RADON AND CHERNOBYL

"It is rarely if ever pointed out," writes Dr Henry Hurwitz in a letter to the New York Times (7/22/86), "that the avoidable public exposures to indoor radon in the US often exceed not only the exposures to residents in Utah from atmospheric testing, but also the exposures [from Chernobyl] to all but a handful of residents of the Pripyat evacuation zone... It is a matter of straightforward measurement to establish the comparative magnitudes of the exposures."

The letter was written in reply to the NYT's further sensationalist articles using Chernobyl to smear US reactors and to panic about radiation damage. The NYT minds have now been faithfully copied by a number of medical and other journals. With the aid of the past three issues, readers should be able to see through such servile parroting by themselves.

Meanwhile several media including Newsweek have come out with stories on radon in Dracula style (RADON GAS: A DEADLY THREAT blares Newspeak in a double spread) that have things all wrong, make no mention of the link to energy conservation, and fail to compare radiation levels with those near nuclear plants and other facilities, including uranium tailing dumps.

Newspeak admits that natural radon is responsible for up to 20,000 US lung cancer deaths, but fails to mention that the number could be significantly reduced by abundant energy, permitting plain, old-fashioned ventilation.

"No one suspected the extent to which the natural release of radon could imperil homes far away from mining activity until late 1984..." write the Newspeak duds, who could have read about it regularly in these pages since September 1979. It is not that they don't have the $22, but that Pulitzer-Prize-winning "investigative" reporting of the Woodward-Bernstein type means having everything served on a silver platter by some "Deep Throat" and not, God forbid, investigating.

Like the NYT would-be reporters, the Newspeak non-investigators believe that radon gas itself is "lethal." In fact, radon is dangerous only as a transporter. With a comparatively long halflife of 3.82 days, it radiates only weakly; moreover, as a noble gas it is chemically inert, so that if inhaled, it will be exhaled again without getting into one's blood or other parts of the body by chemical bonding (as other radioisotopes or chemical toxins do). The real damage is done by the radon progeny, i.e. the decay products. They are shortlived (halflives from 3 to 27 minutes), and therefore highly active; they are also solid, attach themselves to dust particles, and lodge in the lung, where they bombard lung tissue with high-energy alpha particles, and this is what causes the cancers.

What difference does that make? If the radon itself were "lethal," ventilation would not help, because it only draws fresh radon in as it expels the old. But if the danger is the radon daughters, which are born every time a radon atom or its descendant disintegrates, then this progeny will not pile up in well ventilated rooms. (In addition, and quite separately, the progeny can also be filtered out in the intake, since it is solid.) For example, the radon daughter Bismuth 214 (halflife 19.9 min) contributes 0.5% to the total alpha-particle energy in "3-minute air" (air allowed 3 minutes to accumulate the progeny), 4% in 10-minute air, and 38% in equilibrium air. These figures are taken from a booklet written for laymen, "Radon in Buildings," published in June 1980, more than four years before the world according to Newspeak. (Ntl. Bur. Stand. Rep. SP-581, Govt. Prtg. Off., Wash., DC 20402; 1980 price was $3.75.)

[More disgustingly, this issue of Newspeak, in a whitewash of the Stalinista record on human rights, prints "A Rights Primer" with a list of organizations that are super-soft on the Soviet Empire. For better information write Intl. Soc. f. Human Rights, USA Section, Box 90, Toms River, NJ 08753; on the Stalinista record, contact NCPPR, 214 Mass. Ave. NE/#580, Wash., DC 20002.]

To return to the Chernobyl sequel, one of the more interesting points is how Soviet civil defense prevented rain washing the fall-out into the Pripyat and Dnieper rivers. The banks of both rivers were shored up to provide a barrier against such run-off, light planes induced rain far from Chernobyl by seeding clouds with silver iodide, while large planes used granulated carbonic acid to disperse clouds moving toward the contaminated area. There was practically no rain in the Pripyat-Chernobyl area during May.

The source of the report is the Soviet government, so that it may be exaggerated or untrue, but the idea is nifty. It would be nice to think that US Civil Defense took note of the procedure.

But there isn't any.

[STOP PRESS: On 8/14, the EPA announced the expected radon standards: remedial action should be taken at levels above 4 pCi/l. The EPA estimates that some eight million US homes exceed this limit. That is some 26 million people, far too many to be offered shelter in the facilities of the nuclear industry, where the NRC applies a 40, repeat forty, times stricter standard.]