Russian nuclear accident: Medics fear ‘radioactive patients’, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-49432681 23 Aug 19, Russian medics who treated radiation victims after a military explosion in the Arctic had no protection and now fear they were irradiated themselves.
Two of the medics in Arkhangelsk spoke to BBC Russian about the victims’ evacuation, on condition of anonymity.
Five nuclear engineers died on 8 August when an “isotope-fuel” engine blew up at the Nyonoksa test range, officials said. Two military personnel also died.
President Vladimir Putin said the test involved a new weapon system.
Six people were injured in the accident, but officials gave few details about it.
On 14 August Russia’s weather service Rosgidromet revealed that radiation levels had spiked 16 times above normal, in Severodvinsk, a city 47km (29 miles) east of Nyonoksa.
According to the official data, the radiation that reached Severodvinsk was not heavy enough to cause radiation sickness.
Experts in Russia and the West say the test was most likely linked to the new 9M730 Burevestnik nuclear-powered cruise missile, called “Skyfall” by Nato. Last year Mr Putin said the technology would give the missile “unlimited” range.
The Arkhangelsk medics, who spoke to the BBC’s Pavel Aksenov, said at least 90 people came into contact with the casualties, but the military did not warn them of any nuclear contamination risk.
Contamination fears
The medics were at the civilian Arkhangelsk regional hospital, which treated three of the injured, while three other casualties were taken to an Arkhangelsk hospital called Semashko, which is equipped for radiation emergencies.
The medics said they were speaking out now because they feared for their own health and did not want any similar “[safety] violations” to recur.
“We don’t want them to bring us next time not three, but ten people, God forbid, and hide the information from us again,” said one.
The degree of secrecy surrounding the explosion has drawn comparisons with the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, when Soviet officials were slow to admit the truth.
The Arkhangelsk medics said it was clear that the three brought to their regional hospital were very sick. Doctors examined them in the emergency room, then sent them to an operating theatre.
But the emergency room continued to admit other patients for about an hour, the medics said, until the doctors realised that the three “had received a very high radiation dose”. The hospital handles pregnancy complications and other difficult medical conditions.
“The radiation picture was developing by the hour. Blood tests were being done, and every hour you could see that this or that cell count was plunging. That signified a very high radiation dose,” they said.
The hospital staff kept treating the victims despite knowing about the radiation dose. The staff had to improvise some self-protection – for example, they took face masks from the helicopter crews’ emergency kit.
The next day the three victims were transferred to a hospital in Moscow which has radiation specialists. Their condition now is unknown.
Nuclear decontamination
A military team later carried out decontamination work in the Arkhangelsk hospital.
The medics said the casualties’ clothing was removed, along with stretchers and a “highly radioactive bath”.
“Our cleaners should have been advised, they’re just simple country folk, they were just picking up sacks and bundles and carrying them out,” said one.
The other medic said hospital staff were now mentally stressed, knowing that radiation safety information had been withheld from them during the emergency.
Two weeks after the explosion the Russian health ministry said none of the medics at the Arkhangelsk hospitals had received a hazardous radiation dose. Its conclusion was based on medical examination of 91 staff.
Incomplete data
On Monday an international nuclear agency reported that the two Russian radiation monitoring stations nearest to Nyonoksa had gone offline soon after the explosion. The revelation fuelled suspicions that the radiation could have been heavier than officially reported.
The Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty Organization (CTBTO) said the technical failure at those sites was then followed by a failure at two more. It tweeted an animation showing the potential radiation plume from the explosion.
Russia said the weapons test was none of the CTBTO’s business, and added that handing over radiation data was voluntary. Two of the monitoring stations have since started working again.
August 24, 2019
Posted by Christina Macpherson |
health, Russia |
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Two victims of mysterious Russian missile blast ‘died of radiation sickness’ , By Will Englund and Natalia Abbakumova, SMH, August 22, 2019 Moscow: Two of the Russian specialists killed in the explosion at a White Sea missile testing range died not of traumatic injuries from the blast itself but of radiation sickness before they could be taken to Moscow for treatment, the independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta has reported.The paper cited an unnamed medical worker who was involved in their care. “Two of the patients did not make it to the airport and died,” the person said. “The radiation dose was very high, and symptoms of radiation sickness grew every hour.”
Their bodies were taken to the Burnazyan Federal Medical and Biophysical Centre in Moscow, a leading institution in the fields of radioactive and nuclear medicine.
The explosion occurred on August 8, on a sea-based platform off the village of Nyonoksa, in Russia’s far north. Rosatom, Russia’s atomic agency, said a device employing “isotopic sources of fuel on a liquid propulsion unit” was destroyed. Few additional details were provided…….
The doctors and nurses were made to sign nondisclosure agreements stating that information about the incident is a state secret. A doctor told Novaya: “They don’t understand what a state secret is and what the scope of this secret is and that makes the staff very nervous.” …….
Four sensors in various locations across Russia that are in place to monitor compliance with the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty stopped reporting information shortly after the explosion, as first reported by the Wall Street Journal, but at least one has since resumed.
An independent news website, Znak.com, quoted an unnamed nuclear expert as suggesting that the explosion does not pose a health threat to the general population but that the sensors may have been turned off to prevent disclosure of particular isotopes that would give clues as to the nature of the device being tested on the White Sea.
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August 22, 2019
Posted by Christina Macpherson |
health, Russia, secrets,lies and civil liberties |
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Revealed: mental health crisis at Hinkley Point C construction site.
Guardian 13th Aug 2019 Several workers on nuclear plant have killed themselves or attempted to,
says union. Hinkley is grappling with a mental illness crisis, with several
attempted suicides since work began in 2016, a Guardian investigation can
reveal.
More than 4,000 workers are on site delivering the vast decade-long
building project, a central plank in Britain’s future energy strategy. But
according to union officials, there has been a surge in suicide attempts
this year, a rise in the number of people off sick with stress, anxiety and
depression, and an increase in workers suffering from mental distress.
Officials from the Unite union say they have been told of 10 suicide
attempts in the first four months of 2019. The Guardian understands at
least two workers connected to the project have taken their lives since
construction started in earnest in 2016.
The main causes of the distress
appear to be loneliness, relationship breakdown and the struggle of being
sometimes hundreds of miles away from family. At Hinkley, workers live on
special campuses in nearby Bridgwater, or else in converted digs in the
town. They work a variety of shift patterns and are shuttled to and from
the site on scores of buses. Some contractors work as much as 11 days on
with three days off, including an extra weekend day for travelling home.
