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Deep ocean trenches found to have radioactive carbon from nuclear bomb tests

May 9, 2019 Posted by | 2 WORLD, oceans, radiation | Leave a comment

Climate Change Could Unleash Long-Frozen Radiation

https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/environment/a27150094/climate-change-could-unleash-long-frozen-radiation/

Atomic bombs, Chernobyl,Fukushima—radiation has traveled and frozen all over the world. Global warming is changing that.

Melting could be one of the most important phenomena of the 21st century. Thanks to man-made climate change, Arctic ice levels have hit a record low this year. Among the many profound changes that could stem from ice melting across the world, according to a new study from an international group of scientists, is the release of deeply buried radiation.

The international team studied 17 icy locations across the globe, including the Arctic, the Antarctic, Iceland, the Alps, the Caucasus mountains, and British Columbia. While radiation exists naturally, the scientists were looking for example of human-made radiation. It was common to find concentrations at least 10 times higher than levels elsewhere.

“They are some of the highest levels you see in the environment outside nuclear exclusion zones,” says Caroline Clason, a lecturer in Physical Geography at the University of Plymouth, speaking in a press statement.

When human-made radiation is released into the environment, be it in small amounts like the Three Mile Island accident of 1979 or larger quantities like the Chernobyl disaster of 1986and the Fukushima Daichii accident of 2011, it goes into the atmosphere. That includes elements like radioactive cesium, which have been known to make people sick to the point of death across the globe.

After Chernobyl, clouds of cesium traveled across Europe. Radiation spread without regard for borders, reaching as far as England through rains. But when rain freezes, it takes the form of ice. And within ice, it can lay trapped.

“Radioactive particles are very light so when they are taken up into the atmosphere they can be transported a very long way,” Clason tells the AFP. “When it falls as rain, like after Chernobyl, it washes away and it’s sort of a one-off event. But as snow, it stays in the ice for decades and as it melts in response to the climate it’s then washed downstream.”

What does that response look like? Humanity is starting to find out, Clason says. She points to wild boar in Sweden, who in 2017 were found to have 10 times the levels of normal radiation.

Traces of human-made radiation last a famously long time. Ice around the globe contains nuclear material not just from accidents involving nuclear power plants, but also man’s use of nuclear weapons.

“We’re talking about weapons testing from the 1950s and 1960s onwards, going right back in the development of the bomb,” Clason says. “If we take a sediment core you can see a clear spike where Chernobyl was, but you can also see quite a defined spike in around 1963 when there was a period of quite heavy weapons testing.”

Elements within radiation have different life spans. Perhaps the most notorious of these, Plutonium-241 has a 14 year half-life. [ed. most plutonium isotopes have half-lives of many thousands of years] But Americium-241, a synthetic chemical element, has a half life of 432 years. It can stay in ice a long time, and when that ice melts will spread. There isn’t much data yet on its ability to spread into the human food chain, but Clason called the threat of Americum “particularly dangerous”.

A term popular in science these days is the Anthropocene, which refers to the idea that humans have permanently altered the very core of how the Earth functions as a living ecosystem. Looking for radiation buried within icy soil and sediment could offer stronger proof of those changes.

“These materials are a product of what we have put into the atmosphere. This is just showing that our nuclear legacy hasn’t disappeared yet, it’s still there,” she says.

“And it’s important to study that because ultimately it’s a mark of what we have left in the environment.”

April 18, 2019 Posted by | 2 WORLD, climate change, environment, radiation | 1 Comment

The Chernobyl Syndrome

With bountiful, devastating detail, Brown describes how scientists, doctors, and journalists—mainly in Ukraine and Belarus—went to great lengths and took substantial risks to collect information on the long-term effects of the Chernobyl explosion, which they believed to be extensive.

Other researchers have issued a much sunnier picture of post-Chernobyl ecology, but Brown argues persuasively that they are grossly underestimating the scale of the damage, in part because they rely too heavily on simplistic measurements of radioactivity levels.

Radiation has a special hold on our imagination: an invisible force out of science fiction, it can alter the very essence of our bodies, dissolve us from the inside out. But Manual for Survival asks a larger question about how humans will coexist with the ever-increasing quantities of toxins and pollutants that we introduce into our air, water, and soil. Brown’s careful mapping of the path isotopes take is highly relevant to other industrial toxins, and to plastic waste. When we put a substance into our environment, we have to understand that it will likely remain with us for a very long time, and that it may behave in ways we never anticipated. Chernobyl should not be seen as an isolated accident or as a unique disaster, Brown argues, but as an “exclamation point” that draws our attention to the new world we are creating. 

