It is very difficult, and perhaps entirely impossible, to combat the effects of brainwashing by argument.
Paul Feyerabend
It seems that the public is at last coming around to accepting that a nuclear power-generation plant cannot explode like a bomb. The majority that I talk to appear to concede, also, that the Chernobyl accident that occurred in the Soviet Union in 1986 was a result of practices and policy very different from the West's, and that there are other methods of bomb-making that are easier, quicker, cheaper, and safer than fooling around with used power-plant fuel. This leaves fear of radiation as probably the only effective weapon for carrying on the crusade against nuclear energy, as well as justifying what has become a lucrative and no-doubt for some, morally gratifying, cleanup industry. The key credo that keeps both sides of the act in business, re-aired periodically lest we forget, is that "no level of radiation is safe." In other words, any exposure to ionizing radiation, however small, is damaging to health. Yet despite the colossal cost to society in terms of a stalled energy policy, the waste of funds and effort on windmills and solar toys, and millions of tax dollars diverted into hauling away dirt and burying it in holes in the ground, the belief rests on a theoretical construct that has never been substantiated by evidence. In fact, what evidence there is tends to disprove it.
At levels encountered ordinarilyi.e., excluding bomb victims and patients subjected to massive medical doses, usually as a last resort in terminal situationsno measurable results of low-level radiation doses are actually observed at all. Low-level effects are inferred by taking a known high-level point where the effect is measurable, and assuming that it connects to the zero-point (zero dose, therefore zero effect) as a straight line. From this presumed relationship it is possible to read off as an act of faith the pro-rata effects that small doses ought to have, if one accepts the straight-line assumption. In the early days of radiation physics, when comparatively little was known, this was about as good a relationship as any to use when attempting to set safety standards for researchers and workers. By the same token, since little was known about the natural ability of biological systems to repair radiation damage, it was assumed that the effects would accrue cumulatively with dosea bit like equating a shot of whiskey every night for a month with a full bottle straight down. If this overstated the risk, then so much the better, for in the absence of firm knowledge one would obviously prefer to err toward the safe side.
However, somewhere along the line what started out as a sensible precaution came to be perceived as reality. The invisible but assumed effects then took on substance with the introduction of the curious practice of extrapolating them across the whole of an exposed population to derive a total figure for persons X dose, from which effects were deduced statistically. This would be like saying that since a temperature of 1000oC is lethal, 1 degree kills 1/1000th of a person. Therefore raising the temperatures of classrooms in schools containing a million children by two degrees will kill two thousand children. Yet this is the kind of model that the figures the media are so fond of repeating are based on. Research that has been known to the health and radiation physics community for many years indicates, however, that it is wrong.
Trying to emulate the labors of Hercules would cause most of us to drop dead from exhaustion. Nevertheless, jogging a few miles a week makes lots of people feel good and keeps them in shape. A dip in the boilers of an ocean liner would be decidedly damaging to one's health, but soaking in a hot tub is relaxing. Things that get lethal when taken to extremes are often beneficial in small quantities.
This has long been acknowledged for chemical and biological toxins. Trace amounts of germicides can increase fermentation of bacteria. Too-small doses of antibiotics will stimulate growth of dormant bacteria that they are supposed to kill. A moderate amount of stress keeps the immune system fit and in good tone, no less than muscles. The phenomenon is known as "hormesis," from the Greek hormo, meaning "to stimulate." For around two decades, evidence has been mounting that hormesis holds true also for ionizing radiation. Not that sunbathing during a nuclear strike is good for you; but low levels aren't as bad as many would have us believe.
In the early eighties, Professor T. D. Luckey, a biochemist at the University of Missouri, published a study 213 of over twelve hundred experiments dating back to the turn of the century on the effects of low-level radiation on biota ranging from viruses, bacteria, and fungi through various plants and animals up to vertebrates. He found that, by all the criteria that biologists use to judge the well-being of living things, modest increases above the natural radiation background make life better: living things grow bigger and faster; they live longer; they get sick less often and recover sooner; they produce more offspring, more of which survive.
