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Health and the Nuclear Gamble
The world has anxiously watched the events in Japan unfolding this past two weeks after the horrific earthquake, tsunami and subsequent nuclear disaster. The feelings are magnified out of a sense of helplessness in aiding the victims in Japan mixed with concerns for potential effects and implications to our own health and communities. In assessing the devastating effects of natural disasters, we must pause as we consider the potential for catastrophic effects of man made disasters, specifically from nuclear power plants.
The radiation effects of this disaster are unknown at the present time with greatest concern for the firefighters and those workers and people in the immediate vicinity of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. Unfortunately the news has gotten worse on a daily basis and has not been entirely forthcoming or transparent. We have moved from reassurance of no leakage to a small fissure in the containment chamber to the leaking of critical water from the cooling pools with variable releases of highly radioactive isotopes to the probability of a breech of the containment vessel that houses the nuclear core. The latter posses the greatest threat.
Fortunately the risk and radiation detected at our shores appears nominal at the present time. However our own National Academy of Sciences has stated that any exposure to radiation increases a person’s risk of cancer. There is no safe level of radiation exposure. The amazing fact is not that the radiation that reaches our shores is described low level at the present time but that it reaches us at all traveling 5000 miles from Japan. This underscores the interconnectedness of our planet and energy decisions made anywhere in the world. With nuclear power and all of its safeguards, it remains imperfect and with the fragility of human technology there always exists the possibility of a nuclear accident with its risk of radioactivity release.
These invisible radioactive isotopes are intensely toxic to humans. Our bodies when exposed to them incorporate them into our cells as though they were life giving molecules. This is coupled with their extended half lives where they can persist for years promoting health risks. Thus far Iodine 131 and Cesium 137 have been the 2 isotopes confirmed at present. Iodine 131 has a half life of 8 days and is taken up by the thyroid gland where it emits radioactivity increasing the risk for thyroid cancer. Cesium 137 with its half life of 30 years is handled by the body like potassium which is rapidly disseminated throughout our entire bodies where it can cause burns, radiation sickness, cancer particularly of the soft tissues and death.
The other isotopes of concern are Strontium 90 and Plutonium 239. Strontium 90 with its half life of 29 years is utilized by the body like calcium depositing it in teeth and bone where it can cause cancer of the bone, bone marrow and soft tissues around the bone. Finally Plutonium 239 is the most dangerous isotope. Its cancer causing ionizing radiation risk can be either as an external hazard from outside the body or internal hazard by ingestion or inhalation where it is presents a significant lung cancer risk. Once it circulates through the body, it exposes the blood, kidneys, liver, and spleen to its cancer causing alpha particles.
At the present time, Iodine 131 has been found in the drinking water in Tokyo at levels 200% above the allowable for infants and children who are the most vulnerable to its cancer causing effects. Milk and food within the region are showing radioactive contamination. The water within the Reactor 3 which is a mixed oxide fuel reactor of plutonium and uranium has shown radiation levels 10 thousand times that typically seen.
As physicians our ability to respond to these potential toxins is woefully inadequate focusing mainly on supportive care and comfort measures while observing for the delayed effects of these agents. As with most serious illnesses in medicine, prevention is the best practice. As physicians, it is our obligation to do whatever we can to prevent illness.
If there were to be a meltdown, there is the potential for an astonishing release of radioactive material. We are talking about the radiation potential of about 1000 Hiroshima bombs in only one core. Chernobyl was comparable to 400 Hiroshima’s.
As the world grapples with this latest complex compound disaster, a serious reflection and reconsideration of our own nuclear power industry is in order. Nuclear energy is too risky, dirty and too expensive. Are these risks to the health of our children and community ones we are willing to take? We need investment in safer energy sources in particular renewable sources. As long as nuclear power plants exist, prevention of nuclear accidents is paramount. We also must have local disaster preparedness efforts and make ourselves aware of them.
21 Comments so far
Show AllAmen.
