“Looking back more than a year after the event, it is clear that the
Fukushima reactor complex, though nowhere close to state-of-the-art, was
adequately designed to contain radiation.”
- Dr. Richard Muller, physicist, University of California Berkeley,
August 2012.
Take your time. Go back and read that again: “The Fukushima
reactor complex… was
adequately designed to contain radiation.”
While
a recent official
Japanese report on the
Fukushima Daiichi disaster confirms the view that it was a tragedy with enormous environmental, social
and economic effects, there is still commentary appearing in the media claiming
that the real danger was minor, while all the harm it did was caused by
irrational panic. Sadly, the event is said to have needlessly caused nuclear power to fall out
of favor at a time when we need it as an alternative to carbon-based energy. This week, The Wall Street Journal published The Panic Over Fukushima, the latest
example of such an essay, by University of California Berkeley physicist
Richard Muller.
While
Dr. Muller is chosen to speak on this issue in the mass media because of his
expertise as a physicist, his opinion piece has an unfortunately narrow view of
the issue from the viewpoint of medicine, engineering and ethics. Most of what he writes
is correct, but his conclusions are doubtful if what he omits is taken into
consideration.
All
scientists who have tried to downplay the seriousness of nuclear accidents
choose to discuss only cancer and external
radiation exposures. However, people who are concerned about environmental
contamination in Fukushima are mostly worried about the effects of particles
that will get into their bodies, and
other ailments that are not as frightening as cancer but a serious concern.
The earliest studies of the health effects of radiation were focused on
internal contamination, and the hazards were well known before there was a
nuclear power industry that preferred not to talk about them. Every health
physicist knows that cesium in living organisms is absorbed in the same way as
potassium, and strontium fills the role of calcium. The former goes to muscles
and the latter goes to bones. Dr. Muller’s argument doesn’t mention internal
contamination, but it seems to rest on the assumption that the levels of these
toxins in the environment around Fukushima will have a negligible impact, whether they are inside or outside living
things.
Yet considering the complexity of the problem,
how
could anyone know with any certainty what the health effects will be?
Other omissions are the topic of non-cancerous
health effects, and the greater vulnerability
of fetuses and children. These are conveniently not discussed. One reason might
be the common assertion that no
official support has ever been given to the claim that radiation causes
non-cancerous health effects. Indeed it is difficult to find any government
compensation or any legal decision that has favored claimants who said they
suffered non-cancerous health effects from exposure to radiation. But there is
one little-known precedent from a forgotten corner of nuclear history. The U.S. government has
awarded Marshall Islanders, who were exposed to nuclear weapons test
fallout, with compensation for several non-cancerous diseases and benign
tumors, among them non-malignant nodular thyroid disease, hypothyroidism,
autoimmune thyroiditis, severe mental retardation, and unexplained bone marrow
failure. Internal exposure is implicitly admitted in
the recognition of these conditions.
One
quarter of the 36 conditions listed for compensation are non-cancerous or include benign
tumors. It was not easy to get these conditions recognized, but when they were
added to the list they were described as being “medical conditions which are
irrebuttably presumed to be the result of the Nuclear Testing Program.” Skeptics would probably say that it was all
just sympathy money, politicking and liberal guilt caving in to pressure from
victims. There is no convincing some people.
Many of the admitted conditions are related to
thyroid malfunction, which can be a primary cause of other health conditions
such as diabetes, obesity, heart disease and hypertension. Furthermore,
research by Bandazhevskaya et al has
shown that heart disease later in life can be caused by the absorption of the
radioisotope cesium 134 and 137 by heart muscle during embryonic development and during
childhood. The Marshall Islands has some very poor statistics in world rankings
for death caused by ailments related to heart disease (listed in the table below.) If they have never been
recognized as effects of radiation it is because the world authorities in
health physics (WHO, UNSCEAR, IAEA, ICRP)
refuse to acknowledge Bandazhevskaya’s work on heart muscle
absorption of cesium, even though they also seem reluctant to conduct research that would settle the matter.
Also, the diseases in the table are all secondary effects of thyroid
malfunction, and they are parts of a single condition known as metabolic
syndrome which is caused
by a combination of environmental, dietary and cultural factors. It would be
impossible to determine precisely how much nuclear weapons testing contributed
to the present health condition of Marshall Islanders, but undoubtedly it is a
factor in the dismal statistics of a place that should be a tropical paradise full of healthy people.
