HARDING: Why Nuclear Is Not Healthy for Human or Other Life

[Oscar]

Why Nuclear Is Not Healthy for Human or Other Life

By Jim Harding, Ph.D. March 28, 2008

Prepared for “Medicine and Survival”, Physicians for Global Survival, Lake Couchiching, Ontario

At a 1977 IAEA conference on the Nuclear Fuel Cycle, U.S. nuclear scientist Alvin Weinberg commented: “…we nuclear scientists have not faced up to the full consequences of complete success. If we succeed in building tens of thousands of nuclear reactors…which we must do to make any noticeable dent in the world’s use of petroleum, we can expect to have a core meltdown approximately every four years. The lesson is clear. We must stop building these reactors near large cities.” Weinberg went on to recommend that large tracts of land be set aside exclusively for nuclear. From an ecological perspective which values biodiversity and bioregional responsibility, this advice from one of the nuclear industry’s most renowned supporters sounds more like a nightmare than a vision.

1. Errors of Omission and Commission

Today’s nuclear promoters don’t acknowledge this increased probability of catastrophic reactor accidents in their scenario of expansion. They commit grave errors of omission; the main way their scientistic propaganda is perpetrated. Documents obtained through U.S. freedom of information legislation by the Union of Concerned Scientists showed that the calculation in the 1975 Rasmussen Report that there was only 1 chance of a core meltdown in 100,000 reactor years of operation precluded “issues that would not support its predetermined conclusions.” The documents also showed nuclear engineers with close ties to the nuclear industry wrote the report.

This collusion didn’t stop the Cluff Lake Board of Inquiry (CLBI) on the expansion of uranium mining in Saskatchewan from treating this report as the authority on this subject, though the CLBI can perhaps be forgiven, as it didn’t even calculate the risk to uranium workers from alpha radiation.

Errors of omission are used to promote the whole nuclear fuel system. When the CNA issued its 1989 pamphlet entitled How Do We Protect The Environment in Uranium Mining, as part of its series called Nuclear Facts, it failed to mention that the tailings left at the mine site were radioactive.

Nuclear promoters also commit grave errors of commission regarding radiation and human health – which means they intentionally distort the truth. In replying to a letter to the editor from me, CNA’s Director of Research and Promotions claimed: “The writer repeats the false allegation of ‘no safe level of radiation’ – even though all of us live in a universe of radiation that has never been demonstrated to cause any harm whatsoever.” CNA employees have apparently become victims of their own propaganda. Meanwhile independent research on the risks of low-level radiation is steadily moving in the opposite direction of the industry’s reassuring but unfounded claims.

Because background radiation exists as a natural phenomenon does not mean that more exposure from the nuclear fuel system is of no consequence for our health. This “naturalistic fallacy” is opportunistic as well as misinformed. Water is “natural” and yet we can drown from it, if it goes into our lungs instead of our stomach. Because arsenic is “natural” does not give the mining industry the right to pollute waterways and it to end up in a cup of our tea.

The 40 scientists involved in the European Commission on Radiation Risk (ECRR) concluded that present standards for exposure are deficient because they were set before DNA was discovered or understood. In particular they concluded that because of its capacity to damage chromosomes in the lung tissue cells, which could then become cancerous, a low dose of alpha radiation is much more dangerous than previously thought. One implication is that the calculation of average doses of external exposure, such as done by dosimeters at uranium mine and nuclear facilities, is not a reliable way to estimate risk. Internal emitters such as from radon gas are far more carcinogenic than industry-backed standards suggest.

Put simply, radiation dose doesn’t calculate exposure to the particulate and chemical effects of the heavy metal uranium or its by-products once inside our bodies. To fully grasp this we have to make a distinction between inhaled and ingested radioactive particles. The body has no protection for inhaled particles because there is no exit from the lung except to the blood or lymph glands, both internal to the body. This means that inhaled fine particles of uranium are absorbed 100%. In contrast, with ingested material very little is absorbed through the gut (e.g. 1 to 2% of ingested uranium), and if it is absorbed into the blood it first goes to the liver which screens toxins and sends them to the kidney for removal. What a simplistic world the nuclear proponents project onto the public, at the public’s peril, with their reassuring clichés.

The U.S. Academy of Science’s Biological Effects of Ionizing Radiation (BEIR VII) report in 2005 also concluded that there is no safe threshold of radiation. So why isn’t the CNA coming straight on this matter? Could it be that their carefully crafted nuclear promotions campaign intentionally tries to divert public attention from the environmental and human health consequences? Is this about the “health of an unhealthy, unsustainable economy” trumping real considerations of human health?

2. Radon, the Quiet Killer

The CNA’s spin-doctors are out of touch with doctors who are serious about environmental and human health. According to the U.S. Surgeon General and WHO, exposure to low-level radiation from radon gas, after smoking, is the major cause of lung cancer. Lung cancer, which steadily robs us of more of our spirit (breath), is particularly virulent and the survival rate after 5 years remains low.