The Chernobyl Syndrome, The New York Review of Books  SophiePinkham, APRIL4, 2019

Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future

by Kate Brown
Norton, 420 pp., $27.95

Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World’s Greatest Nuclear Disaster

by Adam Higginbotham
Simon and Schuster, 538 pp., $29.95

Chernobyl: The History of a Nuclear Catastrophe

by Serhii Plokhy
Basic Books, 404 pp., $32.00


“………As her book’s title, Manual for Survival, suggests, Kate Brown is interested in the aftermath of Chernobyl, not the disaster itself. Her heroes are not first responders but brave citizen-scientists, independent-minded doctors and health officials, journalists, and activists who fought doggedly to uncover the truth about the long-term damage caused by Chernobyl. Her villains include not only the lying, negligent Soviet authorities, but also the Western governments and international agencies that, in her account, have worked for decades to downplay or actually conceal the human and ecological cost of nuclear war, nuclear tests, and nuclear accidents. Rather than attributing Chernobyl to authoritarianism, she points to similarities in the willingness of Soviets and capitalists to sacrifice the health of workers, the public, and the environment to production goals and geopolitical rivalries. Continue reading →

April 11, 2019 Posted by | 2 WORLD, radiation, resources - print | Leave a comment

Ionising radiation released from ice surface sediments, as climate change melts glaciers

Siren sounds on nuclear fallout embedded in melting glaciers   https://phys.org/news/2019-04-siren-nuclear-fallout-embedded-glaciers.html, by Patrick Galey, 10 Apr 19,   Radioactive fallout from nuclear meltdowns and weapons testing is nestled in glaciers across the world, scientists said Wednesday, warning of a potentially hazardous time bomb as rising temperatures melt the icy residue.

For the first time, an international team of scientists has studied the presence of nuclear fallout in ice surface sediments on glaciers across the Arctic, Iceland the Alps, Caucasus mountains, British Columbia and Antarctica.

It found manmade radioactive material at all 17 survey sites, often at concentrations at least 10 times higher than levels elsewhere.

“They are some of the highest levels you see in the environment outside nuclear exclusion zones,” said Caroline Clason, a lecturer in Physical Geography at the University of Plymouth.

When radioactive material is released into the atmosphere, it falls to earth as acid rain, some of which is absorbed by plants and soil.

But when it falls as snow and settles in the ice, it forms heavier sediment which collects in glaciers, concentrating the levels of nuclear residue.

The Chernobyl disaster of 1986—by far the most devastating nuclear accident to date—released vast clouds of radioactive material including Caesium into the atmosphere, causing widespread contamination and acid rain across northern Europe for weeks afterwards.

“Radioactive particles are very light so when they are taken up into the atmosphere they can be transported a very long way,” she told AFP.

“When it falls as rain, like after Chernobyl, it washes away and it’s sort of a one-off event. But as snow, it stays in the ice for decades and as it melts in response to the climate it’s then washed downstream.”

The environmental impact of this has been shown in recent years, as wild boar meat in Sweden was found to contain more than 10 times the safe levels of Caesium.

Clason said her team had detected some fallout from the Fukushima meltdown in 2011, but stressed that much of the particles from that particular disaster had yet to collect on the ice sediment.

As well as disasters, radioactive material produced from weapons testing was also detected at several research sites.

“We’re talking about weapons testing from the 1950s and 1960s onwards, going right back in the development of the bomb,” she said. “If we take a sediment core you can see a clear spike where Chernobyl was, but you can also see quite a defined spike in around 1963 when there was a period of quite heavy weapons testing.”

One of the most potentially hazardous residues of human nuclear activity is Americium, which is produced when Plutonium decays.

Whereas Plutonium has a half-life of 14 years, Americium lasts 400.  [Ed note: Most plutonium isotopes have very long half-lives, plutonium-239 being one of the shortest at over 24,000 years] 

“Americium is more soluble in the environment and it is a stronger alpha (radiation) emitter. Both of those things are bad in terms of uptake into the food chain,” said Clason.

While there is little data available on how these materials can be passed down the food chain—even potentially to humans—Clason said there was no doubt that Americium is “particularly dangerous”.

As geologists look for markers of the epoch when mankind directly impacted the health of the planet—known as the Anthropocene—Clason and her team believe that radioactive particles in ice, soil and sediment could be an important indicator.

“These materials are a product of what we have put into the atmosphere. This is just showing that our nuclear legacy hasn’t disappeared yet, it’s still there,” Clason said.

“And it’s important to study that because ultimately it’s a mark of what we have left in the environment.”