But the Guardian understands that most people can cope with the stress and
pressure of the work. The problems start once they clock off.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/aug/13/revealed-suicide-alarm-hinkley-point-c-construction-site
Guardian 13th Aug 2019 Angie Young, the health and wellbeing manger at the Hinkley Point C (HPC)
site, does not hesitate when asked what the main cause of mental health
issues there is. “It’s loneliness. You’re living away from home,
living without your family. Loneliness is the big thing.” But a major
complicating factor is that tough men who build stuff are not always great
at talking about feelings. “Our guys are construction guys – they are
macho. The average age is 45-55. They haven’t got someone nagging them to
go and see someone. We’re trying to address that.”
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/aug/13/no-more-man-up-better-mental-health-hinkley-point-c
August 15, 2019
Posted by Christina Macpherson |
employment, social effects, UK |
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Early in the summer of 1979, Larry King, an underground surveyor at the United Nuclear Corporation’s Church Rock Uranium mine in New Mexico, began noticing something unusual when looking at the south side of the tailings dam. That massive earthen wall was responsible for holding back thousands of tons of toxic water and waste produced by the mine and the nearby mill that extracted uranium from raw ore. And as King saw, there were “fist-sized cracks” developing in that wall. He measured them, reported them to his supervisors, and didn’t think anything more of it.
A few weeks later, at 5:30 a.m. on July 16, 1979, the dam failed, releasing 1,100 tons of uranium waste and 94 million gallons of radioactive water into the Rio Puerco and through Navajo lands, a toxic flood that had devastating consequences on the surrounding area.
“The water, filled with acids from the milling process, twisted a metal culvert in the Puerco,” according to Judy Pasternak’s book Yellow Dirt: A Poisoned Land and the Betrayal of the Navajos. “Sheep keeled over and died, and crops curdled along the banks. The surge of radiation was detected as far away as Sanders, Arizona, fifty miles downstream.” According to a Nuclear Regulatory Commission report, radioactivity levels in the Puerco near the breached dam were 7,000 times that of what is allowed in drinking water.
The heavily contaminated water flowed over the river banks, creating radioactive pools. “There were children up and down the river playing in those stagnant pools, and they were deadly poisonous,” Jorge Winterer, a doctor with Indian Health Service in Gallup, New Mexico, said after the spill.
Earlier this year, standing in his yard next to an old Chevy, King pointed in the direction of the now dry Rio Puerco. “It came right through there,” said King. The unleashed river of waste had flowed through his family’s land just a half-mile from his house. “I remember the terrible odor and the yellowish color of the water.” He recalls seeing an elderly woman who had burned her feet crossing the Puerco while watering her sheep that day.
King still lives on the family land, two miles downstream of the rebuilt dam in the Church Rock chapter of the Navajo Nation. His home is surrounded by a beautiful, unforgiving landscape of red rock cliffs, a scattering of Navajo residences and, if you look closely, fencelines with KEEP OUT signs marking the numerous abandoned uranium sites.
Forty years later, the Church Rock spill remains the largest single largest accidental release of radioactivity in U.S. history, worse in terms of total radiation than that of the partial meltdown at Three Mile Island and second in world history only to the 1986 Chernobyl catastrophe, both of which have loomed much larger in the cultural imagination. The effects of the spill have lingered for an entire generation: In 2007, the Church Rock Uranium Mining Project found widespread contamination of drinking water sources in the Church Rock area.
Navajo residents say they have not been given the attention given to other victims of nuclear accidents, even as they remain under the catastrophe’s long shadow, dealing with poisoned livestock and ongoing health problems amid other aftereffects. “We have never been a priority,” said King. “Forty years after the spill and nothing has been done.”
“Our generation is afraid of having children,” said Faith Baldwin, who grew up on the Navajo nation surrounded by abandoned uranium mines. “Cancer runs in our family but it shouldn’t. Cancer, diabetes were nonexistent in Navajo rez.”
During the Cold War, Navajo lands provided much of the raw material for the burgeoning nuclear industry. From 1944 to 1986 some 30 million tons of uranium ore were extracted from mines, but as demand for uranium decreased the mines closed, leaving over a thousand contaminated sites, few of which have been cleaned up.
The Church Rock Chapter has some 20 such contaminated uranium sites, including the mine where King worked. Navajo workers at these places were often poorly paid, underprotected, and uninformed about the danger of radiation exposure. And even before the spill, King said, UNC would routinely pump uranium-contaminated water from the mine into the Puerco, turning the seasonal wash into a toxic “man-made stream.” According to a 1994 report by the U.S. Geological Survey on levels of radioactive elements in the Rio Puerco and Little Colorado River basins, “at least 300 times more uranium and 6 times more total gross alpha activity were released by day-to-day pumping from the underground mines than was released by the spill.”
As a child King remembers playing in the dry Puerco wash, its banks often coated with a “yellowish slime.” And ranchers used the Puerco to water their livestock.
Residents couldn’t have known that the Church Rock dam was at risk of rupturing, but there’s evidence that the United Nuclear Corporation did. King wasn’t the first to notice cracks in the dam: An Army Corps of Engineers report would later find that UNC was aware of the cracks as early as 1977, two years before the breach. That report concluded that UNC failed to properly reinforce the tailings dam, ignored advice from its own engineering consultant that might have prevented the coming disaster, and did not report the cracks to regulators.
“The company was remiss in not heading the problem off,” said Chris Shuey, director of the Uranium Impact Assessment Program at the Southwest Research and Information Center, an organization providing information to the public about the impacts of energy development and resource extraction. Shuey said that UNC failed to repair cracks in the dam while simultaneously overfilling the uranium mill’s toxic tailing ponds that were being held back by that cracking wall.
The cleanup process after the spill was also lacking. Only 1 percent of solid radioactive waste was removed, according to Paul Robinson, the research director at the Southwest Research and Information Center, and no compensation for the nearby residents was provided. In contrast, those affected by the Three Mile Island disaster were paid thanks to the company that operated that plant and its insurers.
“Governments took meaningful measures to deal with the Three Mile Island accident,” said Eric Jantz, a lawyer from the New Mexico Environmental Law Center, “while neither the federal nor New Mexico governments have taken any steps to remediate the Church Rock spill even after 40 years.”
As time went on, the impacts of uranium exposure became more evident to residents. King watched as his former mine coworkers died early deaths. Community members complained of health problems that prior to the entrance of the uranium industry were foreign: kidney disease, bone cancer, and lung cancer afflicting non-smokers.
According to King, the only warnings about radioactivity were a few signs telling residents not to water their livestock in the wash. UNC’s cleanup efforts consisted of hiring some temporary workers to shovel waste from the wash into five-gallon buckets and haul it away, according to Colleen Keane, who made a documentary about the aftermath of the spill called The River That Harms.
