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A Background Briefing on Radioactive Pollution a
document of the Plutonium Free Future SECTION 3 of Internet Edition ACCEPTANCE OF RISK The nuclear industry is researching peoples' willingness to accept risk. It is known that people feel safer driving a car than riding in an airplane, even though driving is more risky. The industry is attempting to offer that same illusion of control with regard to nuclear power. They bank on the hope that the public can be convinced that the benefits of electrical production outweigh concerns about safety and waste (Eichelberg 1994). In the first five decades of the nuclear age, international recommendations for acceptable levels of worker exposure to radiation have been revised downward a number of times (from 30 centisievert per year to the whole body in 1934 to 15 in 1950, five in 1956, and two in 1990) (International Commission on Radiological Protection 1991). The dangers of exposure to low-level radiation have been historically underestimated. A 1989 NRC committee concluded that a given dose of radiation is four times likelier to cause leukemia than was thought ten years ago (Lenssen 1991). Existing human studies show that every dose of ionizing radiation confers a risk of carcinogenic injury (Bertell 1986; Gofman 1981). A growing number of specialists in the field today assert that there is no safe level of radiation exposure. "Safe" means free from risk of injury, and existing human studies show that every dose of ionizing radiation confers a risk of carcinogenic injury, the size of a radiation risk being tied to the amount of the accumulated dose (Gofman 1994). Addressing the issue of how harm from toxins has managed to escalate, Gofman and O'Connor have put forth the Law of Concentrated Benefit Over Diffuse Injury: "A small, determined group, working energetically for its own narrow interests, can almost always impose an injustice upon a vastly larger group, provided that the larger group believes that the injury is 'hypothetical' or trivial or distant-in-the-future, or real-but-small relative to the real-and-large cost of preventing it" (1994). The essence of the axiom is triviality. Triumph for each injustice is virtually assured if the advocates succeed in presenting it as trivial. Even when new injuries or injustices truly are small, the aggregate abuse can accumulate to tragic proportions after the axiom of Concentrated Benefit has operated again and again and again. Since the refusal of the American public to expand nuclear power, there has been a shift in government sponsored research away from learning more about the damaging effects of radioactivity. Instead grants are being given to proposals aimed at demonstrating that some radioactivity is beneficial to life. The DOE has been described as wishing to sell the public the following beliefs: (a) a little radiation is good for you (hormesis); (b) there a threshold dose of radiation below which no harm at all occurs; (c) a dose of radiation is far less harmful if it is received slowly over time, than if the same dose is received all at once. "Since 1980, the false claim that radiation received over time is two to ten times less harmful than in a single dose is invoked to reduce the cancers attributed to the atomic bomb by a factor of up to ten and is applied to predictions about the slow doses from Chernobyl" (Gofman 1990, 1994). ENORMOUS COSTS A definitive study of the accumulated costs of the U.S. nuclear power, Fiscal Fission: The Economic Failure of Nuclear Power (Komanoff and Roelofs 1992) revealed half-a-trillion dollars as a conservative figure for resources spent through 1990. Excluded costs, such as health effects of radiation, accidents, adequate insurance, could well total another $375 billion. These figures do not include the almost certain escalation in future waste and decommissioning costs. The U.S. has just passed legislation, S 1936, that will result in transporting radioactive materials to centralized repositories, putting more than 50 million people in the U.S. at risk of high-level nuclear waste transport accidents. Taxpayers will pay for any accident damages, not the nuclear industry which generated the waste, nor the carrier transporting it. Few realize the extent of taxpayer liability. DOE intends to privatize the transport, while also indemnifying the carriers (Nuclear Information and Research Service 1996). A move to increase DOE's budget for the radioactive waste program will only make sense when the commitment is also made to an orderly and economic phase-out of waste. "Nobody at the time thought it would become such a disaster. Nobody here could even envisage that it could develop into such a tragedy. The truth was hidden because officials did not want to spend the billions of rubles it will take to cure this wound" (Drach 1991). PSYCHOLOGICAL DAMAGE An aspect of nuclear pollution that has not been widely discussed is the