Leaks in the Nuclear Pipeline
Gofman, John W.
BOOKS Leaks in the Nuclear Pipeline RADIATION AND HUMAN HEALTH by John W. Gofman Sierra Club Books. 908 pp. $29.95. Dixie Lee Ray, former head of the Atomic Energy Commission, once...
...After synthesizing all past studies on the health effects of radiation, Gofman proposes ways of calculating the biological price we are likely to pay for our willing or unwilling exposure to radiation...
...Gofman sets out to demystify radiation science by taking us step-by-step from simple nuclear physics and molecular biology through medical statistics...
...He deals as well with the effects of diagnostic and therapeutic uses of radiation, natural background radiation, work in uranium mines and nuclear research installations, waste dumps and "normal" reactor operation—in other words, with all the effects of the many leaks in the nuclear pipeline...
...With the publication of Radiation and Human Health, anyone who still urges us to swallow our peck of radioactivity is not only ignorant, but criminally ignorant...
...Imagine the supper-table conversations: "Finish your cesium-burger, Johnny...
...When he and Tamplin began to publish these conclusions, they were squeezed out of their jobs at Livermore...
...Any official guardian of our welfare, any weaponeer, any reactor salesperson, any player of war games who would lull us with assurances about the mild (not to say wholesome) effects of radiation, should be made to read Gofman...
...Through the use of tables and sample problems, he shows us how to calculate for ourselves the risks we run, individually and collectively, through exposure to radiation...
...If the Department of Energy or the AEC gives you money on a sensitive subject, they don't mean for you to take the job seriously...
...Since leaving Government employ, Gofman has continued to take the job very seriously, as witness his massive new study, Radiation and Human Health...
...John Gofman has argued his case lucidly and comprehensively...
...Who is right...
...My mistake was I discovered something," Gofman told an interviewer recently...
...Those who should find the book especially useful include physicians, public health officials, workers in the nuclear industry, people living near uranium mines or reactors, attorneys, judges, journalists, and anyone seriously engaged in the debate over nuclear power and nuclear weapons...
...That price is a great deal higher than either industry or the Government has ever admitted...
...After the war he divided his time between a professorship at the University of California, Berkeley, and the Lawrence Liver-more weapons lab...
...Dixie Lee Ray, former head of the Atomic Energy Commission, once lightheartedly suggested that the nuclear waste problem could be solved by distributing the nation's radioactive debris, in equal bite-sized portions, to all Americans...
...For example, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has estimated that the Three Mile Island accident should produce only one extra cancer death, but Gofman calculates (using the official figures for radiation releases) that seventy-four extra cancer deaths will occur as a result of the 1979 mishap...
...Samantha, drink all your strontium-broth...
...Because he warned that radioactive fallout from bomb-testing would exact an enormous worldwide death toll, Pauling was stripped of his research funds, ostracized by the scientific community, and harassed by the Government...
...It also surveys virtually all published research into the biological effects of ionizing radiation...
...Gofman has gathered the data, calculations, and scientific theories necessary for drawing informed conclusions...
...The price we pay includes not only an increased risk of cancer and leukemia for the living, but, through chromosome damage, an increase in a wide variety of diseases for those yet unborn...
...Or should we believe those, like John Gofman, who have sacrificed their jobs, jeopardized their standing in the scientific community, and even in some instances risked bodily harm, to warn us about the dangers of radiation...
...nuclear apologists have claimed that no one has ever been killed by plutonium, but Gofman estimates that roughly one million cancer deaths have already been caused, worldwide, by the scattering of plutonium in atmospheric weapons tests...
...With the publication of Radiation and Human Health, we are all now less dependent on "experts...
...Those who would still promote nuclear power and apologize for nuclear weapons must now answer him in detail, if they are to be taken at all seriously...
...Through corporate greed and the reigning habits of private consumption, through our national drive for global supremacy, through both the civilian and the military worship of the nuclear idol, we are mortgaging the health as well as the material resources of future generations...
...Should we believe those experts who earn their living by defending the nuclear enterprise...
...He was one of the first three scientists to work with plutonium...
...Soon after he started at Livermore, where he was investigating the health effects of radiation, he began encountering Government attempts to censor all reports that documented the dangers of radioactivity...
...Scott Sanders (Scott Sanders, a novelist and essayist, is a professor of English at Indiana University...
...During a television debate in the 1950s, Edward Teller, the Faustian father of the H-bomb, declared that for all we know, modest doses of radiation might actually be good for us...
...How else do you expect to grow up big and strong...
...His work and that of his colleague, Arthur Tamplin, eventually led him to conclude that low-level radiation was at least twenty times more lethal than had been officially estimated, and that, contrary to Government claims, there was no "safe" threshold of exposure below which radiation was harmless...
...By posing the alternatives as I have, I have made it obvious that I am more inclined to believe those who have neither economic nor professional interest in promoting the very technology whose hazards they are studying...
...He is such a lucid guide that any patient reader with a high school education should be able to follow him through the lengthy study...
...Consider John Gofman...
...His researches during World War II helped accelerate the atomic bomb project...
...He was Teller's opponent in the broadcast debate...
...This most significant book is the culmination of his own four decades of research on the subject...
...Linus Pauling, for one...
...Who knew any better in the 1950s...
...All those who have subsequently elaborated on Pauling's warnings about the dangers of radioactivity have suffered similar treatment...
Vol. 46 • April 1982 • No. 4
