Working away in relative obscurity without funding or mainstream recognition, Dr. Theodore Rockwell, with thick spectacles, a gray beard, and a stoop in his 80-year-old frame, paces his book-lined office. Rockwell’s eyes shine over his current fascination: a uranium mine in Boulder, Montana, where he’s taking his “sore and aching wife,” Mary, this month.
“It’s 100 miles east of nowhere,” he says. They’re going there to bathe in the healthy effects of low-dose radiation. “Come for a Healing Vacation at a Spectacular Location!” reads the brochure, which promises therapy to those with immune system disorders, arthritis, asthma, lupus, gout, eczema, even migraine headaches. All from radon at 400 to 700 times the “safe limit” recommended by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
No, Dr. Rockwell isn’t crazy, or even terribly eccentric. In fact, he wrote the definitive manual on radiation protection in 1956, The Reactor Shielding Design Manual, which has gone through several printings in numerous languages and is still used as a textbook. After years of working as Admiral Hyman G. Rickover’s technical director in the nuclear Navy, he also penned in 1992 the acclaimed chronicle The Rickover Effect: How One Man Made a Difference. The titles of his talks, papers, and meeting presentations on radiation policy since 1996 run four full pages, single-spaced. He has received Distinguished Service Medals from the Navy and the Atomic Energy Commission and the founding “Rockwell Award” by the American Nuclear Society for lifetime contribution.
While most people believe radiation is a powerful and harmful carcinogen, Rockwell disagrees. “It’s all in the dose,” he says. “Any element can be too much or too little. Most poisons are beneficial in small amounts. Look at your vitamin pills.”
That is the claim at the heart of a growing debate—a debate about much more than the safety of nuclear power. According to Rockwell and his allies in the radiation research field, government regulating bodies are listening more to public paranoia than to sound science. Instead of basing decisions on hard scientific facts, they say, regulators are encouraging public fear in order to increase their own research funds. And taxpayers are footing the enormous bill.
Why It Matters
It’s in the news once again. Congress is taking up the issue of nuclear waste management, as it decides whether to make Nevada’s Yucca Mountain a waste depository. Once again, there is a fierce debate about the safety of such areas.
It’s no wonder the debate is a passionate one. Radiation protection isn’t just an emotional issue; it’s also big business.
It has been estimated that the cost of protection and cleanup exceeds $1 trillion. That’s money that isn’t going to feed the hungry or develop a cure for cancer or bolster social security. Critics insist that if we’re going to spend that kind of money, we’d better be sure that the danger is a real one and that lives are being saved.
And that, they say, is the first problem.
Radiation safety expenditures are often described in terms of how many “hypothetical lives” have been saved. One international radiation expert and member of the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR), Zbigniew Jaworowski, estimates, “Each human life hypothetically saved by implementing the NRC’s [Nuclear Regulatory Commission] regulations costs about $2.5 billion, for no public health benefits.”
A growing number of radiation scientists are now saying there’s no evidence those lives were ever in danger.
Marvin Goldman, professor of surgical and radiological sciences at the University of California, Davis, summed up the issue in the academic journal Science: “Are we really serious about investing about a trillion dollars to clean up our atomic backyard, when in all likelihood very little credible health risk may be involved?”
According to Dr. Rockwell, not only is some radiation harmless, it may actually be helpful. Nuclear medicine, energy, and other technology benefits are being lost at high public cost.
In his opening statement of the July 18, 2000, House sub-committee hearing on the issue, Representative Ken Calvert (R-Calif.) sharpened the point:
Mainstream experts in this field seem to agree that below a certain level of low-dose radiation, adverse health effects cannot be observed. This, of course, raises the question: Why are we proposing expensive standards requiring “gold-plated” technologies to protect to “zero” exposure where there does not appear to be any adverse health effects, and when some scientists claim health benefits?
Critics of the current policy say the battle lines are set: science on one side, the government on the other—and the American people stranded in the middle.
The Evolution of Radiation
A hundred years ago, when radium and X rays were first discovered, scientists scrambled to establish standards for radiation protection. To do so, they had to invent a unit to measure radiation. They named that unit the roentgen (R). If a human being absorbed 500 R at once, he would generally die.
