inactivated. Therefore, chemical reactions in the fruits and vegetables will still occur. There will be a changing chemical composition in the food with time after irradiation. Therefore, the composition of the radiolytic products (unique or not) or products produced by reactions with radiolytic products will change with time after irradiation. (Geraldine Dettman, Ph.D., Safety Office, Brown University, Providence, R.I., Comments on FDA Docket 81N-0004, April 10, 1984.)

Several authorities raise questions about the biochemical impacts of free radicals. Of their effects on fruit and vegetables, Sommer and Mitchell write:

Gamma rays which are produced by cobalt-60 and cesium-137 cause ionizations when they collide with matter.... During ionization, highly reactive free radicals are produced which react in various ways to also produce damaging events in cells. With a water content of 85-90% in most fresh commodities, the most common free radicals are those of water. Space within tissues comprise up to about 20% of the volume of many horticultural commodities...so free radicals from oxygen are also likely to be important. (Noel F. Sommer and F. Gordon Mitchell, Department of Pomology, University of California at Davis, California Fruit Grower, vol. 61, May 1984.)

The impact of free radicals in the human body is also a significant question. Dr. George L. Tritsch, of the Roswell Park Memorial Institute, states:

The greatest danger of food irradiation...is the induction of free radicals. In fats, this results in peroxidation and cross link formation which could result in substances, which, when incorporated into cell membranes, would result in unusually rigid membranes which would furthermore be resistant to enzymatic degradation. Damage to DNA by free radicals is one proposed mechanism of carcinogenesis....I would think that the risks of including molecules altered by free radical reactions in the diet outweigh by far the benefits of irradiation. George L. Tritsch, Ph.D., Roswell Park Memorial Institute, Department of Health, State of New York. Comments on FDA Docket 81N-0004, March 29, 1984.)

There are additional sources of potential toxicity, according to the scientific literature. These chemical changes are in addition to those caused by canning, freezing, cooking or "digestion itself," to use Public Strategies' phrase.

Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons such as BP (Benzo[a]pyrene) are present in significant amounts in many foodstuffs...and the wide-spread occurrence of these compounds in the environment makes them highly suspect as human carcinogens.... [P]re-carcinogens of this type may be oxidized to mutagenic and toxic species in foodstuffs which contain polyunsaturated fats and are subjected to conditions which induce peroxidation, such as the production of free radicals by irradiation.... (J.D. Gower, E.D. Wills, "The oxidation of benzo[a]pyrene mediated by lipid peroxidation in irradiated synthetic diets," International Journal of Radiation Biology, 49:471-484, March 1, 1986; emphasis added.)

Some reports indicate more frequent genetic changes in fruit flies (Drosophila melanogaster) fed an irradiated diet; because if this, the British Ministry of Health said: "The possibility must be considered that, under the influence of radiation, substances are formed in food which are capable of increasing the natural mutation rate at any form of life." (Report of the Working Party on Irradiation of Food, Ministry of Health, Committee on Medical and Nutritional Aspects of Food policy, 1964).

Food irradiation may also cause the appearance of, or increase in, radiation-resistant pathogens. Of particular concern are aflatoxin, produced by Aspergillus flavus, and botulin toxin, produced by Clostridium botulinum. Research at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory in Washington D.C., showed that medium and high doses of gamma radiation actually stimulated heavier production of the potent carcinogen, aflatoxin, with the increase of aflatoxin in the higher irradiation group over fifty times greater than the non-irradiated control. The experimenters, all of the FDA, said:

These experiments indicate that gamma radiation of aflatoxin- producing molds probably cause an increase in aflatoxin production.... These results should be considered when irradiation of food products is being contemplated. (A.F. Schindler, A.N. Abadie, and R.E. Simpson, "Enhanced Aflatoxin Production by Aspergillus flavus and Aspergillus parasiticus after Gamma Irradiation of the Spore Inoculum," Journal of Food Protection, vol. 43, no.1, January, 1980, pp.7-9.)

At the U.S. Army Natick Research and Development Center, experiments showed that Clostridium botulinum spores survived irradiation and were able produce botulin toxin if sufficiently low temperatures were not maintained. (D.B. Rowley, R. Firstenberg-Eden, G.E. Shattuck, "Radiation-Injured Clostridium Botulinum Type E Spores: Outgrowth and Repair," Journal of Food Science, vol. 48, 1983, pp. 1829-31.)

Ironically, food irradiation, by destroying the visual and olfactory signs of spoilage, could permit consumption of contaminated foods and actually increase the incidence of food-borne diseases. The Federal government has already expressed its concern:

While radiation sterilization does destroy microbial life, it does not necessarily destroy the toxins and residue that may be built up or be deposited by large concentrations of such micro-organisms. Therefore, processing would have to remain much the same as it is now. ("The commercial prospects for Irradiated Foods," U.S. Department of Commerce, Business Defense Services Administration, March, 1968.)

Pork products are especially vulnerable:

...cans of ham which were irradiated at substerilization radiation doses for Clostridium botulinum were subject to increased spoilage rates compared to non-irradiated hams. Similar results have been reported for other cured meat products including bacon. (D.W. Thayer, U.S.D.A., Agricultural Research Service, Eastern Regional Research Center, Memo of March 11, 1986, re: Proposed Research to be Conducted by the ARS.)

The projected consumption of irradiated pork and pork products is highly problematic. The U.S. Army fed irradiated bacon to troops in the 1960"s after receiving FDA approval, but when FDA reviewed studies showing tumors, diseases, and changes in production of offspring among test animals consuming irradiated diets, the FDA rescinded its approval.

One study conducted in India by the National Institute of Nutrition, Indian Council of Medical Research, examined, under controlled conditions, a small group of malnourished children who were fed freshly irradiated wheat, and leukocyte cultures were then performed. In four of the five children fed the freshly irradiated grain, polyploid and other abnormal cells developed within a few weeks of initiating the irradiated food, with a gradual return to no polyploidal cells following the cessation of the irradiated wheat diet. In contrast, none of the children receiving unirradiated foods showed this effect, while those fed stored irradiated wheat showed polyploid and abnormal cells in "significantly decreased numbers." This study has been contested by proponents of food irradiation but has received the backing of the Institute in which it was conducted. (C.Bhaskaram and G. Sadasivan, "Effects of feeding irradiated wheat to malnourished children," The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 28: February, 1975.) Ten years later, the director of the Institute wrote:

A series of studies were therefore planned and carried out to test the safety 21 of irradiated wheat under dietary and nutritional conditions prevailing in our country. Feeding of irradiated wheat to children with kwashiorkor was a part of these comprehensive studies. In light of published data we did not anticipate any adverse effects of feeding irradiated wheat to these children. However, as soon as some abnormality was observed in these malnourished children, we terminated the study for ethical reasons and the children were put on the normal therapeutic regime. We could not repeat such studies just for the sake of scientific curiosity since we know that some abnormality (polyploidy) would result. However, a series of animal studies did indicate that when freshly irradiated wheat was fed, polyploidy was observed. (B.S. Narasinga, Ph.D., Director, National Institute of Nutrition, letter, April 2, 1985)

These Indian findings were essentially ignored by the FAO/IAEA/WHO committee in its report, Wholesomeness of Irradiated Food, while other Indian studies and some from China that reportedly showed no such adverse effect were cited as refuting the Bhaskaram and Sadasivan wheat study. One of the Chinese studies lasted only fifteen weeks, far too short a time period to determine the safety of long-term ingestion of irradiated foods. Dr. John Gofman, who worked on the development of the atomic bomb and is a distinguished heart specialist and professor emeritus, University of California at Berkeley, says unequivocally that proper studies, to be of any value, should be conducted for several decades and must use very large numbers of people.

Foodstuffs can also become contaminated after, and in spite of, irradiation. "If the moisture content of stored rice is too high, fungi such as Aspergillus flavus, which are sometimes toxigenic, may grow," reports the FAO committee. Regarding the irradiating and shipping of fish, studies conclude that:

...maintenance of the temperature of melting ice throughout the period of storage of the product has been specified as an additional safeguard against botulism; salting, drying, or other effective measures would have to be substituted if this temperature could not be maintained reliably.... In the case of irradiation, as in any other method of food processing, the gains in microbiological quality must be safeguarded by proper care of the product after processing. (Wholesomeness of Irradiated Food, Report of a Joint FAO/IAEA/WHO Expert Committee, World Health Organization Technical Series 659, 1981.)

These findings demonstrate that food irradiation does not eliminate the need for other forms of preservation,, as well as cooking, any of which unavoidably destroy nutrients to some extent, as does food irradiation itself. Moreover, those animal studies that have been done have shown clear adverse effects. Ralston Purina studies undertaken for the USDA showed "Statistically significant increase in testicular tumors in mice fed irradiated food (Group G)." "...the preponderance of evidence suggests some degree of toxicity was present." "Many lesions (including cancer) ...were often found most frequently in the G group." (Ralston Purina, "Animal Feeding Study for Irradiation Sterilized Chicken," USDA Contract 53-3K06-1-29, June, 1983, quoted in Health Research Group comments on FDA Docket 81N-0004, April 12, 1984.)

The Health Research Group concluded:

There was, according to the final report of this study, a statistically significant dose-related increased rate of death among the offspring of flies fed gamma irradiated chicken.This effect is consistent with chromosomal damage. Health Research Group, supra; emphasis added.)

FDA chose to ignore these studies and justified its decision to approve food irradiation not because it possessed sufficient data to make a finding of safety, but rather because it chose to extrapolate from radiation chemistry and to make, instead, a wholly subjective judgment that irradiated diet components would comprise a small part of the "normal" diet. Put bluntly, FDA waived its customary approval process and substituted mere subjective assumptions for verifiable scientific data:

Ordinarily, animal feeding tests are essential for assessing toxicity of a substance. Not all situations require the same amount or type of testing, however, to determine whether use of an additive is safe. The degree of effort expended in reducing uncertainty about the safety of an additive must relate in some way to the likelihood that use of the additive poses a potential health risk to the public. Testing that is unlikely to provide information that would reduce uncertainty regarding safety should not be required. To do otherwise would waste scarce scientific resources that could be used for more productive purposes. (51 FR 13377; 21 CFR Part 179, April 18, 1986)

Nutrition

Almost entirely missing from the Public Strategies memo is any reference to nutrition - an understandable void if one is promoting food irradiation. Clear scientific documentation exists that demonstrates that food irradiation destroys vitamins:

Undesirable changes in component molecules do occur...as a consequence of ionizing events. Especially noted has been the radiation induced destruction of certain vitamins in fruit and vegetables to thereby reduce the nutritive value. The extent of vitamin destruction is dose related. Vitamin loss will vary from commodity to commodity and will be influenced by storage and handling procedures. Sommer and Mitchell, California Fruit Grower, supra)

The USDA is well aware of this problem, particularly regarding vitamin destruction in pork:

The degradation of thiamine was significantly increased by cooking after irradiation of the bacon. The two processes, irradiation and cooking, produced degradation, but when the product was cooked after it had been irradiated, the overall effect was greater than the sum of the processes applied individually. (USDA, Agricultural Research Service, Research Update Needs, FSIS No. I-87-7, September, 1986.)

A study conducted at the USDA"s Eastern Regional Research Center showed that pork irradiated at 100 Krads (the amount arbitrarily allowed by FDA), suffered a 20% loss of thiamine. Thiamine levels in pork irradiated at 500 Krads were reduced by 54%. Pork consumption is estimated to account for 14% of U.S. thiamine intake. (Health letter, Public Citizen-Health Research Group, March /April, 1986.)

The impairment of nutritional quality of irradiation is of concern to both U.S. government and international agencies. Experts within FDA have stated:

From a number of studies on the radiation stability of vitamins, proteins, fat and other nutrients, it is known that several nutrients are sensitive to degradation by ionizing radiation.... Particular attention should be focused on vitamin A and carotene, vitamin E, vitamin C, vitamin B-12, thiamine, and vitamin B-6. Although other vitamins and essential nutrients must not be ignored, the aforementioned vitamins are noted because of published studies that demonstrate losses in irradiated products. (Recommendations for Evaluating the Safety of Irradiated Foods, Irradiated Foods Committee, Bureau of Foods, FDA, Final Report, July, 1980)

In light of the various negative findings and the unaddressed questions about the safety of food irradiation cited above, Public Strategies" emotionally charged phraseology ("scare tactics," "sow confusion," "ill-advised legislative proposals"), as well as the implied accusation that people who are concerned with health and nutrition are merely "food faddists," seem misdirected if not hypocritical. Perhaps their unidentified author(s) should be asked if these charges are to be applied to members of these distinguished national and international bodies reflecting scientific opinion.

In our search of the scientific literature, we have failed to find the "nightmarish images" of which Public Strategies speaks (although some might consider the unpleasant facts about food irradiation somewhat nightmarish). If the public and legislators are doubtful about the safety of food irradiation, it is in part precisely because overall the scientific findings are inconclusive about the nutritional impacts of food irradiation, and the experts have expressed strong reservations about its safety. Many scientists are also disturbed about the adverse effects that are already known from animal feeding studies, about vitamin destruction, and about the sheer lack of adequate research on the long-term effects of eating irradiated foods, upon the embryo, the ill, the aged, and everyone in between.

Environmental Problems and Radioactive Waste

Despite Public Strategies" accusation (p.17) that "antagonists...confuse the radiation used" in their technology with nuclear power and radioactive wastes, it is important to recognize the relationship between food irradiation and the so-called nuclear fuel cycle, as well as recognizing that exposure to ionizing radiation from any source may be damaging. One portion of a system of production cannot be separated from the total contribution to all parts of that system to the contamination of the environment.

Thus, New Jersey residents have learned, long after the U.S. Radium Company had departed, that radioactive residues from industrial operation decades ago continue to contaminate Montclair and the Oranges, and that there is still no solution to the safe disposal of those radon-emanating wastes. Much of the Northern Hemisphere experienced the passage of the radioactive plumes from the Chernobyl disaster, and cesium-137 fallout from that explosion in 1986 will contaminate European food supplies for upward of 300 years, causing delayed sickness and death to numbers of people estimated variously from 5000 to 1,000,000 over the next 70 years. Radioactive releases from the Three Mile Island Unit 2 reactor damaged severely in 1979 continue, as does the slow, difficult removal of the crumbled and solidified fuel; more than 2000 legal claims of health injury are pending in courts, in addition to those already settle out of court. Hundreds of thousands suffered enduring damage in the Bhopal chemical disaster; toxic materials accidentally released into the Rhine River will continue to wreak their damage for many years to come, at great economic loss to downstream nations.

No technology is risk-free, and the technologies that employ radioactive materials seem especially vulnerable to onsite technical and human failures. The Public Strategies" argument (p.9) that "radiation cannot escape from the chamber" is specious and has been shown by events to be false. Safety systems can be bypassed; workers or managers are sometimes careless or tired; equipment fails; trucks have accidents; waste facilities leak; sabotage is a shadowy threat. In short, the potential for error and accident is always present and by its nature cannot be predicted or protected against.

Public Strategies" claim that the Environmental Protection Agency requires no environmental impact statement misses the point: it is the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, well known for the laxity of its regulatory procedures, that licenses such facilities, not EPA. The statement that "insurance companies routinely provide ordinary liability and property coverage" must also be weighed against the fact that all homeowners" property insurance policies specifically exclude compensation for all radiation-caused accidents. An individual homeowner still cannot purchase any private property insurance to cover against losses incurred in consequence of radiation damages.

Food irradiation"s success commercially, as we have shown, is clearly dependent upon the existence of an ample source of the biologically hazardous cesium-137. This material is regained from high-level radioactive wastes, and is no less hazardous to human beings in its recycled form at the food irradiating plant. Spent source materials will nonetheless continue to be dangerously radioactive long after their economic value to the irradiators has passed. So far as is presently known, much of the cobalt and cesium waste from this industry will become eligible for, and will require, disposal at the regional disposal site of the state in which the food irradiation facilities are located. Food irradiation equipment and structures contaminated by exposure to or contact with these radioactive source materials, too, will require expensive isolation from the environment for their full hazardous lifetime.

