RADON UPDATE

"Distribution of airborne radon-222 concentrations in US homes" by A.V. Nero and others, Science, 11/21/86, pp. 992-997, is probably the most complete statistical survey to date. Under the Indoor Environment Program of the Lawrence Berkeley Lab, seasonal measurements were taken in 1400 homes in 38 areas of the US. The average concentration was found to be 1.5 picocuries per liter (pCi/l), which should be compared with the level at which the EPA recommends remedial action, namely 4 pCi/l.

That level, the authors judge from the statistical distribution of their data, is exceeded in 7% of houses, or approximately four million homes. The authors write "The occasional house with concentrations exceeding 50 or even 100 pCi/l causes truly extraordinary risks. Individual risks of 2% exceed by three orders of magnitude the 10-5 ordinarily considered to warrant action by government agencies" [see this issue, p.2, top of col. 1]. But even "the estimated average individual risk of 0.2% to 0.3% corresponds to about 10,000 annual cases of lung cancer in the U.S."

I have previously noted that the 4 pCi/l set by the EPA as the radon danger limit is 40 times higher than the corresponding limit allowed by the NRC for the nuclear industry in public exposure. But the statistical distribution of radon concentrations reported in this paper allows another formulation: 98% of all US homes expose their occupants to a higher level of radioactivity than does the entire nuclear industry.

A special mention should go to Nader's Health Research Group and its head Sydney Wolf, M.D., chief medicine man at the Court of St. Ralph, who petitioned the OSHA to reduce the exposure of uranium miners to 0.7 WLM/yr. That would correspond to a fulltime occupancy of a home with a radon concentration of 1.36 pCi/l, a little less than found in the average home. This charlatan, then, would prohibit grown men from taking a voluntary occupational risk that is smaller than an infant on the breast is exposed to in the average US home.