“There was no question that high-level radiation could cause immediate physiological effects,” Rockwell says. “The uncertainty was whether radiation levels too low to create immediately detectable symptoms could cause delayed effects such as genetic damage or cancer to show up decades later.”
But in the early 1950s, government regulators decided that radiation’s harmful effects should be assumed to exist (for the sake of public safety) at every level of radioactivity. This despite their own prior research, which showed that radiation of less than 40 R caused no detectable harm.
The theory they developed, called the Linear No-Threshold (LNT) model, quickly became the basis of federal clean-up policies.
But according to Rockwell, it’s wrong. Although a great deal of research has been published on the immediate fatal damage and long-term cancer-causing effects of high-dose radiation, the benign effects of low-dose radiation are not well-recognized by the public. And yet they are widely discussed by scientists in the field. Why is it, scientists ask, that the Japanese citizens who received low levels of radiation in the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are actually outliving their unexposed peers?
Spencer Weart, author of Nuclear Fear (1988), argues that only after Hiroshima did things nuclear and atomic become associated with Armageddon. Indeed, radiation has bombarded all living organisms since the dawn of time. “We just didn’t think about it or measure it” until 1895, when Wilhelm Roentgen discovered X rays, Rockwell says. The following year, Henri Becquerel discovered radioactivity, and in 1898, Marie Curie discovered radium. Radiation was an immediate hit, akin to the elixir of life. Special hair tonics, chocolate bars, toothpastes, and hearing aids were touted as radioactive “cures.”
After World War II, that all changed.
How Dangerous Is Radiation?
Daily, we live in a sea of natural radiation, Rockwell observes, and this natural radiation is no different from man-made radiation: “All nuclear radiation originates from the nucleus of atoms. Natural radiation arises from naturally radioactive atoms in the earth, such as uranium, radium, potassium, carbon, and more than 50 other elements. The human body has no way of distinguishing whether the originating atom was naturally radioactive or made so by a human process.”
When life first emerged, the world was much more radioactive than it is today. Rocks, soil, sea, and air are naturally radioactive. In fact, food, water, and our very bodies also emit radioactivity. Brazil nuts, salad oil, and milk are all radioactive, according to the 1978 Handbook of Radiation Measurement and Protection and the 1997 book Environmental Radioactivity from Natural, Industrial and Military Sources.
Scientific dissenters argue that it makes no sense for expensive radiation protection policies to push for a complete elimination of radiation—the goal of many antinuclear activists who claim that all radiation causes cancer. This despite the latest regulatory report on the subject, Report NCRP-236, which concedes, “It is important to note that the rate of cancer in most populations exposed to low level radiation has not been found to be detectably increased, and that in most cases have [sic] appeared to be decreased.”
Fear of Radiation
Touting the benefits of nuclear radiation would make anyone a pariah in some social circles. But that doesn’t seem to bother Theodore Rockwell.
“It’s fear of radiation that’s killing people and hurting the planet,” Rockwell claims. He believes the radiation policy that was established to protect the public from health risks is actually detrimental to life.
Consider some of the documented evidence of radiation fear. Fear of bearing “nuclear mutants” led 100,000 European women to abort their children after the Chernobyl accident. Thousands of people afraid of the effects of radiation exposure avoid lifesaving medical procedures such as mammograms or radiotherapy. Disposal of harmless radioactive waste is blocked by community organizations, causing hospitals and pharmaceutical companies to shut down radio-medical treatment and research centers. Food irradiation, which could eliminate bacteria that kill 9,000 Americans each year, inspires a public outcry. Politicians avoid promoting nuclear power as a substitute for coal plants, which cause tens of thousands of American deaths from respiratory problems. Meanwhile, Ralph Nader and his allies work to ban smoke detectors with radioactive sources, which fire experts claim are twice as effective as other smoke detectors.
Bioethicist Dr. Margaret Maxey agrees with Rockwell that fear of radiation is more harmful to public health than radiation itself. At a meeting of the Council of Scientific Society Presidents a few years ago, she said, “Fear of radiation has proved fatal”—from abortions and refusal of medical procedures to regulatory roadblocks stopping harmless disposal of low-level radioactive waste.