In the early 90s, King joined the Eastern Navajo Diné Against Uranium Mining (ENDAUM), a grassroots organization fighting against new uranium projects and trying to mitigate the negative impacts of mining operations. Through that work, King began hearing troubling stories from nearby Red Water Pond Road, a small community sandwiched between three uranium sites where residents “unwittingly used water from contaminated wells to drink, bathe, and hydrate their livestock,” according to a 2017 Reveal article.
“Their sheep were born hairless… like baby rats,” said King. There were also the stories of butchered animals whose insides had turned a sickly yellow. A few years back, one of King’s neighbors killed a sheep. Instead of white, the stomach fat was yellow, “more yellow than those happy faces,” said King, pointing to a stuffed smiley face pinned above his couch. “They got concerned and decided to butcher another one. Pretty soon there was a pile of carcasses, all the same… They burned the whole thing.”
he health impacts of the spill on residents remain poorly understood, with only a few authoritative heath studies having been conducted.
One of the few government studies that came out after the spill did limited testing on both residents (six in total) and livestock. The resulting 1983 report from the New Mexico government, based on Centers for Disease Control (CDC) tests, concluded that Rio Puerco water “may be hazardous if used over several years as the primary source of drinking water, livestock water or irrigation water.” The report goes on to state that “the severity of these hazards is not well known at the time.”
But since then, it’s become more obvious that the spill has had long-lasting and serious effects. In 2015, Tommy Rock, a doctoral student of earth science, uncovered uranium contamination in Rio Puerco water in Sanders, a town in eastern Arizona, by looking at tests stretching back to 2003. “The Church rock spill was the single most likely cause,” he said. “For decades people were unknowingly drinking poisoned tap water.” The water company did not report the contamination to residents, and after Rock’s findings a new company took over operations and is drawing on a different well.
For many residents, the spill has come to embody the broader toxic legacy of the uranium industry on the indigenous lands of the West. According to the EPA, there are over 500 abandoned uranium mines, mill sites, and waste piles on Navajo Nation land that continue to contaminate water, soil, livestock and housing.
“The Church Rock spill symbolizes the governmental and societal indifference to the impacts of uranium development on Indigenous lands,” said Jantz. “The Church Rock spill is the third largest nuclear accident after Fukushima and Chernobyl, and the largest in the US in terms of radiation released, but nobody knows about it.”
“Three Mile Island had more coverage and people were compensated right away,” said King. “I always say we don’t get the same attention because we live in impoverished native community… We live in a sacrifice zone.”
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August 13, 2019
Posted by Christina Macpherson |
health, incidents, indigenous issues, Reference, USA |
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Pacific nuclear veterans’ descendants sought for study. https://www.odt.co.nz/news/national/pacific-nuclear-veterans-descendants-sought-study A search is underway for descendants of service personnel who witnessed a nuclear test at Mururoa Atoll to take part in a nationwide study.A Mururoa Nuclear Veterans Group wants all veterans who were deployed to Mururoa Atoll in 1973, and their families, to be part of a study as it’s believed their children may have been affected by their parents’ exposure to radiation.
The then Labour government sent a frigate to Mururoa Atoll, including then Cabinet Minister Fraser Colman, to protest against French nuclear testing there.
Mururoa Nuclear Veterans Group wants all people on the frigate, and their families to be part of a study as it’s believed their children may have been affected by their parents’ exposure to radiation. The group, which was established in 2013 to press the government to help families with nuclear related illnesses, had 135 members who served at the protest. Of those, 56 had children or grandchildren with unexplained medical conditions.
University of Otago associate professor David McBride, has been tasked with conducting the first medical testing of veterans’ children and grandchildren.
To establish whether genetic transfer of illnesses are related to exposure to nuclear radiation and create a registry “would be difficult but not impossible,” Mr McBride said.
Mururoa Nuclear Veterans Group vice-president, Tony Cox, was concerned veteran’s offspring could be more susceptible to conditions like leukaemia and auto-immune diseases.
“If we don’t do it now, when we die no one else is going to care. Their sickness and problems we consider is directly attributable to our service,” Mr Cox said.
“Be it Operation Grapple, Christmas Island, Mururoa, anywhere else … widows and children especially we are looking for.” The University of Otago will carry out the study from October or November this year, but a registry needs to be created for the study to work.
Mr Cox encouraged anyone with a nuclear testing background to come forward to take part in the study or identify themselves in order to be included in the registry.
August 12, 2019
Posted by Christina Macpherson |
health, OCEANIA, weapons and war |
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Space Radiation Will Damage Mars Astronauts’ Brains, Space.com By Mike Wall 9 Aug 19, Space radiation will take a toll on astronauts’ brains during the long journey to Mars, a new study suggests.
Mice exposed for six months to the radiation levels prevalent in interplanetary space exhibited serious memory and learning impairments, and they became more anxious and fearful as well, the study reports.
The trip to Mars takes six to nine months one way with current propulsion technology. So, these results should ring a cautionary bell for NASA and other organizations that aim to send people to the Red Planet, study team members said.
These chronic low-dose-rate, low-dose-exposure scenarios are going to increase the risk of developing, perhaps, mission-critical performance deficits,” Limoli told Space.com. “What exactly those are, we’ll never know until we get out there.”
Researchers investigating the effects of deep-space radiation have historically given lab animals acute doses — high levels over a relatively short period of time. But Limoli and his colleagues — led by Munjal Acharya and Janet Baulch of UCI’s Department of Radiation Oncology and Peter Klein of Stanford University’s Department of Neurosurgery — took a different tack.
Using a neutron-irradiation facility, they exposed 40 mice to 1 milligray of radiation per day (1 mGy/day) for six months, about the same dose and duration that astronauts would experience on a trip to or from Mars. (Astronauts in low Earth orbit are exposed to lower doses, because they’re protected by our planet’s magnetosphere.)
“This is the first study that’s looked at space-relevant dose rates,” Limoli said. “And this is the first study to analyze the consequences of the low dose rate over the course of time on functional endpoints in the brain.”
The researchers analyzed the behavior of these mice over the course of the study, measuring the animals’ ability to learn and remember information, their willingness to interact with new mice introduced into their enclosure, and other variables. And at the end of the six months, the scientists euthanized the mice and studied their brains, looking for physiological changes.
All of these measurements and observations were compared with those gathered from a control group of 40 mice, which did not receive the 1 mGy/day dose.
The results were striking. Radiation-exposed mice exhibited more stress behaviors and a decreased ability to learn and remember. The physiological work bolstered these behavioral findings, identifying impaired cellular signaling in two key areas of the brain: the hippocampus, which is associated with learning and memory, and the prefrontal cortex, the site of many complex cognitive functions. …….https://www.space.com/space-radiation-damage-mars-astronauts-brains.html
August 10, 2019
Posted by Christina Macpherson |
deaths by radiation, radiation, space travel |
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Kevin Barry in Chernobyl: ‘Misha is an example of what happens when a country is on its knees’ Irish Examiner, August 05, 2019
In 2000 the Irish Examiner sent Kevin Barry, now longlisted for the Booker Prize for his novel Night Boat to Tangier, to Chernobyl. Here we reproduce what he reported
Misha photographed by Eugene Kolzov at the No 1 orphanage in Minsk.Misha, aged seven, is the victim of not one but many sicknesses. His physical disorders, as can be plainly seen, are many and various.
