I have an article in the current CounterPunch print edition (Subscribe!NOW! )
concerning the contamination of the US aircraft carrier Ronald Reagan by
Fukushima fallout during the post-tsunami relief operations in 2011.
The Ronald Reagan is in the news because several dozen
crewmembers of the Reagan are trying to sue TEPCO, the Tokyo Electric Power
Corporation, for concealing the radiation release and thereby damaging their
health (unsurprisingly, members of the armed services are precluded from suing
the US military for damage to their health, so redress must be sought
elsewhere).
I try to tiptoe between the two extremes of radiation
alarmism and, I guess, radio-blasé-ism, but in the end I come down on the side
that the contamination was pretty serious.
The Ronald Reagan was caught in a washout. As the Fukushima plume was passing overhead, a
snowstorm brought radioactive nasties down to the ship, and the water
surrounding the ship.
The “nothing to see here” position is that the Reagan was
exposed to the equivalent of an extra few weeks of background radiation.
Trouble is, washed-out fallout isn’t distributed in a neat,
uniform radioactive haze. It’s lumpy,
sticky, filled with hot particles, and prone to “hot spots”.
It is not terribly reassuring to Sailor A that measured radioactive
contamination is averaging out to a gentle buzz if he or she is worried about
standing on or next to a hot spot.
The Ronald Reagan spent a couple months at sea after
contamination trying to clean itself up; then, according to a lawyer for the sailors
claiming injury, it was decontaminated at port in Washington State for another
year and a half before returning to service.
On the washout issue, I draw on a circumstance that is
perhaps not widely known: that Albany, NY, thanks to wash-out of the plume from
a shot at the Nevada Test Site in 1953, was one of the most heavily irradiated
areas in the United States outside of “downwinder” counties in Nevada and Utah.
The only reason we know about Albany is
because the fallout was measured by a local association of scientists from
Rennselaer Polytechnic Institute and General Electric, and because a local
journalist, Bill Heller, wrote about it.
Suffice to say that radiation levels were highly variable, and in
certain locations very high.
Accidents at nuclear reactors can release a lot of
radiation.
A reactor might be loaded with over 25 tons of fuel and at
any given time contain several hundred kilos of plutonium; for comparison
purposes, critical mass for a nuclear weapon involves about 10 kilograms of
weapons-grade plutonium. The amount of
radioactive material liberated by the airburst of a nuclear weapon is predicted
to the milligram; how much goes out the top of a shattered reactor, on the
other hand, is pretty much guesswork, as is the rather imperfect art of using post-accident
forensics and atmospheric measurement and capture tools to extrapolate total
radiation released.
Nobody really knows
how much radiation is released in an accident when containment is breached, throw
in wind and washouts, there’s also really no way of telling where it ends up.
I also address the tendency of governments to
minimize/mislead/suppress information concerning radiation releases from
nuclear accidents and the overall uncertainty pervading their efforts.
The ex-USSR is the recognized world champion in this regard, thanks to
its energy in covering up the mess created by Chernobyl, and the efforts by
Alla Yaroshinskaya, a journalist-turned-activist-turned Duma representative to
bring the truth to light. The United
States, through the Atomic Energy Commission and its successor, the Nuclear
Regulatory Commission, have also been keen to keep the atomic business going by
minimizing the extent of radiation releases.
In the Albany case, the AEC deliberately understated the radiation
levels it had detected in its public statements. As for Fukushima, I was unfavorably impressed
by an NRC PowerPoint briefing released under the FOIA, which significantly
understated the total radiation release at Chernobyl.
The biggest minefield in the issue of nuclear accidents is
the issue of the health effects of radiation exposure. The international standard for nuclear safety
is the “Linear No Threshold” or LNT model, which argues that the negative
health impacts of low-level radiation exposure are, well, low. People who give credence to claims of extensive
radiation-related illness as a result of nuclear accidents are frequently dismissed
as cranks.
Interestingly, the only place that is serious about
emphasizing the health hazards of radiation is a country very much in the news
today, Ukraine. Doing the right thing by
Ukrainian citizens after the injustices inflicted by the Soviet Union on the
Chernobyl front has been an important part of Ukrainian national identity, and
claims of radiation-related illness are given a hearing largely denied to them
in the West, Japan, or Russia.
The international pushback against academics trying to make
the statistical and biomedical case for extensive Chernobyl-related illnesses
has been intense, including the attempt to explain any statistically
significant health effects as a combination of “radiophobia” (the debilitating
fear occasioned by radiation exposure) and the overall decline in public health
in Ukraine following the collapse of the Soviet Union. In 2005 a symposium conducted by the IAEA,
WHO, and UN concluded that only 50 people had died because of radiation
exposure from the Chernobyl accident; that’s quite a distance from estimates of
critics who think the toll might be as high as 50,000.
In response, scientists such as Russia’s Elena Burlakova
have carefully monitored the health of the sizable cohort of Chernobyl “liquidators”
(the hundreds of thousands of workers who were exposed to high levels of
radiation during cleanup at the plant and in the Chernobyl district) and
conducted research to attempt to qualify the LNT standard for measuring the
health effects of radiation exposure.
In addition to the detection of statistically significant
levels of certain illnesses among the liquidator cohort, they have made the
argument that, instead of being linear, radiation health effects are “bi-modal”
at certain low dose levels i.e. more harmful than the linear model
predicts. Backhanded support for this
challenge to the LNT model comes from a school of thought—“radiation hormesis”—now
enjoying a certain vogue in the pro-nuclear crowd in Japan, that draws on the
experience of inhabitants of Ramsar, a community of the Caspian Sea with high
background radiation levels and low cancer rates, to argue that low levels of
radiation are beneficial.
Challengers to the LNT model seem to be making some headway—the
Bulletin of Atomic Scientists recently devoted a special issue to the subject—but
there is considerable resistance to qualifying LNT and thereby admitting the
possibility of rethinking and perhaps acknowledging the likelihood of extensive
health problems from the release of low-level radiation by a nuclear accident.
Cleanup for a nuclear accident is expensive. In an ironic recapitulation of the
uncertainty surrounding the magnitude and destination of Fukushima’s radiation
releases, the total cleanup bill has been estimated in a range from $10 billion
to $50 billion to $250 billion.
To paraphrase Everett Dirksen, ten billion here, ten billion
there, pretty soon you’re talking about real money and the possibility that
even rare and occasional nuclear accidents will push up the total cost of
nuclear power to unacceptable levels.
Understandably, the nuclear industry and people who have
staked their hopes on nuclear power as a greenhouse-gas free alternative to
carbon-based electricity generation resist the idea of expanding the accepted
definition of significant radiation-related health effects, and with it the cost
of any accident.
There is also, perhaps, the temptation to let the radiation
illness problem take care of itself i.e. shy away from investigations of
radiation sickness that might yield inconvenient or perhaps politically or
financially catastrophic conclusions while demographics does its grim work of
culling the irradiated herd.
The sailors of the Ronald Reagan may not make a lot of
headway with their legal challenge; but expect the scientific, popular, and
political clamor concerning radiation-related illness to increase.