The Collective Dose
Lacking direct evidence to support their theory that low-level radiation is dangerous, scientists created the “collective dose” concept.
Dr. Rockwell explains:
In considering genetic damage, some people worried that if large numbers of people were irradiated at a level that caused no individual to be harmed, there might still be damage to the gene pool that would add up to degrade future generations. So they created the notion of “collective dose.” They said that if large numbers of people are irradiated, you should add up the individual doses to get a collective dose for the group. When it became clear from the [atomic] bomb data that even at high dose rates, there was no detectable inherited damage, the idea of collective dose was nevertheless retained and applied to cancer, where it made no sense at all. The collective dose concept says in effect that if we give a hundred million people one aspirin each, then, based on the datum that the lethal dose for aspirin is (say) 100 tablets, one million people in this group will die. But deaths don’t occur to populations; they occur to individuals. Does anyone really believe that people will become sick and die just because they are surrounded by other aspirin-takers? Or that 30,000 people will die from harmless levels of fallout from the Chernobyl accident, just because such a calculation “predicts” it?
The Health Benefits of Radiation
It’s one thing to say that low levels of radiation are harmless; it’s another thing entirely to suggest that they may be beneficial. And yet, that’s what Rockwell is claiming.
His rationale for taking 32 hours of low-dose radiation in a uranium mine is akin to the theory behind immunization shots for polio, chicken pox, mumps, or rubella. Exposure to tolerable levels of a germ strengthens the body’s defenses so that subsequent attacks by this toxin, in larger amounts, are effectively countered. Low-dose therapy also activates the body’s general immune system.
“Numerous studies [e.g., United Nations Scientific Committee on Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR), 1994] have shown that DNA and cellular repair mechanisms are stimulated by low to moderate levels of radiation,” Rockwell says, referring to the research of microbiologist and NRC fellow Dr. Myron Pollycove.
In fact, many European health plans now cover radon therapies. And some doctors in Japan are using low-dose therapy for patients who are about to undergo radiation cancer treatments. A few weeks before their therapy, patients receive small amounts of radiation to fire up their immune system’s cell repair mechanism. This has markedly improved their recovery rate.
The slight increase in the number of cells damaged by the additional radiation, the doctors say, is overwhelmingly offset by the increased rate of repair in the trillions of cells damaged by background radiation and metabolism. This actually results in fewer of the damaged cells that could lead to cancer.
A sizable body of research supports this idea. Tens of thousands of Navy shipyard workers exposed to radiation in the 1960s and 1970s have been carefully studied by Johns Hopkins University. Not only have they been shown to demonstrate no harmful health effects, but they also tend to have fewer incidents of cancers than nonexposed populations (“Health Effects of Low-Level Radiation in Shipyard Workers,” G. Matanoski, 1991). In a second case, thousands of Cold War soldiers who participated in nuclear weapons testing have recently participated in two studies that found no sign of unusual illnesses or higher death rates (“100 Years of Observation on British Radiologists: Mortality from Cancer and Other Causes, 1897-1997,” British Journal of Radiology, 2001). In a third study by Dr. Bernard Cohen of the University of Pittsburgh, cancer rates in American counties with the highest levels of radon were tracked, and an inverse relationship with lung cancer was found—that is, those in counties with the highest exposure to radon actually had the lowest rates of lung cancer (“Test of the Linear No-Threshold Theory of Radiation Carcinogenesis for Inhaled Radon Decay Products,” Health Physics, 1995).
But doesn’t all radiation cause cell mutations? And if so, how can even low levels be considered harmless? In answering this, we must remember that every single gene in the body is likely to undergo about ten billion mutations in a typical life, mostly due to natural metabolism from breathing and eating.
We’re hit by 15,000 nuclear rays or particles every second—more than a billion every day of our lives—from these natural sources, according to Pollycove. But our bodies face even greater challenges, he says: “Nearly 5,000 purine bases are lost daily from the DNA in each human cell because the body’s normal heat breaks their linkages. Even more damage is caused by normal cell division and DNA replication. The most damage though, a million DNA nucleotides in each cell each day, is due to free radicals created in the normal process of metabolism from routine eating and breathing.” Metabolism causes ten million times as many cell mutations—repaired and unrepaired—as natural radiation.
