OMITTING THE OBVIOUS

In an age of alibis when manufacturers must advertise "Use only as directed" (so that parents who substitute shoe polish for mother's milk cannot sue them for infanticide), it is not surprising that the industrial hygiene consultant who monitored the Bateson building states in his report "Hazardous operations or conditions may exist which I did not observe."

Yet it is also obvious that a building with ventilation so poor that at least some people got genuinely sick must also automatically have had a severe radon problem.

As we have pointed out before, buildings trap the radon emanating from the ground and other sources. Radon is an inert, radioactive gas that arises in the natural decay of uranium, and which is not itself very dangerous (except as a transportation agent); but its daughters are solid, highly active, and lodge in the lung, where they can cause lung cancer. It is estimated that some 15,000 fatal lung cancers arise this way in the US every year. The only known prevention of this hazard is adequate ventilation; energy conservation by heat insulation as practiced in the Sacramento Bateson building leads to additional fatal lung cancers -- 10,000 additional fatal cancers per year according to Prof. B.L. Cohen, whose "conservatism in obtaining this estimate was consistently biasing the result to the low side."

Now there is something we should make clear to readers. What we consider shocking is not the radon exposure in energy efficient homes which may go higher than 5 rems (not millirems!) per year, or that this is by far the largest man-made (or man-enhanced) radioactive hazard in the environment, far exceeding the natural background (normally the highest hazard), and exceeding the permissible health standards by a factor of 10. Even the 10,000 (preventable!) cancer deaths by energy conservation may not be the ultimate shocker in a nation that loses 90,000 people to cancer of the respiratory system every year.

What we find far more shocking is the blatant inconsistency of the media in treating this significant hazard of radiation-induced cancer (associated with energy conservation) as an "unmentionable disease while fomenting panic about the same type of hazard in the nuclear power field, where its level is quite negligible in comparison.

The case of the Bateson building is a mild illustration. Those responsible for publishing the results of the Bateson building investigation and the respiratory problems of its occupants seem to have a respiratory problem themselves, for none of them as much as breathed the word radon. The official report does not mention it, and when we enquired at Cal-OSHA, we found the radon level had been measured by the Calif. Dept. of Health, but had not been considered significant, since it never exceeded 0.3 pCi/litre.

That seems decidedly on the low side: poorly ventilated buildings usually have radon concentrations in the units, often in the tens, and occasionally in the hundreds of pCi/litre. Perhaps the value is too low because it was measured by instantaneous readings (rather than by the far more reliable cumulative readings over several months); but let us assume the figure is correct. As will be seen from the conversions explained below, the measured level corresponds to a dose of 90 mrem/year, and in our opinion Cal-OSHA was right in considering this value (if correct) no reason for alarm. However, even that low value is a dose 18 times (eighteen times) higher than Gov. Brown would receive if he spent his time, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, naked on the fence of the Rancho Secco nuclear plant near Sacramento, which he has been vigorously trying to shut down in order to masquerade as a protector of public health. A dose 18 times higher is what his employees get ("the radon level in the Bateson building was comparable to other buildings in Sacramento," Cal-OSHA told us) and what his flaks cover up.

Does that mean they are censors who deliberately suppress information detrimental to their ideology, even if it means damaging public health?

[More.B.L. Cohen: "Health effects of from insulation of buildings," Health Physics, vol. 1980); H. Hurwitz: "The indoor radiological problem in perspective," Report 81CRD025, Feb. 1981, General Electric Corp. R & D, Technical Info. Exchg., Bldg. 81, Rm. A-133, Schenectady, NY 12345; H. Hurwitz: "Are energy-efficient homes more radioactive than nuclear meltdowns?" Amer. Nucl. Soc., Publ. Info., 555 N.Kensington Ave, LaGrange Park, IL 60525; H.W. Alter, J.H. Gingrich: "Track Etch radon detector calibrations and field results," (includes data on US homes), EPA Conference on radon measurement, Aug. 1981, obtainable from the authors at Terradex Corporation, 460 N. Wiget Lane, Walnut Creek, CA 94598. See also AtE Oct 81, p.4, for suppression of evidence on this issue by Science weekly and by the New York State Energy Commission.]