TRITIUM: THE NEW GENIE

...in South Carolina and Georgia...' square-mile reservation...

...Alan Moghissi, an EPA health physicist, says the new regulation reflects growing concern not about tritium per se but about any form of man-made low-level radiation...

...But McCall shares Clark's concerns, and he does some independent monitoring of tritium around the Pinellas plant "to keep them honest...

...The radium entered her system, it is believed, when she would moisten the tip of the brush in her mouth...

...McCall believes it would be impossible to stand up to industry on radiological regulation enforcement matters under those circumstances...

...The United States alone has many thousands of such weapons...

...When measured against such figures, the leakage from such tritium factories as the Savannah River plant seems trivial...

...But this is no ordinary business, and that kind of change will require a lot more clout than they possess...

...One sign was a recent Federal order greatly tightening the tritium standards for drinking water — an indication that health inspectors, if not weaponeers, are becoming more concerned about the environmental impact...

...An abundant metal, lithium has many uses — in tranquilizers and other medications, for example...

...Such amounts are almost in-finitesimally small, but to McCall they are symptomatic of the larger problem of inattention to tritium management in the program as a whole...

...Let us begin with Ulray Clark...

...For a quarter of a century, the United States and other hydrogen weapon states — the Soviet Union, Britain, France, and China — have been producing tritium as a thermonuclear trigger material with little or Howard Morland is a free-lance writer specializing in energy and nuclear weapons issues...

...Mrs...

...Tritium's twelve-year halflife means that the tritium components must be regularly replaced...

...While twenty curies of it in one dose would mean certain death, it disperses so quickly into the atmosphere and oceans that few humans are likely to encounter more than one-thousandth of a curie, which is the maximum permissible body burden set by the Government for radiation workers...

...Ultimately the risk, whatever it may be, is borne by every living creature, every living cell of which carries a radioactive reminder, through the world-wide propagation of man-made tritium, of society's continuing preparation for thermonuclear holocaust...

...When the tritium and deuterium collide, neutrons are released...

...Although Mound's primary mission is to make high-explosive detonators and timers for nuclear weapons, it is also a major center for tritium research...

...Stasi, then single, worked at the plant from 1918 to 1922, painting watch dials...

...Needless to say, other physical effects of thermonuclear war are much worse...

...In 1969, when the containment research got under way, Monsanto discharged 315,000 curies of tritium into the air and 2,300 curies into the ground and the Great Miami River...

...This poses a problem of tritium containment, since a thermonuclear power reactor of reasonable size might hold as much as sixty million curies of tritium — 50 per cent of the natural world inventory...

...Government handbooks minimize the risk to personnel who handle the weapons and their components...

...The company had installed a water recycling system to reduce water consumption by half...

...Security classification and a lack of technical sophistication by outsiders have protected the hydrogen bomb makers on two flanks: The inaccessibility of basic information and the difficulties of assessing what little is known have disarmed both the environmentalist and the peace activist...

...These emissions have been substantially reduced in recent years, but the water table under Miamisburg is so loaded with tritium that some local wells remain in violation of the new rule...

...He thinks the present limits for exposing workers and the public to man-made tritium are too lax...

...Why were Coloradans so upset about a single release of less tritium than the Savannah River plant puts out every twenty-four hours...

...Clark believes the Federal Government has seriously underrated the health hazards of radioactive hydrogen — or tritium...

...As a ceramic, it provides an essential ingredient for hydrogen bombs...

...The residents of Beaufort, South Carolina, began taking drinking water from the river in 1962, when their wells became brackish...

...But another nuclear weapons plant, the Mound facility at Miamisburg, Ohio, has had problems...

...Under pressure from Florida politicians who want to cut state taxes and budgets, the State Health Department has decided to let industry pay for radiological monitoring...

...The deuterium, now in gaseous form, is combined with lithium to make lithium deuteride, a white powder which is pressed and shaped, like aspirin tablets, into weapons parts...