April 11, 2019 Posted by | 2 WORLD, climate change, radiation | Leave a comment

Before we enter “a new nuclear age” – learn from the newly declassified Chernobyl health records

Fortunately, Chernobyl health records are now available to the public. They show that people living in the radioactive traces fell ill from cancers, respiratory illness, anaemia, auto-immune disorders, birth defects, and fertility problems two to three times more frequently in the years after the accident than before. In a highly contaminated Belarusian town of Veprin, just six of 70 children in 1990 were characterised as “healthy”. The rest had one chronic disease or another. On average, the Veprin children had in their bodies 8,498 bq/kg of radioactive caesium (20 bq/kg is considered safe).

For decades, researchers have puzzled over strange clusters of thyroid cancer, leukaemia and birth defects among people living in Cumbria, which, like southern Belarus, is an overlooked hotspot of radioactivity from cold war decades of nuclear bomb production and nuclear power accidents.

Currently, policymakers are advocating a massive expansion of nuclear power as a way to combat climate change. Before we enter a new nuclear age, the declassified Chernobyl health records raise questions that have been left unanswered about the impact of chronic low doses of radioactivity on human health.

*******************************************************

As researchers monitored Chernobyl radioactivity, they made a troubling discovery. Only half of the caesium-137 they detected came from Chernobyl. The rest had already been in the Cumbrian soils; deposited there during the years of nuclear testing and after the 1957 fire at the Windscale plutonium plant. The same winds and rains that brought down Chernobyl fallout had been at work quietly distributing radioactive contaminants across northern England and Scotland for decades. Fallout from bomb tests carried out during the cold war scattered a volume of radioactive gases that dwarfed Chernobyl. 

The Chernobyl explosions issued 45m curies of radioactive iodine into the atmosphere. Emissions from Soviet and US bomb tests amounted to 20bn curies of radioactive iodine, 500 times more. Radioactive iodine, a short lived, powerful isotope can cause thyroid disease, thyroid cancer, hormonal imbalances, problems with the GI tract and autoimmune disorders.

As engineers detonated over 2,000 nuclear bombs into the atmosphere, scientists lost track of where radioactive isotopes fell and where they came from, but they caught glimpses of how readily radioactivity travelled the globe.

Chernobyl’s disastrous cover-up is a warning for the next nuclear age

 https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/apr/04/chernobyl-nuclear-power-climate-change-health-radioactivity,   Kate Brown , 5 Apr 19, Before expanding nuclear power to combat climate change, we need answers to the global health effects of radioactivity In 1986, the Soviet minister of hydrometeorology, Yuri Izrael, had a regrettable decision to make. It was his job to track radioactivity blowing from the smoking Chernobyl reactor in the hours after the 26 April explosion and deal with it. Forty-eight hours after the accident, an assistant handed him a roughly drawn map. On it, an arrow shot north-east from the nuclear power plant, and broadened to become a river of air 10 miles wide that was surging across Belarus toward Russia. If the slow-moving mass of radioactive clouds reached Moscow, where a spring storm front was piling up, millions could be harmed. Izrael’s decision was easy. Make it rain.So that day, in a Moscow airport, technicians loaded artillery shells with silver iodide. Soviet air force pilots climbed into the cockpits of TU-16 bombers and made the easy one-hour flight to Chernobyl, where the reactor burned. The pilots circled, following the weather. They flew 30, 70, 100, 200km – chasing the inky black billows of radioactive waste. When they caught up with a cloud, they shot jets of silver iodide into it to emancipate the rain.In the sleepy towns of southern Belarus, villagers looked up to see planes with strange yellow and grey contrails snaking across the sky. Next day, 27 April, powerful winds kicked up, cumulus clouds billowed on the horizon, and rain poured down in a deluge. The raindrops scavenged radioactive dust floating 200 metres in the air and sent it to the ground. The pilots trailed the slow-moving gaseous bulk of nuclear waste north-east beyond Gomel, into Mogilev province. Wherever pilots shot silver iodide, rain fell, along with a toxic brew of a dozen radioactive elements.

If Operation Cyclone had not been top secret, the headline would have been spectacular: “Scientists using advanced technology save Russian cities from technological disaster!” Yet, as the old saying goes, what goes up must come down. No one told the Belarusians that the southern half of the republic had been sacrificed to protect Russian cities. In the path of the artificially induced rain lived several hundred thousand Belarusians ignorant of the contaminants around them.

The public is often led to believe that the Chernobyl exclusion zone, a depopulated 20-mile circle around the blown plant, safely contains Chernobyl radioactivity. Tourists and journalists exploring the zone rarely realise there is a second Chernobyl zone in southern Belarus. In it, people lived for 15 years in levels of contamination as high as areas within the official zone until the area was finally abandoned, in 1999.