The WHO estimates that up to 15% of lung cancers worldwide result from radon gas inhalation. Health Canada estimates that 2,000 Canadians die yearly from radon-related lung cancer, with the figure in the U.S. being around 20,000. This is no small number of human deaths.

Radon gas occurs naturally where the element uranium exists, and the nuclear fuel system makes this carcinogen much more bio-available. Mining and milling uranium leaves behind powdery uranium tailings containing 85% of the original radioactivity. Canada has built up over 200,000 tonnes of such tailings, particularly in northern Ontario and northern Saskatchewan. Tailings accumulated at the 12 mines around Elliot Lake, Ontario during the first nuclear arms race (1953-66), and since, continue to contaminate the Serpent River watershed that flows into Lake Huron. Ontario’s Ham Commission on the Health and Safety in Mines found uranium miners had lung cancer four or more times the expected levels. A similar build-up of tailings occurred around Uranium City in northern Saskatchewan, and, since the “uranium boom” of the late 1970s, this building up of tailings is also occurring in the Wollaston Lake area. However, a systematic lack of baseline studies has made it easier to cover up excess cancers among workers and civilians.

It is important to note in this regard that uranium workers in Saskatchewan are still working under exposure limits (of 5 Rems or 50 mSv a year) that were introduced by the International Committee on Radiation Protection (ICRP) in 1958. These remained unchanged in 1977, with no re-evaluation since 1990, when a five-year limit of 10 Rems or 100 mSv was introduced. It is irresponsible to not lower these levels in view of new research on the far greater risks from low-level and particularly alpha radiation, especially by the ECRR but also BEIR VII.

Relying on a dosimeter calculating only external radiation is antiquated and obscures dangers to workers. Procrastinating change may have more to do with the ALARA principle (as low as reasonably achievable) than with worker protection, since imposing lower radiation exposure levels might threaten the economics of the high-grade uranium mines.

The tailings left at uranium mine sites are hyperactive in a physical and chemical sense. Uranium-234, with a half-life of 245,000 years, is created in the decay series that starts with natural uranium or Uranium-238. Uranium-234 breaks down into Thorium-230, with a half-life of 75,400 years, which in turn breaks down into Radium-226, with a half-life of 1,600 years. The Radium-226 then decays directly into radon gas (Radium-222) ad infinitum. Radium-226 is water soluble, and therefore can disperse widely. Biologically it mimics calcium and is taken up in the bones, where it is linked to bone cancer. In view of this propensity to disperse, and the greatly underestimated dangers of radon gas, why in the world would we want this radioactivity to bio-accumulate and become much more bio-available? Why in the world would we want to make it more likely that it gets inhaled or ingested by humans as it contaminates water and airways and food chains over its prolonged life cycle?

We are long past the point where the Precautionary Principle should be our guide. This tells us not to do what we know will cause harm to ourselves or others, now or in the future. It’s sort of an environmental version of the adage “do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” which is not to be confused with the Americanized version, which the Harper government has adopted, that talks of risk-management. With plentiful conservation and renewable energy alternatives there is no need to trade off human and environmental health, with growing risks of cancer from the nuclear industry, to address climate change and energy security.

3. Lowering Radon Gas Standards

Mounting research on the risks of low-level radiation has recently forced the federal Harper government to reduce Canada’s standards for exposure to radon gas in our homes. (This is one of many things that contradicts the Ontario and federal government’s desire to expand nuclear power.) Since 1988 our standards have been 800 Becquerel per cubic metre (Bq/cm) of air. What Health Canada calls “new research showing a stronger link to lung cancer” has thankfully finally led the government to make a 400% decrease in exposure levels, taking it down to 200 Bq/cm.

Canada’s standards for radon gas exposure have been among the highest in the world. In 1986 the U.S. reduced its standards to 150 Bq/cm, and European standards have also been much lower than ours for decades. So the question needs to be posed: why did it take Canada 20 years longer to reduce its standards? Might the protection of the publicly subsidized uranium and nuclear industry have been more important than the protection of the public?

A Natural Resource Council report for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimated that one-third of the lung cancers caused by radon gas could have been prevented at the new, lowered standard of 150 Bq/L. (Note that this means the new level is still not low enough.) This would mean 666 (1/3 of 2,000) deaths in Canada per year, or over 13,000 deaths during the 20-year period that Canada kept its radon gas levels higher than elsewhere. Canada maintaining these higher levels of exposure is at the very least complicit, and at most, liable for these “extra” deaths. Meanwhile, 500,000 Canadians are still going to be living in homes that have exposure levels above the new, lowered standards.

The uranium and nuclear industry, including state-owned and operated corporations – from Eldorado Nuclear to AECL, has lobbied hard to maintain Canada’s higher radiation exposure standards, and their influence needs to be thoroughly scrutinized. Seeing the newly created Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission (CNSC) overruled after its first showdown over reactor safety with the AECL over the nuclear isotope fiasco, suggests the historically cozy relationship of the industry and regulator is still solidly in place.