Efficacy, Need, Alternatives

Irradiation does not always extend shelf life, if that is indeed put forth as a "benefit". In some instances, shelf life may be shortened by irradiation, which can accelerate ripening in some foods and induce undesirable alterations in color and consistency. Leading experts in horticulture have this to say:

...irradiation to extend shelf life by suppressing rot generally was not feasible because of softening and consequent increases in handling and transit injury, low benefits in relation to anticipated costs for irradiation, added commodity handling. Often, improved alternatives were available.... Large differences are found in reports of estimated shelf life extension due to irradiation.... Ripening may be delayed in some fruit species or hastened in others.... Unpleasant flavors and aromas may be noted soon after radiation and may be intensified with time after irradiation.... Loss of firmness in irradiated commodities may render some commodities susceptible to handling and transit injuries. (Sommer and Mitchell, "Gamma Irradiation - A Quarantine Treatment for Fresh Fruits and Vegetables?" HortScience, June 1986.)

There are also economic implications for producers and consumers, since irradiation does not eliminate the need for conventional processing, storage, and hygiene measures to prevent post-irradiation contamination and spoilage.

The need for extensive refrigeration facilities and the costs of extra handling and local transport that might be required in connection with irradiation heretofore have not been adequately considered.... It is likely that altered organoleptic qualities, excessive softening leading to transit and handling injury, and skin pitting and other damage will preclude use irradiation for some commodities. The availability of less costly alternative quarantine treatments will further eliminate possible candidates for irradiation. (Sommer, et al., supra.)

Since irradiation is a process that will require extra transport, handling, and storage, there will inevitably be additional costs incurred, but one must ask: incurred by whom? Unless irradiators go into the food business themselves, owning the food they irradiate, the probable sector to be burdened with the extra costs will be the middlemen, the packers and shippers, who in turn will charge food producers, and undoubtedly also consumers, for the extra costs of irradiation.

Packers and shippers operate on a cost-plus basis which means they would charge the grower for the additional cost of having the product irradiated. This cost can me mitigated, if not eliminated, in the case where a premium for the irradiated product can be obtained. As long as the consumer is willing to pay a higher price, the grower most likely would not have to bear the entire cost in the long run. ("Feasibility of Irradiating Washington Fruits and Vegetables for Asian Export Markets," a report prepared by International Marketing Program for Agricultural Commodities and Trade (IMPACT), sponsored by the Washington State Department of Agriculture, September, 1986.)

It is difficult, if not impossible, at this time to demonstrate a clear need for food irradiation or to point to any potential benefits that cannot be obtained from cheaper, safer alternative processes.

There is simply a lack of a need for a new preservation method in the U.S., thus the desire for irradiation could drop over the next ten years. Presently, other technologies, such as freezing, can do most of the same job more cheaply and effectively.... Although the pork industry is favorably inclined to irradiation as a means to help eliminate trichinosis, Dave Meisinger of the National Pork Producers Council says a method called ELISA (Enzyme-Linked Immunosorbent Assay) holds more promise because of economics. Testing each carcass by ELISA would cost a maximum of about 15 cents per hog, compared with 27 to 95 cents for irradiation. (Trends, International Association of Refrigerated Warehouses, January, 1986.)

Proven alternatives for all the stated purposes of food irradiation exist and are now in use: fruit fly sterilization, cold storage, single and double hot water dip, detection of larval infestation with acoustic devices and mechanical removal of larvae, microwaves, and infrared heat treatment, among others. (Health Research Group, op. cit., 1984.) Even enthusiastic supporters of irradiation in the agricultural industry admit that irradiation of produce and grains will not replace all fumigants and pesticides. It should be stressed that irradiation is a post-harvest means of disinfecting foods. The usual pre-harvest herbicides, fungicides and insecticides will still be applied to many commercial crops, some having persistent residues. Very little information exists on the chemical properties of and impacts of these synthetic chemicals which have also been irradiated.

Parenthetically, we would note that the same "expert bodies" who have approved food irradiation had also in the past given approval to other food treatments that were later shown to be harmful and eventually were banned: DDT and ethylene dibromide are instructive examples. Ethylene dibromide is, in fact, the fumigant that food irradiation is touted to replace. Some years ago, its safety was vigorously defended by USDA and New York City officials when lower Manhattan residents opposed its use to fumigate a grain storage building infested by an Asian beetle. Ethylene dibromide is now banned.

Most recently, the European Parliament revoked its general authorization of food irradiation on precautionary grounds and called for study on alternative methods of preserving food. This resolution, adopted March 10, 1987, noted the absence of comprehensive studies on long-term effects, loss of nutritional value, and doubts about the chemical changes induced by irradiation.

World Hunger

The world hunger argument is intended to rouse up sympathy and compassion, but Public Strategies" claims that food irradiation can help to eliminate world hunger do not hold up under scrutiny. A world conference on irradiated food, for instance reported:

Pulses [legumes] are a major source of dietary protein in certain parts of the world. Any deleterious effects of irradiation on the nutritional quality of these crops would therefore be of importance. Conflicting results appear in studies of the protein efficiency ratio (PER) and the effects on B-complex vitamins have not been well established for different pulses. These possible effects should receive consideration wherever irradiated pulses are used as staples of the diet. (Wholesomeness of Irradiated Food, Report of a Joint FAO/IAEA/WHO Expert Committee, World Health Organization Technical Report Series 659, 1981.)

World hunger has social and political roots which give rise to conditions, in addition to poverty, that obstruct the sale and distribution of food supplies. Spoilage of grains held in storage and insect or rodent depredations in Third World countries would be lessened if such foods were promptly and efficiently distributed. The failure to do so is often directly attributed to local economic or political conditions that would not be improved markedly by irradiated foods. Most people who live at subsistence levels lack enough disposable income, anyway, to purchase pre-processed and pre-packaged meats or produce, especially expensive foreign imports.

The proposed "benefits" of food irradiation would in fact accrue to those who would employ this process in order to broaden their foreign markets. But in Third World countries, with low annual per capita income, the importing of foreign pre-processed foods would increase the local cost of food for poverty-stricken populations, and at the same time could discourage the development of local subsistence foodstuffs that can be produce and marketed without processing, packaging, preservation, or extensive transport.

Furthermore, the purportedly beneficial extension of shelf life of produce by irradiation could actually operate to impair nutrition among the already malnourished of Third World nations: not only would irradiation destroy crucial vitamins in produce and grains, but also the extended storage of some irradiated foods would contribute to additional nutritive deterioration and possibly to consumption of spoiled foods.

Raising the specter of food scarcity is truly a scare tactic, or a smoke screen to justify the promotion of high-tech food treatment practices that are inappropriate to the real needs of developing countries. The Institute for Food and Development Policy categorically rejects the notion of food scarcity, stating that, although there is more than enough food produced now to feed the population of the world as projected for the year 2000, extreme inequality in the ownership and availability of land and of access to even low-technology equipment, seed, fertilizer, water, and techniques have together exacerbated the food problem. The vagaries of weather combine with increasing social conflict between poor farmers and the wealthy: age-old problems that the promise of food irradiation can do little to nothing to alleviate.

The Institute also notes that post-harvest grain storage occurs because of poor storage facilities directly traceable to local poverty. Actions based on the hypothesized need to apply high technology to augment food production actually tend to widen the gap between rich and poor, since only well-off farmers can afford access to these new technologies. The result is that high technologies never reach the truly poor.

America"s primary role in the world food trade is not to feed the hungry but to sell to the rich.... Less than 30% of our agricultural exports go to what USDA terms the "less developed countries." Our Food Power strategy...rests not on shipping our food to a world of hungry people, but on molding the tastes and habits of a certain class of people to make them dependent on products and styles that they had never wanted before. (F.M. Lappe and J.Collins, Food First, 1978)

Over eleven year of research on food issues has led us to oppose food irradiation; any argument that increasing production is necessary is deceiving the public; poverty, not technology, is the problem. (Kevin Danaher, Ph.D., Issues Analyst, Institute for Food and Development Policy, personal communication, March 3, 1987.)

These arguments concerning the impacts abroad of food irradiation have another, equally serious, side for the U.S. Agricultural economy. American farmers may be endangered by the uses outside the United States of food irradiation technology in ways which may undercut already precarious food producers in this country. Field applications of poorly regulated mobile irradiators, or port of exit or entry centralized facilities could encourage the importation of produce from abroad that would price American farmers out of business. For retail grocers, too, the arguments in favor of extending shelf life may cut the other way in the low-margin food retailing business; the longer the shelf life the slower the turnover of inventory. Specialty grocers whose business depends on high-quality produce suggest concerns about consumer rejection. (Testimonies before New York City Council, Hearings on Food Irradiation, May, 1986.)

Unquestionably, world hunger is now and will be in the future among the planet"s most serious problems. Starvation is real. It is, however, a consequence of conditions and situations that will not be alleviated by the commercialization of food irradiation here or abroad. We can only conclude that introduction of food irradiation technology is likely to worsen conditions of hunger and to promote greater dislocations in domestic agriculture.

FDA Testing and Approval Procedures

Contrary to statements in the Public Strategies memo, the FDA, in issuing its Final Rule on food irradiation, did not utilize the testing and approval procedures that it normally requires for food additives and other processes. FDA explicitly waived the customarily required proof of safety; ignored altogether the adverse physiological effects found in animal tests; failed to consider the extensive existing literature on the subject; and approved food irradiation based upon abstract radiation chemistry formulas, subjective criteria, and unfounded assumptions. In effect, FDA refused to require either confirmation or refutation of existing data that demonstrated adverse effects. The five studies favorable to food irradiation on which FDA relied, out of several hundred initially reviewed, appear to be seriously flawed. Dr, Donald B. Louria, Chairman of Preventive Medicine and Community Health at the New Jersey University of Medicine and Dentistry, has commented:

I looked in detail at three of those [five] studies. The one from Germany seems adequate, but the other two raise considerable questions. In one, the irradiated food was obtained from some other group and we are never actually given any data to show that the food was irradiated properly or even irradiated at all. Additionally, the authors note an increase in abnormality in dogs at autopsy and then seem to feel that the abnormalities they found were meaningless and should be ignored. In the other study from England, in the group receiving the food irradiated most, there were increased deaths in the offspring and this is completely ignored even though the authors say there is no explanation for it. ....For the FDA to selectively choose the five [studies], is, I believe, improper for deciding safety. (Donald B. Louria, M.D., Chairman, Department of Preventive Medicine and Community Health, University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, letter to Assemblyman John Kelly, February 13, 1987.)

Dr. Louria raises, in addition, the issue of the FDA"s decision not to require labeling of processed or multi-ingredient foods, in which one or more ingredients may be irradiated. No label is required for such foods, nor are restaurant foods or other institutional prepared foods required to be labeled.

As for fresh fruits and vegetables, single component produce (e.g. an apple or artichoke) is required to bear a label or be displayed in labeled containers that are stamped with a symbol called a "radura." The FDA regulations do not make clear if each individual item must be labeled, or only the packing case or display container.

One purpose of the label is to notify the consumer that a food has been subjected to radiation. A second purpose is to decrease the likelihood that a food will be exposed to radiation repeatedly in the distribution system. The USDA Food Safety and Inspection Service states that "At the present time there is no analytical method available for detecting whether a food has been irradiated." (51 Federal Register 43874, December 5, 1986. Emphasis added.)

These labels must also display a written warning, such as "This product has been treated with radiation." However, the written notification is required only for 24 months from the date of FDA approval, viz., April 18, 1986. By the time that irradiated foods begin to appear in large quantities in supermarkets, after April 18, 1988, only the radura, resembling a stylized flower, will be a required symbol to indicate that a food has been irradiated.

The "desire of the irradiation proponents not to label" [irradiated] foods puzzles Dr. Louria; he concludes, "That, alone, is reason to reject irradiated foods in the State of New Jersey."

Conclusion

In this lengthy review of the Public Strategies February 5, 1987, letter and memo in support of food irradiation, Food and Water, Inc., has tried to highlight and document both the scientific research findings and the unresolved questions about food irradiation in order to assist decision-makers in understanding this important topic of public policy. The literature is extensive; the staff of Food and Water will be pleased to provide additional information and citations upon request.

We are aware that affected corporations and, sad to say, some scientists have portrayed food irradiation and related issues, such as radiation effects, radioactive waste, and other nuclear industry connections, in a favorable manner, with little regard for matters of public and worker health and safety. The memo which is the subject of this document contains no references or citations of source material, expert studies, or valid data to substantiate extravagant claims for this radiation technology. In view of those omissions, we suggest that is would be folly to give credence to the opinions and demands on behalf of food irradiation contained in the Public Strategies memo.

The issue of health and safety, now and in the future, is the paramount consideration, and the health and safety of the citizens of New Jersey deserve more than self-promoting opinions of those who would profit from the expansion of this dangerous technology. In our opinion, on the other hand, the jury is still out as far as the safety of food irradiation is concerned. The scientific juries, however, are increasingly returning a verdict on the effects of ionizing radiation on human health: the carcinogenic, mutagenic, and teratogenic consequences of exposure to ionizing radiation are more severe than we had believed in the past. Prudence and sound public health policy therefore dictate that food irradiation technology be foregone unless and until there is irrefutable evidence that it is safe, necessary, and beneficial.

This document is respectfully submitted by the staff of Food and Water, Inc., a not-for-profit public educational and service organization.

If the climate change situation is as dire as Hansen believes, then the speed with which we reduce greenhouse gases and implement renewable energy technologies should be our main concern. In this case, a substantial carbon tax to raise the price of fossil fuels (Lester Brown of the Earth Policy Institute says it should be $200 per ton), plus a massive commitment to mandatory energy efficiency measures and standards are the clear answers. That Hansen does not seem to understand this is troubling.

We know that efficiency can reduce our energy consumption by 30% to 50% within months with proper funding. The failure of our government to make this commitment is deplorable but so is the failure of people like Hansen to take this into account. Promoters of nuclear power have a vested interest in pushing a technology that, safety and waste aside, will starve renewables and efficiency of proper funds and attention, thus undercutting any hopes they offer for solving the climate change crisis even partially. We can cut fossil fuel use and bring wind turbines on line almost overnight, at a tiny fraction of the cost of one nuclear reactor which, ten years from its inception, will only provide electricity and therefore will have no impact on our transportation sector (or any sector requiring liquid fuels) which consumes nearly 50% of our liquid fossil fuels.

Hansen has his head in the sand or the clouds; either way, he can't see clearly and has been mesmerized by self-interested nuclear scientists anxious to get their mitts on government funding for what Amory Lovins calls "a future technology whose time is past". The dis-economics and extended time frame are so obvious to those with eyes and ears that it is troubling to see how wrong Hansen is, and doubly troubling to see Pres. Obama supporting loan guarantees for nuclear reactors and moving a sane energy policy off his desk calendar indefinitely.

Not even Wall St. is cheering the nuclear industry on; it it were, it wouldn't need loan guarantees in the first place if investors were falling all over themselves to invest in it. Again, Lovins nails it when he said that investors may love nuclear power but they love the market more. Like many specialized scientists, Hansen is not looking at the broader context of energy policy but at a very small and speculative part of it, which is to say finding substitutes for electric power generation presently dominated by coal. The electricity sector of our energy economy is the least of our problems. In the metropolitan region, it has just been revealed that only about 8% of the Indian Point nuclear reactors' power is needed by NYC itself, so that the balance of their output will now be exported elsewhere. Why the metro region should bear the risks of nuclear power for other areas is not clear, but in any case this proves an OVER capacity of electricity for which ratepayers will be paying indefinitely.