...Enriched uranium fuel rods are inserted into the tubes to provide the neutrons that convert lithium into tritium, or depleted uranium into plutonium...

...The high-voltage vacuum tubes GE produces at its Pinellas plant are not the ordinary kind...

...Tritium is one of two isotopes of hydrogen that give the hydrogen bomb its name...

...Mrs...

...This was a habit among many of the plant's employes...

...As Florida's public health physicist, Ulray Clark was hired to be skeptical...

...In this way, the manufacturers combine deuterium with lithium, which would be converted into tritium during explosion of the weapon...

...But a Colorado Health Department official, Albert Hazle, has a different explanation: "The awareness level is higher in Colorado," he says...

...When the year was up, he would start working again...

...When wrenched from nature and processed as E. I. du Pont de Nemours processes it in South Carolina, tritium has a variety of practical uses...

...If all radiation can be expressed in a common measure, the tritium dose for most people is insignificant compared with the dose from naturally occurring materials and from medical x-rays...

...The latter is regarded as one of the country's foremost authorities on radium necrosis____ fusion power moves out of research and into production...

...They cannot avoid breathing it, swallowing it, and absorbing it through the skin...

...As a paint, for instance, it lights up the dials of luminous watches...

...The vastness of the atmosphere and oceans, serving as a huge sink, have held the worldwide tritium burden to what seemed to be a safe amount — even after a decade of hydrogen bomb testing in the open air raised it from the normal 100 million curies to a peak of five billion...

...Monsanto says it is working on the problem and hopes to have the situation cleaned up soon, but the episode provides a foretaste of what could be in store for an unsuspecting public when Dial Ra for murder The paint that illuminates watch dials was once made from radium, a hazardous substance that gained worldwide notoriety a generation ago — too late to help the people who had worked with it...

...The shapes and sizes of the parts assure that the precise amounts of deuterium and tritium will be available to give the weapon the destructive power that comes from hydrogen fusion...

...There is a simple explanation: The making of hydrogen bombs — and, in particular, the design, manufacture, and assembly of their tritium trigger components — is the most closely held of the "atomic secrets...

...Tritium's benign reputation is based on the low ionizing energy of its radiated (or emitted) particles, on its high turnover rate in the human body, on the fact that it must actually enter the body to cause damage, and on its short, twelve-year half life...

...To Ulray Clark, to George McCall, and to others, the management of tritium in the thermonuclear weapons industry presents a hazard long overdue for public attention...

...Anna Stasi of 515 Morris Street, Orange, the sixteenth fatality traced to radium poisoning occurred...

...Here and there, a few other health physicists are beginning to say the same thing...

...But he does maintain that today's standards present a hazard both to workers and to the general public...

...The Savannah River plant releases hundreds of thousands of curies of it into the air and water every year...

...The irradiated lithium tubes that come out of the reactors are taken to two closely guarded buildings near the center of the Savannah River's 300'No such misgivings are found in official public health circles...

...Already, the young tritium-paint industry attributes two deaths to tritium...

...As in the earliest days of nuclear fission, when scientists worked by military rules, the facts about tritium production are still shielded from independent inquiry...

...Public outrage over the incident was one of the factors in Dow Chemical Company's subsequent decision to relinquish the Rocky Flats contract...

...An autopsy was performed last night by Dr...

...It may not stay in the body forever," he says, "but it can give you a hell of a dose while it's there...

...Despite such modest steps, George McCall is discouraged...

...Shipped from Oak Ridge as metal ingots, the lithium is alloyed with aluminum at Savannah River and then shaped into "target" tubes that look like plumbing fixtures...

...When plutonium is the desired product, the target tubes are made of uranium-238, called depleted uranium, rather than lithium...

...The natural human body burden of tritium, which comes from the impact of the sun and other cosmic sources on the earth's upper atmosphere, is one-billionth of a curie...

...Mrs...

...As environmental control director of the health department of Pinellas County in west-central Florida, McCall keeps an eye on a big local plant run by the General Electric Co...