In believing that the Chernobyl zone safely contained the accident, we fall for the proximity trap, which holds that the closer a person is to a nuclear explosion, the more radioactivity they are exposed to. But radioactive gases follow weather patterns, moving around the globe to leave shadows of contamination in shapes that resemble tongues, kidneys, or the sharp tips of arrows.

Continue reading →

April 6, 2019 Posted by | 2 WORLD, health, radiation, Reference | Leave a comment

Research on gene mutations caused by nuclear radiation – Kazakhstan

Over the years, those who sought care from Dispensary No. 4 or the IRME were logged in the state’s medical registry, which tracks the health of people exposed to the Polygon tests. People are grouped by generation and by how much radiation they received, on the basis of where they lived. Although the registry does not include every person who was affected, at one point it listed more than 351,000 individuals across 3 generations. More than one-third of these have died, and many others have migrated or lost contact. But according to Muldagaliev, about 10,000 people have been continually observed since 1962. Researchers consider the registry an important and relatively unexplored resource for understanding the effects of long-term and low-dose radiation2. 

Geneticists have been able to use these remaining records to investigate the generational effects of radiation…….

In 2002, Dubrova and his colleagues reported that the mutation rate in the germ lines of those who had been directly exposed was nearly twice that found in controls3. The effects continued in subsequent generations that had not been directly exposed to the blasts. Their children had a 50% higher rate of germline mutation than controls had. Dubrova thinks that if researchers can establish the pattern of mutation in the offspring of irradiated parents, then there could be a way to predict the long-term, intergenerational health risks.

The nuclear sins of the Soviet Union live on in Kazakhstan  https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-01034-8 Wudan Yan– 3 Apr 19, Decades after weapons testing stopped, researchers are still struggling to decipher the health impacts of radiation exposure around Semipalatinsk. The statues of Lenin are weathered and some are tagged with graffiti, but they still stand tall in the parks of Semey, a small industrial city tucked in the northeast steppe of Kazakhstan. All around the city, boxy Soviet-era cars and buses lurch past tall brick apartment buildings and cracked walkways, relics of a previous regime.Other traces of the past are harder to see. Folded into the city’s history — into the very DNA of its people — is the legacy of the cold war. The Semipalatinsk Test Site, about 150 kilometres west of Semey, was the anvil on which the Soviet Union forged its nuclear arsenal. Between 1949 and 1963, the Soviets pounded an 18,500-square-kilometre patch of land known as the Polygon with more than 110 above-ground nuclear tests. Kazakh health authorities estimate that up to 1.5 million people were exposed to fallout in the process. Underground tests continued until 1989.

Much of what’s known about the health impacts of radiation comes from studies of acute exposure — for example, the atomic blasts that levelled Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan or the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl in Ukraine. Studies of those events provided grim lessons on the effects of high-level exposure, as well as the lingering impacts on the environment and people who were exposed. Such work, however, has found little evidence that the health effects are passed on across generations.

People living near the Polygon were exposed not only to acute bursts, but also to low doses of radiation over the course of decades (see ‘Danger on the wind’). Kazakh researchers have been collecting data on those who lived through the detonations, as well as their children and their children’s children. Continue reading →

April 4, 2019 Posted by | Kazakhstan, radiation, Reference | Leave a comment

Why Low dose radiation can be more dangerous- more cancers per person than at high doses

LeRoy Moore: Low-dose radiation can be more dangerous,  http://www.dailycamera.com/letters/ci_32543151/leroy-moore-low-dose-radiation-can-be-more 31 Mar 19  Though Maddie Nagle’s beautifully written column of March 8 criticizes me, more important is that she downplays the significance of low-dose exposure to the alpha radiation of plutonium at Rocky Flats. This could harm people unaware of the danger. Carl Morgan, the “Father of Health Physics,” studied the effects of radiation for those building Manhattan Project nuclear weapons. He knew that the alpha particles released by plutonium cannot be harmful unless inhaled or taken into the body through an open wound.

Toward the end of his life he spoke to Robert Del Tredici. He said “down at the low doses you actually get more cancers per person rem than you do at the high doses … because the high levels will often kill cells outright, whereas the low levels of exposure tend to injure cells rather than kill them and it is the surviving injured cells that are the cause for concern.” The effects of a small exposure “will be much more severe than had been anticipated.”(Del Tredici, “At Work in the Fields of the Bomb,” 1987, p. 133)

Nagle also makes misleading remarks about Tom K. Hei of Columbia University. Hei and colleagues demonstrated that a single plutonium alpha particle induces mutations in mammal cells. Cells receiving very low doses are more likely to be damaged than destroyed. Replication of these damaged cells constitutes genetic harm, and more such harm per unit dose occurs at very low doses than would occur with higher dose exposures. “These data provide direct evidence that a single alpha particle traversing a nucleus will have a high probability of resulting in a mutation and highlight the need for radiation protection at low doses.” (Hei et al., Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 94, April 1997, pp. 3765-3770.)

