Cancer and nuclear power: a mistake in search of a mission, by gimleteye

FPL is planning a massive expansion of its nuclear power capacity at Turkey Point, and so far, neighboring communities are quiet as mice. But that's Homestead and Florida City for you: places where ordinary people have been so beaten down by special interests and insiders, there's practically not a word of dissent. It's tragic, really, to watch how local government works in South Dade and who local government works for.

But that is no excuse for people to roll over and ignore real risks to health that local officials seems determined to ignore, as though they don't breathe the same air or drink the same water as everyone else.

Dr. Jerry Brown is not a favorite of the nuclear power industry, or, of FPL. Lots of money has been spent to discredit his work in South Florida like the Tooth Fairy Project which measured for radiation in baby's teeth in the area. Here's an excerpt worth reading from his new book published by the World Business Academy, "Freedom from Mideast Oil" and the chapter, "Nuclear Power: A mistake in search of a mission".

"We are well aware that the following information may be new, even shocking to some readers. But no discussion of the nuclear power option would be complete without acknowledging the growing body of medical and scientific evidence linking federally-permitted radiation releases from operating nuclear power plants to cancer rates in the United States."

"Today, 50% of men and 40% of women will contract some form of cancer during their lifetimes. Each year, approximately 1.5 million Americans are diagnosed with cancer and over 560,000 die of cancer.

It is probable that cancer rates have soared during the second half of the 20th century partly as a result of the radioactivity released initially from the massive Cold War atmospheric bomb testing during the 1950s and early 1960s, and more recently from nuclear power plants during the 1970s and continuing up to the present. Much consideration has been given to the health ef­fects of a large-scale meltdown of a reactor's core (where heat is produced) and its spent fuel pools (where high-level radioactive waste is stored). The discussion about safe maintenance of spent fuel rod cooling ponds and reactor vessels themselves has been particularly serious since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. What if just one airplane that day had struck a nuclear reactor vessel rather than the World Trade Center or Pentagon? Such an air strike would have created a major meltdown at the reactor. Most reactors are near large cities, and a strike would cause the worst environmental catastrophe in US. history, com­parable to the aftermath of the Chernobyl accident in 1986 in the former Soviet Union.

Nuclear reactors, however, pose significant health concerns even in the absence of meltdowns. During normal operations every nuclear reactor in the world is a source of routine radio­active emissions. To produce electricity by means of nuclear fission, each reactor must periodically emit relatively low-dose amounts of airborne and liquid radioactivity. This radioactivity represents some 50 to 100 different isotopes produced in reac­tors and atomic bombs, including Strontium-89, Strontium-90, Cesium-137, and Iodine-131, all known carcinogens.25 Some of these isotopes are short-lived by-products that decay in a matter of weeks, while others remain lethal for decades. The long-lived isotopes can produce internal doses of radiation in humans as a result of inhalation from air or ingestion from food or water.

Each of these isotopes interacts differently with the human body: iodine seeks out the thyroid gland; strontium, which is chemically similar to calcium, concentrates in the bone, irradi­ating the bone marrow where the white cells of the immune sys­tem originate; cesium is distributed throughout the soft tissues. All are highly carcinogenic. Each decays at varying rates. For example, Iodine-131 has a half-life of eight days, and remains in the body only a few weeks. Strontium-90 has a half-life of 28.7 years, and thus remains in bones and newly-forming teeth of children for more than three decades.

These internally ingested toxins are different from external sources of radioactivity such as medical x-rays, cosmic rays and gamma rays from the explosion of an atomic bomb or from ra­dioactive uranium and radium in the soil. These highly penetrat­ing background forms of radiation pass through the body and do not concentrate or bio-accumulate in specific organs, as do in­haled or ingested particles of Iodine-131 in the thyroid gland or Strontium-90 in bone, which result in local organ damage hun­dreds to thousands of times greater than the whole-body doses from external sources.