...now their tritium body counts are several times higher than natural tritium background...

...Elevated tritium counts are measurable in the urine of some 35,000 people who drink water downstream from the Savannah River plant — but the concentrations are within the Federal guidelines...

...In Colorado, the site of another nuclear weapons production plant, such a situation would create a furor...

...at Oak Ridge, Tennessee...

...14 — With the death yesterday of Mrs...

...The high-voltage tubes create the neutron burst by accelerating small amounts of tritium or deuterium to high speeds...

...Nevertheless, in somewhat the same way that concern over the environmental and health effects of atmospheric testing drew fresh attention to more fundamental nuclear weapons issues a generation ago, today's emerging doubts about tritium management could ignite public interest in the larger questions which surround its production...

...She left her husband and a 3-year-old daughter...

...In placing the tritium in the tubes, the plant releases 200 or 300 curies of tritium per year into the air from two short smokestacks...

...His Office of Radiological Health Services in Tallahassee is Florida's insurance against inadequate Federal regulation of the handling of nuclear materials...

...Henry Devincentis of Orange said this morning that death was directly due to radium poisoning, that the bones of the hip, chest and head were affected...

...I'm not going to pretend to be a public servant if the public isn't paying my salary," he says...

...In a world that worries increasingly about uranium, plutonium, and other substances peculiar to the nuclear age, curiously little attention has been paid to tritium, even though it, too, can trigger enormous power and produces deadly radiation...

...The bombardment takes place in three huge Savannah River nuclear reactors which produce plutonium for conventional atomic bombs as well as tritium for hydrogen bombs...

...But Savannah's industries use river water, and their drinking fountains put out the same water that Beaufort residents get...

...Stasi's case, according to the doctor, closely resembled that of Mrs...

...At McCall's suggestion, GE also put in an additional monitoring system to make sure that water repurification equipment wasn't contaminating the plant's working areas with tritium...

...No such misgivings are found in official public health circles to the north, where tritium is handled on a far larger scale...

...Another sign is the increasing boldness of a few people on the fringes of the program who have long held the deepest reservations about tritium production — and are at last beginning to say so...

...Others point out, quite properly, that even under the worst of circumstances such hazards are dwarfed by the greater peril of the bombs themselves, were they to be put to the use for which they were built...

...The first faint stirrings of national controversy over tritium may have been set in motion by a regulation issued in 1977 by the Environmental Protection Agency to tighten the standards for tritium content in drinking water...

...People who make it or handle it soak it up like sponges...

...The feedstock from which the tritium comes is lithium, a white, lustrous metal which is the lightest of all the solid elements — half as dense as water...

...In the process of salvaging the helium, workers had to learn how to minimize their contact with tritium and their environmental releases of the substance...

...Furthermore, there is the continuous release of some 200,000 curies of tritium per year into the air and water at Savannah River as the production reactors strain to keep up with the demand for new weapons and replacement parts...

...Not all of the tritium produced by an exploding weapon is consumed in the explosion...

...When bombarded with neutrons, the lithium is converted into tritium...

...There is also the discharge of tritium from other installations in the nation's vast nuclear weapons production complex — and that brings us to George McCall...

...The technique for doing this remains a top national secret, though it has been independently duplicated by four other nations...

...When used inside a hydrogen bomb, tritium serves two functions...

...When a hydrogen bomb explodes, it releases vast amounts of radioactive tritium...

...The following news item appeared in The New York Times of September 15, 1930, under the headline, Radium Poisoning Kills 16th Victim: EAST ORANGE, N.J., Sept...

...Helen Caldicott, in the December 1978 issue of The Progressive...

...Helium-3 was once a rare material in great demand by researchers for ultra-low-temperature studies, but since it has no industrial uses, Mound glutted the market for it for years...

...One day he tightened a leaky valve and, in so doing, absorbed so much tritium that the company sent him home to take the only known cure: Drink beer and water to get the tritium count back down...