With such nonchalant standards and the spread of nuclear technology across Canada more radioactive materials are finding their way into our everyday lives, and ultimately to the garbage dump. Alerts about radioactive materials at land field sites grew from 13 to 119 from 2005-06, and most of these were in southern Ontario where the nuclear industry is most pervasive. These materials come from hospitals, university labs and even from construction sites. Since landfill monitoring is still rare and it is easy to divert radioactive materials to unmonitored sites, we can assume this is only the tip of the nuclear iceberg.

4. Tritium Contamination from the Candu

There’s a pattern here, for Canada also has standards allowing far more releasing of radioactive hydrogen (tritium) from its nuclear power plants than do other countries. Might this be because tritium is inherent to the Candu reactor design; e.g. tritium is created when a heavy water (deuterium) atom absorbs a neutron. There is no disputing that the tritium-breeding Candu is Canada’s main source of this carcinogen. The United Nations Scientific Commission on Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR) reports that the Candu produces about 30 times, and releases about 20 times, the tritium of the U.S. light-water reactor (LWR). And with much lower levels of tritium coming from the LWR reactor, the U.S. depends on importing Canadian tritium for both commercial and military uses. Tritium is used in the production of nuclear weapons.

Biologically, tritium mimics hydrogen and disperses into the water, air and food and ultimately into human and other animals’ bodies. It gets into the biosphere through releases of radioactive liquid wastes, process leaks and venting at Candu reactors. Bruce Power directly releases tritium into Lake Huron, and the Candu reactors at Pickerington and Darlington directly release it into Lake Ontario. Levels of tritium were once found to be 900 times the background levels at a farm near the Bruce reactors. After accidental tritium releases at the Bruce complex, the town of Port Elgin, 15 miles from the plant, had levels of tritium of 1,500 Bq/L (or twice the present standard) in its drinking water. Groundwater monitoring wells at the Bruce complex have sometimes shown massive levels (203,500 Bq/L) of tritium. Leeching into water and eco-systems is inevitable.

Due to the effects of dilution, the nuclear industry is allowed to discharge tritium at levels in excess of drinking water standards. However, because of the ecological processes of bioaccumulation, dilution is not the solution to pollution. Meanwhile Canada’s drinking water standards for tritium remain ten times higher than in the U.S. and seventy times higher than in Europe. CNA’s past President, Jeremy Whitlock (the same Whitlock who lobbies hard for nuclear power plants near Peace River Alberta) says the public shouldn’t be concerned about the huge discrepancy between our and other’s standards because there is “no observed effect.” Of course you won’t find what you don’t look for. And while the Ontario Power Authority (OPA) reassures the public that it has lower self-imposed standards, research has found that tritium levels in Lake Ontario (which is used to cool twelve Candu plants) is three times higher than in Lake Superior, which has no nuclear plants.

Even though the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) calls tritium a known carcinogen, and it may also be mutagenic and teratogenic, CNA’s spokesperson reassuringly says, “Canada’s levels are safe”. Until recently the levels allowed in Canadian drinking water were an astonishing 40,000 Becquerel per litre (Bq/L). The drinking water standard in Ontario is now 7,000 Bq/L , but this is still ten times higher than the U.S. EPA standard of 740 Bq/L. And it is 70 higher than the 100 Bq/L recommended by Ontario’s Advisory Committee on Environmental Standards as far back as 1994. (This group thinks the level should be dropped to 20 Bq/L over five years.) The International Joint Commission (IJC) that oversees the health of the Great Lakes considers tritium to be a “persistent toxic substance” and therefore “a candidate for zero discharge”. From an environmental health perspective that considers cumulative effects, this is sound thinking. Ontario’s Drinking Water Advisory Council is reconsidering this standard, but it is unlikely that human health will be allowed to endanger the nuclear power industry. Is this an example of how energy and economic growth trumps human rights and ecology preservation? And why conservation, renewable energy and a nuclear phase-out are the sensible things to do for the wellbeing of future generations?

5. “The Mother” of all Environmental Health Challenges

Threats to environmental and human health exist all along the nuclear fuel system, from mine tailings, to radioactive reactor emissions, to spent fuels. We continue to avoid the environmental health implications of spent fuels (nuclear wastes) not only at the peril of our children’s children, but of evolutionary stability. Intuitively most Canadians grasp that there is something terribly wrong with creating a technology with no viable plan to address its toxic and deadly wastes. But, not knowing what to do, there is a tendency to forget, and again displace the problem onto the future.