Chernobyl photo essay:
http://inmotion.magnumphotos.com/essay/chernobyl
The particles are invisible. The oil in the Gulf "went away", at least until recent sightings indicated a longer-term problem. Nothing will happen until rich people start showing up in ERs with radiation poisoning, or third-degree burns from flaming shrimp on their barbies. And the right wing media will blame government regulations for interfering with the free market's ability to make us all rich. Of course, the US will have a large supply of serfs to clean things up.
The title to this otherwise excellent article is misleading. Nuclear power is NOT A GAMBLE. a gamble is something where it is possible to win. Nuclear power by its nature is guaranteed to give us continuing super accidents like the three that we have already experienced. Plutonium 239 is toxic like nothing else can be. It has a half life of 24,000 years -- that's the time at which half of the initial amount has finally disintegrated. A millionth of a gram inhaled produces lung cancer. And we are playing with this stuff by the ton. Who in God's name can know what happens to every single millionth of a gram of this stuff?
A fundamental human shortcoming is a lack of understanding of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The Second Law is a Law of Nature that we cannot repeal, yet we seem to never stop trying. Why? Because the people who make the Decisions don’t understand that Law.
What is the Second Law of Thermodynamics? Well suppose I handed you two glasses of water, one hot and one cold, and asked you to perform the difficult trick of producing two glasses of lukewarm water. No problem you say, getting a bowl and pouring in the two glassfuls, and your mission has been accomplished. Suppose on the other hand I gave you instead two glasses of water, both lukewarm in temperature, and asked you to produce one glass of water that is hot, and one that is cold. Not quite so easy. You have to get a refrigerator and a heating source to accomplish this mission.
The same if I gave you two glasses of sand, one black and the other white. Easy to turn into a mixture of gray sand, but difficult to separate once mixed.
The Second Law applies specifically to heat, but in its more general form it also states that inanimate Nature prefers chaos or randomness to order. Nature tends to mix things up. The scientific way to say this is that in any closed system, entropy can only increase but never decrease. If somewhere entropy actually decreased by establishing a greater degree of order, then this is always done at the expense of increasing entropy somewhere else. Entropy in the Universe is constantly increasing.
Living things can indeed create a degree of order – even an amoeba is able to organize itself in a way that permits it to live. And human beings are able to create order in much more sophisticated fashion. Yes, if energy is applied to an otherwise closed system, then indeed its entropy can be decreased or its state of order increased, always of course correspondingly increasing entropy outside the closed system.
Now we humans seem to have a strong belief in our ability to establish order and keep it that way forever. We create nuclear reactors, we create the most dangerous of materials such as Plutonium, and we think we can keep those materials safely confined for the next ten thousand years. A microgram of Plutonium in one’s lungs will induce cancer. Yet we play with that material by the pound and by the ton. We forget that there are 100 year earthquakes, that there are terrorists or individuals who would be willing to kill a million people for whatever devious end they might seek. And it is the earthquakes, the baddies, and not the rest of us, that are aligned with the Second Law. If we human beings want to continue to live on this Planet, we had better start acting more nearly in consonance with the most fundamental laws of Nature.
Some people, especially those of the Energy industry, will retort with “but we need the energy.” Yes, we do need a certain amount of energy. What we really need is available from the Sun, the oceans, and the wind. Who says that we have to be driving trucks (aka “sport-utility vehicles”) around the Beltway with an average occupancy (including the driver) of 1.01? Pure madness.
If we want to go on living here, we had better learn to conserve, and we had better learn to wean ourselves from the nuclear demon we have created.
Felix.
"Nuclear power by its nature is guaranteed to give us continuing super accidents.."
There it is in a nut shell.
Felix is a man with sense.
Felix,
Would you have a peer-reviewed scientific reference for your statement about plutonium-239 that:" A millionth of a gram inhaled produces lung cancer." To my knowledge there is no such evidence of that high a risk, e.g. 100% certainty of a cancer. That is not to say that radioactivity deposited in the body carries no risk, but to exaggerate that risk is irresponsible.
"That is not to say that radioactivity deposited in the body carries no risk, but to exaggerate that risk is irresponsible."