But Misha is the victim of another ailment too, a kind of compassion deficiency.
Chernobyl isn’t fashionable these days, it’s been around so long now. April 26, 1986 seems a long time in the way-distant past. After the initial blurt of paranoia and charitable outreach, the fickle gaze of public interest quickly flicked from the incident at Reactor No 4 to fresher horrors.
Misha, then, has been shuffled way back in the compassion pack. He has fallen behind the other ravaged children who sombrely people the planet’s trouble spots, in places like Mozambique and Ethiopia.
He’s competing with Rwanda and Chechnya. And it’s beginning to tell Misha’s illness is a direct consequence of the Chernobyl explosion.
The radioactive danger in Belarus is not so much in the air now as in the food chain. Professor Yuri Bandashevsky, a dissident scientist, told the Irish Examiner this week that the mutations caused by radiation in children like Misha have by now entered the gene pool and thus the effects of the ‘86 explosion can stretch to infinity.
After criticising the state’s alleged misspending of research money for Chernobyl, Professor Bandashevsky recently found himself banged up in jail for five months, bound at the feet.
Which isn’t the sort of thing that bodes well for the likes of Misha. Some aid continues to filter through. This week, a convoy run by the Chernobyl Children’s Project has been on a drive through Belarus, dispensing almost £2 million in food and medicines.
One of the institutions the orphanage supports is Novinki, a children’s asylum on the outskirts of Minsk. Such is its Dickensian squalor, its actual existence was long denied by the state. This is where you’ll find little Misha.
Project leader Adi Roche says she has known the child since he was a baby, but has been stunned at his deterioration since she last visited in December.
After finding him emaciated and dying this week, the project has placed a Dublin nurse and a local Chernobyl nurse on 24-hour care alert with Misha, an attempt to make whatever is left of his life as painless as possible
“We don’t know how long Misha will live, or if he will live, but we are morally obliged to do everything in our power to attempt saving his life,” said Ms Roche last night.
“‘He is not the only child in Belarus suffering as horrifically as this. he’s just one of many.” she added. “‘These children are the victims of 14 years of neglect by the international community.”’
Many children in Belarus consigned to mental asylums have no mentaI handicap. “All orphaned children with any kind of disability are put into mental asylums if they live beyond the age of four,” she said.
Meanwhile, staffed by1,000 workers, the Chernobyl plant continues operate a couple of kilometres inside the Ukraine border.
The authorities say it will close this year. The concrete sarcophagus built to contain contamination from the reactor has 200 holes and counting.
Orphans of the nuclear age
Kevin Barry, in Chernobyl, finds a land and its people scarred by a disaster from which they may never recover.
Chernobyl at this time of year is beautiful, the borderlands of the Ukraine and Belarus a pastoral and idyllic place. Vast swardes of rich woodland are full of babbling brooks and twittering songbirds, every way you turn, there’s a postcard vista to please even the most jaded eyes.
The locals, however, are edgy. The President of Belarus, Alaksandr Lukashenko — aka ‘Batska’ (‘The Father’) — has decreed that the farmlands here–abouts are now safe to plant and he’s threatening to fly overhead and make sure the workers are toiling.
If not, he says, there will be trouble. Big trouble.
The notion of Batska in an airplane is enough to prompt sleepless nights for those who remain in the Purple Zone, the area most contaminated by the accident in 1986 at Smelter No 4 of the nuclear plant that lies inside the Ukranian border.
In a tragedy of happenstance, because there was a stiff northerly gusting that day, Belarus took the brunt of the damage and because radioactivity is most lethal when it attacks developing human systems, children have borne most of the pain.
But for these children, the most serious ailment is not the thyroid cancer or the leukaemia or the heart trouble or the kidney failure or the various disorders of colon and spleen prompted by Chernobyl.
The greatest danger is the compassion-fatigue. 1986 seems a long time ago now and the incident at Smelter No 4 is no longer swaddled in the necessary event-glamour or crisis-chatter.
When the evening news is an atrocity exhibition, when daily there are hellish dispatches from Mozambique, Ethiopia and Chechnya, the Belarussians fall ever further back in the line.
The foreign correspondents have long since moved on elsewhere. The story of a child developing thyroid cancer over a period of years doesn’t conform neatly with the sound-byte culture.
By this stage, the Belarussians have had enough. A condition of mass denial exists in the country and a native of the village Solchechy in the Purple Zone says that up to around 1993, everybody fretted and freaked out but then they decided, well, to hell with it.
“The mess got to be too much,” she says.
We don’t think about it now. Life is life and we try to get on with it.
This is easier said than done in Belarus. The country’s economy is shot — agriculture was its mainstay and since Chernobyl, the income from farming has been negligible. Almost 30% of the country’s annual turnover goes to the clean-up operation.
Belarus remains the most Soviet of states. There are thickly-piled layers bureaucracy and this tangle of demented protocol regulations and petty restrictions is amorphic, constantly shape-shifting.
The natives have had to develop a stoic acceptance of a hard frustrating life…….. https://www.irishexaminer.com/breakingnews/views/analysis/kevin-barry-in-chernobyl-misha-is-an-example-of-what-happens-when-a-country-is-on-its-knees-941735.html
August 6, 2019
Posted by Christina Macpherson |
Belarus, children, PERSONAL STORIES, Reference |
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Radiation research facility opens to public on anniversary of Hiroshima bombing to raise awareness of effects, https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2019/08/05/national/radiation-research-facility-opens-public-anniversary-hiroshima-bombing/#.XUiq5m8zbIU
KYODOm HIROSHIMA – A Japan-U.S. joint research organization opened one of its radiation research facilities in Hiroshima to the public Monday to raise awareness of the effects of radiation on human health, ahead of the anniversary on Tuesday of the atomic bombing of the city.Although the Hiroshima facility will only be open to the public for two days, the Radiation Effects Research Foundation will open another research facility in the city of Nagasaki on Thursday and Friday to coincide with the city’s Aug. 9 A-bomb anniversary.
This marks the 25th annual public opening of the facility in Minami Ward, Hiroshima. It aims to share research content and help the public better understand the health effects of radiation. The research facility has been collecting data from hibakusha since the institute was established in 1975, when it succeeded the research efforts of its predecessor, the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission.