Perhaps we have to carefully look back to be able to truly look ahead. We have been engaging in a huge collective denial process about the nuclear wastes for decades now. Each time an influential body recommends a moratorium on nuclear power or calls for nuclear disarmament as a means to stop nuclear wastes at their source, the government-backed proponents muster up a new military-industrial survival strategy. In 1978 the U.S. EPA report Considerations of Environmental Protection Criteria for Radioactive Waste stared the issue directly in the face. Along with the most toxic of all elements, Plutonium-239, it highlighted Carbon-14 and Iodine-129 as particularly problematic, talking of the imprecise speculation regarding doses for “hundreds of thousands of years.” I-129 is a volatile nuclide with a half-life of 17 million years. Think about that! How do you comprehend isolating such an active element from the biosphere over these timelines? Though C-14 has a shorter half-life of 5,600 years, “if released to the biosphere (it) would represent exposure of the entire world’s population due to rapid movement into the carbon cycle.” If you allow yourself to get your head around the realities of nuclear wastes, you are likely going to agree with the authors; that there is “no way to guarantee protection from radioactive materials which are assumed to have no threshold for effects, other than prohibiting their production.” While this conclusion will scare those who depend economically and/or professionally on the nuclear industry, we have to forge ahead with the creation of a sustainable society, which will by definition be non-nuclear.

The EPA authors point out that, “unfortunately, society has not established clear approaches for dealing with the imposition of such risks into the future.” This is an under-statement. They continue: “In general, permanent isolation cannot be expected …uncertainties dominate predictive ability. For more that a few thousand years, there is only uncertainty.” I am beginning to feel overwhelmed and more powerless. They go on: “…it is difficult to predict the course of events from current trends (regarding institutional continuity) for more than several hundred years”, which I would say is overly optimistic. But they don’t let us off the hook, reminding us that “…any radiation, however small, conveys a proportionate chance of producing a genetic alteration or somatic health effect such as cancer…the appropriate goal is to avoid any increment of radiation in the general environment due to radioactive waste.”

So wisdom trumps scientistic knowledge. Perhaps this provides us with a clue as to how to proceed. We are brought back to the Precautionary Principle. With all the uncertainties and inevitable discontinuities, it is beyond stupid to produce more of these long-lived carcinogens and toxins. What must the people involved in this mindless, irresponsible and deadly process be thinking? Or are they thinking at all? Perhaps they are a bit crazed, and just barging on because of short-term interest and identity, a fear of awakening to what they are involved in; perhaps even a fear of facing general uncertainty, which includes our own mortality.

I sometimes wonder whether the nuclear industry attracts people without the ability to face the responsibilities of uncertainty. As I age and do my best to avoid being worn down by decades of action research on this matter, I have come to think that a collective spiritual shift, to recognizing our self as part of an inter-being, will be required for us to make the transition away from patriarchal technology. It must be more than coincidental that there is so much mechanistic-scientistic discourse among nuclear proponents. They even act a little like an technological priesthood, having their own form of Inquisition to try to keep unruly citizens in check with their version of political correctness (e.g. “my facts are the only correct ones”).

This is a danger to us all, including the nuclear priests and their kin. Perhaps, if we can get ourselves sufficiently organized to challenge the nuclear lies about the risks to the health of our own generation, we can slow down and finally stop the creation of risks which can bring great harm to future generations. We must try. And new research can be a help.

6. Leukemia Among Children Near Nuclear Facilities

For years the nuclear industry and government regulators have denied any deleterious effects from on-going low-level releases of radiation at nuclear facilities. However, as early as 1990 British research suggested that children of workers at the Sellafield (Windscale) nuclear reprocessing plant were twice as likely to get leukemia. Industry spokesmen adamantly denied this greater risk. However in 2002 research done by the Children’s Cancer Research Unit at the University of Newcastle again raised the warning. Using comprehensive data from 1957-91 researchers found a fifteen times higher risk of both leukemia and non-Hodgkin lymphoma among worker’s children born at Seascale, near the Sellafield plant. Children of Sellafield workers living outside Seascale and further from the plant had two times the risk for both illnesses.

A similar trend is shown from French research. A 1997 study at Comte University of children frequenting the beaches near, or living within a 35 KM radius of the huge Areva nuclear plant at La Hague found leukemia rates above the national average. Industry officials predictably disputed this. Then in 2001 a study by the National Institute of Health and Medical research found more leukemia for people 25 years and younger living within 35 KM of the La Hague plant. Children aged 5 to 9 living within 10 KM of the plant had a leukemia rate six times the national average.

The trend of such findings continues with German research. A 2007 study done for Germany’s Federal Office for Radiation Protection, by the Institute for Medical Biostatistics, Epidemiology and Informatics at the University of Mainz, analyzed all 1,592 childhood cancer cases reported to the German Cancer Registry from 1980-2003. It found children under 5 living within 5 KM of any of the 16 nuclear plants had twice the risk of leukemia and a higher than average risk of other cancers. The researchers said “Our study confirmed that in Germany a connection has been observed between the distance of a domicile to the nearest nuclear plant…and the risk of developing cancer, such as leukemia, before the fifth birthday.”

Judged to be methodologically flawless by twelve external reviewers, the study is the most comprehensive done anywhere. The reviewers even suggested there was a basis for extending conclusions about a greater risk of cancer for people living in a 50 KM radius around nuclear plants. This suggests that even without considering the probability of major reactor accidents it was ill advised to place these plants in heavily populated areas.