The list below shows world ranking for rate of death for various diseases,
along with the rate of death within the Marshall Islands. Since these five causes of death are problematically
inter-related, they could be totaled as one cause labeled metabolic disease. In
this way, we can say that 52.35% of Marshall Islanders are dying from this
preventable condition, with radiation exposure being a highly probable
contributing factor.
cause of death
|
world
ranking
|
%
of deaths in the Marshall Islands
|
stroke
|
1
|
17.69
|
endocrine disorders
|
2
|
2.35
|
diabetes
|
4
|
7.22
|
hypertension
|
5
|
6.68
|
heart disease
|
13
|
18.41
|
TOTAL
|
52.35
|
But
this is medicine, not physics. Perhaps
it is too much to expect a physicist to learn this information that is outside his
area of expertise. This is a job that can only be done, apparently, by amateurs who
take the time to read research papers from various fields in their free time.
Dr.
Muller wrote in his conclusion, “Looking back more than a year after the event,
it is clear that the Fukushima reactor complex, though nowhere close to
state-of-the-art, was adequately designed to contain radiation.” I doubt there
are many nuclear engineers who
would agree with this statement because most of them, even ones who are still
staunchly pro-nuclear, must be
ashamed and appalled by how badly this complex was maintained and how badly it failed to contain
radiation. To take just one
example of inadequate design, TEPCO workers on the site found it impossible to
vent the pressure that caused the explosions and led to the catastrophic
release of radiation. It is peculiar that anyone could call this “adequately
designed to contain radiation.”
Of
course, if you believe there are no serious environmental or health
consequences from the massive releases of radiation that occurred, then the
complex was adequately designed. There
will be no problems if other reactors of the same design fail in the same way
because there are no health effects. Don't worry. Be happy.
Furthermore,
this statement about
“adequate design” shows no awareness of the ongoing dangers
posed by the melted cores and the spent fuel pools – the main reasons people are reluctant
to re-inhabit the area.
In his discussion of the risks of nuclear
power, Dr. Muller declares the obvious in stating, “Nothing
can be made absolutely safe.” Then
he asks a question that actually gives his opponents a clear reason to not
change their minds. He asks, “Must we design nuclear reactors to withstand everything
imaginable? What about an asteroid or comet impact? Or a nuclear war? No, of
course not; the damage from the asteroid or the war would far exceed the tiny
added damage from the radioactivity released by a damaged nuclear power plant.” Well, actually, these are good reasons not to
build nuclear power plants in the first place. There are other crises less
severe than nuclear war that could be worsened by the involvement of nuclear
power plants and spent fuel pools. If nuclear power plants had existed at the
time of WWII, their destruction by conventional bombing would have left Europe
uninhabitable. A small war or terrorist attack with non-nuclear explosives
aimed at nuclear power plants would be enough to cause widespread damage.
Most of Dr. Muller’s essay is devoted to a
discussion of how the risks of cancer are calculated for a radiological
emergency, and how these risks compare with natural sources of radiation and
other risks we face from nature or from other man-made threats. The long
mathematical explanation becomes a condescending lecture to the non-specialist
who, it is presumed, is too dimwitted to understand the simple point that
radiation exposure produces relatively few additional cancers compared to all
the cancers that occur in a population. We get it, but those who dwell on this
point fail to address the ethical issues of the discussion.
If the extra cancer cases caused by a
radiological accident amount to only a 1% increase, the crime of imposing this
burden on people is the same no matter what the risk is. If, in addition to the
cancers that will be caused by radiation from Fukushima, there are 99 known
carcinogens sold legally and scattered throughout the environment, the producer
of each one can say that his product contributes only an additional 1% lifetime
risk of getting cancer. And he’ll say that this is, of course, an acceptable
trade-off considering the benefits the product brings to society (sterile
toilet bowls, perhaps). But, of course, the net result of everyone using this
rationale is a 100% chance for everyone of an untimely death by cancer.
For some reason, the moral outrage is easier
to perceive if you consider the risk of harm by criminal activity. If a
sociopathic killer is paroled, the murder rate will increase only
incrementally, while there is a benefit to society in the saved cost of
incarceration. My overall risk of dying by violence hasn’t changed too much by
the release of this one criminal. High-income people, such as university
professors, choose to not live in neighborhoods with higher crime rates, even
if living there would only increase their lifetime risk of dying by violence by
less than 1%. Their “irrational” fear and discomfort with living with the
uncertainty would be the deciding factor, and most people find this to be
natural value system. Psychological comfort matters.