For decades, scientists have documented harm from relative­ly low-dose exposures to radiation previously presumed to be safe, particularly to the developing fetus in the mother's womb. In the 1950s British physician Dr. Alice Stewart found that ad­ministering just two or three pelvic X-rays to pregnant women shortly before birth nearly doubled the risk that the child would die from cancer by age 10.26 But not until 1997, under pressure from Congress, did the National Cancer Institute publish its es­timate that "up to 212,000 Americans developed thyroid cancer after ingesting fallout from above ground nuclear weapons tests in Nevada:'27

More recently, the US Congress acknowledged that thousands of workers in atomic weapons plants developed cancer and other diseases in excess of the normally expected rate. In October 2000, Congress passed and President Clinton signed into law the Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensa­tion Act. This legislative package is designed to provide health care and compensation to certain groups of nuclear weapons workers who were injured from occupational exposure to ra­diation, beryllium, or silica. In addition to providing some 4,000 eligible workers or their survivors with a lump sum payment of $150,000, the legislation gives the benefit of the doubt to a "spe­cial exposure cohort" of workers with radiogenic cancers and presumes that their illness resulted from workplace exposure to radiation.

Elevated levels of leukemia diagnosed as early as in the first year of life have been found in children born in the U S. in 1986 and 1987, just after the fallout from the Chernobyl disaster ar­rived, showing a latency period of less than two years between in-utero exposure and diagnosis. Similar increases in infant leu­kemia, accompanied by other childhood cancers and twice as many brain cancers, have been documented in several other na­tions, including Belarus, Greece, Scotland, Wales, West Germa­ny, and other European countries which received direct fallout from Chernobyl.2s

In 1963, the Atomic Energy Commission (predecessor to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission) hired Dr. John Gofman to establish the Biomedical Research Division at the federal Livermore Laboratory and to investigate the impact of radiation on humans. By 1969, Dr. Gofman and his colleague Dr. Arthur Tamplin had concluded that, if everyone in the United States received the official "permissible" dose of radiation from nuclear power plants, at the time 170 millirems per year, an addition­al 16,000 to 32,000 cancer deaths would be caused annually.29 Writing in Poisoned Power, Gofman and Tamplin concluded:

Radioactivity represents one of the worst, maybe the worst of all poisons. And it is manufactured as an inevitable by product of nuclear electricity generation. One year of operation of a single, large nuclear reactor plant generates as much long-persisting radioactive poisons as one thousand Hiroshima-type atomic bombs. There is no way the electric power can be generated in nuclear plants without generating the radioactive poisons.3o

Cancer rates in persons living near nuclear power reactors have by now been studied in dozens of medical journal articles. For example, at least 12 studies have demonstrated high rates of childhood cancer near various nuclear plants in the United Kingdom. In the US., fewer studies have been done on child­hood cancer near nuclear plants, but they showed a similar pat­tern of significant increases especially in the downwind area.31

But cancer increases were not confined to children. In 1996, the Radiation and Public Health Project published a study, based on National Cancer Institute data collected since 1950 on white female breast cancer mortality, which found that "women living close to reactors are at significantly greater risk of dying of breast cancer than those living further away:'32 The possibility that this increased cancer risk is the result of other factors, such as other environmental toxins, economic status, or ethnicity, is mitigated by another study which found that infant death and childhood cancer rates declined dramatically in downwind counties two years after nuclear plant closings.33

After demonstrating a nationwide correlation between prox­imity to nuclear power plants and breast cancer death rates, Radiation and Public Health Project scientists looked next for physical evidence that would show if radiation levels were in­creasing in the bodies of children living close to nuclear power plants. In order to gather this evidence, researchers initiated the first-ever study of in-body radioactivity near US. nuclear plants. Popularly known as the "baby teeth study;' the research involved the collection of discarded baby teeth and independent labora­tory testing for levels of radioactive Strontium-90.
The baby teeth study is not without scientific precedent. It is based on an earlier effort to measure Strontium-90 in baby teeth due to nuclear weapons testing during the Cold War. A study in St. Louis collected over 300,000 baby teeth (between 1958 and 1970) and measured them for Strontium-90. The St. Louis baby teeth study showed that, because of fall-out from atomic bomb testing in Nevada, children born in 1964 had about 50 times greater concentrations of Strontium-90 in their teeth than did children born in 1950. It also found that in-body levels of Strontium-90 decreased from 1964 to 1969, after the 1963 Par­tial Test Ban Treaty signed by President John F. Kennedy banned all above-ground testing of nuclear weapons.
However, this decline did not continue to the present time as expected. As shown in Figure 2 of a recent paper, ''An Un­expected Rise in Strontium-90 in US. Deciduous Teeth in the 1990s;' published in The Science of the Total Environment, re­searchers found that "Strontium-90 ... levels rose 48.5% for per­sons born in the late 1990s compared to those born in the late 1980s. This trend represented the first sustained increase since the early 1960s, before atmospheric weapons test were banned:' Since there was a large rise in the number of nuclear plants as well as a great increase in the percentage of time they operated per year, the paper concludes that, "It is likely that, 40 years after large-scale atmospheric atomic bomb tests ended, much of the current in-body radioactivity represents nuclear reactor emis­sions:'34