So, how can we possibly survive all this cellular damage? The repair mechanism of the human cell is without equal. Very high radiation levels can overwhelm the body’s normal biological functions and repair processes, leaving the body damaged and vulnerable to cancer and other diseases. But for low doses of radiation, hazardous chemicals, and bacteria, our bodies have a large variety of antioxidants that prevent damage, enzymes that scan DNA to repair damaged nucleotides, and processes that remove those it cannot repair.
Put simply, Rockwell says, our bodies heal these mutations naturally.
Dr. John William Gofman, a vocal proponent of the LNT and head of the Committee for Nuclear Responsibility, disagrees: “How would a safe level of radiation come about? It could come about in theory if the biological repair mechanisms—which exist and which will repair DNA and chromosomes—work perfectly. Then a low dose of radiation might be totally repaired. The problem, though, is that the repair mechanisms don’t work perfectly. There are those lesions in DNA and chromosomes that are unrepairable. There are those where the repair mechanisms don’t get to the site and so they go unrepaired. And there are those lesions where the repair mechanisms simply cause misrepair. We can say that between 50 and 90 percent of the damage done by ionizing radiation is repaired perfectly. What we are then seeing is harm done by the residual 10 or 40 or 50 percent that is not repaired perfectly” (interview in Synapse magazine, January 1994).
But Rockwell doesn’t buy this argument: “For every cell damaged by radiation, there are billions damaged by the routine metabolism of our food. Well over 99 percent of these are properly repaired. If this were not so, we’d all die in our first year from metabolic damage. So whether or not you get cancer doesn’t depend on whether another cell is hit by radiation; it’s still a trivial number compared to those damaged by routine metabolism.”
Questionable Radioactivity
Ironically, the biggest obstacle to achieving a nonradioactive world isn’t the nuclear power plant; it’s the environment itself.
To understand this, one must first understand how radiation is measured. Radioactivity describes the intensity of a radiation source (just as luminosity measures the brightness of a light source). We measure radioactivity in curies (named after Marie Curie, the discoverer of radium). One curie is the amount of radioactivity possessed by 1 gram of pure radium. We usually encounter much less than 1 curie, though, so we measure lesser amounts in picocuries (millionths of a millionth of a curie). In 1 picocurie, only about two atoms per minute are decaying and giving off radiation.
The EPA has proposed a 5 picocurie per liter limit on tap water. The discharge produced from a nuclear power plant is limited by law to 10 picocuries per liter. This sounds reasonable enough at first.
But a liter of normal seawater (the kind you’d swim in at any beach) contains an average of 350 picocuries. In other words, normal seawater is 35 times more radioactive than the discharge of a nuclear power plant. Milk contains an average of 1,400 picocuries per liter. Salad oil has a whopping 5,000 picocuries per liter, which means that salad oil is 1,000 times more radioactive than the EPA’s limit on tap water.
And yet, no one claims that seawater, milk, or salad oil present a radiation health threat to the public. In short, we’re paying billions of dollars a year to control and reduce tiny, harmless radiation levels in a world where we encounter natural radiation levels thousands of times greater—with no known adverse health effects.
So why is the American taxpayer footing the bill to keep much less radioactive nuclear power plants and water systems within unreasonable government limits?
Regulating Radiation Exposure
As questionable as the regulations on radioactivity are, they are much less controversial than the current radiation exposure limits. Radiation exposure, expressed in rems, measures the number of rays or particles that strike our bodies and how much damage each ray or particle can do. If we stand one yard away from a 1 curie source (a gram of radium), we’ll get about 1 rem of radiation each hour. If we move farther away, we’ll get less. To measure the smaller radiation levels usually encountered, we use the millirem (a thousandth of a rem).
According to the EPA’s regulations, no American can be exposed to more than 100 millirems in a year.
But the EPA’s task is a tall one. While a year’s worth of radioactivity from any part of a nuclear power plant’s fuel cycle is only 25 millirems, a year spent within the granite walls of the U.S. Capitol will expose a person to up to 525 millirems. In other words, the U.S. Capitol gives off 21 times more radioactivity than a nuclear power plant. Of course, you won’t see Congress moving to close down their offices for the sake of public health.
