Classified! The secret radiation files.
most of the exposure people received came in the form of internal exposures from ingesting radioactivity, not from external, ambient gamma rays in the environment.
Medical examinations of people in contaminated regions showed a significant increase in the general number of chromosomal mutations in newborns, and the frequency of birth defects in southern Belarus was found to be significantly higher than the control. In terms of general health, Konoplia reported, adults showed an increase in diseases of the circulatory system, hypertension, coronary illness, heart attacks, and myocardial problems, plus a rise in respiratory diseases.
Researchers on the UN team who had security clearances had access to classified studies that showed that 79 percent of children in the Marshall Islands exposed to American bomb blasts under the age of ten had developed thyroid cancer. Seventy-nine percent of several hundred children had thyroid cancer when the background rate was one in a million.
Health physicists fear lawsuits more than nuclear accidents
By Kate Brown, 12 Nov 23, https://beyondnuclearinternational.org/2023/11/12/classified-the-secret-radiation-files/
In 1987, a year after the Chernobyl accident, the US Health Physics Society met in Columbia, Maryland. Health physicists are scientists who are responsible for radiological protection at nuclear power plants, nuclear weapons plants, and hospitals. They are called on in cases of nuclear accidents. The conference’s keynote speaker came from the Department of Energy (DOE); the title of his talk drew on a sports analogy: “Radiation: The Offense and the Defense.” Switching metaphors to geopolitics, the speaker announced to the hall of nuclear professionals that his talk amounted to “the party line.” The biggest threat to nuclear industries, he told the gathered professionals, was not more disasters like Chernobyl and Three Mile Island but lawsuits.
After the address, lawyers from the Department of Justice (DOJ) met in break-out groups with the health physicists to prepare them to serve as “expert witnesses” against claimants suing the US government for alleged health problems due to exposure from radioactivity issued in the production and testing of nuclear weapons during the Cold War. That’s right: the DOE and the DOJ were preparing private citizens to defend the US government and its corporate contractors as they ostensibly served as “objective” scientific experts in US courts.
Health physics is an extremely important field for our everyday lives. Health physicists set standards for radiation protection and evaluate damage after nuclear emergencies. They determine where radiologists set the dial for CT scans and X-rays. They calculate how radioactive our food can be (and our food is often radioactive) and determine acceptable levels of radiation in our workplaces, environments, bodies of water, and air. Despite its importance, as it is practiced inside university labs and government organizations, health physics is far from an independent field engaged in the objective, open-ended pursuit of knowledge.
Compromised Science
The field of health physics emerged inside the Manhattan Project along with the development of the world’s first nuclear bombs. From the United States, it migrated abroad. For the past seventy-five years, the vast majority of health physicists have been employed in national nuclear agencies or in universities with research underwritten by national nuclear agencies. As much as we in the academy like to make distinctions between apolitical, academic research and politicized paid research outside the academy, during the Cold War those distinctions hardly made sense. From the end of World War II until the 1970s, federal grants paid for 70 percent of university research. The largest federal donors were the Department of Defense, the US Atomic Energy Agency, and a dozen federal security agencies.
Historian Peter Galison estimated in 2004 that the volume of classified research surpassed open literature in American libraries by five to ten times. Put another way, for every article published by American academics in open journals, five to ten articles were filed in sealed repositories available only to the 4 million Americans with security clearances. Often, the same researchers penned both open and classified work. Health physics benefited from the largesse of the Pentagon and the Atomic Energy Commission, which produced nuclear weapons for US arsenals. Correspondingly, the field suffered from a closed circle of knowledge that has had a major impact on our abilities to assess and respond to both nuclear emergencies and quotidian radioactive contamination.
Tracking the production of knowledge in the field of health physics shows how the effective renunciation of facts has played a major role in this branch of science. More generally, it demonstrates how the boundary between open and classified research is critical yet rarely acknowledged. The response of international health physicists to the Chernobyl disaster, which occurred in Soviet Ukraine in April 1986, shows heavily politicized science in action. History reveals that the official, federally sponsored cultivation of “alternative facts” is not new but has deep roots in the twentieth century.
Chernobyl came at an unfortunate time for nuclear professionals. As the Cold War creaked to an end, lawsuits abounded. In the 1980s, Marshall Islanders—their homes blasted in nuclear tests, their bodies subjected to classified medical study by scientists contracted by the Atomic Energy Agency—went to court. In Utah and Nevada, those who lived downwind from the Nevada Test Site were lining up for lawsuits. Meanwhile, the Metropolitan Edison Company in Pennsylvania faced lawsuits from plaintiffs living near the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant, which suffered a partial meltdown in 1979.
In the late 1980s, reporters and congressional investigators began to inquire into US government agencies’ wide-scale engagement in human radiation experiments, which included exposing tens of thousands of soldiers to nuclear blasts. These legal actions and investigations constituted an existential threat for nuclear industries, civilian and military. Chernobyl cast into doubt industry statements that nuclear energy is safer than coal, than flying, than living in high-altitude Denver. If another nuclear accident were to occur, UN International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) head Hans Blix told the IAEA board of governors a few weeks after the Chernobyl explosions, “I fear the general public will no longer believe any contention that the risk of a severe accident was so small as to be almost negligible.”
Because radioactivity is insensible, society relies on scientists and their technologies to count ionizing radiation and analyze its effect on biological organisms. In 1986, the three-decades-old Life Span Study of Japanese bomb survivors served in the West as the “gold standard” for radiation exposure. It became the chief referent in lawsuits over health damage from radioactive contaminants. The Life Span Study started in 1950. In subsequent decades, American and Japanese scientists followed bomb survivors and their offspring, looking for possible health effects from exposure to the bomb blasts. By 1986, the group had detected a significant increase in a handful of cancers and, surprisingly, no birth defects, though geneticists had expected them.
The Life Span Study told scientists a great deal about the effects of a single exposure of a terrifically large blast of radiation lasting less than a second but little about the impact of chronic, low doses of radioactivity—the kind of exposures served up by the Chernobyl accident and related to the ongoing lawsuits in the United States. At the time, like now, scientists confessed they knew very little about the effects of low doses of radioactivity on human health. For that reason, after Chernobyl, leading scientific administrators in UN agencies and national health agencies called for using the Chernobyl accident to carry out a long-term, large-scale epidemiological study to determine the effects of low doses of radiation on human health. Unfortunately, those requests went nowhere at first because Soviet officials asserted that health damage was limited to the two dozen firefighters who died from acute radiation poisoning. They insisted that they were monitoring the health of neighboring residents and found no change in their health. Soviet spokespeople told the international community that they did not need help, thank you very much.
Silos of Knowledge
Health physics, a moribund field in the West and a secretive field in the Soviet Union, suddenly appeared in the spotlight after the Chernobyl accident. Archival records show that two silos of knowledge about the effects of low doses of radiation on human health emerged in the wake of the Chernobyl accident. Western health physicists oriented around the Life Span Study, while Soviet health physicists worked from specialized, closed clinics producing literature that mostly was filed in classified libraries. A few months after the accident, Western health physicists— extrapolating from Hiroshima—announced that, given the reported levels of radioactivity released in the accident, they expected to see no detectable health problems as a result. From the Soviet side, spokespeople gave vague assurances, but scientists were silent. For security reasons, Soviet health physicists did not take the podium. Anyway, they were busy.
Behind the Iron Curtain, Soviet scientists near the accident quietly got to work figuring out the extent of the damage. A few days after the accident, Anatolii Romanenko, minister of health in Ukraine, called up medical brigades to examine evacuees and villagers in contaminated areas. Several thousand doctors and nurses fanned out across the Soviet countryside. The effort would have been unimaginable outside of a socialist state highly skilled in the art of mass mobilization. In Ukraine alone, doctors examined seventy thousand children and over one hundred thousand adults in the summer following the accident. People judged to have received high doses were sent to hospitals in Kiev, Leningrad, and Moscow. By late May, the number of hospitalized citizens rose to the tens of thousands.
