I am not kidding myself that it was the merit of this newsletter (it was Pennsylvania's Reading Prong, mainly), but after beating the drum for more than 6 years, it is gratifying to see that radon is no longer the Unmentionable Gas, and ever more stories are openly published in the press. Once it is realized that the biggest radiological hazard in the environment is natural, and that it is strongly enhanced by energy conservation, it should follow that the "nuclear" radiation panic is fraudulent, and that the cure for the radon hazard is abundant energy - - home ventilation without going bankrupt.
Nevertheless, stuffing up your house is still widely extolled without mentioning radon. For example, the November Reader's Digest (the people who brought you We Almost Lost Detroit) brings an article "25 Heat Leaks and How to Plug Them," (condensed from the sun-worshiping Popular Science), which by their own logic should be called "25 Ways to Give Yourself Lung Cancer".
The British (who were the first to realize the danger) have now measured the levels in all parts of Britain, and their National Radiological Protection Board has confirmed that this is the most significant source of radiation exposure to the population, reports the British monthly Nuclear Issues. The average annual exposure to radon daughters in Britain is 43 millirems, but in Cornwall, the southwestern tip of England, the average level is 660 mrems, and 1% of the dwellings there deliver a dose of no less than 5,000 mrems
¾an annual dose allowed in the US only as an occupational risk to workers in the nuclear industry who are under constant medical surveillance. (For the general population in the US, the recommended maximum annual dose from all sources, not just the radon daughters, is 500 mrem.)The risk of contracting a fatal lung cancer from living in a 5,000 mrem Cornish home is of the same order as smoking 10 cigarettes per day, and about five times larger than dying in an automobile accident
¾or would be, if the linear hypothesis were valid. (The linear hypothesis assumes that the dependence of cancer risk on radiation dose can be extrapolated by joining the directly observed points¾high dose, high dose risk¾by a straight line the point 0,0 -- no dose, no cancer.)In fact, however, the doses delivered to the Cornish population, 100 times larger than the British national average, have not led to an increased cancer incidence in Cornwall. This is another strong indication that the linear hypothesis is invalid and unnecessarily conservative: there is evidently a threshold at a certain low level of radiation, below which no ill effects are induced. This is in agreement with Prof. B. L. Cohen's analysis of radon data from an over the world: they will not jibe with the linear hypothesis and indicate a far less dangerous dependence.
But even with the linear hypothesis, the average public exposure from nuclear wastes (in Britain) is 25,000 times smaller in a 5-rem Cornish home.
Legislation to be introduced in Parliament will probably set 2,500 mrems/year as the level for remedial action in existing buildings, and 1,000 mrms/year as the design level for new ones. That is a far cry from the EPA's policy, which uses radon emanations to persecute uranium mills by enforcing ridiculously low levels (set for the flow in picocuries/sq.metre/sec
¾there are few people around to get a dose). It has only recently announced its intention to look into the higher levels in homes. If so, the EPAcrats may discover that unlike piles of uranium tailings, homes are inhabited by humans.
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Vol. 13, No. 4
Newsletter: Access to Energy Newsletter Archive Volume: Issues Issue/No.: Vol. 13, No. 4 Date: November 29, 2004 03:50 PM Title: Futile servility
Copyright © 2004 - Access to Energy Newsletter Archive
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