To take another example, if a real estate
agent knowingly sells someone a house that was used as a methamphetamine lab,
he can rationalize his action in the same way the criminal rationalized making
the drug. He can say that there is only a small increase in the risk to the health
of the sucker who buys the house. If he already has poor health and some bad
habits, so much the better. In these cases, the answer to the moral question
seems clear: risks can only be imposed with informed consent, and individuals
have the right to decline risks for reasons that may seem irrational to others.
This will all become much clearer to you when it is the radionuclides falling
on your property and not on the homes of abstract strangers on the other side
of the world. In my neighborhood, soil deposition of cesium went from a few
hundred Bq/m2 to about 20,000, but this, we are told, is nothing to worry about
because in the exclusion zone 200 kilometers away the figure is 500,000 ~
1,000,000, or more. And the optimists say even that will have a negligible
impact. I didn’t panic and I haven’t evacuated because the doctor is right,
lifetime risks of cancer haven’t increased much at all, and quitting my job at
the age of 53 would have a serious downside. But I still claim my right to be
rationally outraged.
Furthermore, it does not matter whether the
person declining the risk agrees with others about how dangerous it is. If my
wife has a phobia about butterflies, it would be sadistic of me to mount framed
specimens of them on the wall and tell her to just get over it. In contrast,
the fear of radiation is not completely irrational. It is a known poison.
Radioactive particles should not be in the human body, but to some degree
people are, admittedly, irrational about the risks, sometimes. But so what? If
they choose not to live on land contaminated with 500,000 Bq/m2, that’s their
prerogative. If the land becomes economically depressed and depopulated, too
bad. If the electorate no longer wants nuclear power, that’s democracy in action.
If the insurance liabilities of nuclear power make it too expensive to finance
with private money, again, too bad. The market has spoken. This is the
consequence of badly managing nuclear safety, not of the general population’s
panic and irrationality.
In spite of these moral arguments, I regret to
say that Dr. Muller is probably right about the numbers and the long-term
effects of Fukushima. It amounts to just an incremental addition to the health
disasters that have been unfolding for a long time, and, as a civilization, we
appear to be too dumb to understand why people are dropping all around us. Rates
of metabolic diseases and cancer have been increasing steadily, and the
increase in cancer is not occurring just because life expectancy has increased.
According to Samuel S.
Epstein, M.D., the chairman of the Cancer Prevention Coalition,
[Since
1971] … childhood
cancers have increased by 26% overall, while the incidence of particular
cancers has increased still more: acute lymphocytic leukemia, 62%; brain
cancer, 50%; and bone cancer, 40%. The federal National Cancer Institute (NCI)
and the ‘charitable’ American Cancer Society (ACS), the
cancer establishment, have failed to inform the public, let alone Congress and
regulatory agencies, of this alarming information. As importantly, they have
failed to publicize well-documented scientific information on avoidable causes
responsible for the increased incidence of childhood cancer.
If society doesn’t wake up to the causes of
cancer and start preventing it, then nuclear accidents like Fukushima,
occurring amid all the other causes of disease, will continue to be wrongly
perceived as inconsequential.
Dr. Muller makes a couple additional
assertions that are worthy of attention. Invited to write for a major media
company as an expert, he is allowed to make assertions that don’t need to be
supported by as much as a hyperlink to a credible source. Nor does he have to
admit that his assertions are controversial within the scientific community.
He claims that nuclear power is an abundant
resource, but doesn’t explain that there are many uncertainties about the world
supply of uranium. Specialists who have looked into the question admit that the
supply of uranium depends on many factors that can’t be predicted. The World Nuclear Association
is optimistic about a technological solution in a post-carbon world in
which nuclear energy produces hydrogen fuel which powers the heavy machinery to
mine and transport uranium. This presumption conveniently avoids the fact that global warming will do catastrophic damage before carbon energy supplies are depleted. Other experts are not so sure, regardless of the recently
exploited deposits in Kazakhstan that have temporarily dampened talk of a shortage of uranium. An
article in Live Science described
the situation this way:
Now
it seems that mining uranium, which nuclear power depends on, could be even
less environmentally friendly and more costly than critics say, according to a new
analysis led by Gavin Mudd, an environmental engineer at Monash University in
Australia.
On
average, supplies of high-quality uranium ore have been steadily declining
worldwide for the past 50 years, and will likely to continue to wane in the
mid-to long-term, Mudd said. Any new uranium deposit is likely to be deeper and
harder to extract, and getting uranium from lower-quality deposits involves
digging up and refining more ore, according to their analysis of government and
industry reports.