For the subsequent five years, the last years of the Soviet Union, doctors and medical researchers in Ukraine and Belarus tracked health statistics in contaminated regions. They reported the results in classified documents each year. Their reports show that after the accident, frequencies of health problems in five major disease categories grew annually. Soviet doctors did not have access to ambient measurements of radioactivity in the environment and the food chain because that information was classified, so doctors did what they had long done in the Soviet Union. They used their patients’ bodies as biological barometers to determine doses of radioactivity. Medical practitioners counted white and red blood cells, held radiation detection counters to the thyroids of their patients, measured blood pressure, and scanned urine. They looked for chromosomal damage in blood cells and counts of radioactivity in tooth enamel. Using these biomarkers, Soviet doctors determined the doses of radioactivity their patients had encountered externally and ingested internally. Doctors calculated the range of radioactive isotopes lodged in their patients’ bodies. A KGB general who ran his own KGB clinic in Kiev for KGB agents and their families counted twelve different radioactive isotopes in organs and tissue of his patients.
In 1986, in neighboring Belarus, which received the majority of Chernobyl fallout, scientists at the Belarusian Academy of Science set up case-control studies to track the impact in real time on the health of children and pregnant women, two populations judged to be especially vulnerable. The academy also commissioned dozens of studies of radioactive contamination in the atmosphere, soils, plants, agricultural products, and livestock. They drew on a body of knowledge that Soviet scientists had clandestinely developed over four decades in clinics stationed near secret nuclear installations that had suffered a large number of accidents and spills of radioactive effluents during the Cold War rush to produce weapons. In April 1989, the respected president of the Belarusian Academy of Science sent to Moscow a twenty-five-page report that reflected the renaissance of science in the fields of radioecology and radiobiology that had flourished in the contaminated regions as a result of the Chernobyl disaster. Evgenii Konoplia laid out what his Institute of Radiobiology had found.
Almost the entire territory of Belarus had been contaminated, Konoplia wrote, except for a few northern regions.
Continue readingFukushima nuclear plant workers sent to hospital after being splashed with tainted water
Guardian, 27 Oct 23
The operator Tepco says the workers came in contact with the wastewater when a hose came off accidentally and have been taken to hospital as a precaution
Four workers at the Fukushima nuclear plant were splashed with water containing radioactive materials, with two of them taken to hospital as a precaution, according to the plant operator.
The incident, which took place on Wednesday, highlights the dangers Japan still faces in decommissioning the plant. The reactor was knocked out by an immense tsunami in 2011 in the world’s worst atomic disaster since Chornobyl in 1986.
Five workers were cleaning pipes at the system filtering wastewater for release into the sea when two were splashed after a hose came off accidentally, according to a spokesperson for operator Tepco.
Two others were contaminated when they were cleaning up the spill, the spokesperson added………
Tepco said that both would stay in hospital for “about two weeks” for follow-up examinations and that the company was analysing how the accident had occurred while reviewing measures to prevent a repeat of it………………………
more https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/oct/27/fukushima-nuclear-plant-workers-hospitalised-after-being-splashed-with-tainted-water #nuclear #antinuclear #NoNukes #radiation
Multiple radionuclides detected in Fukushima nuke wastewater planned for 3rd round of ocean discharge
Xinhua 21 Oct 23 https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202310/21/WS65339e99a31090682a5e9ef2.html
TOKYO — The third batch of Fukushima nuclear-contaminated water to be released during Japan’s next round of ocean discharge contains carbon-14, cobalt 60, strontium-90 and other radionuclides, according to pre-discharge test results released by the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO).
Despite mounting concerns and opposition among local fishermen as well as from other countries, TEPCO said that preparations for the third round of ocean discharge will begin after the second round of discharge is completed and relevant maintenance and confirmation operations are carried out.
The nuclear-contaminated wastewater from the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, after advanced liquid processing system (ALPS) treatment, must enter the measurement and confirmation facility and wait for pre-discharge test results before being discharged into the ocean.
The measurement and confirmation facility is split into three groups of 10 tanks with each of the groups used on a rotating basis as receiving tanks, measurement and confirmation tanks, and discharge tanks.
At present, the 10 tanks in Group B were emptied in the first round of discharge starting on Aug 24. Meanwhile, the 10 tanks in Group C were confirmed to meet the discharge standards on Sept 21, and the discharge started on Oct 5.
The sampling of the nuclear wastewater stored in Group A tanks for the third round of discharge was completed on July 10. The analysis results showed that they contained trace amounts of carbon-14, cobalt 60, strontium-90, iodine-129 and cesium-137, of which strontium-90 was not detected in the second round of discharge from Oct 5, according to reports released on Thursday by TEPCO.
TEPCO claims that its ALPS facility, a multi-nuclide removal system, can remove 62 radioactive substances except tritium, but it was found that about 70 percent of the water in the storage tanks contained non-tritium radionuclides at a concentration exceeding the regulatory standards applicable for discharge into the environment. #nuclear #antinuclear #nuclearfree #NoNukes
Deadly radioactive dust
In the case of Semipalatinsk, the former Soviet Union’s nuclear testing grounds, the exposure was due to the passage of radioactive clouds. The area and the people were exposed gradually not only during the passage of the cloud but also from the subsequent contamination of the area.
by beyondnuclearinternational https://beyondnuclearinternational.org/2023/10/15/deadly-dust/
A look at the studies of professor Masaharu Hoshi. From Impact
The risks of radiation exposure are better understood today thanks to researchers dedicated to working with the victims of exposure, understanding their symptoms, identifying treatments and developing safety protocols. This article looks at the work of one such researcher, Dr. Masaharu Hoshi.
Harnessing atomic particles and radiation led to powerful and world changing technologies. The field of medical imaging has saved countless lives and continues to push the boundaries of medical interventions and research, which would have been impossible without the first x-ray machines. Unfortunately, not all inventions have been so altruistic.
The advent of nuclear weapons showed the world the destructive potential possible via scientific inquiry. While the dangerous effects of radiation exposure were documented from the inception of this technology, catastrophic events like the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and nuclear disasters at Chernobyl, Semipalatinsk or Fukushima provide a real-time glimpse into the long-term effects of exposure.
Investigating the causes of this exposure in order to prevent future accidents is essential, but so too is cataloguing the rates and types of exposure among the victims. With this information, correlations between exposure and health effects, both short- and long-term, can be assessed. This data is crucial for understanding the mechanisms behind radiation effects on living creatures and in assessing risks, safety protocols and treatment. Since the 1980s, Dr Masaharu Hoshi, Professor Emeritus at Hiroshima University, has been traveling around the world, visiting the sites of nuclear disasters in an effort to fully comprehend the risks. In doing so he is also revealing that there is still much we need to learn regarding the effects of radiation exposure.
Quantifying the risks
“I started my research with the people exposed to radiation in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the year 1980,” says Hoshi. “Before that I completed my dissertation on nuclear physics with a specialty in radiation measurement.” This graduate training positioned him to become an expert on the effects of radiation.
The work that commenced in Hiroshima and Nagasaki right after the blast showed that with higher doses of radiation, the greater the effect on the human body, in the form of symptoms like carcinogenesis. The ratio between exposure and effects is termed risk. This measure of risk is useful in treating people exposed to radiation and it can quantify how much risk individuals face depending on the dose of exposure.
Quantifying the risks
“I started my research with the people exposed to radiation in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the year 1980,” says Hoshi. “Before that I completed my dissertation on nuclear physics with a specialty in radiation measurement.” This graduate training positioned him to become an expert on the effects of radiation.
The work that commenced in Hiroshima and Nagasaki right after the blast showed that with higher doses of radiation, the greater the effect on the human body, in the form of symptoms like carcinogenesis. The ratio between exposure and effects is termed risk. This measure of risk is useful in treating people exposed to radiation and it can quantify how much risk individuals face depending on the dose of exposure.
“This work can inform us whether a medical check-up is required every two years depending on the degree of exposure, or if hospitalization is necessary if there has been too much exposure,” explains Hoshi.
He says that the work done in Japan has informed laws regarding radiation exposure safety and protocols in countries around the world, but this is only one scenario in which a person can come into contact with the deadly rays.
“The people exposed to radiation in Hiroshima and Nagasaki from the atomic bomb were exposed to gamma rays, including a few neutrons, in a short instant,” outlines Hoshi. “From 1 microsecond to about 1 minute which is quite different from the gradual exposure of actual workers in the radiation industry.”
