Uranium 238 has a halflife of 4.51 billion years, after which only half of it remains. What happens to the other half? It decays into other elements some of which may decay into radium, whose daughter is radon, which begets further radioactive elements in a chain that finally ends up with stable lead.
The most dangerous element in the chain is radon¾with a halflife of only 3.8 days it radiates intensely, and as a gas it has easy access into the lung. Radon is the most serious natural radioactive hazard; the lung cancers developed by uranium miners are mostly due to the radon produced by the uranium.
And uranium occurs everywhere. Not, of course, in such concentrated quantities as in rich uranium ore, but there is some uranium (a few parts per million) in almost any kind of ground. Although radon has a short halflife, it is constantly" being replenished by its long-lived great-grandmother uranium. Radon is an inert (chemically inactive) gas that diffuses upward through the ground into the atmosphere, where it is diluted, so that its concentration at ground level is normally low. However, it is easily trapped by buildings with poor ventilation. Even in a building where the air is exchanged every half hour, the radon concentration is three times as high as outoors. Since energy conservation by curtailed air conditioning or heating usually involves reduced ventilation, it also exposes people to an increased internal dose of radioactivity (radiation from a source inside the body) by a potent natural carcinogen¾radon gas.
No, people won't die of cancer just because they don't exchange the volume of air in their homes every half hour; but even if they do, the numbers are impressively high. Even in an average US home trapped radon may give residents 300 mrem/year to the bronchial epithelium (the tissue lining the bronchi) or a whole-body dose of about 100 mrem. Though this is well within safety standards, it is far higher than Americans get from the nuclear industry, and comparable with, or greater than, what they receive from medical uses (X-rays and radiotherapy).
Remember the photo of teenagers in a convertible driving through Harrisburg with a sign "Out to get a little radiation"? They may have got less than people who were advised to stay indoors with their windows shut. Mitchell Rogovin, a strongly antinuclear lawyer, was recently appointed to the TMI Investigative Commission. Will he note the point?
And how about Dr John Gofman, the dedicated sage who dupes juries and anybody else he can buttonhole with his (trivially true) warnings that there is no such thing as a safe level of radioactivity? His method of calculating radiation-induced cancers is to inflate the dose received, multiply by an inflated number of people who received it, divide by 300, and finally recoil in horror from the number of cancers he has thus conjured up. In this way he created 480 cancers at the TMI Grand Disaster, where the official Interagency Commission predicted one in the next 30 years.
Let's try Gofman's calculation, undoctored by his galloping five-digit inflation, on radon in homes: 0.1 times 200 million divided by 300 -- wow! Gofman's genocidal gimmick has just produced more than 66,000 cancer deaths per year merely due to living in homes; and that is even before embarking on the massacre and carnage of energy conservation.
Far be it from us to criticize Dr Gofman's wonderful theory; all we ask is consistency. Even so, there is one thing to be considered: The uranium burned up in nuclear power plants will never turn into radon, because its energy has been used up to give people light and warmth.
[More: H.Hurwitz Jr., Radon in homes: A challenge to regulatory consistency, preprint, $2 from ANSPI, 555 N.Kensington Ave., La Grange Park, IL 60525; see also "Re-evaluated radon-cancer link," Science News, 14 April 1979.
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Vol. 7, No. 1
Newsletter: Access to Energy Newsletter Archive Volume: Volume 7 Issue/No.: Vol. 7, No. 1 Date: September 01, 1979 10:13 AM Title: Standing up to the brainwashers
Copyright © 2004 - Access to Energy Newsletter Archive
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