GREEN PEACE POLLUTES THE SEAS

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UNSCEAR (United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation) is one of the better agencies of the United Twerps and Butchers, perhaps because it is of little interest to any but the industrialized countries. Last October it held an international conference on indoor exposure to natural radiation, which is reported by the British journal Nature (17 Nov 83), along with the chart on right. The "pie" of the dose received by the average citizen in the industrialized countries is cut up a little differently than shown on the cover of The Radiation Bogey (send us $2). Part of the reason is that our pie does not include the internal dose delivered to the body by its own flesh and blood, which contains the natural iotopes carbon 14 and potassium 40. This dose is delivered in honor of Norman Cousins, resident radiologist at the Saturday Review ("The normal radioactive contents of the human body is zero") and the other sages proclaiming that "there is no known safe dose of radiation."

But the chart also differs because of the dose delivered by the radon daughters in homes where the gas is trapped as it bubbles up from the ground and the water supply. This dose is being found ever more significant as more detailed studies are made.

The emissions from nuclear plants are the smallest of the four slices that make up 1%; as M.C. O'Riordan of the British National Radiological Protection Board remarks in the article, "It is no exaggeration to say that public and professional interest in natural and artificial radiation is inversely proportional to the radiation dose received from them."

The exposure to cosmic rays varies mainly with altitude; gamma radiation (uranium and thorium) from the ground and building materials is fairly uniform; but the dose from the radon daughters "exhibits a pronounced variability, and though the average dose is not large (100 mrem/year), many persons receive more than 1,000 mrem/year, and there are cases of 5,000 mrem, which corresponds to a probability of premature death from lung cancer of no less than 5%.

This is the type of information consistently censored by the Science scribblers, who prefer to harp on the "fierce debate over the potential hazards of low-level waste disposal" (1/6/84) and dumping them in the sea, an inocuous and commendable method for low-level wastes (about half, they never tell you, come from hospitals) which the US does not practice. As pointed out in The Non-Problem of Nuclear Wastes (also $2), the radioactivity disposed of in the sea every year by America's whiskey drinkers alone equals 1 ton of low level wastes, and from data given by the British newsletter Nuclear Issues (Feb 83), we find that the activity dumped into the sea from British power plants amounts to 6 Ci (curies) per GW capacity nuclear, but 7.5 Ci per GW capacity from coal ash (which is also dumped into the sea).