In the case of Semipalatinsk, the former Soviet Union’s nuclear testing grounds, the exposure was due to the passage of radioactive clouds. The area and the people were exposed gradually not only during the passage of the cloud but also from the subsequent contamination of the area. “Therefore, the risk is considered to be different from that of the atomic bomb survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki,” confirms Hoshi.
“Because of that, we started our study on the radiation dose and the health effects occurring in Semipalatinsk, which has been going on since 1994.”
Over the course of these studies over decades he has worked with colleagues to amass databases of over 300,000 cases of exposure and long-term follow-up. It was among these cases, spread out in different locations, that a pattern emerged, revealing yet another variable to consider during an exposure event, being radioactive microparticles.
Radiation detectives
Initially in Japan, research started on people who came to the area right after the explosion to help their families and were not the direct victims of the bombing. For these individuals the calculated radiation exposure dose was less than 10 mSv which, according to Hoshi, is usually not a problem.
“Using the Hiroshima University database of people who were exposed to the bombing incident, we found that the mortality rate was higher for those who came to the vicinity directly after the explosion and the cause for this was unknown,” he states.
Furthermore, Hoshi began to see a similar pattern of exposure and symptoms in other places. In Semipalatinsk it was called Kainal Syndrome and again there was no explanation. Many of the survivors of Chernobyl, Gulf War and Hiroshima Nagasaki who entered after the bombing also suffered from hair loss, severe malaise, which can lead to an inability to work, bleeding, diarrhea and more.
“It was then that I understood I would have to use epidemiological ideas to uncover what all of these victims had in common,” he says. Eventually, he realised that commonality was radioactive dust.
Hoshi and his team began investigating the potential for radioactive microparticles to cause internal exposure in all organs of the rats, especially in the lung. They found the effects are 20 times more dangerous than usual external exposure according to the animal experiments.
“With regards to the effects of radioactive particles, some experts have previously pointed it out,” says Hoshi. “However, since there was no supporting research, it has been ignored by public institutions.”
The effects of radiation exposure are the same for every person on the planet, no one country or group of people are immune. Furthermore, when disaster strikes it is usually not contained to one spot. Contamination of air and water can spread over vast distances, bringing with them their deadly side effects. Hoshi and his collaborators are acutely aware of this and are working hard to share their data as far and as wide as possible.
Furthermore, Hoshi stresses that due to the need for a variety of expertise, collaboration is absolutely essential.
“For example, these results are not possible without the input from reactor physicists, radiation and medical physicists, epidemiologists, thyroid specialists, pathologists, medical doctors, as well as statistics and computer database experts,” he highlights.
Hoshi is grateful for all of the hard work this diverse group has done and will continue to do for the benefit of victims and potential victims. Along with further research on progressive treatment and protection, Hoshi plans to continually develop this field. Their work will carry on studying the effects of radioactive dust and ways to protect against it as well as tackling the big problem of evaluating dose exposure from radioactive dust.
This article first appeared on impact.pub whose content is available under a creative commons license.
Dr Masaharu Hoshi is Professor Emeritus at Hiroshima University’s Peace Center. You can read his studies here and here. #nuclear #antinuclear #NuclearFree #NoNukes #NuclearPlants #radiation
Low-Dose Radiation Affects Cardiovascular Disease Risk in Human Aortic Endothelial Cells by Altering Gene Expression under Normal and Diabetic Conditions.
#nuclear #Nuclear-free #anti-nuclear #NoNukes
by Soo-Ho Lee 1,†, Ye Ji Jeong 1,†, Jeongwoo Park 1,2, Hyun-Yong Kim 1, Yeonghoon Son 1, Kwang Seok Kim 1,* and Hae-June Lee 1,*
Divisions of Radiation Biomedical Research, Korea Institute of Radiological and Medical Sciences, Seoul 01812, Korea
2 New Drug Development Center, Daegu Gyeongbuk Medical Innovation Foundation, Daegu 41061, Korea
*Authors to whom correspondence should be addressed.
†These authors contributed equally to this work.
2 August 2022 (This article belongs to the Special Issue Advances in Radiation Toxicity)
Abstract
High doses of ionizing radiation can cause cardiovascular diseases (CVDs); however, the effects of <100 mGy radiation on CVD remain underreported. Endothelial cells (ECs) play major roles in cardiovascular health and disease, and their function is reduced by stimuli such as chronic disease, metabolic disorders, and smoking. However, whether exposure to low-dose radiation results in the disruption of similar molecular mechanisms in ECs under diabetic and non-diabetic states remains largely unknown; we aimed to address this gap in knowledge through the molecular and functional characterization of primary human aortic endothelial cells (HAECs) derived from patients with type 2 diabetes (T2D-HAECs) and normal HAECs in response to low-dose radiation. To address these limitations, we performed RNA sequencing on HAECs and T2D-HAECs following exposure to 100 mGy of ionizing radiation and examined the transcriptome changes associated with the low-dose radiation. Compared with that in the non-irradiation group, low-dose irradiation induced 243 differentially expressed genes (DEGs) (133 down-regulated and 110 up-regulated) in HAECs and 378 DEGs (195 down-regulated and 183 up-regulated) in T2D-HAECs. We also discovered a significant association between the DEGs and the interferon (IFN)-I signaling pathway, which is associated with CVD by Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG) pathway analysis, protein–protein network analysis, and module analysis. Our findings demonstrate the potential impact of low-dose radiation on EC functions that are related to the risk of CVD.
Keywords: low-dose radiation; endothelial cells; diabetes mellitus; gene profiling; cardiovascular disease …………………………………………………………………………….more https://www.mdpi.com/1422-0067/23/15/8577
Important new BMJ article increases our perception of radiation risks
September 3, 2023
The BMJ article which was published on Aug 16, 2023 (accessible free of charge) is the result of a lengthy occupational study by US Professor David Richardson and a team of 11 academics and public health researchers in the US, UK, France and Spain. https://www.bmj.com/content/382/bmj-2022-074520
Its conclusion states
“This major update to INWORKS provides a direct estimate of the association between protracted low dose exposure to ionising radiation and solid cancer mortality based on some of the world’s most informative cohorts of radiation workers. The summary estimate of excess relative rate solid cancer mortality per Gy is larger than estimates currently informing radiation protection, and some evidence suggests a steeper slope for the dose-response association in the low dose range than over the full dose range. These results can help to strengthen radiation protection, especially for low dose exposures that are of primary interest in contemporary medical, occupational, and environmental settings.”
In a nutshell, the article’s findings
- substantially increase our perception of radiogenic risks
- confirm that the linear no threshold model for radiation risks is acceptable
- give new hard evidence of increased risks at low levels of exposure
- act to question the continued use of the LSS studies of Japanese bomb survivors in deriving absolute radiation risks for the public
- act to question the ICRP’s continued use of DDREFs which at present halve radiation risks, and
- act to put pressure on ICRP, WHO, IAEA, etc to revise upwards the current low risks of radiation.
DISCUSSION
- Numerical Risk of Radiation…………………………………………………………………………………………………..So it can be shown that the INWORKS study increases the currently perceived absolute risk of fatal cancer in the UK from ~ 5% to 13% per Sv. This is a substantial increase and will need to be addressed by the ICRP and national authorities.
- 2. Strengthens and Increases the risks found older studies. Second, the new study strengthens an earlier 2018 study (Richardson et al, 2018) by the same team by adding another 10 years’ data to the epidemiology datasets used in the metastudy. It not only strengthens the findings but actually increases the observed ERR risk by ~10% ie from 0.47 to 0.52 per Gy.
- 3. Increased Risks at Low Doses. Perhaps most significant, are the study’s findings of higher risks at very low doses between 0 and 150 mGy which are the doses we need to be concerned with………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………more https://www.ianfairlie.org/news/important-new-bmj-article-increases-our-perception-of-radiation-risks/?fbclid=IwAR0TtpWfyxm1ebiaHGw_eUJd1n1PWRfkmGF3n-YtBnO0rMIRi2XqcPzYYWY
We are all Hibakusha- the global footprint of nuclear fallout
By M.V. Ramana https://beyondnuclearinternational.org/2023/09/03/we-are-all-hibakusha/
The front page of the Times of India of August 7, 1945, carried the headline World’s deadliest bomb hits Japan: Carries blast power of 20,000 tons of TNT. For millions around the world, headlines of that sort would have been their first intimation of the process of nuclear fission on a large scale.