Hansen and his nuclear cheerleader friends, by supporting nuclear power, are actually working against the mitigation of climate change. With friends like this....ironically the climate doubters are in the position of dismissing Hansen's views on climate change but accepting his views on nukes. I don't think they can have it both ways.

But the similarities between how technical information and failure are handled there and here, as well as those in reactor design and the potential for reactor failure are striking. These similarities extend to the press as well as government, but in this respect there is a major difference. In the Soviet Union censorship is imposed by the central government. In the US it is self-imposed.

For example, there was and is nothing in this country to prevent a scientist or journalist or academic researcher from reporting fully and accurately on the consequences of the Chernobyl accident. In this respect we are indeed fortunate to have had independent and impartial scientists like Dr. John Gofman, the leading radiation health expert in the US and formerly of the government-supported Lawrence Livermore Laboratory in California.

Dr. Gofman, using the admittedly incomplete data released by Russia and other European countries, applied rigorous analysis in the context of what is known about Chernobyl-type and size reactors and in the context of highly responsible statistical and epidemiological calculations based on standard radiation dose/response relationships. What Gofman came up with, and what no one in government or the nuclear industry has been able to refute, is an estimate that about one million people throughout the world will develop cancer from Chernobyl fallout, half of whom will eventually die.

Gofman delivered the results of his study before the American Chemical Society annual meeting in Anaheim, California. His figures pointed to 424,300 cancers in the Soviet Union, and 526,700 in Europe and elsewhere over a 70-year period as a result of cesium exposure and ingestion from the accident of April 1986, plus another 19,500 leukemias and an unknown number of thyroid and other cancers from other radioisotopes. These figures are over five times greater than the highest previous estimates, which range from 2000 to 75,000 premature deaths.

The reasons for this huge discrepancy - reasons never explored by the press nor revealed by our government and therefore unknown to the public - lie in the fact that the long-term effects of low-level radiation exposure have consistently been downplayed, distorted or concealed by scientists, the nuclear industry and the government. Even though a patient search of government information can sometimes reveal the phrase "There is no such thing as a safe dose of radiation", this simple sentence conceals multitudes of information. Gofman says: "There is no dose so small that the body can perfectly repair all resulting damage to DNA and the chromosomes". The nuclear industry and the government have long promoted the notion that non-observable, long-term latent effects of low doses of radiation are in effect non-existent; they can safely do this because such effects are not manifested for years or decades, and a specific cancer or genetic defect cannot be traced back to any particular radiation exposure. Accordingly, as Gofman puts it, nuclear power is "mass, random, premeditated murder".

"Undetectable" of course does not mean non-existent. For each amount of radioactivity released into the environment, there will be a statistically certain number of cancers, leukemias and other ill effects that will occur somewhere at some time; only the date and victims' names are unknown. Right down to a zero radiation dose, these victims will appear. And, as Gofman's Chernobyl figures show, people outside the immediate area can be at greater risk than those closer in. As a means of comparison, Gofman notes that the malignancies that arise from one nuclear reactor accident rival the number caused by all the above-ground nuclear bomb tests of the US, UK and USSR combined.

An information blackout occurred in this country as a result of directives from the White House, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), the Dept. of Energy (DOE), and the Dept. of Agriculture (DOA) right after Chernobyl. Government scientists were instructed not to talk to journalists. Even United Press International (UPI) backed down by saying that it could not stand by its initial estimate of 2000 immediate deaths, all of which led the public to conclude that the Soviets were the victims of censorship, while we here in the US had a free press.

It seems that while the US and the USSR had a hard time cooperating on nuclear arms at that time, they had a tacit agreement to cover up each other's nuclear power mistakes. In 1957, what was probably the worst nuclear accident in the world before Chernobyl took place in the Ural Mountains at what is believed to be a nuclear waste dump. Over a thousand square kilometers in the southern Urals were drenched with radioactivity and rendered permanently uninhabitable. Hundreds died immediately, and long-term effects will never be known. The entire industrial area was evacuated; whole rivers, lakes and watersheds became irreversibly contaminated and the area was fenced off to prohibit entry.

Zhores Medvedev, a renowned Soviet scientists, knew about the accident, and in 1973, living in England, was astounded to learn that no one in the West knew about (or cared to admit they knew) the accident. Medvedev published an article in 1976 about the accident which was then reprinted in many western newspapers. The response from the UK, France and the US nuclear establishment was unanimous: they denied that such an accident was technically possible. The then-chairman of the UK Atomic Energy Authority, Sir John Hill, called Medvedev's report "rubbish" and his comments were printed in the NY Times on Nov. 8, 1976 in a Reuters dispatch. Though Medvedev's research, published later in his book "Nuclear Disaster in the Urals", provided detailed information that indicated a nuclear waste accident, nuclear scientists preferred to blame the Soviets for poor radioactive waste handling, thus averting the issue of nuclear power safety entirely. Medvedev's Freedom of Information Act requests to the US Energy Research & Development Authority and the CIA came back to him heavily censored; most documents he had requested were classified and never released.

The Soviets were not the only ones willing to kill their own people, however. In the 1950s, the US Army, with the complicity of Congress, the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), nuclear scientists and physicians, and top levels of government, deliberately marched American soldiers to within 100 yards of ground zero in nuclear bomb tests in Nevada; those victims are still dying today as may any defective offspring. Here are some of the testimonials to those tests:

"Nuclear testing, by and large, has been one of the safest things that was ever done", Robert Newman, Nevada test site manager.

"No one has ever been crippled, killed or severely maimed in a nuclear weapons test", Gordon Jacks, former Army Colonel, 18-year veteran of atomic testing.

"People have got to learn to live with the facts of life, and part of the facts of life are fallout", Willard Libby, AEC Commissioner, AEC meeting of Feb. 23, 1955.

What was behind these blanket denials of the truth? First, keep in mind that these facts, like all those about nuclear power and nuclear weapons testing, were kept secret and released only through the efforts of private citizens and a few courageous researchers and journalists. The AEC, in the 1950s, was fearful of being put out of business and in particular of the consequences if the public became suspicious about nuclear fallout, especially because they had gone to such lengths to separate the civilian nuclear power program from the military nuclear weapons program. Data on actual fallout as well as human exposure and the resultant health effects were held only by the AEC lab at Oak Ridge, Tennessee. The AEC in fact dismissed the notion that humans could ingest strontium from milk and insisted they could ingest it only from eating bone splinters from poorly butchered animals. Regarding radioactivity in the food chain, from animals eating plants growing in fallout areas, they said: "...experiments have indicated that there is no hazard to human health from this source", although it is doubtful that such experiments ever took place.

At least 250,000 American troops were directly exposed to atomic radiation during the 17 years of bomb testing here and in the Pacific, but they have been totally ignored by the government and the Army. Receiving continual unabated assurances of complete safety, these troops were employed literally as human guinea pigs to demonstrate how people could function in a fallout-contaminated area in the event of a nuclear war. It took 30 years before the US government even agreed to conduct any studies of health effects on these troops, and even now the government and Army reject the notion that they are liable in any way for the horrendous and pitiful condition of the survivors and the families of those who died. The Smoky test in Nevada in 1957 showed over twice the normal leukemia rate among servicemen, and later this was amended to three times the rate...and this test exposed only 1% of all those servicemen exposed to nuclear test fallout. There is little doubt that hundreds died and that countless others developed illnesses that led to death from various cancers, blood disorders and chronic body ailments. Today the government still rejects all claims for such illnesses.*

How did the media handle this? On Sept. 28, 1980, on CBS" "Sixty Minutes", there were brief interviews with some atomic veterans but the program concentrated mainly on the Defense Nuclear Agency director, Vice-Admiral Robert Monroe. Monroe stated to Morley Safer and millions of viewers that the Army took "meticulous precautions to insure that exposures were within limits" and denied that there was any statistical increase in cancer deaths from the tests, adding: "This weapon testing is a very, very, very, very tiny amount of low-level radiation". No opposing views were presented on the program, nor was any mention made of the Center for Disease Control's new study that showed a leukemia rate for veterans of over twice the expected rate. In response to angry viewers, which included some atomic veterans, CBS told them to get in touch with --you guessed it - the Defense Nuclear Agency.

The press also played a role in soothing public fears. NY Times science writer William Laurence, writing about the Bikini tests in the Pacific, said: "Before Bikini, the world stood in awe of this new cosmic force. Since Bikini, this feeling of awe has largely evaporated and has been supplanted by a sense of relief..."

The Nevada test site fallout didn't stay put, however. It drifted downwind into Mormon areas in Utah. Several years later, leukemias, lymphomas and other cancers and genetic defects began emerging in this area, particularly among children. The AEC continually stated to local residents that "There is no danger", and most studies done about this area and about nuclear tests in general were secret until 1979. An AEC booklet distributed six years after testing said: "...Nevada test fallout has not caused illness or injured the health of anyone living near the test site".

The effects of weapons testing fallout wasn't limited to nearby residents. The cast and film crew of a Howard Hughes movie, filmed near St. George, Utah in 1954 for three months, took an enormous toll over the next 25 years. John Wayne, Susan Hayward, Agnes Moorehead and Dick Powell all died of cancer between 1960 and 1979. Of a total number of 220 in cast and crew, 91 had gotten cancer by 1980 and half of those had died by then, not counting the native Americans who served as extras in the film.

What did the press do about public protests? The Los Angeles Examiner writer Jack Lotto, in March 1955, blamed these on a Communist scare campaign to stop weapons testing. US News & World Report published an article by Willard Libby citing AEC evidence that fallout would "not likely be at all dangerous". Syndicated columnist David Lawrence cited "world-wide propaganda" that was duping people and "some well-meaning scientists" were "playing the Communist game unwittingly by exaggerating the importance of radioactive substances known as 'fallout', and contended that the Nevada tests were "for a humanitarian purpose".

It is interesting to note that two years prior to the Smoky test, in 1955, AEC Chairman Lewis Strauss suppressed a paper by geneticist Hermann Muller on the genetic effects of radiation. Muller was the discoverer in 1927 of the fact that X-rays caused increased mutations in plants and animals, for which he later received the Nobel Prize. The AEC also was responsible for removing his paper from a UN meeting on "peaceful uses of the atom", held that year in Geneva, mostly, they said, because he mentioned Hiroshima, which they considered "definitely inadmissible" at such a conference.

The fact is that the US has led the world in setting examples of deliberate deceit, suppression of information and harassment of nuclear critics, of which the best example was the Three Mile Island (TMI) accident in Pennsylvania in 1979. Just twelve days before the accident, Gov. Richard Thornburgh had appointed as state Secretary of Health a distinguished doctor and engineer, Gordon MacLeod, in order to restore the reputation of the state health department. Eight months after the accident, only a little over one-quarter into the two-year term MacLeod had agreed to serve, Thornburgh called MacLeod into his office and requested his resignation, claiming a "difference in institutional style".

More to the point was the fact that MacLeod had been a critic of the Thornburgh administration's handling of the TMI accident. The day after the accident news got out, MacLeod urged the governor to evacuate pregnant women and children from a five-mile radius around the plant (later he said he should have urged this for puberty-age children too, who are extremely radiation-sensitive). But no one else in the state agencies agreed and said the evacuation was unnecessary. Thornburgh finally, two days later, agreed to the evacuation after consulting with the chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), Joseph Hendrie.

MacLeod tried valiantly to take all possible steps to minimize radiation exposure. He requested, in vain, a Federal radiation health expert from the NRC and was told they had no radiation physicians on staff or anyone trained in radiation medicine. He tried to get potassium iodide pills from the Federal government, to block thyroid absorption of iodine-131. Five days later, far too late to be of any use, 11,000 vials arrived, more than half of which were unlabelled. Many had only half the dose required, some droppers did not fit the vials, and others had visible contamination. MacLeod also took issue publicly with the testimony of Pennsylvania's chief of radiation monitoring, Thomas Gerusky, before the Federal Kemeny investigative commission and stated his objections in a letter to Kemeny. That seemed to be the "last straw for the Thornburgh administration", and MacLeod was removed soon after.

Meanwhile, what scientists call "cooked" statistics started emerging from the Pennsylvania Dept. of Epidemiological Research, headed by Dr. George Tokuhata. Vital statistics on infant mortality began looking inordinately small, but Tokuhata claimed "printing error". The NY Times enthusiastically printed the state's claims about no increase in infant mortality. The statistics, still being held confidential by the state, did begin leaking out through anonymous calls to MacLeod, who then released what he knew in a church sermon to force the state to release them. The figures showed a sharp increase in the six-month period after TMI. It was later shown that the state had deliberately eliminated the black population in Harrisburg when calculating the data, because of their higher rate of infant mortality than whites. Such subtraction had been done only for the 1979 statistics, the year of the TMI accident, not for any other years, and when the black infant mortality was added in, the local rates for the area under study showed a sharp increase.

Similar withholding and distortion of information occurred regarding thyroid deficiency problems in young children to the southeast of the plant; again, Tokuhata trimmed off some cases to bring the state's figures down to a normal rate. MacLeod pointed out that even accepting Tokuhata's subtractions, there was still a five- to ten-fold increase. Again the NY Times accepted Tokuhata's figures unquestioningly, and printed an editorial about "scare stories" regarding radiation damage from TMI,savagely attacking MacLeod who, they said, "irresponsibly publicized some of the raw data suggesting the existence of health problems".

The question I am most often asked by the pblic is: if the nuclear establishment and its families are equally at risk from nuclear power as the rest of us, why do they lie about its dangers? There are various reasons. Professionals, in order to perform their work, resist truth strongly if it calls the morality of their work into question. They sincerely believe they are helping humankind. In addition, scientific research involves so many uncertainties that scientists can, with an easy conscience, rationalize away dangers that are hypothetical or not immediately observable. They also have an intellectual investment if not a financial one in continuing their work as well as families to support, and nuclear science in particular has been endowed not only with government money and support but great status and prestige. The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), which publishes the journal Science, just chose a nuclear physicist and former Assistant Director of Research for the AEC, Alvin Trivelpiece, as its executive director.

In order to perform professional work, one must not only believe one is doing good but must also rationalize the dangers. Indeed, with regard to ionizing radiation, this is quite easy inasmuch as the risks of radiation exposure at any level are statistical and not immediately manifested. If the odds of dying from a given amount of exposure are one in 100,000, it is easy for a scientist to rationalize that it won't be him. A recent article in the NY Times on the obituary page caught my eye; a man named Mack, aged 52, died of cancer. The article noted that he and his sister were the first two children who ventured onto the site of a nuclear test in the 1950s, where their father worked as a scientist. The article also noted that Mack's sister had died of cancer the previous year. I wondered if the father is still alive, and if he ever had second thoughts about allowing his young children onto that site, or whether his pride (or guilt) had prevented him from acknowledging that he had literally sacrificed his children to the nuclear priesthood.

As you may have noticed, there is no relationship between these incredible conspiracies of silence and distortion and the political party in power. Those in Congress who permitted these things have first loyalty to the institution in which they serve, not to truth; anything that threatens that institution is subversive, even if what they are doing harms the public. It is the same in foreign policy. The illegal violent intervention - state terrorism actually -committed by the US government against innocent Nicaraguans is a policy whose roots were planted deeply not by right-wingers or Republicans but by New Deal-type democrats, primarily Pres. Harry Truman, as was the virulent anti-Communism of that same era.

With regard to the various US interventions in Latin America, and specifically Nicaragua, the press meekly accepts the government handouts as fact, along with the myth that Commnists will take over the world and south Texas unless we overthrow the Sandinistas. But the facts are otherwise and indisputable as any reading of Nicaraguan history will show. Ignoring such history the US Congress readily accepts the Reagan-Kennedy-Truman doctrine of "containing" Communism at all costs, accompanied by "excuse us, we're really sorry about the deaths of those innocent farmers, doctors, teachers, nurses and babies".