...That level has been declining since the atmospheric test-ban treaty of 1963, but accidental venting of underground nuclear tests continues to discharge as much as one million curies into the atmosphere every year...

...Unlike ordinary hydrogen, however, it is radioactive...

...If people in other parts of the country were as conscious of environmental considerations as Colorado people are, there would be more independent monitoring and more controversy...

...They generate the neutron source which initiates the chain reaction in an atomic bomb...

...Martland...

...Clark is not convinced...

...See "Radiation: Unsafe at Any Level," by Dr...

...No one doubts the lethality of tritium in concentrated form...

...Even without the explosion of such devices, day-to-day tritium releases occur from construction, replacement, and maintenance of the thermonuclear weapons stockpiles...

...They say nothing about the possible release of undecayed tritium in the process...

...Mound got into the tritium containment research business by necessity...

...The tritium bonded directly to the weapons parts serves like lighter fuel for a charcoal fire, bridging the gap between the weapon's plutonium bomb trigger (the match) and the much greater blast which comes from the rest of the hydrogen weapon (the charcoal...

...Tritium: the new genie Inside every living cell, a piece of the H-bomb Howard Norland On the banks of the Savannah River in a remote corner of South Carolina, one of the largest industrial enterprises in the United States has been assembled to produce a colorless, odorless, tasteless substance that once was of interest only to chemistry students...

...Nor can they prevent its discharge into the air and water...

...The challenge to researchers was succinctly summarized in 1971 by Delmar Crowson, then director of the old Atomic Energy Commission's Safeguard and Materials Management Office: "The containment of this tritium is the principal environmental problem facing the successful development of the fusion reactor...

...The new standard was achievable, he said, and therefore it was imposed...

...There the tritium is chemically extracted and fabricated into materials for use in nuclear weapons components...

...When fused with the other, deuterium, it produces energy in somewhat the same way the sun does...

...Stasi went to Orange Memorial Hospital for treatment, the doctor added, but the disease was too advanced for successful treatment...

...The tritium which makes the dials glow is marketed through the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge isotope sales office...

...The population most immediately at risk from tritium production, ironically, is the small force of workers who make luminous paint for watch dials...

...no public comment from the scientific community...

...Beyond that, the risk extends in widening circles to weapons workers at Savannah River, Pinellas, Mound, and other installations brought into being by a governmental compulsion to harness the destructive power of the hydrogen atom — and to all who live nearby...

...Marie Stasi of Valley Road, West Orange...

...Quinta McDonald, who died some time ago in Memorial Hospital, New York, from radium necrosis...

...The much larger amount of tritium liberated from the lithium components during explosion of the weapons provides the greater blast...

...Official secrecy about nuclear weapons effectively cloaks the extent of that hazard...

...The experts give varying answers...

...Both isotopes are produced industrially at Savannah River, the mammoth installation thrown up in the early 1950s to give the United States its first rank in the ability to wage thermonuclear war...

...The heavy water from the Savannah River facility is shipped by truck to Oak Ridge, where the deuterium is separated from the oxygen by electrolysis...

...It comes from the cooling systems of the reactors themselves and from the super-secret processes which recover tritium from the irradiated lithium and imbed it in the weapons parts...

...Each year for seven years he "burned out" and had to quit for a while because he had received his maximum annual allotment of whole-body radiation...

...The hydrogen bomb makers have drawn comfort from this, because they know the tritium they produce is virtually impossible to contain...

...Until the research is done and the damage assessments are m, Clark says, the limit on radiant energy dosage ingested from tritium ought to be lowered to the limit for other radionuclides, such as Plutonium...

...The product is tritium, a rare form of hydrogen, the most abundant element in the universe...

...Clark does not contend that the recurring skin cancer he now suffers is the price he paid for this experience...

...It doesn't need penetrating power to cause harm...

...The EPA's new tritium standard for drinking water put the Mound facility in a bind...

...Stasi was 27 years old...

...There is little that McCall or Ulray Clark, his counterpart in the state capital, can do to influence the handling of tritium in a Federally owned and supervised nuclear bomb component factory...