The researchers concede that current radio-biological and radio-epidemiological knowledge doesn’t explain the results. However there were no risk factors discernable other than proximity to nuclear plants. This suggests that flaws in current official predictions of cancer rates should be examined, including incomplete records of nuclear plant emissions, assumptions about absorbed and effective dose, and risk estimates previously extrapolated from higher levels of radiation. In other words, it is time for a shake-up in the paradigm that is used to legitimize the nuclear industry.

Industry officials will continue to pick away at the methods and statistics, similar to the tobacco industry when it disputed any link between its product and lung cancer. However, a meta-study of 17 studies assessing proximity to 136 nuclear facilities in seven countries, including Canada, should put an end to nuclear industry disclaimers. This study, headed by statistician Peter Baker and published in the July 2007 European Journal of Cancer Care, found 14% to 21% more leukemia in children nine and under. These children were 24% more likely to die of leukemia than those not living in the vicinity of a nuclear facility. These results are as available to nuclear industry spokesmen as to anyone else, as they were reported in a 2007 issue of MacLean’s.

According to an interview in the Edmonton Journal, “Baker doesn’t blame the nuclear facilities” because “Doses of radiation that are expected to come from these facilities are so low they shouldn’t cause the excess cases.” In Baker’s words “…it doesn’t seem to make sense with what we know about nuclear radiation.” Baker may not know the controversial and manipulated history of research on radiation and health, or on radiation standard setting, but he admits he wouldn’t want to live near a nuclear facility, or any other polluting plant. This is a good place to start.

The most parsimonious explanation for the continual findings of higher leukemia and other cancers among children and others living near nuclear facilities, remains the radioactive emissions. The convergence of these findings in study after study should be more than enough to apply the Precautionary Principle, and not to expand nuclear power. But we know when money, power, weapons and ideology are so involved that truth is cheap and sometimes even for sale. And, as we see throughout human history, clinging righteously to self-serving myths stands in the way of enlightenment.

7. Manipulating Nuclear Research

In view of the above findings on radon gas and lung cancer and proximity to nuclear facilities and leukemia we must ask why many Canadians and our governments are so susceptible to promotions that claim nuclear is safe. This becomes a question for social science rather than epidemiological study. To answer it we must look at the legacy of relentless control of health research by nuclear proponents.

The 1959 UN-IAEA Agreement:

The pervasive influence of the nuclear industry on public and environmental health goes back to the beginning of the “peaceful atom”. When the UN accepted the IAEA as the international regulator of the nuclear industry it agreed to sideline its own agencies, including the WHO. Paragraph 1 of Article I of the October 1959 agreement between the UN and IAEA says: “…the Agency which is established for the specific purposes of dealing with the peaceful uses of atomic energy will have the leading position in this field.” Article II makes it very clear that the IAEA will be guided by geopolitical, and not necessarily scientific considerations. It says the UN and IAEA will “…apply certain limitations for the safeguarding of confidential material furnished to them…nothing in this Agreement shall be construed to require either of them to furnish any information the furnishing of which would in its judgment constitute a violation of the confidence of any of its Members…”

According to this 1959 agreement the WHO could not undertake or publish any research (e.g. on radiation and health) without the approval of the IAEA. This has worked very well for the nuclear powers, who dominate the UN’s Security Council with their vetoes, and had to all agree with setting up the IAEA in the first place. There can be little doubt that matters of perceived national interest and nuclear weapons supremacy have remained uppermost in what information makes it to the public realm.

Manipulation By Design:

A recent article in the International Journal of Occupational and Environmental Health chronicles other ways the nuclear industry has shaped research that could jeopardize the credibility of the “peaceful atom”. Character assassination and sometimes blacklisting of independent researchers has been the first line of attack – things that have been done to Drs. Gofman, Mancuso, Stewart and Morgan, all pioneers regarding the risks of low-level radiation. The case of recently deceased John Gofman is most instructive. Gofman was a nuclear chemist whose work helped lead to the discoveries of plutonium and certain isotopes of uranium (U-233). He was also a medical doctor and heart specialist involved in pioneering work on cholesterol. Because of his range of talents he was an ideal candidate to do health research in the nuclear industry. As Chief Medical researcher for the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) he concluded that normal reactor emissions were a threat to the health of Americans and must be radically reduced. When he refused to change his findings he and co-researcher Arthur Tamplin were driven from their jobs. His life work on “the evidence relating low-level radiation to cancer and other diseases” was published in the 908-page book Radiation and Human Health published by Sierra Club Books in 1981.

Examples of such interference abound in nuclear health research. When researchers first found excess cancers around the Sellafield (Windscale) nuclear plant in England in 1991, “scientists” in the pay of the industry wrote harsh critiques dismissing the results as “theoretically impossible.”
What this means is that establishment claims are frozen, and all new research is judged to be true or false in terms of them, which, as Thomas Kuhn showed in his 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, is how “scientific” orthodoxy stops scientific advancement. When excess cancer mortalities among people with radiation exposures within accepted limits were found at the U.S.’s Oak Ridge Laboratory in 1991, well-positioned, industry-paid scientists also attacked the study.