"I
have often found that the numbers used by many in industry, government or green
groups are guesses rather than extensive, measured data sets," Mudd said.
"The main thing is to understand the environmental costs of mineral
production in terms of land disturbance, energy and water inputs, greenhouse
outputs and that this will gradually climb up over time."
Another questionable claim of Dr. Muller is in his reference to the
gold standard of radiation studies – the studies of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
victims – to make conclusions that may be flawed. Critics of the official
studies of Hiroshima and Nagasaki have pointed out for a long time that their
basis is questionable. For one thing, a very important group of radiation
victims died in the instant the bombs detonated, or shortly afterward from
burns. That takes about 200,000 people out of the studies from the start.
Another problem is that the official studies left out people who were living at
a distance of more than 2.5 kilometers, and people who entered the cities after
the detonations. These groups received significant internal doses and low-level
external doses. Another physicist, Inge
Schmitz-Feuerhake, studied these groups and said in a recent interview, “What I found was that the death rate
from leukemia and respiratory and gastrointestinal cancers was above the
national average, and that the incidence of thyroid cancer, leukemia, and
breast cancer among women were 1.5 times to 4.1 times higher.” That’s a higher rate than just a few cancers
added to the millions that occur “naturally,” but Dr. Schmitz-Feuerhake is
just a member of the European
Committee on Radiation Risk (ECRR), a group accused by the
nuclear establishment (the IAEA, ICRP, UNSCEAR and industry organizations) of being politically motivated
and fringe – not to be taken seriously. It is interesting that these groups of
scientists and engineers always see these traits in those who disagree with
them, but view themselves as rational, neutral Dr. Spocks who have no skin in
the game.
Dr. Schmitz-Feuerhake goes
on to say,
Meanwhile, in the past several decades,
various studies on nuclear accidents, nuclear facility workers, medical x-rays,
and natural radiation have shown the effects of low-level radiation exposure on
health. However, the research has been largely ignored, primarily because they
contradict data from Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The ICRP's risk assessment, in
particular, underestimates the effects of long-term low-level radiation
exposure, and also lacks awareness of its effects on illnesses other than
cancer… Similar
things [official denial of the effects
of internal exposure] are happening in many other countries.
It's because once a public organization acknowledges internal radiation
exposure, they would be forced to acknowledge their responsibility for the
risks to the health of nuclear plant workers. Nuclear plant workers are
burdened with the same problems as the people of Fukushima who have been exposed
to radiation.
I hope that Dr. Schmitz-Feuerhake and
others in the ECRR might find that the above-mentioned recognition of Marshall
Islanders constitutes a rare official acknowledgement of non-cancerous diseases
and internal exposure. As for commentators such as Dr. Muller, I am reminded of
something I was told by a friend who took the Trans-Siberian Railway in 1989. A
few times he saw graffiti on dilapidated buildings that screamed out, “Eat
here, Gorbachev.” This is food for thought for anyone who thinks the exclusion zone in
Fukushima is fit for human habitation.
References and Other Resources
Bandazhevskaya,
G.S., V.B. Nesterenko, V.B., Babenko, V.I., Babenko, I.V., Yerkovich, T.V.,
Bandazhevsky, Y.I. “Relationship
between Cesium 137 load, Cardiovascular Symptoms, and Source of Food in
“Chernobyl” Children – Preliminary Observations after Intake of Oral Apple
Pectin.” Swiss Medical Weekly 134: 725-729. 2004.
Choi,
Charles Q. “Uranium
Supply Decline Clouds Nuclear Power’s Future.” Live Science. April 22,
2008. http://www.livescience.com/2463-uranium-supply-decline-clouds-nuclear-power-future.html
“Do not underestimate the severity of the Fukushima nuclear crisis: interview.” Mainichi
Shinbun. August 19, 2012. http://mainichi.jp/english/english/newsselect/news/20120819p2a00m0na004000c.html
Epstein,
Samuel S. “Escalating
Incidence of Childhood Cancer Is Ignored by the National Cancer Institute and
American Cancer Society.” The Cancer Prevention Coalition. May 9, 2003. http://www.preventcancer.com/press/releases/may09_02.htm
Muller,
Richard. “The
Panic Over Fukushima.” The Wall Street Journal. August 18, 2012. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444772404577589270444059332.html?mod=e2tw