...The new standard has not affected Pinellas or Savannah River, which were already within compliance, if barely...

...One reason may be that the arid Colorado environment does not cleanse itself as rapidly as rainy South Carolina...

...Fuel rods from the naval and research reactors are chemically processed at a weapons facility in eastern Idaho, reduced to uranium metal at Oak Ridge, and fabricated into metal fuel rods at Savannah River for use again and again in the production reactors there...

...Coloradans still recall the uproar that ensued more than five years ago when the State Health Department discovered that Rocky Flats, a plutonium fabrication plant near Denver, had leaked fifty to one hundred curies of tritium — a relatively tiny amount — into the Broomfield town reservoir...

...He just doesn't know...

...And in challenging the accepted guidelines he is taking on a wide range of opponents, including many of his colleagues in health physics who characterize tritium as the least hazardous of radioactive materials...

...At Savannah, Georgia, where the river meets the ocean, the city's artesian wells have so far escaped contamination by tritium or seawater...

...How dangerous is tritium to people...

...If, on the other hand, tritium must be placed in a class by itself because of hydrogen's unique chemical role in biological processes, then the hazard cannot be discounted...

...Clark says the low radiant energy of tritium may be offset by its unique chemical nature...

...Radioactive particles from tritium don't do much damage, so the theory goes, and they wash out of the body instead of accumulating...

...The EPA set the maximum concentration at twenty-billionths of a curie per liter of water — considerably lower than the level of three-millionths of a curie per liter still permitted by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which regulates the discharge from nuclear facilities...

...Two decades ago, the Atomic" Energy Commission mined and enriched a vast quantity of lithium, which remains stockpiled at the nuclear weapon materials fabrication plant operated by Union Carbide Co...

...Like ordinary hydrogen, tritium combines with oxygen to form water and with other elements to form a variety of organic and inorganic chemicals, including DNA, the basic genetic material in living tissue...

...Explosion of the largest of the hydrogen bombs can disperse no fewer than twenty million curies of surplus tritium into the environment — about one-fifth of the earth's natural total from cosmic rays...

...But there are signs that the curtain may be parting...

...Twenty years ago, Clark was a worker at the Savannah River plant...

...Several years ago, McCall gently prodded GE into upgrading the tritium detection capabilities of the Pinellas plant...

...We haven't put out enough research on tritium damage to my satisfaction," he says...

...Hydrogen goes into every cell in the body...

...In the 1960s, the Mound facility had the job of disassembling old thermonuclear weapons components and extracting helium-3, which had built up as the tritium decayed...

...That's what worries Ulray Clark...

...The other hydrogen isotope, deuterium, is derived from Savannah River water pumped through a huge plant which separates out the deuterium oxide (or "heavy water"), a one-five-thousandth part of natural water...

...What makes it valuable to weaponeers is that one of its isotopes (Lithium-6) can be used to produce tritium...

...In South Carolina and Georgia, the state governments monitor for tritium and are satisfied that the hazards to the public are small and tolerable...

...Today, the Mound facility, operated by Monsanto Corporation, is concentrating less on salvaging helium-3 than on developing containment procedures for what some see as the energy technology of the future — nuclear fusion...

...Enriched uranium used to drive the Savannah River reactors is provided by unburned fuel from the Navy's nuclear submarine fleet and, ironically, from the dozens of research and test reactors in universities and research centers around the country — a fact that has escaped the notice of most campus peace activists...

...If thermonuclear reactions are ever harnessed for the production of electricity, as the Department of Energy hopes to do through its funding of extensive fusion research at its nuclear weapons laboratories and at several universities and research centers, deuterium and tritium will be the fuel...

...She suffered a lingering illness and died at the home of her sister, Mrs...

...For enforcement, he must rely on friendly persuasion...

...Stasi, like the fifteen who had died before her, was employed by the United States Radium Corporation when it was located in Orange...

...And that would mean a twentyTfive-fold reduction...