Some of this history is in order. Nicaragua is not a Marxist-Leninist state. Most of its directorate were Social Democrats, some were Christian Democrats and some were Conservatives. What none of them were was Communist. Communists were excluded from the Sandinista directorate because they OPPOSED the revolution against Somoza (not the first or last time the Communist Party would oppose popular pro-democracy uprisings). Why did they oppose it? Because the revolution was not inspired or controlled by Moscow and the Communist Party. It was, rather, a homespun, nationalist, socialistic revolution stressing social welfare reforms, not a centralized authoritarian revolution. Some Left critics of the Sandinistas are upset because land reform has not gone far enough. The notion that Nicaraguans pose a threat to the US is on a par with the notion that Grenada's former left government posed such a threat. Half of Nicaragua's population is under the age of sixteen, and Nicaragua does not even possess an air force.

The Reagan doctrine of hegemony was developed long ago, and is best expressed by a statement made by George Kennan, in a 1948 document, when he headed the planning staff of the Dept. of State. He wrote: "...we have about 50% of the world's wealth but only 6.3% of its population. In this situation we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security. To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives. We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of altruism and world-benefaction...We should cease to talk about vague and -for the Far East - unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standards, and democratization. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better".

After a democratic civilian government was overthrown with US help in El Salvador, John F. Kennedy said that "governments of the civil-miltary type of El Salvador are the most effective in containing Communist penetration in Latin America". Of course what he and modern-day "liberals" call Communism has nothing to do with Soviet Russia. Rather, as a 1955 study of the National Planning Association and the Woodrow Wilson Foundation noted, the main threat of "Communism" is that it could lead to transformation of Communist powers "in ways which reduce their willingness and ability to complement the industrial economies of the West". Such complementary roles were and are played magnificently not only by the former Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua but by similar military dictatorships in Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador. Thus, the real threat posed by Nicaragua lies in its nature as a nationalist, non-aligned, independent revolution not beholden to and controlled by the US interests - in other words, that it was a true popular democratic revolution that put human social welfare and equity first, in direct confrontation with foreign hegemonic powers, US or Soviet. Such popular-based revolutions set a powerful example to other oppressed nations, hence their unacceptability to the US.

That Congress, the press, academia, the military and Big Science collaborate and conspire with whichever faction rules the White House is not recent nor surprising. Their interests and the continuation of political and economic conditions that reinforce their powers and the institutions that support them - corporations, universities, research institutions, think tanks, mass media, often the courts, supranational agencies like the World Bank and other international agencies not accountable to the public - are what both rule this country and facilitate domestic and foreign policy. This is a lesson that political activists need to heed. American society, in its diversity and tolerance, supported by a remarkable Constitution, has many ways of absorbing various demands such as equal rights for minorities, welfare state programs, etc. Such incremental reforms pose no threat whatsoever to either the economic or foreign policy hegemony exerted over the rest of the world. Social issues can and will eventually be accommodated, without rocking the real boat.

What is threatening, however, are movements that directly challenge such hegemony, whether in the form of Star Wars nuclear weapons in space or ecologically based movements questioning the US (and global) model of untrammeled economic growth and resource consumption, and of course anti-intervention movements. These go to the heart of the very values and objectives of the central state, which in the case of the US is not readily indistinguishable from the Soviet Union. In fact, as Noam Chomsky has pointed out, the existence of civil rights and liberties in the US has functioned to draw attention away from the execrations of foreign policies that assist in, directly or indirectly, the commission of some of the most revolting human rights violations in history, accurately called state terrorism.

The Philadelphia Inquirer courageously printed a series of articles on the Pentagon's' "Black Budget" the $35 billion or so of under-the-counter money given them, with carte blanche with Congressional approval. The Iran-Nicaragua arms deal to support the contras in Nicaragua was part of this, as are indeed many of the other assassinations and subversions of the CIA and NSA. There is no public oversight over this budget or over the use of these funds; it is the equivalent of the KGB in the Soviet Union. The Philadelphia Inquirer stood virtually alone in sticking out its neck, to show the dirty underside of what purports to be a democracy. Let us hope others follow their example.

(Sources: Cover Up: What you are not supposed to know about Nuclear Power, Karl Grossman, Permanent Press; The Washington Connection & 3rd World Fascism, Noam Chomsky & Edward S. Herman, South End Press; The Turning Tide, Noam Chomsky, Pluto-South End Press; Killing Our Own, Harvey Wasserman & Norman Solomon, Delta (Dell) Publishing.)

*As of 2001, the DOE has acknowledged culpability and has agreed to compensate survivors for damages.

(Lecture delivered by Lorna Salzman at Hunter College, Energy Studies program, 1986).

In the case of nuclear power, we are already being forced to accept restrictions on our personal freedoms as the price for safeguards against nuclear terrorism and sabotage. These restrictions range from utility guards with submachine guns under instructions to shoot to kill, to sanctioned surveillance of dissident citizen groups, and are an open admission by our government that nuclear proliferation (of both commercial and military nuclear facilities) represents the single greatest threat to national security. The question then arises as to whether these restrictions will bring on a political backlash that could stimulate the political terrorism they are designed to preclude.

Big Brother

Some of the actions already taken by the Federal government and the private nuclear utilities (the latter accompanied by its promotional arm, the Atomic Industrial Forum and the public relations firm of Charles B. Yulish Associates in New York City), should give citizens cause for alarm. Over recent years the above conglomerate has been assembling dossiers on anti-nuclear individuals and organizations. Groups being surveyed include Friends of the Earth, Sierra Club, Ralph Nader's public interest groups, Environmental Action, Environmental Policy Center, Another Mother for Peace, and the Union of Concerned Scientists.Some utilities such as Potomac Electric Power Co. have files on environmental letter-writers in general.

Surveillance of individuals continues at a high pitch, with the aid of Federal agencies such as the FBI. Several years ago the Texas State Police, on the instigation of the FBI, assembled a dossier on Continental Airlines Pilot Robert Pomeroy because he was a member of Citizens Association for Sound Energy, a group opposing a proposed nuclear power plant near Dallas. In this particular case the airline, who had been notified by the police of Pomeroy's activities, told Pomeroy of the investigation and the plot was exposed. More recently, it was revealed that Jacqueline Srouji, an FBI informant, had infiltrated the reporting staff of the Nashville Tennessean in order to keep tabs on an editor and a reporter who had written articles critical of nuclear power. Sronji's FBI connections came out in Congressional hearings when it was learned that she had access to thousands of pages of top-secret FBI files on nuclear power which clearly only an authorized FBI agent could have possessed or inspected. Srouji later received threats from the FBI not to reveal more information and was recently quoted in a Rolling Stone article as saying that she believed plutonium worker Karen Silkwood had been murdered because she had discovered a plot to smuggle plutonium out of the Kerr-McGee plant in Oklahoma.

Several government-sponsored studies pinpoint the potential for nuclear terrorism and sabotage as the weakest link in the nuclear fuel cycle. In response to this, proposals have been made to institute wiretapping, surveillance, and infiltration of citizen groups to detect possible plots against nuclear facilities—neglecting the fact that nuclear critics are leading the battle to prevent nuclear violence, and that government-aided nuclear proliferation will increase the potential for violence.

Both the Rosenbaum Special Safeguards study and the Mitre Corp. report "The Threat to Licensed Nuclear Facilities" contain recommendations for citizen surveillance, personal searches, psychological studies, and investigation of people moving into neighborhoods near nuclear facilities with surveillance done in conjunction with the FBI, CIA, and the NSA. Both reports recommend creation of a federal nuclear security force.

Threat to Democracy

In the area of legislation, inroads are being made already into the democratic process. The State of Virginia considered a bill in 1975 (proposed by the Virginia Electric Power Co.) to permit VEPCO to set up its own police force with the power to arrest anyone anywhere in the state and obtain confidential records on citizens. Representative Melvin Price of Illinois, co-sponsor of the infamous Price-Anderson Act (which exempts utilities from liability over a certain amount in the event of a nuclear accident) will re-introduce Federal legislation giving the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) the power to control the siting of nuclear power plants anywhere in the country. Thus, all state and local hearings and decisions on nuclear safety, economics, and siting would be eliminated. More recently, a Mitre Corporation sponsored report, "Public Participation in Energy Related Decision Making", responding to Dr. Albert Einstein's famous remark on the need to have decisions made by voices from the village square, suggested re-defining that village voice, an ominous threat to our basic Constitutional right to self-government.

All of this adds up to the indisputable fact that nuclear power as an energy source, as an economic institution, as a political bellwether, and as an environmental and health hazard, may already be condemning democracy to extinction, for it represents the ultimate concentration of political and economic power that in turn may control our personal lives, freedoms, and social fabric. For these reasons citizens must question nuclear power not only on technical grounds but must examine the stresses that reliance on this uniquely dangerous energy source will create. The inescapable conclusion is that nuclear power is inherently incompatible with a democratic society.

Lorna Salzman is the Mid-Atlantic Representative, Friends of the Earth, writer and lecturer. She is a board member of the Safe Energy Coalition of New York State and is presently organizing the Citizens' Project on Radioactive Waste (NY State).

Source: Syracuse Peace Council Newsletter, April 1977.

But commercial nuclear power development quickly diverged and accelerated, with the help of vast Federal subsidies, tax benefits, economic incentives, and exemption from liability; according to a Battelle Laboratory study, these subsidies total to date well over 40 billion dollar, even though nuclear energy provides at this moment less energy than firewood in this country.

Fissionable materials for the weapons program in this country after the war were produced by highly enriched uranium and by production of plutonium in special military reactors. Until now, commercial spent fuel was not reprocessed for the domestic military weapons program (an exception was the West Valley N.Y. reprocessing plant, Nuclear Fuel Services, a Getty Oil subsidiary, which operated for six years at a financial loss, some of whose spent fuel by-products — plutonium-239 —were apparently exported for use in foreign nuclear weapons manufacture).

But abroad the picture was and is quite different. Because most nuclear energy programs in both the western industrial nations and the less developed nations are under control of the national governments, public participation has been much less than here. In western Europe awareness and opposition is at a high level but without the opportunity to alter national energy policy or halt nuclear power development; in the less developed countries, energy policy, like all policies, is made by the technocratic and power elites unilaterally. These programs have not been indigenous but rather are the results of deliberate efforts by the industrial nations' financial, economic and political controlling interests to hook these nations into the complex and costly infrastructure of commercial nuclear energy. Through active exports of tools and technology, training programs, financial assistance, ostensible >>safeguards>>, the intent was to make less developed countries dependent on western nuclear technology, financial institutions, and bureaucratic control.

In their anxiety to promote nuclear energy worldwide, the industrial powers have in effect established a competition for who can sell the most the fastest and the cheapest. For the U.S. this became crucial as the demand for new electric capacity dropped, the price of electricity soared, and inflation beset labor, materials and construction (and public opposition increased). Hundreds of planned reactors in the U.S. have been cancelled or indefinitely postponed; the reactor division of General Electric has always operated at a loss, and it is safe to say that the fission >>dream>>— really a nightmare—is nearing its end domestically. The industry's only hope, therefore, is to revive itself through the export of nuclear technology. Towards this end, the government and related agencies have devised financial,promotional and scientific schemes, all of which are in the end supported by American taxpayers.

One fatal flaw exists, however: the fact that possession of nuclear fuel and technology directly provides purchasers with the capability of manufacturing nuclear weapons. According to the Congressional Research Service and others, ...>>The present and future problems of proliferation appear to originate mainly with the nuclear supplier nations of the free world ...Any industrial nation which wishes to make nuclear weapons can do so without external aid so long as it can get uranium ores>>.

The route to nuclear weapons can be through establishment of reprocessing facilities, which separate out unfissioned uranium and plutonium-238 from irradiated reactor fuel, through high enrichment of uranium-235; through the new technique of isotope separation of uranium-235 and uranium-238. In turn, reprocessing inevitably leads to initiation of a fast breeder reactor program utilizing uranium-238 and plutonium-239, with the hopes of obtaining additional plutonium to fuel other reactors. This is what France is doing today.

Both president Ford and Carter implemented a policy of foregoing commercial spent fuel reprocessing, but the Reagan administration has expressed its desire to reverse this and by so doing would make absolutely clear to U.S. citizens the direct link of nuclear energy to nuclear weapons. But even if reprocessing does not occur, this country continues to promote and export nuclear fuel, reactors, technology, and training programs to less developed countries all over the world, including many that we do not even trust to handle nuclear materials. President Carter proposed to bring back spent fuel from these nations so they would not be able to reprocess the fuel and extract plutonium for weapons construction; this raised the question of just why we were providing nations we cannot trust with nuclear technology in the first place).

Some of the ways the United States is abetting nuclear proliferation worldwide

1. Nuclear exports. Not counting foreign component sales, Westinghouse and G.E. have sold 53 reactors abroad but the actual number is far higher due to joint ventures with European and Japanese concerns which also benefit U.S. reactor suppliers. The U.S. dominates the enriched uranium market and had a monopoly on uranium enrichment until 1974. France, Germany and Canada, however, are now the chief competition, with Framatome supplanting Westinghouse as the leading reactor supplier, followed by Kraftwerk Union. These countries as well as the U.S. are also providing reprocessing technology to other countries. Canada is now entering the export market vigorously, hoping to replace the U.S. light-water reactor that uses low-enriched uranium (and potentially provides much more plutonium for eventual reprocessing).

2. Propaganda, promotion and training. Through the International Atomic Energy Agency ( IAEA), a sub-agency of the United Nations, ostensibly established to conduct international safeguards, nuclear energy has been vigorously promoted and world nuclear scientists and engineers. The IAEA has many flaws, not the least of which is the fact that it cannot detect incipient diversion of nuclear materials but only after-the-fact detection, and that a nation is not required to place all of its nuclear facilities under IAEA inspection. Thus, secret reprocessing facilities could operate anywhere in the world without the IAEA knowing of them. About one third of the IAEA budget comes from the U.S. but only about 20% of the total budget goes for safeguards. No fulltime onsite inspectors are deployed, and it relies on materials accounting rather than physical inspection. The IAEA cannot deal with nonstate adversaries such as terrorists, subversives or fanatics; even if it detects diversion of nuclear materials, no tough international sanctions exists to deter others.

3. Hoax of the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Aside from the fact that three major nuclear superpowers have not signed the NPT (France, India and China), the Treaty has a builtin contradiction. Those who sign the Treaty agree to forego weapons manufacture and stockpiling but in exchange they are guaranteed >>fullest possible exchange of equipment, materials, and scientific and technological information for the peaceful uses of nuclear energy>>. (They can withdraw from the Treaty with 3 months' notice if they wish). In view of the fact that the IAEA cannot detect the existence of secret reprocessing or weapons manufacture facilities, this guarantee to Treaty signers of nuclear technology completely undercuts the intent of the vow to forego weapons manufacture.

4. Export-Import Bank loans. The export-import bank provides subsidies in the form of low-cost loans to foreign countries to encourage them to purchase American products. The subsidies for nuclear exports are greater than for any other single category of U.S. exports, according to the Council of Economic Priorities study >>Power Politics: The Nuclear Industry and Nuclear Exports>> Ex-Im serves two functions: to bail out ailing American industries, and to further U.S. international strategies and goals. Since 1974, ten less developed countries have received Ex-Im financing totaling 5 billion dollar to buy 18 of our reactors, none of which they could have otherwise afforded; among beneficiaries of Ex-Im aid are many repressive countries, including the Philippines (where G.E. exported a reactor for construction near an active volcano), South Korea, and Taiwan. The Shah of Iran was also a recipient of 620 million dollars in the early 1970's, which was used to purchase U.S. armaments. Ex-Im functions by providing loans at very low interest rates (6%), combined with private banks' commercial rates, which functions to lower the total loan interest. Ex-Im gets repayment, however, only after the private banks are repaid; thus if a loan is defaulted, it is the U.S. taxpayers who pick up the tab.