But, a careful stratigrapher, who studies layers in the soil or rock, might be able to discern that, in fact, nuclear fission had occurred in July 1945. The stratigrapher would just have to look for plutonium at Crawford Lake in Ontario, Canada, the site proposed as the “golden spike” spot to mark the start of the Anthropocene (recognising the problems with its definition as highlighted in Down To Earth’s interview with Amitav Ghosh).
What happened in July 1945 was, of course, Trinity, the world’s first nuclear weapon test, now familiar to many through the film Oppenheimer. A group of researchers recently reconstructed how the plutonium released during that explosion would have been transported by the wind. They calculated that direct radioactive fallout from that test would have reached Crawford Lake within four days of the test, “on July 20, 1945 before peaking on July 22, 1945”.
Since Crawford Lake is nearly 3,000 kilometres from the Trinity test site in New Mexico, it stands to reason that many other places would also have received radioactive fallout from the Trinity test. Now consider the fact that there have been at least 528 nuclear weapon tests around the world that took place above the ground, plus the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki—and you can easily imagine how radioactive fallout must have fallen practically everywhere, whether on land or in the oceans.
Not included in the abovementioned list of 528 is the debated 1979 “Vela incident” that most likely involved an Israeli nuclear weapon test with help from South Africa. It is described as debated only because political elites in the United States, whose Vela satellite 6911 detected a double-flash of light that is characteristic of nuclear explosions, did not want to impose sanctions on Israel.
In 2018, two scientists collected a range of evidence consistent with such a nuclear test, importantly cases of radioactive element iodine-131 that was found in the thyroids of some sheep in 1979—in the south east part of Australia, across the oceans. Again, proof that radioactive fallout from nuclear weapon tests spread out globally.
But it is not just nuclear weapons tests. Accidents at nuclear power plants, too, have produced radioactive fallout that has contaminated the peoples of the world. Radioactive cesium released by the 1986 Chernobyl reactor explosion was found in multiple countries across Western Europe. Yet again, sheep, this time in England, Scotland and Wales, were contaminated, and for a time scientists could not even understand the behaviour of the radioactive cesium that the sheep were ingesting.
The sheep remained contaminated for decades. Restrictions on sheep were lifted in all areas only in 2012. Of course, closer to Chernobyl, many areas are still highly contaminated. Radiation levels go up and down depending on outside events, such as forest fires or the Russian army invading the area.
Even without nuclear weapons explosions and reactor accidents, people around the world are exposed to radioactive materials—from reprocessing plants. These facilities chemically process the irradiated spent fuel from nuclear power plants, while also producing very large volumes of liquid and gaseous radioactive effluents. These effluents are released into the air; exposure to these constitutes the largest component of the radiation dose to “members of the public from radionuclides released in effluents from the nuclear fuel cycle”.
People in South Asia have, of course, been exposed to radioactive fallout from nuclear explosions conducted by other countries, nuclear reactor accidents, and reprocessing plants. What about the nuclear weapons exploded by India and Pakistan in 1998, and by India, in 1974? All of these weapons were exploded underground, which should, in principle, have contained all the radioactive materials within the soil. If so, their route for exposing people to radiation can only be by contaminating underground water sources, sometime in the future.
But underground nuclear weapon tests do, sometimes, vent, releasing radioactive materials into the air. After the Limited Test Ban Treaty of 1963, all US nuclear weapons tests were designed to completely contain the radioactivity underground. Nevertheless, 105 of them vented radioactive materials into the atmosphere. A further 287 tests had “operational releases” whereby radioactivity was released during routine post-test activities. Similarly, several hundred underground nuclear weapons explosions at the Novaya Zemlya test site in the Soviet Union released radioactivity into the atmosphere.
Radioactive materials from these releases spread far and wide. In 1970, radioactive materials vented during the Baneberry test were detected as far as Canada; but Canadian diplomats told US officials that “they had no intention to make a formal protest or to conceive of the event as a violation” of the Limited Test Ban Treaty.
It is possible, though not very probable, that the 1998 or the 1974 nuclear tests vented radioactivity. One reason to suspect venting is that residents of the villages near Pokhran, India have repeatedly complained of different kinds of physical illnesses, and demanded that radiation levels be checked. So far, no comprehensive and independent examination of the health of these people or the radioactivity levels in the area has been conducted.
Nearly eight decades since the nuclear age started, people around the world, not to mention the flora and fauna, have all been exposed to radioactive materials from nuclear activities. Any exposure to radioactivity elevates the risk of developing cancer or cardiovascular disease, two great health scourges in modern times.
We are all, in the words of Robert “Bo” Jacobs, the “Global Hibakusha”, survivors of the nuclear age but always at risk of developing one of the diseases associated with radiation exposure. And the worldwide spread of fallout is not, as Jacobs points out, “something that happened, it is something that is still happening”.
OPENING THE FLOOD GATES AT FUKUSHIMA
Discharging radioactive water from the damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant is avoidable, risky and potentially illegal
By Sarah Hachman and Associate Professor Tilman Ruff AO, University of Melbourne, 29 Aug 23 https://pursuit.unimelb.edu.au/articles/opening-the-flood-gates-at-fukushima
The Japanese government intends to discharge all 1.34 million tonnes of wastewater from the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station, an operation that began on 24 August 2023. Presumably, it also plans to discharge the wastewater that will continue to accumulate over the coming decades.
This decision is not only harmful to human and environmental health but is also in direct violation of international law.
The original announcement, made in 2021, came 10 years after a 9.0 earthquake and tsunami struck Japan’s east coast, damaging the cooling mechanisms at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station (FDNPS) and causing three nuclear reactors to meltdown.
The destruction of the FDNPS released an estimated 520 Peta Becquerels (520 x 10¹⁵ nuclear decays per second) of various radionuclides (radioactive elements) into the atmosphere, including cesium, carbon-14, iodine-129, and tritium. However, this figure excludes noble gases such as xenon-133, of which the Fukushima release was the largest since atmospheric nuclear bomb tests.
AN INCOMPLETE CLEAN-UP
Following the incident, the Japanese government worked with the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) on a plan to decommission the plant, efforts which continue to this day.
The first step of this process was to ensure the reactors remained stable. As such, ocean water was pumped into the reactors as a replacement for the now-defunct cooling mechanisms. Though necessary, this process, along with extensive groundwater leakage, has produced over one million tonnes of irradiated wastewater, which continues to accumulate daily.
This wastewater is being decontaminated using an Advanced Liquid Processing System (ALPS), a filtration process intended to remove 62 radionuclides from water using a series of chemical reactions. However, this system’s consistent effectiveness, even with repeated treatment, has not yet been demonstrated, and ALPS is incapable of eliminating tritium and carbon-14.
As of July 2023, the ALPS-treated wastewater was being stored on-site in 1,046 storage tanks that are nearing capacity, hence the claimed need for ocean discharge.
The Japanese government plans to incrementally discharge the treated wastewater into the Pacific Ocean over the next 30 to 40 years. Though presented with other disposal options, such as long-term storage in purpose-built, seismically-safe tanks and solidifying the water in a leakproof form such as mortar or concrete, the task force declined to explore these avenues due to complexity and cost.
Even after initial cleaning, 70 per cent of the stored wastewater contains levels of radionuclides above regulatory standards, in some cases up to 20,000 times higher. And it’s not just tritium (more on this substance below) in this water, there are other, more toxic, substances, such as cesium-137, strontium-90 and cobalt-60.
However, the IAEA found that Japan’s plans “are consistent with IAEA Safety Standards” and that the levels of tritium, carbon-14, and other potential radioactive contaminants will be within international standards when discharged, without TEPCO having demonstrated its water cleaning can consistently achieve this.
Dilution of the wastewater as planned to meet regulatory limits will not alter the total amount of materials released, which is the key factor.
TEPCO estimates the annual radiation dose to people from the discharged water would be lower than that of a dental x-ray or a round-trip flight from New York City to Tokyo.
