INTRODUCTION

     You can't see it. You can't feel it. You can't smell it. It's effects may not show up now, this decade, this generation, this century. There is no marker on any disease or damaged cell saying "I was caused by that particular exposure to radiation." Yet the radiation of our nuclear legacy will endure for millennia. Our descendants will have one question to ask of us: What did you do with the stuff?

     The scientific, technological, political, and moral challenges presented by radioactive pollution are huge. In the press of war, we learned how to create and use a nuclear chain reaction. Tragically, we have not learned how to control its horrific results. We do not know the extent of radioactive contamination nor the extremity of its damage. We do not know how to recall it once radioactivity is let loose. We do not know how to contain forever that which we still possess. We do not know how finally to say "enough is enough" and stop making it, selling it, and poisoning the planet. These challenges are explored in this article.

     Helplessness may overwhelm us in the face of the enormity of the problem and its endurance through time. We may be broken-hearted in our grief, rageful at what has been perpetrated in our names, or in denial because our pain is so great. Yet, for the sake of unborn generations, growing numbers of people are mustering the courage to overcome the fear and are facing the monstrosity we have created.

     At this time the only known protection of life on Earth from an increasing burden of radioactivity is to immediately abolish the nuclear industry and to monitor constantly the poison we have created (Makhijani 1994; Nuclear Guardianship Forum 1992). Nuclear guardianship provides a model for how we may responsibly protect the biosphere from further toxic contamination into the future.

RADIATION AND CONTAMINATION

     An element is radioactive when it has an unstable nucleus that spontaneously releases energy (or decays). The particles emitted in the process, in the form of alpha or beta particles, neutrons, and gamma rays, affect other atoms, causing them to become unstable emitters of radioactivity themselves, with the potential to contaminate whatever they are near.

     The nuclear chain consists of human activities that begin with disturbing natural radioactive uranium deep in the earth, and includes every stage of mining, milling, transporting, enriching, fabricating, processing, and so-called disposal. Every link in this chain results in contamination of the biosphere. As wind and water, microbes, insects, seeds, birds, and other life forms move through all ecosystems (including those identified as too contaminated to be inhabitable by humans), unconfined radioactivity eventually disperses through the biosphere worldwide.

     Radioactive particles move through the air in the form of dust from both the mining of uranium and the wind moving over the tailings-mountains of uranium-laced earth left on the ground after three to 4% of uranium is removed for processing. Extracting the usable uranium contaminates the equipment used, the liquid that washes it, the vehicles that transport it, the clothing of the workers, the water they wash with, and the air with the radioactive gases that are routinely vented. Contamination continues at every step along the way without end; in the reactors, the submarines, the weapons manufacturing, stockpiling, storage, testing, use, and dismantlement.

     Accidents can happen at any reactor or in transport of radioactive materials. Nuclear reactors have been described as "accidents waiting to happen" (Roy 1993; Thomas, Greensfelder, and Akino 1996). Of course, some accidents have already happened.

     Released radioactive gases and materials and structures left without effective on-going containment have let loose into the biosphere unknown amounts of radioactivity. Regions where the concentration of such abandoned radioactivity has been greatest from mining, accidents, spills, explosions, weapons fabrication, testing, dumping of wastes, etc., have been designated as "sacrifice zones": Chernobyl and Chelyabinsk in Russia, Hanford, Washington, Bikini Island in the Pacific, to name a few.

     Whether through naivete or misplaced priorities, by plan or by accident, the development of nuclear technology has been accompanied by gross as well as minute releases of radioactivity into the atmosphere, the soil, the oceans, seas, and water table, showing up worldwide in animal, vegetable, and inert matter. Radiation crosses species and concentrates through the food chain, subjecting other animals and humans to its damaging effects.

BIOMEDICAL EFFECTS

     The greatest threat of radioactivity to life as we know it is damage to the gene pool, the genetic make-up of all living species. Genetic damage from radiation exposure is cumulative over lifetimes and generations.

     Some biomedical effects of radiation are well known. If the exposure is great enough, as it was for 200,000 people in Japan in 1945 and for the clean-up crew in Chernobyl, death can occur immediately or within days.

     Even low-dose exposures are carcinogenic after extended exposure (Gofman 1990). The current generation, the one in utero, and all that follow may suffer cancers, immune system damage, leukemias, miscarriages, stillbirths, deformities, and fertility problems. While many of these health problems are on the rise, individuals cannot prove either increase in "background" radiation or specific exposure as the cause. Only epidemiological evidence is scientifically acceptable to impute cause. Perhaps the most extreme outcome over time would be simply the wholesale cessation of the ability to reproduce. Radiation is a known cause of sterility (Gofman 1981).

     The quality of life of vast numbers of us may be affected by the increased burden of radioactivity we all bear. Many victims of radiation sickness do not show up in the statistics because the kind of symptoms experienced, while disabling, are not as significant as childhood leukemia, or stillbirths, or cancer, or birth defects. Nevertheless, lives of countless people have been affected by radiation exposure.

     Beyond the physiological effects, the mental and emotional consequences of the trauma of exposure to invisible environmental contaminants in general, and radioactivity in particular, has been documented (Vyner 1988). One can only speculate about the spiritual consequences (Schell 1982; Lynch 1995).

     "Background radiation" is a measurement of the accumulated radioactivity in the atmosphere from all sources combined: the sun, the earth, and all man-made explosions, leaks, accidents, purposeful ventings, and dumpings. The term, however, implies naturally occurring radiation is of no real concern. But before the Atomic Age there were no comprehensive measurements of naturally occurring radiation, so the use of this term obscures the reality that we already live in a contaminated world, and that radiation's effects are cumulative and irreversible.

     With respect to nuclear pollution (and every other type of persistent pollutant which lacks a safe dose), it cannot be overemphasized: What counts biologically is the sum of all the injuries over time from all the combined sources and events which release persistent poisons (radioactive or other) into the biosphere. If the sum matters biologically, then each contribution to the sum matters (Gofman and O'Connor 1994).

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Wendy Oser and Molly Young Brown edit and write for the Nuclear Guardianship Forum and other publications. They can be reached at Plutonium Free Future, P.O. Box 2589, Berkeley CA 94702.

This article was originally published as:

The Guardianship Ethic In Response to Radioactive Pollution: 
A Meta Model for a Sustainable World.

in Current World Leaders International Issues
v. 38, No. 6, December, 1996
International Academy at Santa Barbara 
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