5. International fuel cycle center. The nuclear superpowers, ostensibly concerned about nuclear proliferation and the problem of safeguards, are now discussing international fuel cycle centers which would concentrate enrichment, fabrication, reprocessing and radioactive waste storage facilities in one or more site under international control. However, these presents sever political and safety problems because they would sanction the production and use of plutonium and would make multiple facilities even more vulnerable to sabotage or terrorism. They would in no way eliminate the problems associated with transport of fuel to and from reactors. By their very nature they would make usable plutonium available to other nations and an item of ordinary commerce, thus relieving terrorists of the difficulty of reprocessing spent fuel. Finally, they would undercut movements in less developed countries to develop indigenous, safe, less costly energy sources by consolidating control, financing, and supervision in the hands of a limited number of industrial superpowers who, in the end, would be the chief beneficiaries.

Why we must shut down the nuclear power/weapons industry and terminate all nuclear exports.

While a nuclear freeze and eventual disarmament of the Soviets and the U.S. are vitally important, the continued export of nuclear technology on the other hand only exacerbates the threat of a nuclear conflagration. Such a nuclear outbreak, in the near east or anywhere in the world could lead in turn to involvement of the superpowers and an all-out war. If we desire to prevent nuclear war, we must counteract the threat at all the sources. It would be folly to freeze U.S.-Soviet arms with one hand, and with the other continue to hand out to all comers the means to manufacture and stockpile nuclear weapons.

How to disarm the world

Establish an international renewable energy institute to disseminate information, technology, personnel, and low-cost loan programs to enable less developed countries to develop renewable appropriate energy sources; end the promotional and training role of the IAEA and limit it to safeguards only; end the pretense that nuclear safeguards are or can be effective to any significant degree; reduce the proliferation threat at its source by phasing out nuclear weapons stockpiles and commercial nuclear power plants.

Source: FOE-Link, 2/82.

European and American anti-nuclear protests have taken strikingly divergent paths in the most recent years of the nuclear power controversy. While Europeans took to direct action and protested, Americans were for the most part fighting the battle in the uniquely American adversary process (the only process available to them) called intervention, where experts and lawyers jousted for points in a stacked-deck proceeding that always ended in nuclear reactor licensing no matter how persuasive the arguments to the contrary. Such interventions swelled the reputations of environmental lawyers and kept them and their citizen-clients busy for six years or more at a total cost often running into hundreds of thousands of dollars. Interventions did serve some purposes. They extended the licensing process so that costs of building reactors increased and led to many postponements and cancellations, and often introduced new evidence which then had to be considered in other license application hearings.

But it is only in the past five years that the public in the true sense of the word entered the nuclear debate outside the courtroom, a rather dismal commentary since this uniquely hazardous form of energy made its commercial debut twenty years ago without public knowledge or a public mandate. Nonetheless, it is a fact that in these few short years the ball game has passed out of the proponents' park into that of the opponents. Until very recently the entire burden of proof lay with citizens (it still does in the Federal hearings for licensing reactors) who often tried to convince themselves that the elaborate process of intervention was impartial, objective and a potential way to stop nuclear power plants.

In this five-year period most of the vital issues inherently associated with nuclear power were raised by underfunded, understaffed citizen groups lacking the technical and financial resources possessed by the nuclear industry and government. Out of desperation and also out of hope that interventions represented a vital part of the American democratic process, citizens raised issues of waste transport and disposal, nuclear terrorism, evacuation plans, reactor safety, nuclear economics and reliability, proliferation, design and human error, risk of catastrophe accidents, the need for power and alternatives to fission. All these issues were introduced in the face of a hearing process and government- industry collusion which citizens long ignored or thought they could overcome: a kangaroo-court hearing process where licensing of reactors is assured. Deliberate lying and suppression of information by government regulators; intimidation of dissenters; media arm-twisting; arbitrary and capricious rule-making and non-enforcement of safety and engineering standards were all part of the court hearing process.

As the face of government deceit became clearer, new concerns arose over the social and civil liberties aspects of nuclear power, when the government released a report suggesting wiretapping, surveillance and infiltration of dissident groups and even torture in some circumstances. Thus the implications of a centralized, hazardous, high-technology energy source became clear: the necessity for immaculate and indefinite supervision and control bordering on what has been termed 'friendly fascism'. The resignation of half a dozen nuclear engineers from industry and government highlighted the fact that not only were there vast unresolved safety problems with reactors but that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) was licensing reactors such as Indian Point II and III 25 miles north of New York City, and the North Anna plant built over an earthquake fault in Virginia, with the full knowledge that they do not meet the NRC's own safety criteria for licensing.

In 1971-72, the Union of Concerned Scientists and the National Intervenors, a national coalition, aided by leaked government documents showing internal dissent on the efficacy of emergency core cooling systems (ECCS) (the reactor's main backup safety system – tested so far only by computer) opened up the discussion of nuclear safety for all to see. These hearings, lengthy, dry, complex, were the first inkling of trouble for the industry and for government. They showed that not only were catastrophic accidents possible, but in fact quite likely since the ECCS worked only on paper and had never been actually tested under appropriate or near-scale conditions. But the government's response was predictable: it merely implemented some 'purely cosmetic' changes.

In 1957, Brookhaven National Laboratories, in response to the insurance companies' refusal to provide sufficient liability for nuclear power plants, had conducted a study to assess the consequences of a serious nuclear accident. They estimated that for a 50% release of the radioactive contents of a 500 MW(e) reactor (half the size of those being built now) located 30 miles away from a large city, 3,400 would die immediately, 43,000 would be irradiated, and property damages of $7 billion would result. In 1965, two years before the Price- Anderson Act was due to expire, Brookhaven was asked to do an update of their study. They did so and the findings shocked even the research team. This time prompt deaths totaled 45,000, with 100,000 radiation injuries, $17 billion in property damage at the minimum, and radioactive contamination of an area of 150,000 square miles.

Significantly, Brookhaven refused to assess the likelihood of a catastrophic accident. The study director. Dr. Clifford Beck, stated that . . . "there is no objective, quantitative means of assuring that all possible paths leading to catastrophe have been recognized . . ." and added that. . ."there is not even in principle an objective and quantitative method of calculating probability or improbability of accidents. . ."

The revelations of the ECCS hearings and the shocking findings of the Brookhaven report left only one alternative to the government: to show that catastrophic accidents were extremely unlikely to occur. This led to the commissioning of the now totally discredited Rasmussen Reactor Safety Study. The study was headed by Dr. Norman Rasmussen, a director of Northeast Utilities and of the Nuclear Property Liability Insurance Co., and an industry consultant, who himself lacked credentials in nuclear engineering or risk assessment. The team he put together consisted largely of nuclear engineers and physicists employed by the Atomic Energy Commission and was actually conducted out of AEC headquarters in Maryland. Although the study was widely touted as a brilliant and impartial methodology to assess accident probabilities and consequences, subsequent events proved otherwise. The Union of Concerned Scientists obtained, under the Freedom of Information Act, tens of thousands of pages of internal memoranda, reports and letters showing that the study was intended to shore up industry claims of safety, and that the findings of safety were pre-determined by the study team with data and events selected to support these a priori assumptions, and finally, that internal criticism from within the government itself was suppressed and excluded from the final report. (The main criticisms reiterated throughout were that it was impossible both in theory and practice to identify all possible causes of accidents, and that human error and acts of sabotage could not be predicted or quantified as to their likelihood). The UCS findings revealed the total bias of the report that many had suspected but had been unable to prove.

Suppression of information is not the only avenue of defense traveled by nuclear proponents. In addition to twisting the arm of the media (NBC's superb documentary: "Danger: Radioactive Waste" so enraged the industry that it pressured the entire NBC board of directors hard enough to prevent the film from ever being shown again on the network), scientists, industry and government now take a new tack, led by such "techno-twits" as Alvin Weinberg, former director of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory and plutonium enthusiast Bernard Cohen of the University of Pittsburgh, that radioactivity isn't really so bad for you, it's just another risk we have to live with, and that public concern over radioactivity is due entirely to ignorance and emotionalism. They and others go to great lengths to prove this (Cohen says sexual intercourse is more dangerous than plutonium ingestion) and to prove that coal-fired plants create greater health hazards than nuclear, neglecting to point out that they assume no pollution controls on the coal plants and perfect, permanent reactor operation and containment of all radioactive products until the end of time.

When one totals up the record and finds such unmitigated deceit, distortion and lies perpetrated by the government that is supposed to be regulating nuclear power in the public interest, the obvious question is: what are they trying to hide? If nuclear power is as benign and beneficent as they say, why go to such lengths to stifle dissent and conceal the facts and prevent a full honest airing with democratic public participation? Why are testimony and cross-examination in licensing hearings limited only to those subjects which the government deems permissible? Why are accidents more serious than core meltdowns not permitted in license hearings even though internal (and suppressed) government reports show they are theoretically possible? Why does the government forbid challenges to radiological standards? Why are states and municipalities not permitted a veto over nuclear plant construction and operation? Why are they prevented from setting higher radiation standards than the Federal government? Why are citizen groups not given equal funding and technical help for interventions? Why are citizens unable to file suit against nuclear plants until they have gone through the entire costly and time-consuming intervention process? Why does the government continue to play the role of judge, jury and prosecutor? Why does the NRC select a licensing board that consists entirely of people with direct ties to the nuclear industry? Why is the burden of proof put on opponents rather than on the utility seeking to build a reactor? Why is the utility not forced to show a need for power or prove availability of alternatives such as co-generation, energy conservation, rate restructuring, or renewable energy sources? Why does the industry still demand and get heavy subsidies such as cheap uranium enrichment, a 22% uranium depletion allowance (coal gets 10%), fuel adjustment costs, accelerated plant depreciation, investment tax credit, insurance subsidy, waste disposal, and government research and development funding? And finally, if nuclear power sparks such deception and requires such oppressive political and economic conditions, is it not inherently incompatible with democracy?

The record is clear. Despite the apparatus of the adversary hearing process, American citizens have no voice in or control over those political institutions affecting energy policy and no administrative or legal recourse. It is a small wonder that 1,400 people non-violently occupied the site of the proposed Seabrook, New Hampshire reactor on April 30,1977. They knew, as did other groups who had spent long years and many dollars, that the traditional channels for input to government decision were in the end blocked and that it had finally come down to 'the last resort' of disenfranchised citizens. They had learned that not only was nuclear power the greatest threat to individual safety and survival but that it offered to industry and government the best opportunity to control citizens' lives – their civil liberties, energy supply, capital investment, social policy and goals, land use, and end uses of energy. For that is, after all, the key question. Energy is not an end in itself but a means, and the end uses of nuclear energy are not feeding, housing or educating the poor but insuring that private financial interests and economic expansion take precedence over public health and safety.

In contrast, the solar society is not an imposition on the rights of others. It is an act of cooperation, community and conscience. It does not impose radioactivity over the protests of minority dissidents. It does not monopolize capital or deprive other sectors of their proper needs. It does not create a technocratic elite to guard us from nuclear disaster. It does not necessitate an international paramilitary order to minimize nuclear theft and terrorism. It does not impose radioactive wastes and genetic disorders on future generations. It does not concentrate economic power in the hands of utilities, investors, stockbrokers, banks and multinational energy conglomerates. It is not precariously doled out at a high price by centralized corporations beholden to their stockholders, but is freely available to and controlled by local communities and nations to use appropriately in their decentralized agrarian economies. It does not replace jobs with capital and energy as does construction of electric generation facilities but creates them in the form of plumbers, sheet metal workers, carpenters, architects, electricians, etc. – skilled and semi-skilled jobs that can be developed in and for the community.

These are the social and political realities which persuaded 1,400 people to occupy the Seabrook site and spend weeks in jail – the reality of the failure of the American political and legal system to protect the individual from physical harm and corporate arrogance, and the awareness that an alternative energy source leading to an alternative society exists. There are few remaining illusions about the ability of the American system to make decisions that implement the will of the majority while protecting the minority. Decision making will no longer be left to lawyers or power delegated to hearing boards. "The last resort" of direct citizen action is upon us.

Source: Resurgence, Summer 1977.

Nuclear advocates say that the world must continue to increase energy consumption and production to maintain economic stability and progress and that we are depleting rapidly our known, usable fossil fuel reserves. They call for widespread development of nuclear reactors as the safest, least polluting and most economical way to provide more energy and to forestall the eventual and complete depletion of fossil fuel supplies.

Nuclear opponents argue that economic growth can continue while the world reduces energy use through easily-tolerated conservation methods, that nuclear power is neither safe, non-polluting, nor economical, and that safer, cheaper alternative energy sources (wind, sun, water, geothermal, etc.) can and should be developed.

A major area of conflict is over safety, but even many advocates acknowledge that certain hazards are inherent in atomic power. Catastrophes are to be feared from various quarters: terrorists could obtain plutonium, a radioactive, poisonous explosive which is a by-product of the atomic energy process and from which atomic bombs can be made. Human or mechanical accidents, earthquakes, fires or floods could take place at refining facilities, reactors, waste disposal sites, or in the transport of nuclear fuel and wastes. Any event like this would release dangerous quantities of radioactive poisons near population centres. Other fears are that men cannot devise a permanent, fail-safe method of storing the waste products of nuclear power (plutonium, for example, has been called 'fiendishly toxic' by one of its discoverers, and it remains lethal for 250,000 years), and that proliferation of nuclear power will cause a concomitant rise in birth defects and cancer due to the increase in low-level 'background radiation' from nuclear plants. Concerned advocates call for more stringent safety measures; opponents, for an end to nuclear power altogether.

Despite the significance of these issues, the American press has paid so little attention to them over the years that a nationwide media research study recently put the nuclear safety story on a list of 'ten best censoredstories'. Commenting on the study, columnist and former presidential press secretary Jerry ter Horst cited 'media dereliction, neglect and lack of perception'. But this article will show that the major responsibility for keeping the public poorly informed lies with the nuclear power industry and, more disturbingly, with the agencies of the United States government which have been charged with regulating the nuclear industry.

Albert Einstein said that the question of nuclear power would eventually be decided in the village square. Apparently, industry and government fear the villagers' decision, for while they ask for public acceptance of the nuclear power programme, and while they repeatedly state that the public is in no danger, they have contrived to keep the public ignorant of key safety studies, technical data, unresolved problems, even of internal dissent on these subjects among government-hired experts themselves. Some of this valuable information is now reaching the village square where the decisions must be taken, mostly as a result of Freedom of Information requests and threat of lawsuits by citizen-action groups.

But so far the larger problem of absolute control over nuclear information exerted by Federal agencies under the Atomic Energy Act of 1954 (the law setting out the general regulatory process, as well as control over reactor licensing procedures and radiation exposure standards) has been immune to public challenge. This becomes more and more of a scandal as the government proves itself to have been and still to be, not an impartial watchdog, but an all-out supporter of the nuclear industry.

The following examples are not the only instances of suppression of nuclear information to have been exposed as a result of citizen investigation. And what has been exposed is only the tip of the iceberg. It is becoming clear who censored this 'best censored story' of the past two decades, and we should also ask ourselves why.

Accident Studies - One Denied

In the mid-1950s, at the start of the commercial nuclear power programme, and as a result of Congressional hearings on the thorny problem of nuclear accident liability, Brookhaven National Laboratories were asked to study the theoretical consequences of a nuclear accident at a 500 megawatt reactor within thirty miles of a populated area. Their study, published in 1957, showed that–with a 50 percent release of the radioactive contents of the reactor–several thousand people would die immediately, tens of thousands would be irradiated, and property damages could amount to $7 billion. The report caused serious concern in government and in the insurance industry, which up till then had refused to provide more than $110 million in liability for a single accident. The government, faced with threats from the nuclear industry that they could not expand without sufficient liability insurance, agreed to provide an additional $450 million and simultaneously absolved utilities and reactor manufacturers from any damages or responsibility over the total of $560 million. This limited liability law was passed in the form of the Price-Anderson Act for a period of ten years.