Britain’s worst ever nuclear accident occurred at Windscale in 1957 when the graphite rods used to control nuclear reactions caught fire. The fire sent a plume of radioactive caesium, iodine and polonium across Britain and northern Europe. Scientists who recently restudied this accident have concluded that twice as much radiation was released as previously thought. Their research suggests that even estimates of cancers made using new epidemiological methods in 1990 underestimate the thyroid, breast and leukemia cancers resulting from this accident.

Perhaps the most insidious interference in research on radiation and health was in the aftermath of the 1979 nuclear accident at Three Mile Island. The follow-up study was paid for by the litigation settlement fund, which in turn was financed by the nuclear operator’s insurers. It set such strict conditions on how doses were estimated that it pretty much ruled out finding any evidence for excess cancers. A later study using the same health data found radiation dose estimates were too low and that excess cancers did occur.

This is manipulation by design. There has also been direct interference in research; such as when the Deputy Director of the Los Alamos Laboratory suggested research conclusions in a 1999 study on occupational radiation risks should be modified to better satisfy the Department of Energy funder.

Manipulation also occurred in the aftermath of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear catastrophe. While both the WHO and UNSCEAR made claims of little or no negative health impact, several independent studies concluded that the assumptions made about doses and risks were “grossly underestimated”. Direct experience of much higher than expected cancers continues to amass in the Ukraine and beyond. UN-based research will remain suspect in view of the 1959 Agreement with the IAEA.

As the author of this chronicle of nuclear industry manipulations in health research said in his overall conclusion: “The ethics of scientific rectitude has been seriously violated and the general public has been misled.” And such misleading continues, and requires constant scrutiny.

8. The War on Cancer and the Warfare State

As Director of the University of Pittsburgh’s Centre of Environmental Oncology, Professor Devra Davis is well suited for undertaking this scrutiny. In her mammoth best seller, The Secret History of the War on Cancer, she makes several references to the continuing, uphill struggle to get radiation risks from the nuclear fuel system acknowledged. In a 1949 issue of Scientific America Geoff Conklin noted that 75% of cobalt and uranium miners in Germany, and more than 50% in Czechoslovakia, had died of lung cancer. However when uranium mining expanded to fuel the nuclear arms race this knowledge was suppressed or ignored.

Rachel Carson, author of the groundbreaking 1963 book Silent Spring credits Wilhelm Hueper as the pioneer of environmental epidemiology. This is the field of study slowly making us aware that increases in many of the most virulent cancers result from carcinogens spread into the environment by the military-industrial system. This field helped show that the increase of cancer from the 8th to 2nd cause of death in the U.S. from 1900-1950 couldn’t be explained by an aging population, but rather by exposure to carcinogens – most notably cigarettes, radon gas and workplace toxins. Because of his concern that the risks of smoking might be used to obscure those from toxic chemicals in the workplace, Hueper greatly underestimated the role of smoking in lung cancer. We have yet to fully realize how occupations in the industrial society contribute to smoking.

A pathologist by training, Hueper initially worked in Dupont’s Haskell Laboratory of Industrial Toxicology where he studied the rising incidence of bladder cancer among workers manufacturing synthetic dyes. Wanting to study humans and the workplace directly, and not be isolated in the lab, and continuing to publish findings that displeased his profit-seeking industrial bosses, Hueper was fired in 1938.

After leaving Dupont and working in various jobs for a decade, Hueper headed up the new environmental cancer section at the fledgling U.S. National Cancer Institute, where he stayed till he retired. He immediately ran into difficulties with a public educational program that directly identified the industrial sources of many environmental cancers. And he was soon to go head-to-head with the military state. When he found lung cancer rates among chromate and uranium mine workers to be 10-20 times higher than expected he was accused of being anti-business, which in the McCarthyist climate of the day implied being pro-communist. Davis wrote, “Uranium and chromate are critical to the production of nuclear weapons. Hueper learned the hard way that inquiries into their dangers were not welcome.” When Hueper took his results to the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission he was simply told “it’s not the radioactivity.”

The dangers of radiation from nuclear weapons testing were also systematically denied or downplayed. In 1997, long after Hueper had gone, the National Cancer Institute released a study, withheld held from the public for five years by the Department of Energy (DOE), showing the doses of Iodine-131 from Nevada’s atomic tests in the 1950s and 60s were 100 times greater than the federal government had previously admitted. The DOE now admits this dosage was sufficient to have caused from 11,000 to 212,000 additional cases of thyroid cancer.
Nuclear Diagnosis and Cancer Risks:

Davis notes that, “Obstetricians and nuclear weapons advocates alike maintained that small doses of radiation were harmless.” Many people know that Marie Curie, the pioneer of nuclear medicine, died of leukemia from radiation exposure from radium, a by-product of uranium. (Her radium-radiated bones lost the ability to make the right amount of white blood cells.) However, nuclear industry officials claiming that such risks only exist at high levels of exposure, continue to emphasize the benefits and ignore the risks of radiation technology in diagnosis and cancer treatment. Yet, as early as 1956 in The Lancet Dr. Alice Stewart showed that children developing leukemia born between 1953-55 were three times more likely to have had routine in utero x-rays, and that just one such x-ray in early pregnancy doubled the risk of leukemia. This research helped establish that nature of the risks from low-level radiation, including that used in medicine.