Nor are they about to declare the Rocky Mountain states a health hazard. This despite the fact that in those states residents receive up to 1,000 millirems a year from the natural background radioactivity. That’s ten times the EPA’s “maximum permissible exposure” level for the public.
If anti-radiation advocates are correct, we should see evidence of radiation effects among the residents of those states. Thus far, though, no such evidence has been produced.
But it may not be as simple as that. Anti-radiation activist, Dr. Alice Stewart, argues that the “event that you are looking for, which is rare and long delayed, is also going to be a very common, natural event. This follows from the concept of there being any effect to background radiation. You’ll notice, that if there’s going to be a low-level radiation effect, there’s bound to be a background radiation effect. Therefore, the thing you’re looking for is a natural phenomenon, isn’t it? It must be there, must be happening all the time. You know we’re all whirling around in space, but we all have the impression that we are sitting quietly, absolutely still…. This is exactly the same impression that we’re getting from any ill effect of background radiation, that it isn’t there. But it is there. But we’re all suffering from it equally or sufficiently equally for all practical purposes not to show” (lecture at the 1992 World Uranium Hearing).
Dr. Stewart’s claim is almost impossible to prove. If the effect of background radiation is universal—we all suffer from it to some degree—how could we ever recognize it?
“Besides;” Rockwell says. “People in San Francisco, or the Gulf states may get as little as 80 millirems per year, whereas people in Brazil, Iran, or India get several hundred times that amount. And yet we find no evidence that the people in the high radiation areas have any deleterious effects from this.”
Entrenched Policies
What has evolved over more than 50 years of radiation protectionism, critics contend, is an entrenched culture where the main players and institutions have grown dependent on the radiation protection industry for funding, reputations, and credibility. Not surprisingly, they strongly resist any change.
In the meantime, critics say, billions of dollars are being wasted yearly on the cleanup of harmless radiation waste; extreme regulations are imposed that degrade the credibility of science and governmental bodies; destructive fear is generated; detrimental health effects are created; and environmental degradation is accelerated as we depend on coal and oil for 80 percent of our energy needs. Even storing low-level pharmaceutical radioactive waste requires multimillion-dollar studies with costly, unnecessary reviews and public hearings.
While endorsing the use of the LNT model as a “philosophical principle” that provides a “conservative” approach to public health, Dr. Paul S. Rohwer, president of the Health Physics Society, acknowledged:
Legislative and regulatory adoption of [the LNT model] as a quantifiable fact without lower limits has led the general public to insist on radiation standards for environmental cleanup of insignificant quantities of radioactive material that is resulting in the expenditure of billions of dollars of public monies. This expenditure is being made in the name of protecting public health. The public exposures that may be avoided through many of these environmental cleanup efforts are so small, it is known that no public health benefit could ever be detected from these efforts. However, the use of large amounts of public monies for these efforts amounts to a misappropriation of funds. The expenditure of large sums of money with no known public health benefit is not a conservative health policy. [Testimony before the House Science Subcommittee on Energy and Environment, July 18, 2000]
One political ally of the scientific dissenters is Senator Pete Domenici (R-N.M.). “Many companies’ profits from these cleanup contracts are enhanced by the use of the [LNT] model, which unfortunately tends to build a constituency with a vested interest in maintaining [that] model,” he noted. “We spend over $5 billion each year to clean contaminated [Department of Energy] sites to levels below 5 percent of background [radiation levels].”
Not only that, but “the gigantic uncertainties in the LNT model and significant evidence contradicting [it] are almost never discussed.”
Domenici concluded that Congress shouldn’t be mandating arbitrary, across-the-board radiation standards. Rather, it should ensure that “no standard be more stringent than the variation in natural levels within the United States for any substance or phenomena, unless specific health studies support the need.”
But despite the best efforts of nuclear scientists and their allies, the anti-radiation protection industry continues to shape public perception. Critics lament that hundreds of billions of dollars are still being wasted on needless regulations; clean, safe, and efficient nuclear power is hampered; and promising medical advances are abandoned.
“And that’s dead wrong,” Rockwell says.