Some of the exhibition booths explain the risks of radiation, as well as the role of blood. Visitors can also experiment with freezing cells in liquid nitrogen for preservation, which tends to be popular with children when the experiment is successful.
“The (facility was) full of things I didn’t know were there, like health research on second generation hibakusha. Even as a Hiroshima resident, I learned a lot,” said Sanae Yamamoto, a 41-year-old housewife from Asakita Ward in the city who visited the facility with her children.
August 6, 2019
Posted by Christina Macpherson |
Japan, radiation |
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Long-Term Radiation Exposure From Space Travel Harms Memory, Mood, D-brief,
Researchers also know that short, powerful doses of radiation are deadly. But less is known about long-term, low-dose radiation — the kind that settlers on Mars or the moon would face.
Now, a team of scientists led by Charles Limoli at the University of California, Irvine, has taken a step toward a better understanding of those long-term risks. The researchers exposed mice to chronic, low-dose radiation for six months. The results are troubling for the future of spaceflight. The radiation left the mice suffering from both memory and mood problems that the scientists say would likely show up in human subjects as well. The results were published Monday in the journal eNeuro.
Radiation on the Brain
In the study, the mice showed “severe impairments in learning and memory,” according to the research paper. The mice were also generally more stressed out by their environments. That isn’t a good sign for space settlers, who will need their wits to face unforeseen struggles. Other studies have also already shown the potential ill effects of the long-term isolation and stress.
In the past, scientists hit lab mice with radiation levels some 100,000 times higher than they’d actually experience on Mars’ surface. But the researchers say their test is the first that has used these lower, more realistic doses of radiation over long periods to study space travel. Their efforts were made possible by a new facility.
The radiation included both neutrons – heavy particles from atomic nuclei – and pure energy in the form of gamma rays and other scattered photons……
Researchers found both physical and chemical changes in the brains they examined, in addition to the behavioral changes they observed in the living mice……..
more tests need to be done, and the radiation, while more realistic than past experiments, still doesn’t exactly mimic the space environment. But if their results hold up, they’re not a good sign for the future of human space settlement, at least not without a lot of bulky and expensive radiation shielding. http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/d-brief/2019/08/05/long-term-radiation-exposure-from-space-travel-harms-memory-mood/#.XUionm8zbIU
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August 6, 2019
Posted by Christina Macpherson |
2 WORLD, radiation, space travel |
2 Comments
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Sunken Soviet Sub leaking high levels of radiation, Norwegian researchers sayNorwegian researchers have discovered that a Soviet nuclear submarine that sank in the Barents Sea 30 years ago, killing 41 sailors, is leaking radiation at nearly 1 million times normal levels. Bellona, August 5, 2019 by Charles Digges
Norwegian researchers have discovered that a Soviet nuclear submarine that sank in the Barents Sea 30 years ago, killing 41 sailors, is leaking radiation at nearly 1 million times normal levels.
The submarine, called the Komsomolets, was at the time the most advanced in the Soviet Navy. When it went down on April 7,1989, it was carrying two plutonium warheads, which now lie at a depth of 1,680 meters with the rest of the sub’s wreckage, including its reactor. The wreck has caused concern about possible radioactive leakage ever since.
Now those worries have been confirmed. Using a remote-controlled vehicle to probe the wreck, researchers from the Norwegian Radiation and Nuclear Safety Authority found extensive damage to the sub’s hull. Of particular disquiet, they say, are exceptionally high radiation levels in the area around one of the sub’s ventilation pipes.
The highest measurement researchers recorded stood at 800 becquerel per liter. Radiation levels in that body of water typically remain around 0.001 Bq per liter, the authority said.
“We found levels of radioactive cesium…that were close to 1 million times higher than the levels we find in [uncontaminated] seawater,” Hilde Elise Heldal, a researcher from Norway’s Institute of Marine Research who participated in the July 7 mission, told RFE/RL. In remarks to Reuters, she added that: “This is, of course, a higher level than we would usually measure out at sea, but the levels we have found now are not alarming.”
Heldal said team members “weren’t surprised” to discover elevated radiation levels, the BBC reported. Radioactive cesium is easily diluted in the depths of the Barents Sea, and few fish live in the area surrounding the wreck.
What we have found … has very little impact on Norwegian fish and seafood,” Heldal said, according to the Associated Press. “In general, cesium levels in the Norwegian Sea are very low, and as the wreck is so deep, the pollution from Komsomolets is quickly diluted.”
Still, the confirmation that the submarine is actively leaking radiation comes weeks after a fire aboard a top-secret Russian nuclear submarine in the Barents Sea killed 14 sailors, making it the deadliest submarine incident to hit the Russian Navy since 2008.
Norwegian scientists have been monitoring the wreck of the Komsomolets – which lies 180 kilometers southwest of Norway’s Bear Island and 350 kilometers northwest of the country’s mainland coast – since the 1990s……..
ven in its watery grave, the Komosomolets is the stuff of Cold War legend. Launched in May of 1983 from Severodvinsk on the Barents Sea, the sub could dive to deeper depths than any other vessel at the time. It was manned by a crew of 69 and could launch both nuclear and conventional weapons.
The Komsomolets had been patrolling the waters for 39 days when a fire broke out in one compartment and quickly spread through the submarine on April 7, 1989, according to the CIA report. Forty-two crew died either in the fire or while awaiting rescue, and the sub sank to the bottom of the sea.
The matter of the Komsomolets shook faith in an already ailing navy. Within two years of the accident, the Soviet Union would cease to be – leaving in its wake hundreds of derelict decommissioned nuclear submarines, and a host of other radioactive hazards dumped by the military.
By 1994, the government in Moscow would reveal the scale of its irradiated legacy in the Arctic. The Soviet navy had scuttled hundreds of barrels of nuclear waste in the Kara Sea, along with old nuclear reactors, and, in one case, an entire nuclear submarine. https://bellona.org/news/nuclear-issues/2019-08-sunken-soviet-sub-leaking-high-levels-of-radiation-norwegian-researchers-say
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August 6, 2019
Posted by Christina Macpherson |
environment, radiation, Russia |
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The fallout of uncertainty in nuclear test communities https://www.hcn.org/articles/nuclear-energy-the-fallout-of-uncertainty-in-nuclear-test-communities
For downwinders of bomb testing, plans for compensation to redress past harms makes for tricky politics. Aria Alamalhodaei Aug. 2, 2019, The atomic bomb was born in the desert. In the early hours of July 16, 1945, after a spate of bad weather, a 20-kiloton plutonium-based nuke referred to as “the gadget” detonated near Alamogordo, New Mexico. Firsthand testimonies of the test, codenamed Trinity, converge on the uncanny axis of awe and dread. The Manhattan Project’s Chief of Field Operations, General Thomas Farrell, wrote that “the strong, sustained, awesome roar … warned of doomsday and made us feel that we puny things were blasphemous.”
