THE WHOLE TRUTH ABOUT THREE MILE ISLAND
Sternglass, Ernest
The whole truth about Three Mile Island NRC ignored the full hazard Ernest Sternglass The accident at the Harrisburg nuclear power plant may have exposed about a million people to up to 130 times...
...In the past few months, however, the NRC has issued new regulations that will no longer make it necessary to report routinely the level of strontium 90 in local soil and milk...
...The NRC reported only the external gamma radiation doses received from passing clouds of radioactive gases...
...Failure to consider strontium 90 and other decay products emitted during the Harrisburg accident is tantamount to a coverup of the seriousness of the damage done...
...Yet even using only the external dosages that the NRC has reported — 2 miilirems to a population of about a million within fifty miles of the plant — between 0.5 and fifty cancer deaths can be expected, according to Dr...
...Krypton and xenon are the most common radioactive fission products...
...Karl Z. Morgan, professor of health civics at Georgia Institute of Technology and former director of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory's health civics division...
...This is a completely deceptive attempt to minimize the true nature of the exposure...
...The health hazard has also been discounted by other Federal officials...
...Strontium 90 has been regarded by the scientific community as the most toxic of all fission products produced during nuclear testing...
...This report was distributed by Pacific News Service...
...Although the NRC has cited maximum accumulated doses as being eighty miilirems in the course of a week following the Harrisburg accident, the true maximum doses to the lung may have been as large as 10,000 miilirems...
...It will also affect an infant developing in the mother's womb, possibly years later...
...The only instruments present were simple thermo luminescent dosimeters, which cannot distinguish between different chemical elements that give rise to the gamma radiation they register...
...But if, in addition to the reported external doses, the unreported exposure from inhalation is considered, the number of cancers that may develop in the next ten to twenty years might be 300 to 2,500, depending on what risk estimate one adopts...
...A dental x-ray is confined to a couple of inches of relatively insensitive area...
...The NRC has told the public the emissions contained mostly these inert gases, which do not necessarily produce the greatest biological damage...
...The NRC's claim that pure xenon and some traces of iodine 131 were the only radioactive gases released is misleading and certainly unproven by information available to the public...
...It collects in the bones and can cause leukemia and other cancers...
...Joseph A. Califano Jr., secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, told the Senate health subcommittee that radiation that had leaked was not expected to cause a single cancer death among the people living within fifty miles of the plant...
...It failed to calculate the total dose received by critical organs and bones from inhalation of fission gases — which produce the greatest biological damage...
...The health effects of this exposure will be far more serious and long-lasting than the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) has so far acknowledged...
...He based his calculations on data from releases during earlier nuclear accidents and during nuclear bomb tests carried out in the 1950s and 1960s...
...Other health effects that can be expected include genetic defects, and physical and mental retardation among the newborn...
...Brodsky's estimates...
...Repeatedly, officials have compared radiation doses at Harrisburg to those received during dental x-rays...
...Allen Brodsky, an expert in the field, lists twenty-one...
...Gases inhaled when fission products pass by in a cloud of steam produce a dose about 130 times greater than the dose absorbed by the body from external gamma radiation, according to Dr...
...The doses to bones from elements including strontium 89 and 90, which are decay products of the rare gas krypton, are about 30 times greater than what is absorbed by external gamma radiation...
...Furthermore, the dental x-ray is over in a fraction of a second, while the inhalation of strontium 90 will irradiate the bone and bone marrow for many decades after the individual has been exposed...
...The whole truth about Three Mile Island NRC ignored the full hazard Ernest Sternglass The accident at the Harrisburg nuclear power plant may have exposed about a million people to up to 130 times more radiation than the Government has so far reported...
...However, there is every reason to believe that this steam contained many of the radioactive chemicals normally Ernest Sternglass is a professor of radiological physics at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine...
...produced in the fission process, of which the NRC's Dr...
...At Three Mile Island, the whole body was exposed...
...It is, I believe, further evidence that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is primarily concerned with protecting the nuclear industry...
...The Government had no instrumentation in place to measure the precise composition of the radioactive steam that escaped into the atmosphere at the start of the Harrisburg disaster...
...However, official statements have generally failed to point out that these elements decay into other more biologically hazardous materials, including cesium, barium, and strontium...
Vol. 43 • June 1979 • No. 6