This recent rise of radiation levels in US. baby teeth thus re­versed a long-term downward trend in Strontium-90 levels fol­lowing the 1963 Partial Test Ban Treaty. President Kennedy ne­gotiated the treaty with the Soviet Union and the UK. partly due to his concerns about increasing Strontium-90 in baby teeth ac­companied by rising childhood cancer and leukemia rates from fallout. Thus, Kennedy's action was based in part on precisely the same kind of technique of measuring Strontium-90 levels used in the later baby teeth study.

In evaluating the data presented in the Radiation and Public Health Project's South Florida baby teeth study, Samuel Epstein, M.D., professor emeritus of Environmental Health and Occupa­tional Medicine at the University of Illinois, wrote:
Given prior evidence of the relationship between childhood cancer and radioactive emissions from 103 aging nuclear power plants in the US., and the well-established biological risks of radioactive Strontium-90, it is now critical to recognize that radioactive emissions from commercial nuclear power plants pose a grave threat to public health in southeast Florida and throughout the nation.

In its most recent assessment of Health Risks from Exposure to Low Levels of Ionizing Radiation, the National Academy of Science's National Research Council reported that "a prepon­derance of scientific evidence shows that even low doses of ion­izing radiation, such as gamma rays and X-rays, are likely to pose some risk of adverse heath effects:' Committee chair Dr. Richard R. Monson, Harvard School of Public Health, observed that "the scientific research base shows that there is no thresh­old of exposure below which low levels of ionizing radiation can be demonstrated to be harmless or beneficiaI:'35
Similar concerns about the health effects of low dose ion­izing radiation have been raised by the European Committee on Radiation Risk (European Committee). The European Commit­tee used a new model for assessing cancer risks that takes into account the predominance of internal doses and the evidence of a supra-linear dose-response caused by protracted exposures to internal doses produced by low levels of fission products. Based on this assessment, the 2003 European Committee report "pre­dicts 61,600,000 deaths from cancer, 1,600,000 infant deaths, and 1,900,000 fetal deaths" world-wide as a result of the nuclear age. The report states, "The committee concludes that the pres­ent cancer epidemic is a consequence of exposures to global atmospheric weapons fallout in the period 1959-1963 and that more recent releases of radioisotopes to the environment from the operation of the nuclear fuel cycle will result in significant increases in cancer and other types of ill health:'36

It should be noted that these findings indicating a causal link between the low-level radiation released by the normal opera­tions of nuclear power plants and serious health effects have not yet been acknowledged by US. government health agencies or any major medical and public health associations in the US. or the European Union. They have been vigorously denied by the nuclear utilities, the Nuclear Energy Institute, the us. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and the International Commission on Radiological Protection. In fact, rather than calling for an inde­pendent assessment of the heath risks of America's aging reac­tors, the Nuclear Energy Institute, the trade association of the nuclear industry, prefers to shoot the messenger by labeling the baby teeth study as "junk science;' despite the fact that its find­ings have been published in more than a dozen scientific articles in peer-reviewed journals and are supported by the 2003 Euro­pean Committee report.37

Thus, the science behind these ominous conclusions is strong and will likely prove to be fully supported by supplemental anal­ysis in the future. In fact, we believe delving into these horrific cancer statistics to ascertain the safety of normal nuclear op­erations should be the first assignment Congress gives itself before appropriating another dime of public money to build new nuclear power plants.

Since the beginning of the nuclear age over a half-century ago, human beings have been the unwitting subjects of a monu­mental, albeit unintended, radiation experiment initially involving atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons, and subsequently, radiation releases from nuclear power plants. It took decades before the links between other known carcinogens, such as as­bestos, tobacco, and vinyl chlorine, were formally acknowledged by medical professionals and government public health officials. There seems to be a growing momentum behind a similar pro­cess of scientific peer review and validation to assess the public health impact of internally-ingested environmental radiation re­leased by nuclear power reactors. At a time of escalating health care costs, it is only prudent for business leaders to consider increasing cancer rates as a "significant risk factor" in any discussion of a nuclear power revival; spiraling healthcare costs hit corporate balance sheets when a government committed to pro­motion of nuclear reactors and weapons fails to do its job."