With such knowledge behind us, and x-raying foetuses less common, we’d hope the risks from exposure to medical radiation are in decline. But if anything cancer caused by medical x-rays will likely grow in the future. Davis notes that the American College of Radiologists estimates the U.S. population gets five times the exposure to radiation from medical imaging as 25 years ago. In the U.S. there are seven times the CT scans as ten years ago, and Davis points out that a CT scan to the chest is equivalent to 400 x-rays and one to a child’s stomach is equivalent to 600 x-rays. This is not good news for parents (or their children) who go into the medical system without their eyes open.

Davis holds no punches, saying that the risks “…of CT scans remain secret, and those of nuclear energy or the use of depleted uranium remain masked in mystery.” Nuclear propaganda about the relative safety of low-level radiation originally shielded the nuclear arms race from critical scrutiny. We can all be thankful to the women and mothers who revealed the uptake of Strontium-90 and Iodine-131 in children’s bodies from atomic testing, and helped build global pressure for a Limited Test Ban Treaty in 1963. However such propaganda continues to shield us from the threat posed by the proliferation of nuclear weapons, particularly the use of DU weapons since 1991, and from the nuclear power and nuclear medicine industries as well.

The question must now be asked, whether in the wake of the end of the Cold War, other ideological means are being constructed which can blind us to the environmental and health risks and consequences from the global nuclear system. The exploitation of the growing fear of global warming appears to be the next form of manipulation that will be tried. And fear and panic is never a sound way to assess our options and to consider how our existing practices will affect environmental and human health in the future.

It is encouraging that the 6,800-strong Colorado Medical Society unanimously opposed issuing permits for uranium mining because of “the potential risk it poses to the health of residents.” It opposed Powertech Corporation and the Colorado Mining Association’s bid for an in-situ uranium mine that would threaten an aquifer that countless communities depend upon. Indigenous peoples who continue to live among the uranium tailings left by the nuclear arms race are already facing the risks of contaminated water, and so, the time has come for Settler people to work in good faith with Indigenous people to protect the common good.

The alliance developing to stop uranium mining in Ontario’s Mississippi watershed is already an inspiration for Canadians from coast-to-coast-to-coast. The harsh use of the courts and recent jailings of Indigenous activists as “political prisoners” to protect the interests of uranium mining companies, contradicts both the Supreme Court’s call for consultation with First Nations over resource extraction and international law regarding the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. It is also testimony to how we will have “energy wars” within our own borders until we embrace renewable and sustainable approaches.

It is doubly encouraging that the 100,000 doctors from 40 countries who are members in the International Society of Doctors for the Environment are advocating a non-nuclear strategy to address global warming. And we should not forget the exemplary role of the B.C. Medical Association in bringing to public light the risks of low-level radiation in the late 1970s, and the role this played in the B.C. government’s 7-year moratorium on uranium mining.

However, the nuclear industry is again on the march with renewed false promises and reassurances. While it is necessary to demystify the present claims, particularly about climate change and there no longer being a weapons’ connection, we shouldn’t forget the lessons learned from remembering that this is a multi-layered story of deception with a long history.

Medical doctors, in solidarity with healthcare workers, public healthcare defenders and environmental health activists everywhere, must be encouraged to place their commitment to human health, which now means protecting environmental health, above any business, industrial or military ideology or pressures they may feel. The preservation of ecological integrity and the creation of a sustainable society is now inextricably connected to the promotion of human health. Perhaps medical groups will soon join the growing number of municipalities, including Canada’s capital city, Ottawa, in calling for a uranium moratorium in the most nuclearized of all provinces.

Appendix I:

MAJOR ENVIRONMENTAL “EVENTS”: Spills, floods, and review failings at Saskatchewan uranium mines – 1979-2006

In 1979 it was revealed that there had been ongoing draining of several lakes at the joint venture (Cameco, Areva) Key Lake mine for three years prior to the Board of Inquiry (KLBI) being appointed or reporting. An attempt to get a court injunction failed because most lakes had already been drained. All environmental groups boycotted the Inquiry. (CDS, p. 66)

The Cluff Lake mine was operated by Areva from 1980-2002. The highly radioactive tailings (e.g. thorium and radium) were to be separated, stored in cement caskets and buried. By the mid-1980’s several caskets were leaking, and the AECB gave permission for reprocessing and adding the radioactive tailings to the open tailings. This did what the earlier inquiry said was unacceptable. (CDS, p. 124).

