BLACK DEATH IN PENNSYLVANIA

What difference do the new findings of hormesis make to the radon problem in homes where ventilation has been sacrificed to energy conservation?

Little or none. In the first place, in many cases the level is well beyond the hormesis range; in some cases it approaches and even exceeds that permitted for uranium miners (who are adult, take a voluntary and occupational risk, and do not spend most of their day in the mine).

Second, as I have often stressed, I am less worried about the health effects of radon than about the horrendous inconsistency of the bureaucrats (and the media): the EPA penalizes radon emissions with religious zeal when they come from uranium tailings, but shuts its eyes to them when they take place at a far more dangerous level inside people's homes due to energy conservation. If the present estimate of 10,000 fatal lung cancers/year in the US is wrong, and it is, say, only 500, it is still 500 deaths that could have been prevented by warnings and, above all, by removing the roadblocks to abundant energy.

There are two points of interest here. By giving tax credits for energy conservation without warnings about radon and ventilation, the government first gives its citizens tax-subsidized lung cancer; it then generously steps in to give them a tax break for what it has caused (or enhanced) in the first place.

The other point is the 2 WL (in one case, 13.6 WL!). If the people in those 40% of homes in Berks County spend an average of 50% at home, they get a dose three times the dose the NRC permits as an occupational risk in the nuclear industry. Or to put it another way, they absorb, every day, 42.3 times the dose that the neighbors of TMI got once in a lifetime. That makes a total of about 100,000 Grand Disaster doses just since the Grand Disaster. Compare this with the puerile horror fiction by professional antinuke Harvey Wasserman to which the Los Angeles Times gave space on 2 September. "Whether a modern-day Black Death began at TMI six years ago is a question to be answered by future epidemiologists," says Mr Wasserman, without mentioning that more than 300 lives have already been lost in the fuel cycle of the substitute power because he and his kind keep (the unharmed) Unit 1 of TMI closed. I know little about drugs, but in lives lost per buck profited, Mr Wasserman and the Los Angeles Times must be getting close to the drug pushers who hook your kids on cocaine and heroin.

With one difference: unlike Mr Wasserman, the pushers do not strut about as moralists and health protectors.