However, TEPCO’s checkered history gives little grounds for confidence in its assurances.
NOT ENOUGH EVIDENCE OF SAFETY
Despite reassurance from the IAEA, the scientific community remains divided on the decision, citing growing evidence of how tritium may impact human and environmental health.
Moreover, environmental scientists have argued that the amount considered to be an environmentally safe level of radiation is more political than scientific. National standards invariably lag behind the science, and regulatory limits for tritium in water vary from as much as 7000 Bq/L (Becquerels per litre) in Canada to 15 Bq/L in California.
Tritium is a naturally occurring, radioactive form of hydrogen also produced by nuclear reactors and explosions. It is the largest radioactive byproduct of nuclear power plants. It reacts with oxygen to create tritiated water, which is why ALPS is unable to filter it. Tritium exposure has been largely considered to be harmless in low concentrations and, when ingested, tritiated water is processed in the body identically to water.
There is strong evidence, however, that tritium, particularly organically-bound forms, may have lasting health effects similar to other forms of radiation exposure, such as decreased lifespan, developmental delays and cognitive deficits, immunodeficiency, infertility and birth defects, and cancer and DNA mutations among humans, land animals and aquatic vertebrates and invertebrates who experienced high or prolonged exposure.
The International Commission on Radiological Protection considers tritium’s beta radiation overall to be twice as biologically damaging as X-rays, and organically-bound tritium three times as damaging as tritium incorporated into water.
Though the task force has committed to monitoring tritium exposure in aquatic animals, TEPCO noted that “fish tritium measurement is very difficult and there are only a few analysis agencies that are capable of performing this measurement,” and that reports from these agencies are often conflicting, making this an insufficient risk mitigation strategy.
ILLEGAL UNDER INTERNATIONAL LAW
Japan joined both the 1972 London Convention to prevent marine pollution by waste dumping, and also the 1996 Protocol which specifically prohibits the marine dumping of radioactive waste. In 1996, Japan ratified the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), an international agreement that established a framework for maritime activities.
By ratifying UNCLOS, Japan committed itself to “protect and preserve the marine environment” and abstain from polluting waterways from “land-based sources”.
Additionally, in 1992 Japan committed to the Rio Declaration, a collection of goals created by the UN targeting sustainable development and environmental protection that heavily emphasises the precautionary principle. Article 15 states: “where there are threats of serious or irreversible damage, lack of full scientific certainty shall not be used as a reason for postponing cost-effective measures to prevent environmental degradation.”
Though there is still debate within the scientific community surrounding the effects of tritium and what constitutes an acceptable level of radiation exposure, two truths remain. One, Japan has committed itself to environmental protection, and two, the contaminated wastewater is a land-based source of pollution.
Furthermore, the very existence of the debate on tritium’s safety and the knowledge that the discharged water will contain other, more harmful radioactive pollutants, requires Japan to employ the precautionary principle just as they agreed to in 1992.
The Japanese government moving forward with the discharge plan, disregarding its commitments to the global community and international efforts for environmental protection sets a precedent for how the global community responds to modern nuclear crises.
Approving this plan means approving a compromise on human and environmental health, inflicting a transboundary and transgenerational problem on peoples around the Pacific with no offsetting benefit or say in the decision, and a failure to engage state and non-state actors with stakes in the nuclear industry to question what’s acceptable.
As such, the Japanese government must follow through on its commitments to the international community and critically consider alternatives for wastewater disposal. The discharge is planned to go on for 30-40 years and radioactive wastewater will continue to accumulate.
Even though it has already started, it can still be stopped and a better alternative implemented.
Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station is still continuing to release radioactive materials
A new argument for considering the issue of contaminated ALPS water release .
This brief examines the amount of radioactive material that has been
leaking from the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station ever since the
meltdowns occurred more than 12 years ago.
It is huge. Both TEPCO and the
government are undoubtedly aware of this reality. Despite this, they are
now attempting to release even the radioactive materials they have been
able to manage in tanks to the outside world. While attention focuses on
this release, this brief attempts to highlight the even larger problems of
Fukushima Daiichi and the irresponsible way the authorities are dealing
with them.
CNIC 23rd Aug 2023
Risk of cancer death after exposure to low-dose ionizing radiation underestimated, suggests nuclear industry study
by British Medical Journal, 16 Aug 23, https://medicalxpress.com/news/2023-08-cancer-death-exposure-low-dose-ionizing.html
Prolonged exposure to low-dose ionizing radiation is associated with a higher risk of death from cancer than previously thought, suggests research tracking the deaths of workers in the nuclear industry, published in The BMJ.
The findings should inform current rules on workplace protection from low-dose radiation, say the researchers.
To date, estimates of the effects of radiation on the risk of dying from cancer have been based primarily on studies of survivors of atomic bombs dropped on Japan at the end of the Second World War.
These estimates are used to set the level of protection required for workers regularly exposed to much lower doses of radiation in the nuclear industry and other sectors such as health care.
But the latest data from the International Nuclear Workers Study (INWORKS) suggest that risk estimates, based on the acute exposures among atomic bomb survivors to an extremely high dose of radiation, may underestimate the cancer risks from exposure to much lower doses of ionizing radiation delivered over a prolonged period in the workplace.
The researchers therefore tracked and analyzed deaths among 309,932 workers in the nuclear industry in the UK, France, and the US (INWORKS) for whom individual monitoring data for external exposure to ionizing radiation were available.
During a monitoring period spanning 1944 to 2016, 103,553 workers died: 28,089 of these deaths were due to solid cancers, which include most cancers other than leukemia.
The researchers then used this information to estimate the risk of death from solid cancers based on workers’ exposure to radiation 10 years previously.
They estimated that this risk increased by 52% for every unit of radiation (Gray; Gy) workers had absorbed. A dose of one Gray is equivalent to a unit of one Joule of energy deposited in a kilogram of a substance.
But when the analysis was restricted to workers who had been exposed to the lowest cumulative doses of radiation (0-100 mGy), this approximately doubled the risk of death from solid cancers per unit Gy absorbed.
Similarly, restricting the analysis only to workers hired in more recent years when estimates of occupational external penetrating radiation dose were more accurate also increased the risk of death from solid cancer per unit Gy absorbed.
Excluding deaths from cancers of the lung and lung cavity, which might be linked to smoking or occupational exposure to asbestos, had little effect on the strength of the association.
The researchers acknowledge some limitations to their findings, including that exposures for workers employed in the early years of the nuclear industry may have been poorly estimated, despite their efforts to account for subsequent improvements in dosimeter technology—a device for measuring exposure to radiation.
They also point out that the separate analysis of deaths restricted to workers hired in more recent years found an even higher risk of death from solid cancer per unit Gy absorbed, meaning that the increased risk observed in the full cohort wasn’t driven by workers employed in the earliest years of the industry. There were also no individual level data on several potentially influential factors, including smoking.
“People often assume that low dose rate exposures pose less carcinogenic hazard than the high dose rate exposures experienced by the Japanese atomic bomb survivors,” write the researchers. “Our study does not find evidence of reduced risk per unit dose for solid cancer among workers typically exposed to radiation at low dose rates.”
They hope that organizations such as the International Commission on Radiological Protection will use their results to inform their assessment of the risks of low dose, and low dose rate, radiation and ultimately in an update of the system of radiological protection.
More information: Cancer mortality after low dose exposure to ionising radiation in workers in France, the United Kingdom, and the United States (INWORKS): cohort study, The BMJ (2023). DOI: 10.1136/bmj-2022-074520
Journal information: British Medical Journal (BMJ)
Huge study of nuclear workers in France, the United Kingdom, and the United States confirms low dose radiation as a cause of cancer.