April 1, 2019 Posted by | radiation, Reference, USA | Leave a comment

Age and Sex Bias in Radiation Research

April 1, 2019 Posted by | 2 WORLD, radiation, Reference, women | Leave a comment

Manual For Survival – A Chernobyl Guide to the Future

Science 6th March 2019 Two decades after Chernobyl, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the World Health Organization (WHO), and the United Nations (UN) Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation stated that “fewer than 50 deaths had been directly attributed to radiation from the disaster, almost all being highly exposed rescue workers,” because radiation levels were considered too low to have caused any detectable harm. This conclusion was based on data derived from the atomic bomb survivors life-span study, a program that began in 1950 to document the long-term health effects of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Russian, Ukrainian, and Belorussian scientists vehemently disputed this assessment, estimating Chernobyl-linked fatalities in the hundreds of thousands. The UN agencies later recognized a broader spectrum of Chernobyl-related health effects,
yet the idea that there were no long-term consequences to human health proved hard to dislodge.
The UN-WHO-IAEA assessment was repeated in many venues and was cited by journalists as a scientific consensus. After the Fukushima nuclear accident in 2011, residents in the affected region were told by experts from many of the same international institutions that there would be no direct long-term health effects because their radiation exposure was low.
Because there was no post-Chernobyl equivalent to the atomic bomb survivors life-span study, the argument went, the data on the Japanese survivors remained the gold standard of international nuclear regulations.
The notion that no such data existed, however, was not entirely true as regards Chernobyl. Kate Brown’s meticulously researched Manual for Survival is the first environmental and medical history that recovers decades-long efforts of scientists and doctors in Ukraine and Belarus to document the long-term health impacts from the Chernobyl meltdown.
Unlike the Japanese atomic bomb survivors life-span study, which began 5 years after the exposure, Soviet doctors worked in contaminated areas right after the Chernobyl accident—many of these areas populated by people who didn’t
know that they were exposed to radiation. Over the years, Soviet scientists amassed vast evidence of a broad range of debilitating health effects from low-level radiation, including cancers; anemia; gastrointestinal problems; and severe disorders of the liver, kidneys, thyroid, and other organs.
The individuals who collected these data risked their careers and lives, enduring harassment from regional politicians and Soviet secret police and accumulating radioactive isotopes in their own bodies.

https://blogs.sciencemag.org/books/2019/03/06/manual-for-survival/

March 12, 2019 Posted by | radiation, resources - print, spinbuster | Leave a comment

Along the 2020 Olympics torch route in Japan – higher radiation levels

Atomic Balm Part 1: Prime Minister Abe Uses The Tokyo Olympics As Snake Oil Cure For The Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Meltdowns  March 01, 2019, Fairewinds Energy Education, By Arnie Gundersen “……….To determine whether or not Olympic athletes might be affected by fallout emanating from the disaster site, Dr. Marco Kaltofen and I were sponsored by Fairewinds Energy Education to look at Olympic venues during the fall of 2017.We took simple dirt and dust samples along the Olympic torch route as well as inside Fukushima’s Olympic stadium and as far away as Tokyo. When the Olympic torch route and Olympic stadium samples were tested, we found samples of dirt in Fukushima’s Olympic Baseball Stadium that were highly radioactive, registering 6,000 Bq/kg of Cesium, which is 3,000 times more radioactive than dirt in the US. We also found that simple parking lot radiation levels were 50-times higher there than here in the US.

Thirty of the dirt and fine dust samples that I took on my last two trips to Japan in February and March 2016 and September 2017 were analyzed at WPI (Worchester Polytechnic Institute. The WPI laboratory analysis are detailed in the report entitled: Measuring Radioactivity in Soil and Dust Samples from Japan, T. Pham, S. Franca and S. Nguyen, Worchester Polytechnic Institute, which found that:

With the upcoming XXXII Olympiad in 2020 hosted by Japan, it is necessary to look into the radioactivity of Olympic venues as well as tourist attractions in the host cities… Since thousands of athletes and millions of visitors are travelling to Japan for the Olympics, there has been widespread concern from the international community about radiation exposure. Therefore, it is important to investigate the extent of radioactive fallout from the Fukushima Dai-ichi incident.