A decade later, when the law was close to expiration, Brookhaven was quietly asked by the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) to update the study. No public acknowledgment of the new study (called 'the up-dated WASH 740 Report') was made. In fact the government heatedly denied its existence for six years until 1972. The Friends of the Earth, Ralph Nader and a citizens' group called 'Business and Professional People in the Public Interest' threatened a Freedom of Information lawsuit and obtained a look at the internal memoranda and working papers of the study. The update, which dealt with reactors much larger than those originally considered, stated that a similar accident could kill 45,000 people, irradiate another 100,000, cause property damage worth over $17 billion, and contaminate an area of 150,000 square miles with radioactivity, rendering it uninhabitable for centuries.

Several members of the Brookhaven task force had originally urged suppression of the update, but it was turned over to the AEC where it was kept confidential for over six years. Interestingly, the study director, Dr. Clifford Beck, stated in a memo to the AEC commissioners that…'there is no objective, quantitative means of assuring that all possible paths leading to catastrophe have been recognized and safeguarded…here is encountered the most baffling and insoluble enigma existing in our technology: it is in principle easy and straightforward to calculate potential damages that might be realized under such postulated accident conditions; there is not even in principle an objective and quantitative method of calculating probability or improbability of accidents or the likelihood that potential hazards will or will not be realized' (emphasis added). At a committee meeting Dr. Beck later stated about accident probability: 'We feel that we cannot predict if, or when, it might happen'. Beck's conclusions are significant in the light of the findings of other government-sponsored studies.

Hearings on Reactor Safety

Accidents such as those studied by Brookhaven can only occur under certain circumstances. When uranium atoms are split, energy is produced to heat water circulating through the reactor. The resultant steam powers a turbine which then generates electricity. If a pipe carrying water to the fuel breaks, emergency cooling water must reach the fuel within 60 seconds to prevent overheating, melting and release of radiation from the fuel core of the reactor. If the emergency core cooling system (ECCS), designed to prevent such an accident, fails to work effectively, the reactor core would overheat and a major release of radioactive matter in gaseous form could be blown across land and water and to nearby cities.

Obviously the ECCS is an extremely important safety feature, and only if its design and operation are properly carried out can there be any assurance that meltdowns can be prevented or mitigated. Although some citizens have been concerned about the hazards of nuclear power for years, the public had been given little evidence that all was not well with reactors until 1972-3, when the independent Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) forced the AEC into holding extended technical hearings on the ECCS and other safety features. The hearings revealed not only that the ECCS had never been tested under realistic accident conditions, but that the government-sponsored-and-funded studies relied upon computer codes that AEC engineers themselves said were incomplete and inadequate as a basis for reactor licensing.

During the hearings the government repeatedly denied requests by the Union of Concerned Scientists for access to expert witnesses and internal documents, but some documents were leaked to them anyway. Internal studies brought out as a result of the hearings indicated that nuclear engineers working on the Emergency Core Cooling System and on its computer programme had grave doubts the safety feature would work at all. Small-scale tests of it had failed completely, and full-scale tests had been postponed, with the government farming out paper tests to the manufacturers of the system, rather than to independent evaluators.

Moreover a special internal task force, which had been set up after the small-scale tests had failed, questioned the efficacy of the ECCS as well as the computer simulations upon which claims of its safety were based. One report stated that it was beyond the present capability of engineering science to predict how well the system would perform. While some task force members were optimistic, others strongly disagreed. Dr. Morris Rosen, an AEC official in charge of ECCS analysis wrote, in an internal memo of 1 June 1971, that '…the system performance cannot be defined with sufficient assurance to provide a clear basis for licensing'. Dissenting reports like this, however, were disregarded by the task force when it prepared interim criteria for the ECCS. Another report by the Idaho Reactor Testing Station listed 28 areas where information on the ECCS was 'missing', 'inadequate' or 'unverified'. This report was withheld by the AEC division of Reactor Development and Technology, even from its own AEC colleagues who were responsible for licensing.

At the ECCS hearing the AEC tried to prevent Rosen and another official, Robert Colmar, from testifying; and the Commission further distributed to all government witnesses a memo that warned: 'Never disagree with established policy.' Soon after the hearings, Rosen was removed from his position as head of the Systems Performance Branch of the AEC Division of Reactor Standards and given a purely advisory job. He later left the AEC and Colmar asked for a transfer.

At the conclusion of the hearings the AEC adopted its old position on the adequacy of the ECCS, with some minor changes that Dr. Henry Kendall of the UCS termed 'purely cosmetic'. The government continues to license reactors with the same untested emergency system, and even now no actual testing of the system is planned.

The Rasmussen Reactor Safety Study (RSS)

For years the government and industry had been defending themselves against charges that nuclear power is rife with inherent dangers as well as external risks from errors and sabotage. The response had been to claim that 'redundant safety features', 'safety-in-depth', and 'quality assurance-quality control' essentially preclude serious accidents, and that in any case the consequences of an accident would not be unacceptably severe. But the uncovering and publication of the updated WASH-740 report–indicating large numbers of deaths, radiation injuries and widespread radioactive contamination–belied the latter claim. The facts uncovered during the ECCS hearings proved that the major features (and perhaps others) on which the former claim rested had never been tested. The only alternative left to the government was to demonstrate that catastrophic accidents were extremely unlikely to occur.

To this end they commissioned WASH-1400, the Rasmussen (after the study's director) Reactor Safety Study or RSS. At a cost of $4 million and after three years of research, a report that allegedly attempted to assess the probability and consequences of serious nuclear accidents was released in October 1975. Although many technical consultants were employed on the study, two features stand out. First, the computer data on reactor components' behavior and failure rates (and analysis of them) were provided by the nuclear industry itself without any independent evaluation; the accident consequences appendix was actually prepared by a Westinghouse employee. (Westinghouse is a major manufacturer of nuclear reactors and related equipment.) Second, the study was conducted by in-house AEC staff at their headquarters in Bethesda, Maryland.

The director, Dr. Norman Rasmussen of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), had no training or expertise in reactor safety, statistical methods, risk assessment or any field relevant to accident probability. Furthermore he had, and still has, firm ties with the atomic energy industry, as a consultant to the Nuclear Energy Property Liability Association, to two prominent nuclear engineering companies and to Reddy Communications, a nuclear public relations firm, and as a founding board member of American for Energy Independence–a lobbying group for nuclear power funded by Westinghouse.

Clearly the RSS had built-in inadequacies. Furthermore, it dealt only with intrinsic failures of components and systems, not with external causes of accidents by human error or sabotage. As noted above, it was based on industry computer models, data and analyses not verified independently by the RSS task force. It concerned itself with reactor accidents only, not accidents in other parts of the nuclear fuel cycle. It analyzed only two representative reactors of 800 megawatts in size or less, although much bigger 1100 megawatt reactors were already being constructed.

But the defects of the final report were far greater. As a result of the Freedom of Information request filed by UCS, 50,000 pages of internal studies, memos and comments pertaining to or used in the RSS were released by the government. These proved what many had suspected all along: the findings for safety were pre-determined by the study group, and the report was envisioned from the start as one that would be 'of significant benefit for the nuclear industry'. Data and technical examples had been selected so as to prove a priori assumptions that accidents were extremely unlikely and that if they did occur the consequences would be essentially negligible.

The AEC was keenly aware of the public scrutiny that the report would receive. Memoranda of the period note that 'the sensitive nature of these studies will require careful control of all official information releases', and 'the report to be useful must have reasonable acceptance by people in the industry'. The internal documents show a sharp disparity between the claims of the agency that the study was a 'full, objective and scientific analysis of the risks', and the truth about its finding and also its methodology, as the following example shows.

I have already referred to 'quality assurance quality control' (QA-QC). These are the standards by which components and procedures are designed to operate to guarantee safety , and they were especially relevant to the RSS because findings on the unlikelihood of accidents rests in part on how well QA-QC is implemented. The working papers for the RSS, however, betray a concern that, if a truly comprehensive QA-QC review were conducted at the two plants being studied (Surrey in Virginia and Peach Bottom in Pennsylvania), numerous deficiencies might become known which would cast doubt on a basic element of nuclear safety. Two approaches were suggested: the first would select information to support a 'pre-determined finding' of safety and reliability; the second would not pre-determine finding but, as compensation, would discuss only those major deficiencies already found and resolved in the field by the AEC, thus inspiring public confidence in QA-QC procedures. The first approach, of course, left the door open to public awareness of possibly poor QA-QC programmes that the AEC feared could 'undermine public confidence in the reliability of plant safety systems' (E. Gilbert memo, 10/23/73). The second could be recognized as incomplete and could cast a negative cloud over the whole programme, leading to fears that 'the whole story (may be) much worse…' After much deliberation, the argument was settled–by eliminating the entire subject of QA-QC from the study.

Internal Dissent Stifled

Before the publication of a first draft of the report in August 1974, internal comments were made on a working draft. Twelve persons, mostly AEC officials and some outside consultants, made comments, but these were not compared or correlated. However, looking at the now-released internal documents, one can see recurring criticism in two areas: common mode failures, and the problem of identifying all possible causes of component or system failure. A common mode failure involves two or more failures stemming from a common cause. Such a failure has wide implications for nuclear safety since it could undermine the concept of 'redundant safety features'. An expert in common mode failure had alerted the RSS study group to the problem as early as 1973, and task force comments on the first draft were critical along the same lines, calling some of the examples cited, 'a disaster' that might 'invalidate' much of the study results. The RSS study group, according to the experts, had overlooked some obvious types of common mode failures as well as near-misses, all of which had been omitted from the draft. For example, one AEC staff member pointed out that the RSS paid practically no attention to earthquakes as an accident-initiating factor, even though this was considered a prime cause of potential common mode failures.

The other criticism amounted to no more than commonsense: the inability of any analysis to ensure that it has included all potential sources of accidents, to which Dr. Beck referred in the updated WASH-740 study. Clearly accident probability calculation, especially for complex nuclear power plants, cannot be estimated without identifying all possible causes of failures. Darrell Eisenhut, a member of the AEC regulatory staff and its internal review group, commented on this and added that the omission of sabotage was proof that the study did not include all significant effects. Richard De Young, another member of the AEC regulatory staff, stated that 'The absolute assurance given in the report that "all" accidents have been considered renders the conclusions vulnerable if it can be shown that even one sequence of significance has been overlooked…' He added: 'A risk assessment that does not address the sabotage issue cannot be considered other than incomplete', and he urged more work, saying that release of the report without such revision would be 'inadvisable and a disservice to the study group'. De Young goes even further: 'The report contains deficiencies and inconsistencies to such an extent that to correct them would likely be a major task requiring many more months of effort.'

Despite these internal comments the draft was released on 20 August 1974 without mention of the substantive internal criticisms of the study or of the fact that the review group's recommendations had been ignored. At this time major independent reviews were also conducted by the UCS together with the Sierra Club, by Intermountain Technologies Inc. on behalf of the US Environmental Protection Agency, and by the American Physical Society Study Group on Light Water Reactor Safety. Again no substantive criticisms were allowed by the AEC to be aired publicly, nor did these groups receive any response from the RSS study group.

The AEC simply set up another review body to consider all comments within sixty days. This second group picked out many safety issues they claimed had not been fully addressed, including earthquakes and also fires. Seven months later, in March 1975, a major fire began in the Tennessee Valley Authority's nuclear plant at Brown's Ferry, Alabama, which had been in operation for only seven months. Starting in the cable spreading room, the fire destroyed all the 'redundant' electrically wired safety systems and brought the plant perilously close to a meltdown. A cable tray fire like this had not been considered by the RSS as a possible initiating event for an accident.

As the regulatory agency, now called the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) prepared to issue the final RSS draft, the chief of the government's Accident Analysis Branch stated: 'The final RSS cannot therefore be accepted uncritically and without further review.' He too was ignored and the report was published on 30 October 1975.

Congress and the RSS

The Congressional Joint Committee on Atomic Energy (now abolished) was considering another extension of the Price-Anderson Act at the time. It held oversight hearings on the final RSS, but was given the impression that expert critics had already commented on the final version and had taken no strong exception. In fact, internal criticism had been brushed aside and no independent groups had an opportunity to comment on the final study at all. In answer to a query from Congressman Mike McCormack on 26 November 1975 on the existence of any substantial dissent, Dr. Rasmussen stated that there was 'None that I'm aware of'. This of course was deceptive, if only because at the time of the hearings, as of 20 November, interested parties like the UCS had not even received copies of the final version and could not have been expected to compare it with the earlier draft.

The study continues to be used by government and industry–despite expert criticism from impartial sources–as proof that nuclear power plant accidents are extremely unlikely. That many of the RSS staff themselves disagree is a fact that remains largely unknown.

One can only conclude that the government and the nuclear industry cannot tolerate dissent, that is to say, any information which casts a negative light on nuclear power or calls into question the judgement of those 'experts'. For a supposedly open, democratic society, the campaign of suppression and deception that has accompanied the nuclear power debate is unprecedented. Nonetheless, against powerful odds and well-funded adversaries, citizens and public interest groups have managed to ferret out information and use it in such a way that the opposition to nuclear power development continues to grow. The question remains: if nuclear power is as benign and beneficent as its proponents say, why do they go to such lengths to stifle dissent? And, more to the point, if nuclear power sparks such deception and requires such manipulation, is it not inherently incompatible with democracy?

USA: A Terminal Case

Research indicating low levels of radioactivity in the environment may cause cancer has been terminated early by its Federal government sponsors. Dr. Thomas Mancuso (of the Public Health School, University of Pittsburgh, USA) was working on a study with Dr. Alice Stewart (a cancer epidemiologist at Birmingham University, England) and George Kneale (a British statistician). It was funded by the US government Department of Energy and was meant to focus on the long-term health of workers at a Federal nuclear facility in Hanford, Washington State.

In 1974, when another study by Dr. Samuel Milham for the Washington State Department of Health indicated a positive correlation between radiation exposure and cancer deaths, the Atomic Energy Commission tried to persuade Dr. Mancuso to release his preliminary findings in order to rebut the other research. Dr. Mancuso, who had been working on his study since 1964 using a 30-year database, refused to do so, stating it would be premature. In fact his interim findings (published later) also showed a positive correlation between low levels of radiation exposure–far below present permissible limits–and excess cancers.

Last year Dr. Mancuso was informed that funding for his study would be terminated as of July 1978. The reason given was that, being aged 65, he should retire, although the actual retirement age at the University of Pittsburgh is 70. Simultaneously the government asked him to turn over his data to Oak Ridge-Associated Universities, a government laboratory in a major centre of nuclear research, development and manufacture at Oak Ridge, Tennessee.

A final report was submitted in July 1977 and later published. During this period the DOE had prepared and was circulating internal critiques of the study, but refused to make them available to Drs. Mancuso and Stewart. They obtained copies only after filing a Freedom of Information request.

Source: Index on Censorship. Volume 7, Number 5, September-October 1978, pgs. 37-42.

At least two separate fallout clouds dropped their lethal loads of radioisotopes of these elements (as well as cesium-137 and plutonium-239) on the Northeast in early October in heavy rains, where cows grazing on contaminated pasturage passed it along the food chain to people, who reconcentrated it in the thyroid gland and bones. Milk samples in some Long Island dairies with radioactivity levels as high as 480 picocuries convinced health authorities to order cows put on stored feed. That was over three times the levels of iodine-131 measured in New York milk in 1962 and 1963 just before atmospheric testing ended.

The EPA continues to perpetuate the dangerous myth that existing levels of iodine in milk are safe and that no action is required until levels reach 4,200 picocuries. But the agency conveniently forgets that while atmospheric testing went on in the late 1950s and 1960s, the protective action level was set at 100 picocuries per liter. This was later raised by executive order in 1964 to 4,200 picocuries because testing had ended. And this higher level is still being used.