What this study adds
- The results of an updated study of nuclear workers in France, the UK, and the US suggest a linear increase in the relative rate of cancer with increasing exposure to radiation
- Some evidence suggested a steeper slope for the dose-response association at lower doses than over the full dose range
- The risk per unit of radiation dose for solid cancer was larger in analyses restricted to the low dose range (0-100 mGy) and to workers hired in the more recent years of operations
Cancer mortality after low dose exposure to ionising radiation in workers in France, the United Kingdom, and the United States (INWORKS): cohort study
BMJ 2023; 382 doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj-2022-074520 (Published 16 August 2023)Cite this as: BMJ 2023;382:e074520
David B Richardson, professor1, Klervi Leuraud, head of service2, Dominique Laurier, deputy director of health2, Michael Gillies, medical statistician3, Richard Haylock, senior research scientist3, Kaitlin Kelly-Reif, senior research scientist4, Stephen Bertke, research statistician4, Robert D Daniels, senior research scientist4, Isabelle Thierry-Chef, senior research scientist5, Monika Moissonnier, research assistant6, Ausrele Kesminiene, senior visiting scientist6, Mary K Schubauer-Berigan, programme head6
Abstract
Objective To evaluate the effect of protracted low dose, low dose rate exposure to ionising radiation on the risk of cancer.
Design Multinational cohort study.
Setting Cohorts of workers in the nuclear industry in France, the UK, and the US included in a major update to the International Nuclear Workers Study (INWORKS).
Participants 309 932 workers with individual monitoring data for external exposure to ionising radiation and a total follow-up of 10.7 million person years.
Main outcome measures Estimates of excess relative rate per gray (Gy) of radiation dose for mortality from cancer.
Results The study included 103 553 deaths, of which 28 089 were due to solid cancers. The estimated rate of mortality due to solid cancer increased with cumulative dose by 52% (90% confidence interval 27% to 77%) per Gy, lagged by 10 years. Restricting the analysis to the low cumulative dose range (0-100 mGy) approximately doubled the estimate of association (and increased the width of its confidence interval), as did restricting the analysis to workers hired in the more recent years of operations when estimates of occupational external penetrating radiation dose were recorded more accurately. Exclusion of deaths from lung cancer and pleural cancer had a modest effect on the estimated magnitude of association, providing indirect evidence that the association was not substantially confounded by smoking or occupational exposure to asbestos.
Conclusions This major update to INWORKS provides a direct estimate of the association between protracted low dose exposure to ionising radiation and solid cancer mortality based on some of the world’s most informative cohorts of radiation workers. The summary estimate of excess relative rate solid cancer mortality per Gy is larger than estimates currently informing radiation protection, and some evidence suggests a steeper slope for the dose-response association in the low dose range than over the full dose range. These results can help to strengthen radiation protection, especially for low dose exposures that are of primary interest in contemporary medical, occupational, and environmental settings.
Conclusions This major update to INWORKS provides a direct estimate of the association between protracted low dose exposure to ionising radiation and solid cancer mortality based on some of the world’s most informative cohorts of radiation workers. The summary estimate of excess relative rate solid cancer mortality per Gy is larger than estimates currently informing radiation protection, and some evidence suggests a steeper slope for the dose-response association in the low dose range than over the full dose range. These results can help to strengthen radiation protection, especially for low dose exposures that are of primary interest in contemporary medical, occupational, and environmental settings.
…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… Discussion
This study, which involved a major update to an international cohort mortality study of radiation dosimeter monitored workers, reports evidence of an increase in the excess relative rate of solid cancer mortality with increasing cumulative exposure to ionising radiation at the low dose rates typically encountered by French, UK, and US nuclear workers. The study provides evidence in support of a linear association between protracted low dose external exposure to ionising radiation and solid cancer mortality.
…………………………………………………
What is already known on this topic
- Ionising radiation is an established cause of cancer
- The primary quantitative basis for radiation protection standards comes from studies of people exposed to acute, high doses of ionising radiation
What this study adds
- The results of an updated study of nuclear workers in France, the UK, and the US suggest a linear increase in the relative rate of cancer with increasing exposure to radiation
- Some evidence suggested a steeper slope for the dose-response association at lower doses than over the full dose range
- The risk per unit of radiation dose for solid cancer was larger in analyses restricted to the low dose range (0-100 mGy) and to workers hired in the more recent years of operations
Still more information about Tritium
Many citizens do not realize that SMNRs (Small Modular Nuclear Reactors) produce all of the same kinds of radioactive wastes that traditional larger reactors do – high-level waste (irradiated nuclear fuel), medium-level waste (e.g. decommissioning waste resulting from the dismantling of reactor structures), and low-level waste. This particular post is about tritium.
by Gordon Edwards, 9 Aug 23
By far the most radioactive objects produced by any nuclear reactor, large or small, are the intensely radioactive used nuclear fuel elements. A used nuclear fuel bundle is one of the most dangerous objects on Earth. It can give a lethal gamma radiation dose to any unshielded human being in a short time, even after “cooling off” for several decades.
But even after all the irradiated nuclear fuel (high-level radioactive waste) has been removed from the reactor there is still a large volume of dangerous radioactive waste left behind – including the activation products that are created in the core area of the reactor. Two of the most biologically and environmentally mobile radioactive activation products are tritium (radioactive hydrogen) and carbon-14 (radioactive carbon).
(1) Tritium is radioactive hydrogen. A tritium atom is three times heavier than a normal hydrogen atom, but the two are otherwise chemically identical. Any chemical compounds formed with ordinary hydrogen can equally well use tritium instead. The only fundamental difference is that tritium atoms disintegrate (explode), while other hydrogen atoms do not disintegrate. When a tritium atom explodes it gives off a beta particle, but there are no gamma rays. It is a “pure” beta emitter.
(2) For example, a normal water molecule H2O is not radioactive. Tritiated water is radioactive because one or both of the hydrogen atoms in H2O has been replaced by a tritium atom. So when you drink or inhale or otherwise absorb tritiated water, the tritium atoms are disintegrating inside your body. Your cells are being bombarded with beta particles from disintegrating tritium atoms.
(3) Chemically, radioactive water molecules are no different than ordinary water molecules. It is not possible to separate out the tritiated water molecules by filtration or any normal chemical processes. Tritiated water is chemically identical to ordinary water. Municipal water treatment plants cannot remove tritium from drinking water. You can’t filter water from water.
(4) Evaporation of tritiated water will produce radioactive water vapour. Tritiated water vapour will condense to form radioactive dew drops, and can precipitate as radioactive raindrops or radioactive snowflakes. To contain tritiated water therefore it is important to prevent evaporation. Sealed drums or water tanks are suitable for the task.
At Fukushima Daiichi there are about 1.3 million tonnes of tritiated water stored in over 1000 large steel tanks. This inventory is constantly growing because of the continual cooling of the molten cores with ordinary water which becomes heavily contaminated with two dozen radioactive waste materials on contact with the molten core material, including tritium. The main reason that TEPCO has given for dumping this huge amount of stored tritiated water into the Pacific Ocean is simply because the site is running out of space to accommodate more tanks. This is a lame excuse – more space can be found if needed. The tritiated water at Fukushima is also contaminated with other radioactive materials, even though much of these other varieties has been greatly reduced by decontamination equipment called ALPS — which in no way reduces the tritium content. Since no removal process is 100%, other radionuclides remain in the tritiated water, in some cases to a very significant degree.
This problem of a growing inventory of tritiated water will not occur at Indian Point or any other shut down nuclear reactor. In such a situation, the volume of tritiated water is a constant and can be stored for many decades in drums. These drums would have to be inspected and repaired or replaced when necessary.
(5) All organic molecules (including DNA) incorporate carbon atoms and hydrogen atoms. Tritium atoms can and do replace some of the non-radioactive hydrogen atoms in the organic molecules in your body. This is called “organically bound tritium” or OBT. Whereas tritiated water, like ordinary water, passes through the body easily, OBT stays around for a lot longer. The “biological half-life” is how long it takes the body to get rid of half of the tritium; evidently it depends a lot on whether it is OBT or not. Tritium and carbon-14 are unique in their ability to become a part of our very own DNA molecules; most radionuclides do not have this possibility.
(6) It has been shown in animal experiments that tritium causes genetic damage of almost all kinds, both chromosomal and non-chromosomal. Tritium ingested by a pregnant female passes through the umbilical cord to the embryo and the developing fetus in fact gets a larger radiation dose than the mother. Tritium has been shown to cause physical deformities and more subtle developmental abnormalities in embryos of experimental animals – for example, loss of the “righting reflex” in mammalian juveniles.