The bomb produced a massive cloud column that drifted in several directions, dusting large swaths of the surrounding region with radioactive snow – fallout that settled on buildings, plants, and animals, and that continued to permeate the air as invisible particulate in the weeks and months that followed. Five years later, the Nevada Test Site was established to continue the work that Trinity set alight.
Although the mushroom cloud became the icon of American nuclear activity in the 20th century, the harms of these bombs did not fade with their dimming fireballs. No group in the U.S. understands this better than the downwinders, communities throughout the American Southwest and beyond who were exposed to the fallout of the military’s domestic nuclear test program.
In 1990, the U.S. government passed the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA), which provided financial remuneration to downwinders who had contracted cancer or other illnesses linked to radiation exposure. (The law also provided compensation for certain on-site test participants and uranium miners.) As of April 2018, the
program had awarded more than $2.2 billion to some 34,370 claimants.
As the law was written, however, only downwinders in
specific counties in Arizona, Utah, and Nevada were eligible for compensation. Even residents of New Mexico, the site of the Trinity test, were excluded. Since the law was passed, studies and fallout reconstructions have suggested that the health impacts of the nuclear tests likely extend to areas as far away as Idaho, Montana and Guam. Residents in those far-flung locales have provided vivid testimonies of
glowing dust,
strange maladies befalling livestock, and
cancer clusters ravaging whole families.
For more than a decade, civic groups have lobbied lawmakers, unsuccessfully, to open RECA to a broader population of downwinders. That Congress has so far balked at those proposals is a testament to many factors; legislative decisions are informed not only by science but by moral and political calculus. But lawmakers’ inability to come to terms on who suffered, and on who deserves reparations for that suffering, points to a little discussed weak spot of modern politics: its uneasy relationship with uncertainty.
RECA’S COMPACT DELIMITATION OF “affected areas” was based on dose estimates produced by the Department of Energy’s Off-Site Radiation Exposure Review Project — a complicated calculation that drew from atmospheric transport models, reconstructions of fallout patterns, and reports of dosimeters and other radiation recorders. The bill was amended once, in 2000, to include a larger population of uranium workers and to expand the time frame, eligible diseases, and geographic locations covered. Two years later, in response to a congressional mandate, the Health Resources and Services Administration commissioned the National Research Council (NRC) to review the RECA program and determine if additional populations should be covered. Their final report was published in 2005. Based in part on mortality and disease-incidence data on atomic bomb survivors in Japan, uranium miners in the U.S., and Utah schoolchildren exposed to fallout from the Nevada Test Site, the committee
concluded that in most cases involving downwinders who had been excluded from RECA, “it is unlikely that exposure to radiation from fallout was a substantial cause to developing cancer.”
But radiation epidemiology is a science of uncertainty, and tracing a person’s illness to a single exposure event can be challenging even in seemingly clear-cut cases. Although high doses of radiation are known to lead to disease and death, the effects of lower doses are far less predictable. Moreover, an individual’s radiation dose — the amount of radiation that he or she internalizes — depends on the person’s age, sex, diet, and pre-existing risk factors; weather conditions; and the characteristics of the nuclear event itself. Extrapolating results from one nuclear event to another, as the NRC study did, is bound to introduce some error.
Consider the Trinity test, which has been consistently ignored by lawmakers. According to the
Los Alamos Historical Document Retrieval and Assessment (LAHDRA), conducted in 2010 for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, previous efforts to determine exposures from Trinity ignored the specific characteristics that distinguished it from all other subsequent tests. Unlike tests conducted at the Nevada Test Site, the Trinity “gadget” detonated only 100 feet from the ground. At this height, more organic material would’ve been swept into the explosion and returned to the earth as fallout. Another compounding factor was the relative inefficiency of the device. Of the 13 pounds of fissile material contained in the device, only about 2.6 pounds exploded; the rest was dispersed into the environment, where it remained radioactive.
The LAHDRA report also faulted previous studies for failing to adequately account for internal exposure, caused by the inhalation or ingestion of radioactive material. Research shows that internal exposure is significantly more harmful to the human body than the external exposure that occurs, say, when X-rays or other high-energy radiation penetrate the skin. Internal dosages are influenced by occupation, diet, local environment, and other sociodemographic factors. Any assessment that does not account for those factors is incomplete. And, according to the LAHDRA report, no assessment has properly accounted for the internal radiation dosages experienced by residents near the Trinity site.
In the case of the Trinity test, there’s reason to believe that sociodemographic factors would have been significant. During the 1940s, New Mexican communities were largely agrarian; most people were farmers or ranchers who grew their food, hunted and fished, and drank water collected from cisterns or holding ponds. If those sources were contaminated, residents would likely have been at an increased risk for radiation-linked illnesses.
LAST SUMMER, MEMBERS OF THE NEW MEXICO community organization Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium (TBDC), along with representatives from the Navajo Nation, argued in a Senate Judiciary hearing for amending RECA.
Stated TBDC co-founder Tina Cordova, “The New Mexico downwinders are the collateral damage that resulted from the development and testing of the first atomic bomb.”
Their appeals appear to have fallen on receptive ears. This March, a bipartisan coalition of U.S. Senators, including New Mexico Senators Martin Heinrich and Tom Udall, reintroduced
Senate Bill 947 (S. 947), “Radiation Exposure Compensation Act Amendments of 2019.” It is the most recent in a long line of bills that attempt to expand the RECA’s coverage. Among other changes, it seeks coverage for downwinders in New Mexico, Colorado, Montana, Idaho, and Guam. A companion
was introduced in the House in July.
Meanwhile, the National Cancer Institute (NCI) is currently conducting a three-phase study on the diet and lifestyles of mid-century New Mexicans. The models generated in this study may help scientists draw firmer links between present day cancer cases and the Trinity test. In an email, NCI spokesperson Michael Levin confirmed that the results of the study are anticipated to be published in late 2019.
Like other epidemiological studies of its size, the NCI’s study has been expensive to run and frustratingly time-intensive. And time is precisely what many downwinders feel they don’t have. More than 70 years has passed since the Trinity test. Many downwinders have passed away or are battling cancers and other diseases. Over time, it becomes increasingly difficult to demonstrate that a disease was caused by nuclear fallout rather than, say, cigarettes or bad luck.
The government, meanwhile, plods along at its own pace, unconstrained by the length of a single lifetime or the distressing span between a diagnosis and its terminal conclusion. In response to a news article about S.947
posted to the Idaho Downwinders public Facebook page, one commenter wrote, “The government are just waiting for all of us to die off so they won’t have to be bothered with it.”
