In one of its cornily cute, shallow, and falsehood-ridden articles, the Economist published a survey of health in the USSR (9/12/1990). Much of it is true, for it is known from independent and more trustworthy sources that a whole Soviet hospital got in-fected by AIDs, because there was only one syringe and it was not properly disinfected; one third of Soviet hospitals does not have running water; life expectancy, infant mortality, disease incidence, and other health indicators are bad and deteriorating. But the Economist destroys the credibility of these true reports by mixing them with Chernobyl and heavy-handed anti nuclear propaganda. Chernobyl IV, short-lived pigsty though it was, still saved more lives from coal than it took, and will take, by radiation. But the Economist's ignorant hacks not only reprint trashy superstitions ("today one can say with confidence that small doses of radiation cause infectious diseases . . ." [Name a single one even for large doses!]), but play the old intimidation game: they print the con-tamination by cesium 137 in curies per square kilometer in various Soviet republics
¾without explanation or comparison. The Rus-sian republic, for example, has 2,000 square km of cesium-con-taminated soil to¾get a load of this!--some 20 curies per square kilometer. Twenty curies per square kilometer!As they say in the Economist's homeland, "Coo!" (an expres-sion of shock and awe).
Now cesium 137 really is dirty stuff. It is bone-seeking, and above all, it has an intermediate halflife (30.0 years). Iodine 131 attacks the thyroid, but with a halflife of 8.05 days it is pretty well gone in two weeks. On the other hand, uranium 238 has a halflife of 4.6 billion years, so that its radiation is extremely weak and bare-ly detectable (how else could it last that long?) But 30 years is neither here nor there, the isotope stays on the ground, gets into the food chain and does its work weakly, but for a long time.
But for the umpteenth time, it is the dose that makes the poison. Health physicists have been working for half a century to produce tables so people can look up what dose is delivered by Cs 137 when spread over a land area at 20 Ci/km2 (20 microcuries per square meter). From A. Brodsky, Handbook of Radiation Measurement and Protection (CRC 1978), pp. 640-41, one can easily calculate that the dose from gamma rays 3 ft above ground amounts to 169 mrem/year, which is less than the US average natural background (200 mrem/yr) and roughly equal to the additional dose people get by living in Wyoming or Colorado. If a Russian were to inhale all of the cesium on a square meter, vacuum-cleaning it out until the soil is perfectly decontaminated, he would get a maximum dose of one rem to any body organ (the doses vary for different organs for the same exposure), or less than the lifetime dose each of the Economist's dunces gets from his own blood.
To smear with little known words or units is not only despicable, but also cheap and easy. The Economist's editor, of all people, should know this: It is not much of a secret, shocking as it may be that his testicles are strongly anisotropic, that notwithstanding his well paid position, his wife has rarely (if ever) seen fit to get involved in any truly meromorphic functions, and that both have been known to enjoy morbidezza in public places without the slightest feelings of shame.
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Vol. 18, No. 3
Newsletter: Access to Energy Newsletter Archive Volume: Issues Issue/No.: Vol. 18, No. 3 Date: December 01, 2004 04:00 PM Title: Threatened: Environment or Liberty?
Copyright © 2004 - Access to Energy Newsletter Archive
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