But according to radiological physicist Ernest Sternglass, of the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, a fetus whose mother drinks a quart of milk daily for the three months following a peak concentration of 4,200 picocuries, and with levels dropping off after that each day due to radioactive decay, would get a cumulative dose to the thyroid of 30 rads–20 times the maximum permissible annual dose to the thyroid of 1.5 rads. (The dose to an adult, however, would be less serious.)

Using government figures of 2 to 3 rads as the doubling dose for thyroid and other cancers, a 30-rad dose would thus increase the number of cancers by 1,000 to 1,500 percent. Using the 100 picocurie protective action level, cancers would increase by as much as 75 percent. In Pennsylvania, the state agricultural department was prepared, on the advice of the state radiologist, to take protective action at 100 picocuries but inexplicably raised the action level to 500.

Adding insult to injury John Matuszek, head of the New York State Radiological Sciences Laboratory of the Bureau of Radiological Health, said that "there will be no observable health effects at these levels" and that "the fetus is not at risk at the levels we have seen." That view directly contradicts a National Academy of Sciences report of 1972 that says no level of radiation is safe, that health effects increase directly proportional to dosage, that there is no threshold below which effects do not occur, and that exposure to radiation is to be avoided or minimized when possible. The academy's policy has been fortified more recently by the views of Karl Z. Morgan, formerly of the Atomic Energy Commission laboratory in Oak Ridge, Tenn, and a leading radiological health expert, who recommends that radiation standards be reduced by a factor of 200.

Thus far the United States has made no formal protest to either China or the UN, and as a result of the government's failure to either warn or take action to protect the American public from the effects of iodine and strontium ingestion, there will be a statistically certain increase in infant mortality, cancers and other sub-lethal illnesses. Meanwhile, the government continues to churn out official press releases in the same soothing tone. It all indicates that, as usual, political considerations are being put ahead of public health safety.

It is important to recognize two things. First, when scientists say that fallout levels or radioactive leak from nuclear power plants do not exceed federal standards, this is because these standards are set high enough so they do not hinder the project or facility releasing the radioactivity. They are also set high in order to be, as a Brookhaven National Laboratory spokesman recently put it, "manageable," that is, enforceable. Second, it seems clear that the concerted efforts to play down the hazards of fallout and low-level radiation are a kind of brainwashing, much like the bomb shelter propaganda of the 1950's, which is intended to induce the public, into accepting radioactivity as part of daily life. In both these respects, federal, state and scientific personnel associated with all aspects of nuclear weapons, power or research have a tacit agreement not to alert or alarm the public.

In the aftermath of Vietnam and Watergate and revelations about the unconstitutional actions of the CIA and FBI, it is all the more important that the public scrutinize government statements with an eagle eye, keeping in mind the fact that they can no longer trust government agencies to defend their right to health and life itself.

Source: Newsday, October 25, 1976.

The fruits of modern science are qualitatively different from those of the past. They have a potential global impact (e.g. weather modification, radioactive and chemical contamination of the food chain, ocean pollution), a genetic impact on future generations (e.g. impoverishment of species, redirection of evolution, and bypassing of natural selection through genetic manipulation), and the trait of irreversibility (e.g. creation of novel organisms, persistent radioactive substances, and toxic synthetic chemicals).

There is no longer any distinction between science and technology or any such thing as "pure" science. Much of modern science, particularly nuclear physics research and molecular biology, involves positive action, not mere thought. For this reason scientists are not absolved from accountability to society or responsibility for their actions.

Because of the potential impact and import of technological consequences–the creation of radioactive wastes, genetic engineering, production and release or carcinogens–those involved in these hazardous enterprises have tried to focus public attention not on the consequences of science applications or their failure but on the probability of accident, error or failure. By so doing, they change the terms of debate, and the dialogue moves away from the question of subjective feelings about risk, ethics, need, or alternative, and into the abstract realm of mathematics, logic, models, and computers, from which realm the ordinary citizen is excluded.

Ingenious exercises are performed by the defenders of the pernicious to minimize, justify, or glorify hazardous technologies and their inevitable by-products; some of these exercises are excruciatingly familiar to us, such as risk analysis and the cost-benefit ratio. In their utilization all of these share in at least one thing: a perversion of the scientific method, where favorable data and studies are selected to support a pet hypothesis ("nuclear power is clean, safe, cheap and necessary"), and contradictory data and studies are ignored or suppressed. An example of the former is the Inhaber study comparing risks of nuclear and solar power; an example of the latter is the long-suppressed WASH-740 update done by Brookhaven National Laboratories.

This massive perversion is not new, for each age and culture has its snake oil salesmen. What is new is the scale of the deception and the encouragement of such trickery through controlled media, government agencies, and corporate subvention by means of grants and contracts.

Risk analysis is no longer the identification of a range of hazards associated with a particular technology, with a view towards minimizing or eliminating the most dangerous or finding alternatives, but rather towards the justification, using numerical mumbo-jumbo and other forms of black magic, of the projects and plans of special interests such as the nuclear power industry, the space colonization freaks, and the pharmaceutical manufacturers.

In this game of power–for it is as much about societal control as profit–risk analysis is an absolute prerequisite since it provides the most secretive and esoteric terminology but disguises the promoters' biases, assumptions and self-interest while evading broader social, political and ethical issues. Thus, risk analysis is less a tool than a complete language that by its nature excludes citizens from social policy making and keeps the ball game in the technical rather than in the political arena.

Control of the game is aided by obscurity of terms, ostensible complexity, and unspoken assumptions which are revealed only to those who know the language and can ask the right questions; those who abide by these rules have already lost the game. Non-quantifiable issues of course cannot be discussed; diversity of subjective opinion on the acceptability of a particular risk is suppressed; goals and values of different sub-groups in society, which often do not coincide with those of others, are not aired. Cooperation in the game of risk analysis requires a priori agreement to discuss only the probability of accident or failure but not the consequences or acceptability of such failure or alternatives. Above all, there is an emphasis on the causes of failure rather than on effects; this is especially true regarding complex systems like nuclear reactors, where the consequences of error or failure, and the difficulty of assessing accident probability, are far greater than in simpler systems.

None of this is very surprising when one looks at who the inventors and users of risk analysis are–not ordinary citizens but precisely those involved in or regulating dangerous technologies. Presumably, if one throws around enough weighty ritualistic jargon, the public can be duped into believing that there actually is such a thing as scientific objectivity. Thus, risk analysis data are highly useful not for being explicit about potential dangers, but just the opposite: for concealing facts, values, opinions, and consequences. A look at the diagram illustrates how the really important information can be hidden and the implicit not made explicit; using such ploys, scientists need not discuss the horrendous consequences of being wrong, such as killing one of the last condor chicks, tainting the human gene pool forever, or irreversibly contaminating the biosphere with radioactive and chemical wastes.

- From the 3-pound report NRC FIN No. A1077 - NUREG/OR-743 - Transportation of Radionuclides in Urban Environments: Draft Environmental Assessment, July 1980. Prepared by Sandia National Laboratories, Albuquerque, NM, run by Western Electric for the U.S. Department of Energy.

* Groundshine Doses to Pedestrians

Pedestrian groundshine doses are computed using the contamination level on streets and sidewalks (CULVL-DFS, where DFS is the street decontamination factor), with a pedestrian density computed by a time-weighted average of pedestrian densities for each time span in each affected cell (PedD).

where Q9 = units conversion factor -4.39 x -10-5 rem/MeV-uCi-d.

The term ymax in Eq. (37) describes the maximum fraction of the cell covered by the cloud during its passage. The first term in the brackets describes the initial exposure to un-decontaminated ground, and the second term describes the 50-year exposure to decontaminated area.

* (Note: "Groundshine" means radioactivity.)

Another favorite of risk rationalizers is dilution by comparison, using such arguments as: "all activities involve risk"; "there is no such thing as zero risk"; "naturally occurring risks are as bad as man-made ones"; "new risks are acceptable because so many other already exist" (e.g. pre-existing risks justify creation of new ones, ad infinitum), etc. These arguments are too transparent to require response; my only comment here is that the reason the environmental movement arose in the first place was to eliminate or find alternatives to dangerous enterprises. If pre-existing hazards are immutable, then why do so many scientists spend so much time trying to cure naturally occurring diseases?

When confronted with new or controversial technologies, people react in basically one of two ways. One group is skeptical, asks persistent questions of a different kind than those suggested by the technologists, urges restraint regarding undemonstrated projects, looks to evolutionary and cultural experience and tradition, recognizes the omnipresent role of uncertainty and human fallibility (of both human behavior and institutions), is wary of over-enthusiastic claims about "benefits", urges full disclosure of biases and self-interest, respects technical expertise but desires to make the ultimate judgments themselves, resists coercion, involuntary risk and intellectual authoritarianism, balks at taking irreversible steps, and desires to consider the full spectrum of social political consequences of new technology and its impact not only on the individual but on the family, community, human society, the earth, future generations, and non-human species and systems.

The other group unhesitatingly embraces new ideas and projects no matter how untried and speculative, accepts "expert" information from government, media or scientists as "truth", sees science's future as limitless and untrammeled, scoffs at the idea of societal control over science and technology, unquestioningly accepts claims about "benefits", minimizes the imperfections of human beings and human institutions, and in general supports the concept of unrestrained technology in the name of "progress".

For some strange reason the former group is called radical, and the latter conservative. This peculiar switch is hard to explain, except possibly insofar as our society looks at those who challenge existing values and authoritarianism as subversives rather than as valued guides and critics. Our society has a low tolerance for dissent or scrutiny, especially of established religions; perhaps this is because most of its technological enterprises cannot survive close examination, particularly in a broad socio-political context. In another era, the riskers–those who destroy habitat and species by building dams, who produce radioactive waste without knowing what to do about it, who tinker with genes and evolution, who try to hold back the ocean and re-direct the elements–would have been called radical, e.g. disruptive of the established order, subversive of traditional values and adaptive human experience, mockers of useful and necessary emotions like fear and distrust, and promoters of an increasingly lethal society rather than defenders of human health and welfare.

The true conservative–which includes the riskee–demands, at the very least, a demonstration of little or no harm, reversibility, and alternatives. He or she resists coercion, imposition of physical harm and involuntary risk, asking questions about how the proposed action may harm or benefit that person as well as others, and how it will fit in with and sustain societal values and institutions, as well as asking what new kinds of institutions it may require for its acceptance and continuance. The conservative gives more weight to scientific disagreements and the limits of knowledge, rejects the argument that life inevitably involves incremental risks, refuses to justify creation of new risks simply because of pre-existing or unavoidable ones, and seeks, as John Holdren says, to "minimize the social costs of uncertainty", or, as I put it, to minimize the opportunities for mischief.

As for the famed "cost-benefit" ratio, scientists should be very careful when using this, for by implying benefits they imply not the practice of "pure" science but its application. Once these are implied, the benefits, speculative or not, are available for social scrutiny and possibly rejection.

By employing the criterion of usefulness, the scientist becomes personally responsible for the consequences and applications of his work, whether it be atomic bombs or social engineering through genetic manipulation.

Another argument often heard to promote things like nuclear power is that failure to continue it will deprive future generation of this energy source. I need not point out that there is a vast ethical difference between the consequences of not acting and acting. Those who witness a crime without acting to stop it are reprehensible; those who commit the crime are guilty and punishable by law. The future can forgive us for not doing something but never for doing something irreparable and irreversible. In fact, most societies laud those who actively help to prevent violence and physical harm–except ours, which castigates them. For the future, which choice makes sense? To do nothing and deprive it of a (possible) cure for diabetes, or do something and deliver them millions of curies of radioactive substances? Is it better to deprive the future of a cure or deprive them of a catastrophe?

The promotion of lethal technologies by self-interested parties, in the guise of "objective" science, is part of a vaster problem, which I stated previously as the perversion of the scientific method. Konrad Lorenz wrote that it was his habit upon arising each morning to discard a pet hypothesis. Normally most scientists do this when they are faced with non-corroborating data. With nuclear energy, we have the exact opposite: promulgation of an hypothesis (nuclear energy–or nuclear reactor–is clean, safe, necessary), accompanied by a careful selection of those data and studies which support it, and discarding or suppression of those that contradict it. In the former category we have the WASH-1400 Reactor Safety Study, intended by its manufacturers and purveyors to be of "substantial benefit" to the nuclear industry, the infamous, now-retracted Inhaber comparative risk study of nuclear and solar energy, the selective, deliberately incomplete Atomic Industrial Forum study on nuclear and coal plant efficiency, with moral support and propaganda provided by such illustrious bodies as Science, now become house organ for the nuclear industry, and the New York Academy of Sciences' recent Three Mile Island Conference. Simply put, scientists cannot be accepted as both technical experts and proponents, though many of them aggressively seek both these roles. In any case, nuclear power plants are no more or less safe as designed and operated than other machines; but the consequences of failure, human or mechanical, are far greater, and nuclear scientists and engineers cannot be permitted to impose theircriteria of social acceptability of such failure on others.

Some years ago a a group of prominent scientists, including the President of Harvard University, issued a statement in utter seriousness attacking astrology. That they felt compelled to do this at all surprised me, since astrology strikes me as an utterly harmless pastime that imposes no cost or risk on society at large. The thrust of the attack was that the public was being deceived into thinking that astrology was a science, based on scientific "fact" or "truth", whereas it really was based, in their opinion, on irrational faith and superstition. Further comment is really not needed, but it is hard to resist the comment that few things are more irrational than the faith of those in the nuclear establishment regarding the low probability of accidents and the disposal of radioactive waste and its isolation form the biosphere for millennia. And when one sees molecular biologists blithely crossing species barriers and creating new strains of life in test tubes while deprecating a suggestion that such research might create virulent organisms or lead to social misuse of this work, then I wonder which of these schools–the astrologers or the scientists–is based on irrationality and blind faith. Nowadays it is the scientist who mocks what is most natural and useful in man–intuition. Who is deceiving the public more? And which is more dangerous?

Ultimately we must face the real Faustian bargain, which concerns not only knowledge but its control, and must recognize those issues and areas of study where human control may be worse than none at all, especially where it may give the illusion of safety and protection.

In this context some areas of science may have to be placed off bounds, and we may have to recognize that science may have a more limited value to society than scientists would wish, and that people may place other values above those of science. In this respect nuclear energy, recombinant DNA research and its application eminently qualify for exclusion. The by-products of nuclear power affect and control our gene pool by accident, while those of recombinant DNA control it intentionally. And just as humans have always understood the need to protect themselves from natural harm, such as flood, earthquake, hurricane, disease, they must learn, through control and selection of technologies, to defend themselves from man-made harm, which may mean refusing to do certain things at all. Those scientists who do not practice this self-restraint only help to erode scientific legitimacy, and if they persist in calling modern technology too complex for ordinary mortals to understand, then perhaps this automatically may make these technologies unfit for a democratic society.

Questions and Answers

Q: I'd like to compliment you on a very eloquent statement of your views. In fact, I think it's one of the better statements that I've seen along these lines. I'd like to ask, however, whether your opposition to nuclear energy is limited to nuclear reactors or whether you are calling attention to the use of nuclear weapons and our military program as well, which, as I understand it, produces a greater risk than does the civilian program. Which is it?

A: My view are inclusive

Q: You believe the military program should be stopped?

A: Absolutely

Q: How about genetic, say hospital research and things of this nature involving radiation? Do you believe that should be stopped?

A: Medical research, no. I would not terminate it. I think there is a vast difference–technically and ethically, providing that the disposal, the handling of the disposal, of nuclear materials in medicine is done properly, not flushed down the toilet, or out the smoke stack. Actually the disposal of medial waste is far simpler than commercial waste, providing that it is done properly. You are dealing with an individual decision and an individual risk taking rather than one that is generally imposed on society.

Q: I'm not sure I could agree with that, but in reality, how would you obtain the nuclear materials available for medicine?

A: You would have to have a small research reactor to produce those isotopes. It wouldn't have to be on a scale, in terms of size or numbers, of the existing program.

Q: Presuming we eliminate nuclear reactors, should we also eliminate coal-burning power plants?