And the same appears to be true also of humans. The state that the EPA found as having the highest average level of radon in the home, Iowa, also has below-average cancer incidence. 214 The mountain states, with double the radiation background of the U.S. as a whole (cosmic rays are stronger at higher altitudes, and the rocks in those states have a high radioactive content), show a cancer rate way below Iowa's. The negative correlationmore radiation, less cancerholds for the U.S. in general and extends worldwide. 215 The waters of such European spas as Lourdes, Bath, and Bad Gastein, known for their beneficial health effects since Roman times, are all found to have high radioactivity levels. British data on over ten thousand U.K. Atomic Energy Authority workers show cancer mortality to be 22 percent below the national average, while for Canada the figure is 33 percent. 216 Imagine the hysteria we'd be seeing if those numbers were the other way around.
This kind of relationship is represented not by a straight line, but by a J-shaped curve sloping upward to the right. Dose increases to the right; the damage that results is measured vertically. The leftmost tip of the J represents the point of no dose/no effect. ("No dose" means nothing above background. There's some natural background everywhere. You can't get away from it.) At first the curve goes down, meaning that the "damage" is negative, which is what we've been saying. It reaches an optimum at the bottom, and then turns upwardwe're still better off than with no dose at all, but the beneficial effect is lessening. The beneficial effect disappears where the curve crosses its starting level again (the "zero-equivalent point), and beyond that we experience progressively greater discomfort, distress, and, eventually, death.
This has all been known for a long time, of course, to the authorities that set limits and standards. The sorry state of today's institutionalized science was brought home at a conference I attended some time ago now, in San Diego. Several of the speakers had been involved in the procedures that are followed for setting standards and guides for low-level ionizing radiation. The conventional model, upon which international limits and regulations are based, remains the Linear, Non-Threshold (LNT) version. Yet all the accumulated evidence contradicts it. According to the speakers, the reality of hormesis is absolutely conclusive. Were it to be acknowledged as real, just about all of the EPA hysteria about cleanups could be forgotten, the scare-statistics being touted about Chernobyl would go away, and most of the worries concerning the nuclear industry would be seen as baseless. However, such an interpretation is not, at the present time, politically permissible. Hence, quite knowingly, the committees involved ignored all the discoveries of molecular biology over the past twenty-five years, and threw out the 80 percent of their own data that didn't fit the desired conclusions in order to preserve the official fiction.
So what optimum radiation dose should our local health-food store recommend to keep us in the better-off area below the x-axis? Work reported from Japan 217 puts it roughly at two-thousandths of a "rem," or two "millirems," per day. That's about a tenth of a dental X ray, or one coast-to-coast jet flight, or a year's worth of standing beside a nuclear plant. For comparison, the "zero equivalent point" (ZEP) crossover where the net effect becomes harmful is at around two rems per day; fifty (note, we're talking rems now, not millirems) causes chronic radiation sickness, and a hundred is lethal.
On this basis, if regulatory authorities set their exposure limits too low, i.e., to the left of where the J bottoms out, then reducing levels to comply with them can actually make things worse. In a study of homes across 1,729 U.S. counties, Bernard Cohen, professor of physics and radiation health at the University of Pittsburgh, has found a correlation between radon levels and lung cancer mortality almost as high as that for cigarette smoking. Except, it's in the opposite direction: As radon goes up, cancer goes down. 218
Perhaps radioactive tablets for those who don't get enough regular exposure wouldn't be a bad idea. Or a good use for radioactive waste might be to bury it underneath radon-deficient homes. And perhaps cereal manufacturers should be required to state on their boxes the percentage of the daily dietary requirement that a portion of their product contributes. After all, if radiation is essential for health in minimum, regular amounts, it meets the accepted definition of a vitamin.