In its 2005 review of the RECA law, the National Research Council stated that, although scientific recommendations were meant to inform policy, the “attendant policy decisions must come from the larger body of citizenry” and “applying this new scientific knowledge may require additional societal value-based decisions.” This is particularly true of probability-based information on cancer epidemiology. When there is simply not enough data available to definitively estimate risk, the question of compensating the citizens who live in the long shadow of the nuclear testing era becomes a moral one: How much uncertainty can we stand?
August 3, 2019
Posted by Christina Macpherson |
radiation, Reference, USA |
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Brexit: nuclear medicine at risk from no-deal, The Conversation, ManMohan S SodhiProfessor of Operations and Supply Chain Management, City, University of London August 1, 2019 With Boris Johnson as prime minister, a no-deal Brexit looks more likely. Indeed, Goldman Sachs recently
raised the probability of a no-deal Brexit from 15% to 20%. Faced with an uncertain future, it is difficult to make adequate preparations for critical medicines – especially ones with a complex supply chain.
A no-deal Brexit will disrupt the supply chains that bring medicines to the UK and take goods from the UK to continental Europe. About 45m packs of medicine travel from the UK to Europe every month and the UK receives 37m packs in return. Even if a deal is reached, supply chains will continue to be disrupted long after the event.
Healthcare professionals are particularly concerned about the impact this could have on nuclear medicine. This branch of medicine mostly involves using radioactive dyes to perform diagnostic tests, which can be used to check if cancer has spread or to see how well the heart or kidneys are working. Therapies are also used to treat hyperthyroidism or thyroid cancer with radioactive iodine.
According to the British Nuclear Medicine Society, 60% of the radiopharmaceuticals the UK uses come from the EU and are used during the treatment of as many as 600,000 patients per year. These are transported mostly by road and rail across the English Channel.
Danger of delays
All medicines have expiration dates, but with radioactive pharmaceuticals there is the added problem of radioactive decay. This happens as the radioactive substance changes into one that is more stable. While this process releases the radiation needed for scans and therapies, it also means they don’t last forever.
A measure of how quickly a radioactive substance decays is its half-life. This is the time taken for the strength (or activity) of the measured radiation to decrease by half. For example, the radioactive iodine used in therapies, iodine-131, has a half-life of only eight days. After two days the strength is reduced by 15% and after eight days, by 50%.
The speed of decay means that unplanned delays of only a couple of days at a border could render the nuclear medicine unusable. The shelf life of nuclear medicines is therefore often low compared with other drugs. Extensive stockpiles simply cannot be kept……..
For UK taxpayers, the government depending on the pharamaceutical industry, either domestic or foreign, for supply of medicines is an expensive option. The NHS can use its vast purchasing power to source drugs much more cheaply than healthcare providers can in most other countries, including the US. Indeed, UK sale prices of the top 20 selling medicines are only one-third of the US equivalent.
For specialised areas such as nuclear medicine, the cost difference compared with the US is probably much more. Brexit, especially without a deal, places the NHS in a precarious position and will mean suppliers are in an advantageous position to close this price gap, driving up prices in the UK. Also, the US administration may offer a poisoned chalice in the form of a US free-trade agreement that includes the NHS, meaning higher prices like in the US.
Patients and the NHS may end up paying much higher prices for nuclear medicine, if they can get the supplies at all. https://theconversation.com/brexit-nuclear-medicine-at-risk-from-no-deal-121139
August 1, 2019
Posted by Christina Macpherson |
health, politics international, UK |
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Mysterious Radiation Cloud Over Europe Traced to Secret Russian Nuclear Accident https://www.livescience.com/66050-radiation-cloud-secret-russian-nuclear-accident.html By Tom Metcalfe, Live Science Contributor | July 29, 2019 A vast cloud of nuclear radiation that spreadover continental Europe in 2017 has been traced to an unacknowledged nuclear accident in southern Russia, according to an international team of scientists.
The experts say the cloud of radiation detected over Europe in late September 2017 could only have been caused by a nuclear fuel-reprocessing accident at the Mayak Production Association, a nuclear facility in the Chelyabinsk region of the Ural Mountains in Russia, sometime between noon on Sept. 26 and noon on Sept. 27.
Russia confirmed that a cloud of nuclear radiation was detected over the Urals at the time, but the country never acknowledged any responsibility for a radiation leak, nor has it ever admitted that a nuclear accident took place at Mayak in 2017. [Top 10 Greatest Explosions Ever]
The lead author of the new research, nuclear chemist Georg Steinhauser of Leibniz University in Hanover, Germany, said that more than 1,300 atmospheric measurements from around the world showed that between 250 and 400 terabecquerels of radioactive ruthenium-106 had been released during that time.
Ruthenium-106 is a radioactive isotope of ruthenium, meaning that it has a different number of neutrons in its nucleus than the naturally occurring element has. The isotope can be produced as a byproduct during nuclear fission of uranium-235 atoms.
Although the resulting cloud of nuclear radiation was diluted enough that it caused no harm to people beneath it, the total radioactivity was between 30 and 100 times the level of radiation released after the Fukushima accident in Japan in 2011, Steinhauser told Live Science.
The research was published today (July 29) in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Ruthenium release
The cloud of radiation in September 2017 was detected in central and eastern Europe, Asia, the Arabian Peninsula and even the Caribbean.
Only radioactive ruthenium-106 — a byproduct of nuclear fission, with a half-life of 374 days — was detected in the cloud — Steinhauser said.
During the reprocessing of nuclear fuel — when radioactive plutonium and uranium are separated from spent nuclear fuel from nuclear power reactors — ruthenium-106 is typically separated out and placed into long-term storage with other radioactive waste byproducts, he said.
That meant that any massive release of ruthenium could only come from an accident during nuclear fuel reprocessing; and the Mayak facility was one of only a few places in the world that carries out that sort of reprocessing, he said.
Advanced meteorological studies made as part of this new research showed that the radiation cloud could only have come from the Mayak facility in Russia. “They have done a very thorough analysis and they have pinned down Mayak — there is no doubt about it,” he said.
The accident came a little more than 60 years since a nuclear accident at Mayak in 1957 caused one of the largest releases of radiation in the region’s history, second only to the 1986 explosion and fire at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, which is now in the Ukraine. [Chernobyl Nuclear Disaster 25 Years Later (Infographic)]
In the 1957 accident, known as the Kyshtym disaster after a nearby town, a tank of liquid nuclear waste at the Mayak facility exploded, spreading radioactive particles over the site and causing a radioactive plume of smoke that stretched for hundreds of miles.
Nuclear accident
The study showed that the 2017 accident at Mayak was unlikely to have been caused by a relatively simple release of radioactive gas, Steinhauser said. Rather, a fire, or even an explosion, might have exposed workers at the plant to harmful levels of radiation, he added.