A: We're getting into a very broad question here which wasn't quite touched on. There again, I follow the concept of soft energy. Given the fact that electricity is not our main problem–liquid fuels is our energy problem–we don't need growth in electricity then we probably don't need much coal either.

Q: You don't feel we need electricity?

A: I think electricity is pretty well saturated. Perhaps not to the utilities' liking in economic terms, but in terms of potential end uses, I think it is at a saturation point, with the exception of possible replacements of older plants. But, even there, I think you will find co-generation and energy efficiency and photovoltaic cutting into that, too. So, if you don't need more electricity, you don't need coal plants either.

Q: Do you feel that there are no growth opportunities?

A: No. I was talking about providing energy services at the point of the end user, that has nothing to do with growth. I can see tremendous growth potential, using the criteria of the previous speaker, for jobs, currency stability and clean environment. I would say that renewable energy, which includes efficiency, cogeneration as well as various forms of solar, fits these goals.

Q: Considering how dilute the solar is on the Earth, I would question that it could serve a very large society.

A: Well, it's dilute but it's quite diverse.

Q: Going back, then, you feel that the existing sources–oil, gas, coal, etc.–are acceptable sources.

A: It depends on the time period you are talking about. I don't think there is any question that we will be in a solar society by the middle of the next century. It is a question of whether we will make decisions between now and then that will enable the peaceful transition with hardship in terms of employment and inflation. I think that is the question. There is no question we will be there. In fact, I've heard many proponents of nuclear technology talk of it as an interim energy source. Although the wastes are not interim, they speak of the technology.

Q: It is my understanding that a coal generating plant will emit more radiation directly into the atmosphere than will a nuclear plant.

A: There are many different kinds of radiation products, some of which are not as intensely radioactive as others. There again, I'm assuming a dirty coal plant and a perfectly operating nuclear plant. If you look at the entire fuel cycle, which on the nuclear side includes the mining of uranium and the creation of mill tailings, which are hazards, then there is no question that there is far more radioactivity of different and more dangerous kinds in the nuclear cycle.

Source: Energy Magazine. Proceedings from 1980 Fourth Annual International Conference on Energy - "The Energy Revolution: Its Impact on Industry and Society".

In the aftermath of the near meltdown at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania, we are already being inundated with the government-and-industry sales pitch about how safe nuclear power is and how we won't survive without it. Don't fall for it. Scientists who have studied the short and long-term effects of radiation, closely and for years, know that people will die as a direct result of the low-level radiation released in that nuclear accident.

Low-level radiation is defined as being within the limits set by the government for nuclear workers and non-workers in one year from all sources, from 500 millirems (half a rem) to 12 rems. Nuclear workers are allowed 5 rems per year, but with their curious exposure-bank-account system, they can get up to 12 rems from their work alone. Then there are background radiation, medical and dental x-rays, and fallout to add to the load they carry.

There are different kinds of radioactivity, which act in different ways. Alpha particles, given off by uranium and plutonium and their decay products, are not very penetrating, but if inhaled or absorbed in a wound, they irradiate a small area intensely and almost certainly induce cancer. Beta particles, such as those given off by strontium-90, a fission product created in reactors, are somewhat more penetrating and are also dangerous if lodged in tissues. Gamma rays, given off by iodine-131, another fission product as well as X rays and neutrons, are highly penetrating. They may pass through the body's cells harmlessly or cause damage that can be repaired, or they may kill cells entirely. But worst of all, they can do damage to a cell without impairing its ability to reproduce. This can lead to cancer or genetic damage.

Of greatest concern in a reactor are the fission products, primarily iodine-131 (gamma), strontium-90 (beta), and cesium-137 (gamma), which concentrate in the thyroid, bone, and tissues respectively. Iodine-131 has only an eight-day half-life. That means half of a given quantity decays in eight days, half the remaining quantity decays in another eight days, and so on. But the shorter the half-life, the more radiation is being given off per unit of time, hence the concern about iodine. Strontium and cesium have about thirty-year half-lives, but they are deposited in soil and concentrate in the human food chain. Thus they persist for hundreds of years. We are still ingesting these elements that came down from the nuclear weapons tests fallout in the Fifties and Sixties, as well as the tons of vaporized plutonium (half-life 24,0000 years) that will circulate in the northern hemisphere essentially forever.

A controversy over iodine in the Harrisburg area milk arose because of the government's attempts to downplay the dangers of radioactive iodine, and some basic facts need to be restated. First, all experts agree that no level of radiation is safe, and the increments from any source result in statistically certain increases in the occurrence of cancer and genetic damage. For this reason it would be prudent health practice to minimize radiation exposure, particularly if there is no benefit in the exposure (such as with medical X rays). Because there is no safe level, or threshold, for radiation damage, there is a continuum of "health effects" (a euphemism for cancer) from any given exposure, with certain parts of the population, such as pregnant women, infants, the elderly, and others susceptible. Even the small amounts of iodine released from Three Mile Island will result in extra cancer cases and genetic effects; the only problem is that we do not know who will suffer or when, due to the long latency period of most cancers. (Nor will we know for sure just how much was released, to be ingested by people, since the government cannot be trusted to tell us, nor was radiation monitoring begun until three days after the accident). One estimate, based on the government's own figures, postulated fifty latent cancer deaths from the increased background radiation levels. In any case, it will be many years before those health effects are perceived, and even then they will not be distinguishable from cancers from other causes.

But one thing is certain: Most, if not all, of these cancers could have been prevented by prompt evacuation of all people in the area and by converting local milk to dried milk products that could be stored for a month to maximize iodine-131 decay. The government also commissioned drug companies to produce and rush a million doses of potassium iodide to the area. (The chemical floods the thyroid gland with safe iodine, so that radioactive iodine is flushed out of the body through urination.) But it was not distributed to the people, except among the plant workers. Why were these simple protective actions avoided? To prevent public panic and fear! This avoidance amounts to an indirect act of murder, because it resulted in totally unnecessary increased radiation exposure to local people, some of whom will develop cancer as a result.

The government continues to issue misleading and murderous misinformation about so-called safe levels of iodine in milk. During nuclear tests in the Sixties, protective action, such as feeding cows stored feed and using dried milk, was recommended if iodine-131 concentrations in milk exceeded 100 picocuries (trillionths of a curie) per liter. During the 1976 fallout crisis from Chinese nuclear tests, Pennsylvania's radiological bureau used this level but then raised it to 500 under pressure from dairy unions. The government itself used 4,000 picocuries at the time as the protective-action level, and now, after Three Mile Island, it actually raised the protective-action level to 12,000!

Does this mean that higher levels are safe? Not by a long shot. There is no scientific basis for this arbitrary increase–the intent is to prevent public alarm and to allay concerns about food supplies: to make us think radiation exposure is okay. As always, the government acts as protector of private economic interests and the utilities, not of public health and safety. By suppressing the facts about the true impact of the Pennsylvania accident and its radiation releases, the government continues a long tradition of lying. Can you see what else they are telling us? They are admitting that the truth about the risks of nuclear energy cannot stand up to public scrutiny. If you could know the truth, you would not put up with it!
Lorna Salzman is the mid-Atlantic representative of Friends of the Earth, a national environmental organization of over 20,000 members.

Source: Gallery, 8/79.

Undoubtedly what this "advisory committee" had discovered was that my article was about male birders LIKE THEM. Early on Floyd himself apparently had no problem with the article but when confronted by the Old Boy Network he knuckled under without a whimper of protest. According to some people, this was the first time anyone had heard of any Birding "advisory committee" at the magazine, and one person inquired as to just what the magazine had an editor for in the first place if not to make editorial decisions on his/her own. Good question. (Recall the maxim about the horse designed by a committee, which turned out to be a camel).

In any case the killing of this article by the Old Boys at ABA definitively confirms the subtext of my article.They are living proof of the omnipresent threat of male birders to women and perfect examples of why and how men continue to dominate not only the profession but how they want to suppress public discourse about their behavior...........Lorna Salzman)

Some people still think birding is a backyard hobby of little old ladies in tennis sneakers. In fact it has become a highly competitive contact sport for macho types, who vastly outnumber females in the field.

Looking at the strongly skewed ratio of male to female birders, it becomes clear that there must be special hazards and risks that discourage women from participating in this popular sport. And in much the same way that obstacles to women in other competitive sports have been gradually overcome, it is incumbent on the presently male-dominated birding community to overturn the barriers to female participation so as to achieve gender parity in the field.

The general dangers presented to all birders are always with us: ticks, snakes, chiggers, mosquitoes, jaguars, Montezuma's Revenge and rental car breakdowns, though these are not found necessarily in the same place at the same time. Through the rapid communication offered by the internet and by specialized publications and bird clubs, birders have quickly learned how to minimize these omnipresent risks. With the exception of the professional trip leader who decided to investigate on behalf of his group a loud noise in the Indian jungle and was later found half-eaten by a tiger, most birders have learned how to keep insects more or less at bay, how to walk carefully on an untrodden trail, and how to recognize jaguar tracks. In any case the risks posed by wildlife in the United States are generally far less than those of tropical countries.

But there is another risk that is ubiquitous, on all continents and in all climates, which uniquely targets women birders, and which requires careful, calculated responses: men. In order to sensitize themselves to this special hazard, and most of all to develop appropriate defensive measures, women need to understand the behavior and ecology of the male sex, or rather of that morph of the male sex whose niche lies in bird habitats.

All male birders should be regarded as alpha males, even those lacking the typical physical characteristics. Many of these who might otherwise have served in the US Marines or in major league football are, either literally or figuratively, 90-pound weaklings who never read a Charles Atlas ad or assumed it didn't apply to them. But it does apply, whether they are 5'5" or 6"6"' tall,because if they are the former, that makes them even more aggressive and competitive. Thus, women, on encountering male birders in the wild, should assume the worst and not judge male physical size and bulk alone.

While some men may lack the physical equipment of alpha males, size matters in one crucial respect: binoculars. Apparently the binocular manufacturers are colluding with male birders. If you look carefully, you will see that nearly all the new improved binoculars advertised to and bought by the birding community are ten power rather than the old-fashioned seven or eight power type. And although new light materials are used, the new ten power binocs are extremely expensive and often heavier than the old type. An analysis of these facts tells us that the manufacturers took the male birders aside and whispered in their ears: "Psst, I've got a great deal for you. These binoculars are very expensive so frugal women won't buy them, and best of all they are too big and heavy for most women to carry, so you can spot those rare birds faster than they can". A male birder hearing this is hooked because it means that he can make a rapid identification before the woman can focus on the bird, and in most cases the bird will already have flushed before she sees it, thus insuring that she cannot challenge the man's ID.

It is important to understand the primary differences between men and women birders. They have not only different behavior but different objectives and therefore different strategies.In the field these will frequently clash. Therefore Assertiveness Training is a fundamental prerequisite for women before they can hold their own. The male goals are: maximization of species numbers; being the first to spot a new bird; finding a rarity. Anything that interferes with or poses an obstacle to these is considered detrimental and hostile, and the male behavioral response to such obstacles is calculated accordingly.

Female birders' objectives - and thus their strategies - are diametrically opposed to those of men: to have fun, learn about the ecology of birds, see interesting habitat and appreciate Nature. Thus, they should expect their presence in particular and participation in general to be regarded by male birders as hostile. With a little practice the following recommendations of adaptive behavior in the field should become second nature to women birders.

1. Your first impression is always correct. If you think you see a black bird with a yellow head, you have indeed seen one, even if this is literally your first foray into the field. Don't let any male question your observation. You were right.

2. There are no "rare" birds. Most birds called "rare" by men are birds they studied with extreme care and memory training in a book, not birds they ever actually saw in their lifetime. In practice the birds called "rare" by men (and few will dare to challenge them) will be those that no one else saw or was able to see, such as the out-of-range Manx shearwater seen fifteen miles away on the horizon of a black ocean, on an overcast morning, during a pelagic trip 80 miles out to sea, with eight -foot swells and a wildly rocking boat. (I was on that boat so I know whereof I speak.) If you find yourself in that situation, pull out your bird book and give the man a quiz: ask him to provide every field mark he saw and prove to everyone's satisfaction that it was indeed a Manx. This may take some courage but you need not worry that his troops will come to his rescue; they are all inside the cabin, eyes closed, manifesting a peculiar shade of yellowish-green. (Note: all beginning birders will sooner or later see a "rare" bird but eventually as the birders become more experienced, those rare sightings will diminish and eventually disappear).

3. Vernacular and traditional names are still valid such as Baltimore oriole and Myrtle warbler. Or Bluebill or timberdoodle. (Caution: the old-time vernacular for cormorants is disallowed). Don't let the self-styled male experts intimidate you or demand that you recite the full list of the most recent AOU species splits. Traditional and vernacular names are a vital part of birding history and culture so use them at every opportunity to keep birding a popular, not an elitist, pastime.

4. It is better to be a Splitter than a Lumper nowadays. Scientific advances in DNA analysis mean that new species are being split off from previous parent species faster than you can say "Drink your tea". But of course this can change so be alert.

5. DON'T, I repeat, Don't memorize birds from the book and then take off looking for them hither and thither. You will end up seeing memorized birds in wholly inappropriate habitats and will look foolish. Even worse, the B3 (Black Belt Birders, the avian equivalent of the Mafia) will put out a contract on you. This happened on a trip in South America where a male, not a female, tripmate, having read about an ancient Oilbird spotting in the area, ID'ed a single supposed Oilbird flying up a tiny stream at final dusk. He wasn't concerned about the fact that South America has only a handful of Oilbird cave colonies, separated by hundreds or thousands of miles, or that Oilbirds emerge at night and travel huge distances to feed in huge flocks not on riverine vegetation but solely on oil palms, or that the bird he saw was about one quarter the size of an Oilbird. But the B3 were just getting organized so the spotting of the purported Oilbird - in reality a small duck -- went unpunished. Today that spotter would be kneecapped had he been a woman, but being a man he got off with a light sentence: stepping out of a small boat, he slipped and fell into thick black mud up to his keister.

6. Be suspicious of any male birder who scorns the "clock" method of locating birds in a tree. This is hostility in the extreme because it is intended to impair or delay the enjoyment of the other birders. This method, which uses the highest central point of the tree as high noon, and the sides of the tree as a.m. and p.m., is extremely useful and works very well, saving a lot of time for less experienced birders who might otherwise search every leaf and never find the bird. The same men who scorn the clock method are the ones who call out a new bird and, when asked where it is, hem and haw and say: well, I guess it's out there in that tall tree between that small green shrub and that other tree, guaranteeing that by the time you have found the right tree the bird is gone. So the Guy chalks up the bird on his list and the others don't. This is what could be called Arboreal Upsmanship.

7. If you are a woman birder, NEVER bird in a group unless there is at least one other woman present, stick together, support each other, point out the birds to each other before you point them out to the men, and always take the offensive, not the defensive. If you see a new or unusual bird, do not under any circumstances allow your attention to be diverted away from the bird! Continue to study the bird and its characteristics and behavior, while noting its presence out loud so others can hear, but do not take down your binoculars or look away until you have examined it as best you can. All around you men will be demanding that you specify where it is; do not let them distract you until you are sure you have seen everything you need to see. You can be sure that if the situation were reversed, they would not defer to you. Hold your ground.

8. On pelagic trips, always stand at the rail and never move away. When a bird is spotted and everyone crowds to the rail, remember that the men are taller than you and can see over or around you quite well. They can take care of themselves.

Finally, some words of encouragement for those women birders who have unwittingly and unwillingly let themselves become awed by male birders:

Whatever happens, it's not your fault. The men are not always right. You are having more fun.

(Note: names have been withheld to protect the innocent; the guilty will recognize themselves. All situations and incidents, however, are taken from real life).

For identification purposes: Lorna Salzman, an environmental activist and writer, has travelled widely with her husband on most continents to see birds. She does not keep totals of birds seen.