The measured results showed a much higher activity of Cesium-137 in the proposed torch route compared to other areas. Overall, the further away from the Fukushima Dai-ichi Nuclear Power Plant, the lower the radioactivity. The activity of Cesium-137 in Tokyo, the furthest site from the plant, was the lowest when compared to the other sites. Therefore, the activity of Cesium-137 in Tokyo sample was used as the baseline to qualitatively estimate the human exposure to radiation.

At the Azuma Sports Park, the soil and dust samples yielded a range of 78.1 Bq/kg to 6176.0 Bq/kg. This particular Olympic venue is around 90 km from the Nuclear Power Plant. The other sites that are closer to the Nuclear Power Plant like the tourist route, proposed torch route, and non-Olympic samples have higher amounts due to the close proximity to ground zero of the disaster.

… the proposed torch route samples had the highest mean radioactivity due to their close proximity to the plant. Based on the measurement, we estimated qualitatively that the radiation exposure of people living near the Azuma Sports Park area was 20.7 times higher than that of people living in Tokyo. The main tourist and proposed torch routes had radiation exposure of 24.6 and 60.6 times higher, respectively, than in Tokyo…. Olympic officials should consider using the results of this project to decide whether the radioactivity level at the proposed torch route and the Olympic venues are within acceptable level……  https://www.fairewinds.org/demystify/atomic-balm-part-1-prime-minister-abe-uses-the-tokyo-olympics-as-snake-oil-cure-for-the-fukushima-daiichi-nuclear-meltdowns

March 2, 2019 Posted by | environment, Japan, radiation | Leave a comment

Radiation in a crematorium traced back to a human body

It wasn’t enough radiation to be alarming, but it could be a sign of an ongoing problem The Verge By Rachel Becker  Feb 26, 2019, 1A crematorium in Arizona became contaminated with radiation when workers cremated a man who had received radiation treatments for cancer right before he died, a new study reports. The findings highlight a potential safety gap for crematory workers, who might not know what’s in the body they’re cremating.

In this case, the radiation in the crematorium wasn’t significant enough to be worrying for the crematory worker’s health, according to a study published today in the Journal of the American Medical Association. But the study also found clues that exposure to radioactive compounds from medical treatments may be an ongoing safety risk for crematory workers……..

It’s not an easy problem to fix. Manufacturers provide detailed instructions for handling the drug with patients who are alive, but not for ones that have died, Yu says. “It presents a unique safety challenge.” Detecting radioactive materials is more complicated than running a Geiger counter over the body. And there aren’t any federal regulations for what to do with a radiation-treated body, Yu says, so the laws change from state to state. ……https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/26/18241402/radiation-crematorium-arizona-radiopharmaceuticals-cancer-body-lutetium

March 2, 2019 Posted by | employment, radiation, USA | Leave a comment

Trump administration accepting the greedy “radiation is good for you” group

These assertions stand scientific consensus on its head. Most experts say to the contrary that even low doses of radiation cause cell damage that years later can promote uncontrolled cell growth and replication, and that children and fetuses are particularly susceptible to harm. That seven-decade-old view was reaffirmed as recently as last April in a study by a congressionally chartered nonprofit organization, the National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurement.

The study, overseen by a dozen experts from the government, academia, and industry, and funded by the NRC, considered 29 contemporary scientific studies of the effects of low-dose radiation in reaffirming that even low-level radiation should be avoided to the extent possible.

RADIATION IS GOOD FOR YOU? THE FRINGE VIEWPOINT GAINS GROUND IN THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION, https://publicintegrity.org/national-security/radiation-is-good-for-you-the-heretical-view-gains-ground-under-trump/The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is actively considering claims that low-dose radiation protections should be lifted because exposures make you healthier, a potential boon to radiation-related industries. 

Since World War II, virtually every American business where radiation is present – hospital emergency rooms and cancer wards, uranium mines, nuclear power plants, and others – has operated under rules generally requiring that exposures be kept as low as possible. The rules are based on a widely-accepted scientific dicta that even small amounts of extra radiation can be harmful to human health.

Following those rules, though, is costly and often cumbersome, and so the requirement for low-dose radiation protections – known as the ALARA standard for “as low as reasonably achievable” – has long been annoying to a large swath of American industry. Estimates of the costs associated with these protections run into the billions of dollars.

Until the Trump era, opponents of the rules have gotten little traction in trying to upend low-dose radiation protections – such as isolation units, elaborate shielding, specialized air cleaners, and elaborate worker training — in federal regulations. But proposed relaxations have been percolating in recent months, courtesy of a little-known advocacy group called Scientists for Accurate Radiation Information, or SARI.