How does that level of irresponsibility compare to placing every form of life on the planet at risk of a horrible death? These kind of black swan tail events are so ridiculously dangerous that no nuclear plant in the world is privately insured. You think the insurance companies don't understand risk? If anything, I think the real risk of nuclear power has been hidden from an epidemiological standpoint, by exposing the entire population of the planet when all the above-ground nuclear tests were performed back in the '40s and '50s.
EPA typically calculates cancer risk such that one person in a million will get cancer. If these calculations were actually valid, there should be 300 cases in the US. Clearly their math is wrong, and the real cancer risks have been wildly understated. THAT is irresponsible.
Plutonium is the heaviest primordial element, by virtue of its most stable isotope, plutonium-244, whose half-life of about 80 million years is just long enough for the element to be found in trace quantities in nature.[3] The most important isotope of plutonium is plutonium-239, with a half-life of 24,100 years. Plutonium-239 is the isotope most useful for nuclear weapons. Plutonium-239 and 241 are fissile, meaning the nuclei of their atoms can break apart by being bombarded by slow moving thermal neutrons, releasing energy, gamma radiation and more neutrons. These can therefore sustain a nuclear chain reaction, leading to applications in nuclear weapons and nuclear reactors.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plutonium
Nukes are cancer forever increasing
Mark Twain complained that, because the Earth roates east, he was having to breathe air into which the French had farted.
Trylon
Hey dude, why not go stimulate your immune system and whip yourself up a plutonium milkshake. You sound like the old ad where more doctors prefer Camels to any other cigarette. Why don't you get entrepreneurial, you know? Take nuke-loving tourists on low-level joy rides over Fukushima Daiichi. That MOX steam ought to clean out the sinuses.
"One of the arguments used in support of increasingly strict radiation dose limits is that every incremental reduction in radiation exposure carries with it a net benefit to the public health. This hypothesis is also frequently cited by those with a seemingly irrational fear of radiation as justifying their fears, and the continued use of the linear, no-threshold (LNT) hypothesis helps to feed radiation phobia. Abandoning this hypothesis or explaining that it over-predicts risks at low levels of radiation exposure, if supported by appropriate scientific studies, may help alleviate radiation phobia."
"Recently-published data suggest that there is no detectable chromsomal damage from the high levels of natural background radiation found in Ramsar and other HBRAs, contrary to the predictions of linear, no-threshold or supra-linear models of radiation dose-response (Ghiassinejad et al. 2001; Mortazvi 2000). This suggests that the linear extrapolation of radiation risk from very high dose at high dose rates (e.g., to A-bomb , many animal studies) to moderate doses at natural low dose rates is scientifically invalid."
http://www.groenerekenkamer.nl/grkfiles/images/Karam.pdf
"Based on results obtained in studies on high background radiation areas of Ramsar, high levels of natural radiation may have some bio-positive effects such as enhancing radiation-resistance. More research is needed to assess if these bio-positive effects have any implication in radiation protection (Mortazavi et al. 2001). The risk from exposure to low-dose radiation has been highly politicized for a variety of reasons. This has led to a frequently exaggerated perception of the potential health effects, and to lasting public controversies."
http://www.ecolo.org/documents/documents_in_english/ramsar-natural-radioactivity/ramsar.html
"In the last decade, an alternative hypothesis called radiation hormesis has gained adherents. The term "hormesis" describes any physiologic effect that occurs at low doses of a substance and cannot be anticipated by extrapolation from the substance’s toxic effects at high doses. Some everyday examples of hormesis include the effects of vitamins, trace elements, and hormones. In each instance, a small amount of the substance is beneficial but a large amount is toxic. Similarly, radiation hormesis proposes that low levels of radiation exposure produce health benefits. The radiation hormesis hypothesis can be shown graphically as a decrease in the radiation risk at low levels."
