“The radioactive sludge left over from the making of the first atomic bombs is now leaking out of its waste tanks seven miles from the Columbia River. Current estimates suggest that it will take between $50 and $100 billion of taxpayer dollars to encapsulate the nuke glop into some form of glass bricks for permanent storage. And, there are serious doubts as to whether even this very expensive plan will work. [Web Site Editor's note: Nuclear power looks competitive with other power sources only because the waste disposal costs, which will go on for many centuries, are not included in the calculations. Instead, the waste disposal costs have been shifted to the taxpayers of this and future generations.]“
That’s not nuclear power, though. That’s bomb manufacturing.
Filed under Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day, Economics, Environment, Proliferation, Waste
Posted on September 25, 2006 by Stewart Peterson |
Some of those cleanup funds are aimed at “cleaning up” levels of radioactivity that are around natural background levels.
A 30-second search revealed a document that states that the dose limit for release of a site at Hanford is 15 mrem/year.
If I were to move from…oh, say…Durham, North Carolina to…oh, say how about Eagle County, Colorado, I would (1) get more than 15 mrem/year of added radiation (2) have increased my life expectancy from somewhere around average to top in the nation.
Eagle County, Gilpin Co., Clear Creek Co, and some other high elevation, granitic rock-based Colorado counties in a recent Harvard life expectancy study are also known to have quite high natural background radiation levels.
Another place with high life expectancy is counties in Iowa and southeastern Minnesota, in which there are high radon levels. Dr. Bernard Cohen did some related studies with radon and lung cancer.
The Harvard researchers say that they can’t explain everything that’s going on about location, because it isn’t all correlated with income.
Put this map of life expectancy and this map of radon side-by-side and try telling me that people in high-radon counties don’t live longer.
1. Regarding the Washington Department of Health document, p.9, paragraph 3:
>>The dose standard in this guidance is a dose of 15 mrem/y above background levels.
So it’s not trying to clean up below background, if that’s what you were saying, but while I do not see the point of preventing exposures (to sealed sources) that are known to be safe, why shouldn’t pollution be cleaned up?
2. I have to say I’m less than convinced about hormesis–as unconvinced as I am about the LNT. Specifically, the examples you gave are ecological studies without extremely high correlations, which is a classic anti-nuclear mistake (and obviously differs from valid research like the the shipyards study). Cohen mentioned it as well in the linked article.
People in high-radon counties live longer–but that’s not necessarily because of the radon, just like Mangano and Gould with cancer near nuclear power plants. As with negative effects on the other side of the threshold (wherever it is), it’s just too small an effect to detect statistically, if it exists. Some studies show hormesis and some show risk. Are they not both within the margin of error?
On hormesis, although I feel that evidence is indeed thin on the ground, you might like to review this paper on a large-scale study of matched populations from Navy shipyard workers. The low-level exposure was non-voluntary once signed up for the shipyard, and carefully tracked.