(7) Tritium gives off a non-penetrating form of beta radiation and so it is relatively harmless outside the body – unless it is in contact with bare skin. It can be absorbed directly through the skin. However once inside the body it goes everywhere (all organs) and is known to be at least 2-3 times more biologically damaging (per unit of absorbed energy) than gamma radiation. IMPORTANT: Although this “discrepancy” has been known for decades, and is not disputed, NONE of the regulatory bodies take it into account! After careful study, the UK Committee Examining Radiation Risks of Internal Emitters (CERRIE) published a report showing that the biological damage of tritium (per unit of absorbed energy) may be as much as 15 times greater than the damage from gamma radiation. See www.ccnr.org/tritium_paper_CERRIE.pdf .
(1) Resources on tritium can be found at “Troubles with Tritium” www.ccnr.org/#tr For general background on tritium, this article is easy to read: http://www.ccnr.org/GE_ODWAC_2009_e.pdf(2) Other resources can be found at Tritium Awareness Project (TAP Canada) http://tapcanada.orgHere is a brief reference to OBT (organically-bound tritium) from TAP Canada.
Additional information on tritium .
Robert Alvarez, 9 Aug 23,
To augment Gordon Edward;s ‘s excellent overview about tritium here are some other basic facts.
As for tritium being “mildly radioactive,” as Gordon points out, this is not the case when taken in the body- as tritiated water-the most common form of exposure. The Defense Nuclear Facility Safety Board overseeing DOE nuclear sites informed the Secretary of Energy in June 2019 that “tritiated water vapor represents a significant risk to those exposed to it, as its dose consequence to an exposed individual is 15,000 to 20,000 times higher than that for an equivalent amount of tritium gas.”
With a specific activity of 9,619 curies per gram, tritium emits, as it decays, nearly 400 trillion energetic disintegrations per second. William H. McBride, Professor of radiation oncology at the UCLA Medical School, describes ionizing radiation disintegrations as “explosive packages of energy” that are “highly efficient at forming complex, potentially lethal DNA double strand breaks.”
Source: William MacBride, UCLA School of Medicine Vice Chair for Research in Radiation, Principal Investigator of UCLA’s Center for Medical Countermeasures Against Radiation — National Institutes of Health, Jan 27, 2014.
“No matter how it is taken into the body,” states a fact sheet, from the Energy Departments’ Argonne National Laboratory, “tritium is uniformly distributed through all biological fluids within one to two hours.” During that brief time, the DNFSB points out that “the combination of a rapid intake and a short biological half-life means a large fraction of the radiological dose is acutely delivered within hours to days…” McBride underscored this concern, stating that, “damage to DNA can occur within minutes to hours.”
Dangers of Tritium
by Karl H Grossman, August 01, 2023 https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/8/1/2184519/-Dangers-of-Tritium
The two nuclear reactors at Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island, New York were shut down in the late 1990s because they had been leaking tritium into the water table below, part of the island’s aquifer system on which more than 3 million people depend on as their sole source of potable water.
BNL was established on a former Army base in 1947 by the then U.S. Atomic Energy Commission to develop civilian uses of nuclear technology and do atomic research.
BNL scientists were upset with the U.S. Department of Energy over the closures. BNL has been a DOE facility in the wake of the elimination of the AEC by the U.S. Congress in 1974 for being in conflict of interest for having two missions, promoting and also regulating nuclear technology.
The water table below BNL flows partly into a community named Shirley.
Welcome to Shirley: A Memoir of an Atomic Town is a 2008 book by Kelly McMasters, a professor at Hofstra University on Long Island, who grew up in Shirley.
In it she tells of widespread cancer in Shirley noting how BNL was designated as a high-pollution Superfund site in 1989 “with soil and drinking water contaminated with Cesium 137, Plutonium 239, Radium 226, and Europium 154, as well as underground plumes of tritium stretching out towards my town.”
BNL scientists in the wake of the closure of its two reactors because of the tritium leaks minimized their health impacts noting that tritium is used in exit signs—begging the question of why a radioactive substance is used in exit signs.
Now, tritium has become a major international issue with the Japanese government planning to release 1.3 million tons of water containing tritium into the Pacific Ocean from the site of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plants.
It’s also been a hot issue in New York State where Holtec International has a plan to dump tritium-contaminated water from the decommissioned Indian Point nuclear power plants, which it owns, into the Hudson River. A number of communities along Hudson River depend on the river for their potable water.
Tritium is a radioactive isotope of hydrogen. As the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission in its “Backgrounder on Tritium” acknowledges: “Like normal hydrogen, tritium can bond with oxygen to form water. When this happens, the resulting ‘tritiated’ water is radioactive. Tritiated water…is chemically identical to normal water and the tritium cannot be filtered out of the water.”
Regarding the use of tritium in exit signs, what’s that about?
As the website of a company called Self Luminous Exit Signs, which sell signs using tritium for $202.95 each, says: “World War II created the demand for glowing emergency exits in ships, submarines, barracks and bombers where battery power was unavailable.”
Something that grew out of war was commercialized afterwards—as has nuclear technology been generally.
As to dangers, in a posting titled “Tritium in Exit Signs,” the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency says: “Tritium is a radioactive isotope that needs special handling procedures. Tritium is most dangerous when it is inhaled or swallowed. Many exit signs contain tritium….Tritium exit signs are marked with a permanent warning label. Tritium exit signs are useful because they do not require a traditional power source such as batteries or hardwired electricity.”
“No radiation is emitted from a working, unbroken, tritium exit sign,” EPA goes on.
Damage to tritium exit signs is most likely to occur when a sign is dropped during installation or smashed into the demolition of a building. If a tritium exit sign is damaged, the tritium could be released….If a tritium exit sign is broken, never tamper with it. Leave the area immediately and call for help.”
Adds EPA: “Unwanted tritium exit signs may not be put into ordinary trash; they require special disposal. Tritium exit signs that are illegally put in ordinary landfills can break and contaminate the site.”
Further, says the Conference of Radiation Control Programs, Inc. on its posting headed “Tritium Exit Signs Present a Challenge in Handling and Disposal,” they “must be isolated from other wastes during disposal, since they may and often do contaminate scrap metal from demolition sites. For this reason, tritium exit signs are regulated by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and proper disposal of the signs is required once they are no longer used. “
It goes on: “While many large commercial and government entities are aware of the requirements for use and disposal, many small businesses are unaware of the NRC requirements, leading to the improper disposal of tritium exit signs industrial or municipal landfills, or worse, their being sold over the internet. An estimated 2 million tritium exit signs have been sold in the U.S. The number of signs in use now and where they are located is unknown, given that there is limited tracking of the purchase, use, or disposal of the signs and that tritium exit signs have a usable life ranging from ten to twenty years.”
Also, says the organization: “Should a tritium exit sign—which contains tritium-filled glassed tubes—break, its contents could pose a risk to those located in the near vicinity. They could be exposed to tritium gas or tritiated water from the tritium that has escaped into the environment. Cleaning up tritium after an accident could be costly, especially for small businesses. Worker or public exposure to tritium also could present unwanted and unnecessary liabilities.”
So it goes regarding the very real dangers of tritium exit signs.
For a broader review of the hazards of tritium, this year a book, Tritium’s Danger, was published, authored by Dr. Arjun Makhijani, president of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research. His Ph.D. involved a specialization in nuclear fusion, on which the hydrogen bomb is based. The hydrogen bomb’s fusion process utilizes tritium. And, if fusion is ever developed as an energy source—and an enormous effort has been underway for years to do that—tritium would play a major part.
“Makhijani makes it clear that the impacts of tritium on human health, especially when it is taken inside the body, warrant much more attention and control than they have received until now,” writes Robert Alvarez in his review of Tritium’s Danger in the June 26, 2023 issue of The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Alvarez, senior scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies, served as senior policy adviser to the Department of Energy’s secretary and was deputy assistant secretary for national security and the environment from 1993 to 1999.
Tritium, relates Alvarez, “is one of the most expensive, rare, and potentially harmful elements in the world.”
“Although its rarity and usefulness in some applications give it a high monetary value, tritium is also a radioactive contaminant that has been released widely to the air and water from nuclear power and spent nuclear fuel reprocessing plants,” Alvarez goes on. “Makhijani points out that ‘one teaspoon of tritiated water would contaminate about 100 billion gallons of water to the U.S. drinking water limit; that is enough to supply about 1 million homes with water for a year.”