http://tech.snmjournals.org/cgi/content/full/31/1/11
"Low doses and low dose-rates of gamma rays and x-rays appear to stimulate the body's natural defenses, an effect that has been called radiation activated natural protection (ANP). This protective mechanism involves selective removal of aberrant cells such as those that are precancerous via apoptosis (cell death). The selective removal of precancerous cells via apoptosis it thought to involve intercellular signaling involving reactive oxygen and nitrogen species and certain cytokines. In addition, there is considerable evidence supporting the action of low-dose radiation in connection with stimulating immunity against cancer cells. These protective effects would operate for both sporadic and hereditary cancers. As mentioned above, there are evolutionary arguments suggesting that such protective mechanisms may have been essential to survival."
http://www.yourhealthbase.com/radiation_and_cancer_risk.htm
http://geology.about.com/library/bl/maps/blusradiationmap.htm
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/environment/county-cancer-map.htm
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2939692/
Oh sure. Toxic waste is good for us.
Where I have heard this argument before?
The problem with your logic is that while most DNA involves instructions for manufacturing complex molecules, a small amount of DNA performs error checking and repair. If those sections get knocked out by radiation, then apoptosis fails and the cell will continue dividing, ultimately resulting in cancer. So this claim "that some level of smashing up of DNA is actually good for you" is simply not true because it depends upon which parts of the DNA get damaged.
You pro nuke shills have certainly been busy lately doing damage control. The problem is that you have no credibility. I have no doubt that if everyone in Tokyo dropped dead tomorrow from radiation poisoning, the trolls and shills would still claim this technology is safe. Personally, I am getting really tired of being told that obvious lies are truth.
I'll just point out again that every industry makes these kinds of claims, and tries to find whatever justification they can for exposing us all to materials that should only result in one in a million risk of cancer. But for some reason the rate is greater than 1 in 3. Big difference there.
I don't think that inhaling some plutonium is in any way going to be an improvement on my health status. Of course these self-repair mechanisms are essential for survival. Those that don't have them are out. Those that get overwhelmed, are out. Areas of high natural radioactivity are not the same thing as the fallout from numerous broken nuclear reactors and spent fuel pools. Your position is exactly what one would expect to hear from a corporation or industry hack. Yea, this stuff is good for us. The primary study you referenced was a commentary on the EPA position supporting the linear no threshold model, which had previously been published at the journal Dose-Response.
It turns out that one Jerry Cuttler, of the firm Cuttler & Associates Inc., a utilities industry consultant in Mississauga, ON, Canada makes the claim that based on data in fruit flies in a small number of industry-funded Japanese studies, that low doses of radiation are actually good for us. How do these studies compare with ingesting or inhaling radioactive particles and having them deposited in our bodies, to bombard our cells with radiation for the rest of our lives? They don't compare. Cuttler makes a number of radical leaps in logic with a very limited dataset that has a remarkable similarity to the fluoride story, another toxic waste disposal sales job.
I don't consent to this experiment. Complete credibility fail. It's people like you who have truly lost their souls by wreaking the commons just to have and hold power.
Maybe now the people in Ventura will start listening. Duh!
Nuclear radiation, like smoking cigarettes, is both a choice and a dice roll. A few smokers will live to 90 years old and will still be puffing. That doesn't mean it was ever a good idea.
With nuclear radiation, certain communities made the choice (to not fight the power plant off with tooth and nail, which some communities did successfully). Now comes the dice roll, and it's a big one. Fukushima Prefecture and all of Japan has already lost this dice roll. They should be evacuating but they aren't, so, sadly, there will be individuals disappearing into hospitals one by one, maybe six figures of deaths. That's what happened after Chernobyl. A tumor doesn't have a tag saying where the cancer came from, but people will suspect.
The whole world should make the choice to fight off the power plants. Then we won't see more meltdowns putting long-lived isotopes into the whole world's food chain.
http://www.mndaily.com/2011/03/28/how-i-learned-stop-worrying-and-love-nuclear-power
http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-source.html
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article4836556.ece
Our nuclear power plant not only got buried (long ahead of it's non-extended life) but the spent fuel is all in dry casks. Now if we could just do something about Hanford...
What's interesting is that PGE pulled the plug when repairs got too costly - and then it takes a good 10 years to 'decommision' nuclear power plants, usually costing more than it did to build them. Some hot deal, huh? No wonder Forbes had such a good word about such an 'investment' - con job.