The Key Lake mine opened in 1983. Within a few months this “state of the art” mine had had 8 spills. The largest, involving 100 million litres of radioactive water, occurred in 1984 and received coverage in the national media. (CDS, p. 63-66)

Cameco’s Rabbit Lake mine opened in 1975 and is still operating at Eagle Point, with plans to use the mill for uranium from the Cigar Lake mine. In 1989 there was a major spill of 2 million litres of radioactive water into Wollaston Lake. (CDS, p. 85-90)

From 1980, when the SK Mine Spill Reporting started, until 1989, there were 150 reported spills at uranium mines, two-thirds involving radioactive materials.

In 1993 the Joint Federal Provincial Panel (JFPP) recommended not proceeding with the joint venture Denison/Areva Midwest mine, and postponing Areva’s McLean Lake mine. The provincial NDP government ignored this and proceeded to approve both mines. (CDS, p. 186-90)
In 1996 two panel members resigned due to the inconsequential and flawed process of the JFPP. These included the occupational and environmental health specialist and First Nations member. The Inter-Church Uranium Committee (ICUC) withdrew from the JFPP and 4 northern mayors refused to host public hearings.

In 1999 the AECB granted a new license at Areva’s McLean Lake mine, which started operations in 1995, even though its JEB tailings facility hadn’t undergone a full environmental assessment. The ICUC had the license quashed in Federal Court but the mining continued. The company had the injunction overturned in an appeal and the ICUC was refused standing to appeal at the Supreme Court. The company was awarded costs from ICUC. (CDS, p. 239)

In 2003 the new Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission (CNSC) renewed the license for the Rabbit Lake mine, which gave Cameco authorization to breach the dike that separated the mined-out Collins Bay A-zone pit from Wollaston Lake. The nearby community of Wollaston Lake opposed this action, and several groups including Minewatch sought a full assessment. The breaching of the dam was called “site rehabilitation” rather than “decommissioning” to avoid a consultative process and environmental assessment.

Cameco and Areva’s joint venture McArthur River mine, the largest uranium mine in the world, opened in 1999 and is still operating. In 2003 production had to be suspended due to underground flooding. (CDS, p. 236)

In 2004 the Cluff Lake mine and mill (which operated from 1980-2002) was decommissioned by Areva without further environmental assessment. The federal government simply referred the matter to the CNSC.

In 2004 the CNSC renewed the license for the Key Lake mine and mill operating since 1983, even though the side-walls of the Dielman pit were caving in. One million cubic metres of sand had already slumped. Besides decreasing the capacity for tailings this would make the tailings more permeable.

In 2006 Cameco and Areva’s joint venture Cigar Lake mine suspended construction due to complete underground flooding. Production delayed for two years and perhaps indefinitely. (CDS, p. 235-36)
Many more instances of review and mine company failings have been researched by Saskatoon’s ICUCEC.

Sources: Jamie Kneen, Uranium Mining in Canada, Minewatch, 2006; and Jim Harding, Canada’s Deadly Secret (CDS): Saskatchewan Uranium and the global Nuclear System (Fernwood, 2007).

Jim Harding, Ph.D.

Jim Harding’s interdisciplinary doctorate in the sociology of knowledge explored the philosophical and ideological underpinnings of the ideology of scientism, and he has applied this critical background in various research and teaching endeavours. In the Faculty of Environmental Studies at the University of Waterloo he taught environmental and occupation health, and went on to publish “political ecological” analyses of asbestos mine tailings in Lake Superior, pulp and paper industry mercury contamination in north western Ontario, and, most extensively, uranium mining (and its end uses) in northern Saskatchewan.

As Director of Research for the Province of Saskatchewan’s Alcoholism Commission he did pioneering work, in partnership with the federal Non-Medical Use of Drugs Directorate, on the medicalization of socio-economic problems and the over-prescribing of pharmaceutical mood-modifiers. As Director of Prairie Justice Research at the University of Regina he headed the SSHRC-funded Uranium Inquiries Project, which critically deconstructed the competing worldviews in the controversy over uranium mining and nuclear energy. As Professor in the School of Human Justice at the University of Regina he was instrumental in creating multidisciplinary and inter-professional curriculum on social, legal and criminal justice studies. One of his main focuses has been Aboriginal Justice, and he continues teaching in the area of ecology and justice, and on strategies for conversion to a sustainable society.

Since retiring he has built a passive solar house on the Crows Nest Ecology Preserve in Saskatchewan’s Qu’Appelle Valley, where he hosts “social therapy” retreats, and organically gardens with his spouse Janet; and has written two books: After Iraq: War, Imperialism and Democracy (Fernwood, 2004), which led him to work with the Betrand Russell-inspired World Tribunal on Iraq (WTI); and Canada’s Deadly Secret: Saskatchewan Uranium and the Global Nuclear System (Fernwood, 2007), which has resulted in ongoing non-nuclear network-building speaking tours in various regions of Canada. He is now working on a pan-Canadian analysis of the growing support for a non-nuclear strategy to reduce the threats of both climate change and proliferation and to help build a broad-based movement for a sustainable society.