psychological damage to the world's population, collectively and individually. Knowing that, because of the presence of nuclear materials, our planet, our home, our selves could be irreparably destroyed at any moment, impairs our ability to engage in meaningful, successful, protective strategies (Lifton 1979; Erikson 1994). This psychological terrorism has been abated only superficially by the end of the Cold War. While some weapons are being dismantled, their plutonium pits are being stockpiled. We do not know how to make them harmless. How to make nuclear bombs is information that is publicly available. While reprocessed plutonium is the ingredient of choice in "high-tech designer" bombs, modest amounts of either plutonium or enriched uranium are sufficient to create "crude" nuclear weapons. In addition, every presence of nuclear materials, whether in civilian reactors, mine tailings, reprocessed plutonium, or so-called waste and dumped materials has the potential to be used in terrorist threats or acts of destruction (military or otherwise). This potential, whether or not carried out, constitutes an ongoing psychological assault upon the human family. PROBLEMATIC "SOLUTIONS" Humanity's vast body of scientific knowledge pales before the challenge of isolating nuclear waste until it is harmless eons hence. For less than a century scientists have been exploring the nature of the atom and radioactivity, and during only a fraction of that time have they begun to consider how to protect life from its harm. Many ideas for "final disposal" have been put forward in addition to geologic abandonment but none have proven even remotely adequate. Each technical fix explored, including some already enacted, contains major flaws. Vitrification, radioactive wastes solidified in molten glass to reduce its movement, generates explosive and flammable gases and very hot radioactive sludge (Makhijani 1994). The process is vulnerable to accidents and was found to be 30 times more expensive than the option of storing materials on site (Roy 1993), and it renders the radioactive materials permanently inaccessible for application of future knowledge. Encasement in, or combining with, cement is being researched (Roy 1993), although no encasing material will outlast the radioactivity, which itself causes the cement to become embrittled, to crack and crumble. Proposals for transmuting the so-called waste materials would produce additional radioactivity materials, which are looked upon as further resources for economic reasons, thus continuing the nuclear chain and its enduring pollution (Fuller 1992; Thomas, Greensfelder, and Akino 1996). In addition transmutation requires great amounts of energy and chemical processing, creates new, massive quantities of waste, and radioactive waste problems will remain in any case (Makhijani 1994). Breeder reactors have been rejected by most nations that explored them because of their danger and the necessity for repeatedly transporting highly poisonous plutonium and producing more of that substance which, as previously noted, is uniquely valuable for weapons manufacture. Japan alone is continuing to develop its breeder program, against the rising voice of protest from its citizens. "By industry estimates, reprocessing multiplies the quantities of wastes requiring long-term isolation nearly ten-fold" (Lenssen 1991). There are seminal ideas that capture the imagination as possibilities for the near or far future. Just this summer a primitive microbe was identified as a new form of life, offering possible new sources of renewable, nonpolluting natural gas and for cleaning toxic heavy metal waste. It belongs to the class of one-celled organisms, archaea, which can withstand radiation in doses rated at two million rads - where 450 rads would be fatal to any human (San Francisco Chronicle 1996). Thought has been given to blasting radioactivity materials under the ocean floor or into the sun. The seabed idea is stopped by the same issues that prohibit deep burial in the earth: we cannot predict with certainty a stable geologic future for the required time spans. On the contrary, Earth changes geologically and biologically, and sooner or later the radiation will disperse. Erikson (1994) suggests that, instead of saying "any methodology that claims precision in the anticipation of repository consequences must be viewed with appropriate caution," the DOE should flatly declare "any methodology that claims precision in that regard must be regarded as ridiculous." While the sun could easily absorb the addition of our manufactured radioactivity, we lack the precision to ensure accident-free transport of the materials to Cape Canaveral, let alone an accident-proof launch. Writer Anne Herbert put it this way: "Nuclear accidents are made by fools like me, but only God could make a nuclear reactor that's 93 million miles from the nearest elementary school" (1994).
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