Members of the group, which claims its ideas have been wrongly dismissed and belittled by mainstream scientists, subscribe to a minority theory known as “hormesis.” It defies conventional wisdom by holding that damaging things that are dangerous in high doses might actually be beneficial to human health in small doses.

Despite swimming against the tide in the past, one of the group’s members has just been appointed to head a Radiation Advisory Panel at the Environmental Protection Agency, which helps set federal standards for radiation doses received by the public and by workers. And several of its recommendations to ease radiation protections are presently under active consideration by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

SARI’s members typically have more day-to-day connections to radiation than others, and potentially more influence: They have held jobs connected to radiation protection at the EPA, the Department of Labor, the Energy Department and its sub-agency responsible for building nuclear weapons at nine factories across the country. Practitioners of nuclear medicine, people employed in the nuclear industry, and professors who teach nuclear medicine or industrial hygiene also populate SARI.

The NRC’s consideration of the SARI views got started when three members of the group petitioned it in 2015 to abandon its current approach and accept that radiation in low doses is not only benign, but improves health. That was two years after SARI’s founding by industry officials trying to tamp down public concerns about the radiation that spilled from the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster.

The NRC took the petitions seriously. Its staff created a working group to study the issue, and insiders now say that work is done. According to Scott Burnell, an NRC spokesman, the five members of the commission as a result will take up the issue this spring. Continue reading →

February 28, 2019 Posted by | politics, radiation, Reference, spinbuster | 1 Comment

Coastal populations dosed with radiation from nearby nuclear facilities

Radioactive sea spray is dosing communities, February 17, 2019 by beyondnuclearinternational  Governments want to cover it up By Tim Deere-Jones.

It is clear from the available empirical data that coastal populations impacted by prevailing onshore winds and living next to sea areas contaminated with liquid radioactive effluents from nuclear sites, are annually exposed to dietary and inhalation doses of man-made marine radioactivity.

Effluents discharged to the sea by nuclear power stations, fuel fabrication sites and reprocessing facilities are transferred from sea to land in airborne sea spray and marine aerosols (micro-droplets). They come in also during episodes of coastal flooding. This problem has been particularly pronounced around the UK Sellafield reprocessing and plutonium production site in Cumbria. In 1988, independent empirical research commissioned by a west Wales local authority reported that
Sellafield-derived, sea-discharged cesium had been found in pasture grass up to 10 miles inland of the Ceredigion coast.

Clearly, this contributes to human dietary doses via the dairy and beef food chain. The research also implies the inevitability of further dietary doses via arable and horticultural crops. Given that airborne radioactivity is driven at least 10 miles inland, it should be assumed that coastal populations are exposed, on a repeated annual basis, to inhalation doses.
https://beyondnuclearinternational.org/2019/02/17/radioactive-sea-spray-is-dosing-communities/

February 19, 2019 Posted by | environment, radiation | Leave a comment

Ireland’s Radiation scrutiny now transfers to HIQA 

Radiation scrutiny now transfers to HIQA  Jhttps://www.lawsociety.ie/gazette/Top-Stories/radiation-scrutiny-transfers-to-hiqa/

13 Feb 19, Last month’s transposition of European Council Directive 2013/59/EURATOM into Irish law means that HIQA is now responsible for regulating medical exposure to ionising radiation.

The new law covers dental x-rays, hospital CT scans, mammograms and radiotherapy received as part of cancer treatment.

Treatment

A medical exposure to ionising radiation is when a patient receives ionising radiation as part of their diagnosis or treatment.

The transposition into Irish law confers new statutory functions on HIQA under the EU’s (Basic Safety Standards for Protection against Dangers Arising from Medical Exposure to Ionising Radiation) Regulations 2018 SI No. 256.

HIQA’s John Tuffy said: “Generally the risks associated with receiving medical exposure to ionising radiation can be considered very low.

“However, as procedures that involve ionising radiation carry varying levels of risk dependent on the dose given, it is important that all radiation doses are kept as low as practically possible.

Vital

“It is vital that patients are only exposed when the benefits of receiving the exposure outweigh the risks.”

“The new legislation has given HIQA regulatory powers to ensure that appropriate processes are in place to protect patients in public and private healthcare facilities for the first time.”

Last month’s transposition of European Council Directive 2013/59/EURATOM into Irish law means that HIQA is now responsible for regulating medical exposure to ionising radiation.

The new law covers dental x-rays, hospital CT scans, mammograms and radiotherapy received as part of cancer treatment.

Treatment

A medical exposure to ionising radiation is when a patient receives ionising radiation as part of their diagnosis or treatment.