Russia has not acknowledged that any accident occurred at the Mayak facility, maybe because plutonium is made there for thermonuclear weapons. However, Russia had established a commission to investigate the radioactive cloud, Steinhauser said.
The Russian commission ruled that there was not enough evidence to determine if a nuclear accident was responsible for the cloud. But Steinhauser and his team hope it may look again at this decision in the light of the new research.
“They came to the conclusion that they need more data,” he said. “And so we feel like, okay, now you can have all of our data — but we would like to see yours as well.”
Any information from Russia about an accident at the Mayak facility would help scientists refine their research, instead of having to rely only on measurements of radioactivity from around the world, Steinhauser said.
The international team of scientists involved are keenly interested in learning more about its causes. “When everybody else is concerned, we are almost cheering for joy, because we have something to measure,” he said. “But it is our responsibility to learn from this accident. This is not about blaming Russia, but it is about learning our lessons,” he said.
July 30, 2019
Posted by Christina Macpherson |
incidents, radiation, Russia, secrets,lies and civil liberties |
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As the four-mile wide fireball bathed the Pacific seascape in its angry, white-red light, onlookers recognized something nearly divine—and unquestionably ominous. “It was a religious experience, a personal view of the apocalypse or transfiguration,” said one observer. Another remembered feeling “like you stepped into a blast furnace,” even though he was over thirty miles away.
This was the
Castle Bravo thermonuclear test, one of several dozen nuclear detonations the United States carried out in the Marshall Islands during the Cold War. At 15 million tons of TNT—one
thousand times more powerful than the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima—it was the largest explosion ever set off by Americans.
It was also the dirtiest, as a new study
published this month shows. Researchers from Columbia University, analyzing soil samples from several Marshall Island atolls, discovered widespread radioactivity. Bikini Island itself was declared unsafe for human habitation, while the three other atolls had significant radionuclide concentrations—mainly americium, cesium, and plutonium. In some cases, the level of radioactivity—more than sixty years since the last mushroom cloud loomed over Bikini’s azure lagoon—exceeded that found at Chernobyl or Fukushima.
The process that led to this long-standing radioactivity is relatively simple, even if it wasn’t fully understood as the Cold War heated up. As the Castle Bravo fireball ascended into the sky, it carried with it tons of vaporized coral, rock, and dirt. This debris
intermingled with radioactive isotopes before settling back down to the ground as deadly fallout. In one case, ignorant of its lethal effects, children on a neighboring atoll played in the falling powder, believing it was snow.
But American nuclear testing didn’t just occur in the middle of the Pacific. Throughout the Cold War, the United States detonated hundredsof atomic bombs in Nevada at a test site just northwest of Las Vegas. Many of these tests were above-ground, exposing the continental United States to the same radioactive fallout that fell over those remote atolls.
As with the Marshall Islands, the radiological effects of this testing were widespread—and immense. A 2017 study from the University of Arizona
suggested that the fallout generated by the Nevada nuclear explosions exposed millions of Americans to its lethal radiation.
The exposure mechanism wasn’t always direct, either. Once caught in high-altitude winds, fallout from these tests would travel for hundreds or even thousands of miles before settling back down over the vast fields of the American heartland. Unsuspecting cattle would graze on grass freshly laced with this fallout, including Iodine-131, a highly potent radionuclide that spews beta and gamma radiation.
The cows concentrated this iodine in their milk, which would then be quickly consumed by the local population through the dairy industry. Because they’re chemically indistinguishable, the human body can’t tell the difference between normal iodine and the radioactive variety, and so deposits both in the thyroid gland. Once securely lodged there, Iodine-131 bombards nearby tissue on a cellular level, damaging DNA strands and eventually causing cancer.
This was just one of the exposure mechanisms; there were many others. Taken together, the 2017 study suggested that fallout from the Nevada nuclear testing could have led to between 340,000 and 460,000 premature deaths, mostly Americans and mainly through cancer.
If that death toll seems unreal, consider the scale of the radiation involved. Using a figure of 81 million Curies for the radioactive material released at Chernobyl as a baseline, one estimate held that the Nevada-based nuclear testing emitted 12 billion Curies into the atmosphere between 1951 and 1963. That’s the equivalent of nearly 150 Chernobyl disasters—or one a month for more than a decade. If you added in the Marshall Islands nuclear tests over this same period, that figure would be even higher.
As we mark the seventy-fourth anniversary of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings in a handful of days, we will rightly remember the horrors of nuclear war. But we should also recognize the deadly tests that followed. Because any nuclear explosion—even a “peacetime test” in a Pacific paradise or the dry desert of Nevada—can put human lives at risk.
Just ask the children who played in the snow.
July 29, 2019
Posted by Christina Macpherson |
health, weapons and war |
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A Dead Man Was Cremated in Arizona Without Anyone Realising He Was Radioactive, Science Alert PETER DOCKRILL, 28 JUL 2019
In 2017, a 69-year-old man with pancreatic cancer went to hospital with abnormally low blood pressure. Sadly, he died only two days later, and his remains were cremated.
What nobody at the hospital or the crematorium knew, was that this hadn’t been the man’s only recent trip to hospital. ust one day earlier, in fact, he had been injected with a radioactive compound at another hospital to treat his tumour – and when his mortal remains were incinerated, this radioactive and potentially dangerous dose of lutetium Lu 177 dotatate was still inside his body.
This alarming case, reported in a research letter published in February this year, illustrates the collateral risks potentially posed by on average 18.6 million nuclear medicine procedures involving radiopharmaceuticals performed in the US every year.
While rules regulate how these drugs are administered to living patients, the picture can become less clear when those patients die, thanks to a patchwork of different laws and standards in each state – not to mention situations like the 69-year-old man, whose radioactive status simply slipped through the cracks.
“Radiopharmaceuticals present a unique and often overlooked postmortem safety challenge,” researchers from the Mayo Clinic explained in a case note.
“Cremating an exposed patient volatilises the radiopharmaceutical, which can then be inhaled by workers (or released into the adjacent community) and result in greater exposure than from a living patient.”……..
Given more than half of all Americans eventually get cremated, postmortem management of individuals who receive radioactive drugs is an area the US health system needs to work on, the researchers say.
This includes better ways of evaluating radioactivity in deceased patients (prior to them being cremated), and also standardising ways of notifying crematoriums about their clients.
After all, nobody really has any idea how often this is happening.
As nuclear scientist Marco Kaltofen from the Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts, who wasn’t involved with the research, told BuzzFeed News: “They only happened to catch this one case because normally they don’t look.”
The findings were reported in JAMA. https://www.sciencealert.com/a-dead-man-was-cremated-in-arizona-without-anyone-knowing-he-was-radioactive
July 29, 2019
Posted by Christina Macpherson |
radiation, USA |
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