The EPA has recently released the results of the largest radon survey to date--11,600 homes in 10 states: 21% exceed the EPA's remedial-action guideline of 4 pCi/l, itself forty times higher than the emissions allowed in the nuclear industry; 1% of the homes had a level exceeding 20 pCi/l. The highest percentage of homes with excess activity (over 4 pCi/l) was found in Colorado (39%), the highest individual readings in Michigan and Alabama (162 and 182 pCi/l). The report estimates the annual fatal lung cancers due to radon in the US between 5,000 and 20,000. (Total estimated 1987 lung cancer deaths: 136,000.) All of this is consistent with the previous largest survey by Lawrence Livermore Lab workers [AtE Jan 87].
Perhaps more interestingly, the radon data accumulated since 1979 have moved the National Council of Radiation Protection and Measurement (NCRP) to revise its assessment of the average exposure of the US citizen to ionizing radiation. Its mid-November 1987 report divides exposures into several categories, of which three can be dismissed out of hand. Yes, you guessed it, the nuclear fuel cycle, with 0.03% of the total, is one of the three. (Fallout and "miscellaneous environmental" are the other two.) Consumer pro-ducts seemingly account for 3%, but most of this is again radon
¾ via domestic water supplies (the rest of the 3% is mainly building materials, some mining and agricultural products and¾get this¾ coal burning). So if we lump this radon in with the "natural" radon (not all that natural, since it is man-made housing that traps it and raises the exposure over the outdoor level), then for all practical purposes¾to within less than 1%--we are left with two radio-active sources in the environment: Mother Nature (85%) and the medical profession (15%, of which 11% come from X-rays and 4% from nuclear medicine).Meanwhile, what may be the world's first health facility consciously using radon has opened in Boulder, Montana, some 30 miles south of Helena. It is the "Free Enterprise Health Mine" (Box 67, Boulder, MT 59632; tel. 406/225-3383), visited by an annual 2,500 patients with arthritis and other diseases. Their exposure is supervised by the Montana Occupational Health Bureau, which does not allow more than the NCRP standard, so that the mine may be less effective than the historic spas at Bath, Lourdes, Bad Gastein and others round the world. Still, as we know from the now plentiful work on hormesis, a little radioactivity is healthier than none. It is only when energy conservation in homes drives the radon concentration into the tens of pCi/l that lung cancer threatens. (And even then one must multiply by the time spent in the home, for it is still the dose that makes the poison).
Note that it is only the fine details that are now emerging from the EPA and the NCRP; the effect as such, and even the average exposure with its risk of lung cancer, has been known to specialists for some time, and has been available to the layman in simple terms since at least 1980. Yet the Jordans of America strictly censored any mention of it until last year when the Reading Prong publicity made further cover-up untenable. And to this day the Jordans are censor-ing the radon link of lung cancer to energy conservation, even as they scare people with the word "radioactive" and with superstitious garbage about nine-legged frogs.
Well, they just did not know, you may say. Then what are they doing in a newspaper, of all places? And what difference does it make to the uninformed victims of coal pollution or radon whether they were killed by malice or incompetence?
Still, they are sincere, goes the last defense.
But of course they are. Did you think Hitler was pretending?
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Vol. 15, No. 5
Newsletter: Access to Energy Newsletter Archive Volume: Issues Issue/No.: Vol. 15, No. 5 Date: December 01, 2004 10:29 AM Title: Peace in Our Time
Copyright © 2004 - Access to Energy Newsletter Archive
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