The transposition into Irish law confers new statutory functions on HIQA under the EU’s (Basic Safety Standards for Protection against Dangers Arising from Medical Exposure to Ionising Radiation) Regulations 2018 SI No. 256.

HIQA’s John Tuffy said: “Generally the risks associated with receiving medical exposure to ionising radiation can be considered very low.

“However, as procedures that involve ionising radiation carry varying levels of risk dependent on the dose given, it is important that all radiation doses are kept as low as practically possible.

Vital

“It is vital that patients are only exposed when the benefits of receiving the exposure outweigh the risks.”

“The new legislation has given HIQA regulatory powers to ensure that appropriate processes are in place to protect patients in public and private healthcare facilities for the first time.”   

Last month’s transposition of European Council Directive 2013/59/EURATOM into Irish law means that HIQA is now responsible for regulating medical exposure to ionising radiation.

The new law covers dental x-rays, hospital CT scans, mammograms and radiotherapy received as part of cancer treatment.

Treatment

A medical exposure to ionising radiation is when a patient receives ionising radiation as part of their diagnosis or treatment.

The transposition into Irish law confers new statutory functions on HIQA under the EU’s (Basic Safety Standards for Protection against Dangers Arising from Medical Exposure to Ionising Radiation) Regulations 2018 SI No. 256.

HIQA’s John Tuffy said: “Generally the risks associated with receiving medical exposure to ionising radiation can be considered very low.

“However, as procedures that involve ionising radiation carry varying levels of risk dependent on the dose given, it is important that all radiation doses are kept as low as practically possible.

Vital

“It is vital that patients are only exposed when the benefits of receiving the exposure outweigh the risks.”

“The new legislation has given HIQA regulatory powers to ensure that appropriate processes are in place to protect patients in public and private healthcare facilities for the first time.”

Last month’s transposition of European Council Directive 2013/59/EURATOM into Irish law means that HIQA is now responsible for regulating medical exposure to ionising radiation.

The new law covers dental x-rays, hospital CT scans, mammograms and radiotherapy received as part of cancer treatment.

Treatment

A medical exposure to ionising radiation is when a patient receives ionising radiation as part of their diagnosis or treatment.

The transposition into Irish law confers new statutory functions on HIQA under the EU’s (Basic Safety Standards for Protection against Dangers Arising from Medical Exposure to Ionising Radiation) Regulations 2018 SI No. 256.

HIQA’s John Tuffy said: “Generally the risks associated with receiving medical exposure to ionising radiation can be considered very low.

“However, as procedures that involve ionising radiation carry varying levels of risk dependent on the dose given, it is important that all radiation doses are kept as low as practically possible.

Vital

“It is vital that patients are only exposed when the benefits of receiving the exposure outweigh the risks.”

“The new legislation has given HIQA regulatory powers to ensure that appropriate processes are in place to protect patients in public and private healthcare facilities for the first time.”

February 14, 2019 Posted by | Ireland, radiation | Leave a comment

Increasing danger of the radioactive by-products from the nuclear industry

Paul Waldon Fight To Stop Nuclear Waste Dump In Flinders Ranges SA, February 6  

From mining the uranium rich ore, to nuclear abandonment – a dozen by-products more radio toxic than the ore mined to fuel the reactor are discarded. These products are the raffinates culminating in 85% of the total radioactivity that goes directly into the tailings only to migrate throughout the environment.

Products like Radon gas, Polonium-210 with a 140 day half life, Radium-226, with a 1600 year half life, Thorium-230 with a 76,000 year half life are released , and yet only 1kg of Uranium oxide is recovered in every 4,000 kilos mined.

Uranium-238 subjected to neutron bombardment in the reactor becomes Uranium-239 with a 23 minute half life, then that becomes Neptunium-239 with a 2.3 day half life, and that goes on to become Plutonium-239 with a 244,000 year half life, then this spent fuel finally decays to become Uranium- 235 with a half life of 700 million years.

Moreover, x that by no less than 10 to get the life of the radioactive hazard, which equates to no less than 7 billion years, and here we have only just crossed the nuclear industries threshold within the last 76 years with many thousands of nuclear events, and accidents recorded, and yet this is not the only wastes these machines produce with one Canadian CANDU reactor that recorded 100 trillion becquerels of radiation from the Tritium released in just one year.

The nuclear embracing coterie tell us they can safely manage these radioactive wastes, yet there containment vessels are only guaranteed for 25 years not 7 billion years, and a director of Holtec has stated there is no way to remedy a breach of containment. Moreover these nuclear wastes are a gamble and risk that only grows exponentially with every generation.

February 9, 2019 Posted by | 2 WORLD, radiation, Reference | Leave a comment

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