VALUE OF RADIATION IN HUMAN LIVES

What is the value of increased quantity and quality of human life? Is a life worth $300,000,000 - the price that the Occupational Health and Safety Administration charges industry per estimated human life saved by its benzene regulations? Or, is it essentially valueless as implied by the political efforts of those who advocate eliminating three fourths of the world's population in favor of fish and other animals?

Although most people would rather not think about this question, it is not avoidable. Economic resources cost human lives when they are withdrawn and save human lives when they are supplied. All eco- nomic activity, whether socialist or free, transfers resources that determine, in part, who lives and who dies.

This is the problem of the forgotten man or woman (or child). It is ever so nice to give resources to others - especially if one avoids think- ing about those from whom the resources were extracted, as by taxes. One easily falls victim to this sort of forgetfulness in many contexts.

As a young man, I loved the musical The Sound of Music (and still do). It tells a wonderful, idyllic, and true story of a young nun who joins a family where the mother has died leaving a husband and seven children. I watched this movie over and over, and I still greatly enjoy it. The family's life following the events in the movie was comparably remarkable, too, as recorded in the autobiogmphy of Maria Von Trapp. It was not, however, until my own wife died leaving our six children with just their father that I, for the first time, thought about the forgotten character in The Sound of Music - the mother who died. The tragedy within the story is forgotten in the subsequent beauty. "Estimated Cost of Person-Sv Exposure" by C. F. Guenther and C. Thein, Health Phy,sics 72, No. 2, pp 204-221 (1997) estimates the value of a year of human life in the United States by the cost people are willing to pay for it in nine different circumstances: jury wrongful death awards, medical expenditures, life insurance coverage, lifetime wages and investments, life-saving inventions, willingness to pay, hu- man capital analysis, values used by government, and law enforcement costs. Assuming a 75-year life span, these nine methods give values fkom $600,000 to $4,200,000 per human life with a mean of about $3,000,000. The authors choose $4,000,000 as their final estimate.

At this point, however, their analysis goes awry because they use the discredited no-threshold linear hypothesis, which erroneously holds that all mdiatioh exposure diminishes human life span. The authors therefore calculate a cost of $2,000 per person-Sv or a person- rem cost of $200,000 per Sv. This is wrong because most people are living in background radiation fields that are below the radiation level for optimum life span. Use of the no-threshold linear hypothesis incorrectly extrapolates from health effects of mdiation levels above the optimum level and gives a false estimate at low levels.

Using Cohen's data on lung cancer deaths as a function of mdon levels in the United States (see Access to Energy 24, No. 6, pp 1-3, February 1997 and included references) and an estimate of 15 years of life lost per lung cancer death, we calculate (20,000)(15) (4,000,000) / (75) = 16,000,000,000 or $16 billion in annual cost of human lives lost in the United States to lung cancer that could have been saved by increasing the background radiation levels in which the victims lived.

This is just lung cancer. Experiments show that hormesis is a gen- eral phenomenon, although data are not yet available for most diseases. Based on existing indications, however, the overall result in American health would probably be orders of magnitude larger than $16 billion.

"Nuclear-Waste Project at a Nevada Mountain Illustrates How 'Nimby' Has a Long Half-Life" by John J. Fialka in The Wall Street Journal, p. A18, February 19,1997 reports that the Department of Energy does not expect to complete the Nevada nuclear waste depository until 2007 and that the Clinton Administration has already misappropriated the remaining funds paid by public utilities for this site to offset the federal budget deficit. The Administration is also ignoring a federal court order to store waste by 1998 as required by the law under which it has already collected $13 billion from nuclear power producers.

One rational but politically incorrect solution would be to simply dilute the waste until it has a low radiation level and then add it to building materials such as sheet rock and cement. This would extend the lifespans of Americans by hormesis and eliminate the waste.

Vitamin D is routinely added to milk for its health benefits. Too much Vitamin D in the diet is, however, fatal. Like radiation, Vitamin D has a threshold biological effect. Below that threshold it is beneficial, but at too high levels it is toxic.

Modem people like to think of themselves as rational beings who are now free from the superstitions and irrationalities that afflicted people in previous millennia. Unreasoning fear of radiation and chemicals, materials that greatly extend human life when used properly and damage life when used improperly, is, however, evidence of modem superstitions that have very high costs when measured in human lives.