“Since the 1990s, about 70 percent of the nuclear power plant sites in the United States (43 out of 61 sites) have had significant tritium leaks that contaminated groundwater in excess of federal drinking water limits,” writes Alvarez.
“The most recent leak occurred in November 2022, involving 400,000 gallons of tritium-contaminated water from the Monticello nuclear station in Minnesota. The leak was kept from the public for several months….A good place to start limiting the negative effects of tritium contamination, Makhijani recommends, is to significantly tighten drinking water standards,” says Alvarez.
“Routine releases of airborne tritium are also not trivial,” writes Alvarez. As part of his “well-researched” book, says Alvarez, “Makhijani underscores this point by including a detailed atmospheric dispersion study that he commissioned, indicating that tritium from the Braidwood Nuclear Power Plant in Illinois has literally raining down from gaseous releases—as it incorporates with precipitation to form tritium oxide—something that occurs at water cooled reactors. Spent fuel storage pools are considered the largest source of gaseous tritium releases.”
And Alvarez, who not only has long experience as an official with the Department of Energy but for years was senior investigator for the U.S. Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs, states: “In past decades, regulators have papered over the tritium-contamination problem by asserting, when tritium leakage becomes a matter of public concern, that the tritium doses humans might receive are too small to be of concern. Despite growing evidence that tritium is harmful in ways that fall outside the basic framework for radiation protection, agencies such as the Nuclear Regulatory Commission remain frozen in time when it comes to tritium regulation. The NRC and other regulating agencies are sticking to an outdated premise that tritium is a ‘mild’ radioactive contaminant….Overall, the NRC implies its risk of tritium ingestion causing cancer is small.”
As for the dumping of 1.3 million tons of tritium-contaminated water into the Pacific from the Fukushima site, this is being opposed in the Pacific region and is focused upon in a just-released film documentary, “The Fukushima Disaster: The Hidden Side of the Story.”
After the 2011 disaster, Tokyo Electric Power Company, the owner of the Fukushima plants, released 300,000 tons of tritium-contaminated water into the Pacific, notes the film. A thousand tanks were eventually built for holding tritium-contaminated water which continues to leak from the plants. But now there is no room for additional tanks. So the 1.3 million tons of tritium-contaminated water are proposed to be discharged over 30 years into the Pacific.
In the documentary, Andrew Napuat, a member of the Parliament of the nation of Vanuatu, an 83-island archipelago in the Pacific, says: “We have the right to say no to the Japan solution. We can’t let them jeopardize our sustenance and livelihood.”
“China condemns Japanese plan to release Fukushima water,” was the headline of an Associated Press report. It quoted a Foreign Ministry spokesperson as saying it “concerns the global marine environment and public health, which is not a private matter for the Japanese side.”
Sean Burnie, a senior nuclear specialist with Greenpeace who has been involved in the aftermath of the Fukushima disaster, is quoted in the Guardian as describing as “scientifically bankrupt” the claim the tritium would not pose a health risk. “It is internal exposure to organically bound tritium that is the problem—when it gets inside fish, seafood, and then humans. When tritium gets inside cells, it can do damage. Tepco and the Japanese government are making a conscious decision to increase marine pollution with radioactivity, and they have no idea where that will lead.”
The International Atomic Energy Agency is supporting the scheme. However, the agency was established by the UN as an international version of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission with its mission, like that of the AEC, to promote nuclear technology—as the IAEA statute says “to accelerate and enlarge the contribution of atomic energy”—while also regulating it, a continuation of nuclear conflict interest but on the international level.
Back in the U.S.A., some 138 groups organized in a Stop Holtec Coalition have been calling on New York Governor Kathy Hochul to stop Holtec’s plan to dump a million gallons of tritium-contaminated water into the Hudson River.
A letter they sent to the governor says “we are deeply concerned about the impacts on the health and safety of local resident, the river’s ecosystem, and local economy. The Hudson Valley region is densely populated and also serves as a recreational area for millions from New York City and across the state…The Indian Point nuclear power plant was rightfully shuttered in 2021, yet the spent fuel pool wastewater remaining on the site contains radioactive contaminants, including tritium. Exposure to tritium is linked to cancer, miscarriages, genetic defects and other health effects.”
Organizations signing the letter include Food & Water Watch, Grassroots Environmental Education, Hudson Riverkeeper, Hudson River Sloop Clearwater, Indian Point Safe Energy Coalition and Promoting Health and Sustainable Energy.
There was legislation passed in the New York State Assembly in June and in the State Senate in May banning “the discharge of any radiological agent into the waters of the state.”
There have been demonstrations protesting the plan, a petition drive with more than 400,00 signatures, and resolutions passed by local governments opposing the release. The first was passed unanimously in March by the Westchester Board of Legislators. It noted how “pre-release treatment would not remove tritium” from water, that tritium is “carcinogenic” and that “there are seven communities” that “source their drinking water from the Hudson.” The Indian Point plants are in Westchester County, 25 miles north of New York City.
Backgrounder on health consequences of nuclear radiation fallout and the Anthropocene.
Mary Olson — July 21, 2023
Since fatal cancer and some catastrophic impacts to pregnancy originate from damage to a single living cell, there is no amount of ionizing radiation that is safe. It is therefore extremely appropriate in terms of human and environmental health, that particles of plutonium from nuclear weapons fallout has been chosen as the marker for the new geologic epoch in which the dominant force acting on this planet is us.
The Anthropocene is, so far, a time of imbalance and disease, including destabilization of our climate, destruction of natural habitat sending extinction rates up and biodiversity down, made worse by dumping new toxic chemicals widely, polluting air, water and food. Radiation from nuclear fission adds the additional scrambling of genes and genomes.
Fallout warrants an update from the health perspective. The disproportionate impact of bomb radiation on women and girls is established, and particularly troubling given the global distribution of fallout particles. However, a new paper from Dr Alfred Körblein is the first to find the correlation of very large numbers of lives lost and fallout. Körblein reports the death rate of infants (live-birth) in five European nations (UK, France, Italy, Germany and Spain) and the U.S. during and following the period of atmospheric nuclear testing (1945—1963). After a tour de force statistical analysis, Körblein concludes: “atmospheric nuclear weapons testing may be responsible for the deaths of several million babies in the Northern Hemisphere.”
A clear spike (25% increase) in infant deaths was previously reported by Tucker and Alvarez citing New Mexico state records after the 1945 Trinity Test. These are live births, not losses of pregnancies, which may have been much higher. Körblein examined biological sex as a factor, but found no strong correlation. Infant death was likely due to insufficient immune capacity.
Fallout is not only in the past, when worldwide 528 nuclear detonations were made in our atmosphere. In 2021 Science Magazine reported detection of Cesium-137 in honey in the United States. While only trace levels were found in the honey, radioactivity from Cesium, a major constituent of the fine particles of fallout that drift back down, or are carried down in much higher concentrations by rain. Cesium, inhaled or ingested mimics potassium in the body, where uptake is primarily to muscle, including the heart. Cardiovascular damage has now been linked to radiation as a causal agent for heart disease and stroke.
Highly radioactive fallout particles have been dispersed worldwide, not only the lake in Canada where the Anthropocene spike will be placed. This is demonstrated in the modern digital modeling work of Sebastien Philippe and his team on French nuclear tests in Polynesia.
The widescale distribution of highly radioactive cesium, iodine, strontium and also plutonium, known carcinogens at any concentration have been contributors to the widescale suffering of cancers. Fission products in our air, food and water have contributed to reproductive impacts. Due to many factors, the global birth rate has dropped in half since 1950 and the impact of fallout is likely to be part of this.
Exploding a nuclear weapon in the biosphere is not only a test of the weapon—it is a test of life itself, in a massive, uncontrolled experiment. Thankfully, our species retains the capacity to change our minds, and invest in a healthy future. The United Nations General Assembly declared a healthy environment to be a universal Human Right in July, 2022. Perhaps the Anthropocene will also be a time of healing.
1 This Month
of the week– Nuclear Reactor Information Task Force
14 May – online event From Bombs to Data Centres: the Face of Nuclear Colonialism
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