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Pawning the Chernobyl Necklace

By Valerie Brown

Valerie Brown

Valerie Brown is an independent journalist based in Oregon’s Willamette Valley. She has written about environmental health, climate, radiation, energy and other issues for numerous publications including Miller-McCune Magazine, High Country News, SELF, and Environmental Health Perspectives. In 2009 she was awarded first prize for explanatory print journalism by the Society of Environmental Journalists for her article “Environment Becomes Heredity” in Miller-McCune Magazine.



As the world gapes mesmerized at the nuclear disaster unfolding in Japan, those not at risk of exposure to the radiation bless their good luck and wonder what it must feel like to be the unlucky ones – the ones who can’t escape that invisible blanket of fear.

Let me tell you what it feels like.

On a spring day in 1975, the first words I heard as I rose through the fog of anesthetic were “it was malignant.” I was twenty-four years old. A couple of months earlier during a routine physical my doctor had found a mass on my thyroid gland. X-rays and ultrasound had failed to clarify whether the mass was a fluid-filled cyst or a solid tumor. The only choice was surgery. The tissue analysis during the operation confirmed a diagnosis of thyroid cancer. The surgeon removed one lobe and the isthmus of the barbell-shaped gland at the base of my neck. I was informed that I’d take thyroid hormone for the rest of my life because if my own remnant gland were to start functioning again, it might grow itself another cancer. And so I have taken the little pill every morning for thirty-six years. It took a long time for the screaming red scar around my neck – the kind that was later dubbed the “Chernobyl necklace” – to fade.

I was very lucky. I can say that now, after so many years without a recurrence. But it has been thirty-six years of ever-present fear and not a few physical problems, along with an increasing sense of outrage, as the likely cause of my trauma has gradually been revealed to me.

At the time, “Why me?” was uppermost on my mind.

“We don’t know what causes it,” my doctor told me in a casual tone. “But a lot of young women get thyroid cancer.”

Although I tried to put it behind me, I developed a form of post-traumatic stress disorder. I became terrified of my body. Every blemish triggered anxiety about new tumors. Every routine screening was a nightmare. I endured a string of significant but non-fatal health problems involving several more surgeries and biopsies. One time I asked a doctor whether having had cancer once meant I’d paid my dues. He laughed, saying the opposite was true: One cancer increases the odds of getting another cancer, or of the original cancer spreading to other organs. Paying your dues early doesn’t get you a free pass later.

I can’t say I handled the experience well. As a young baby boomer I was already immersed in the nihilism triggered by the long shadow of the Cold War and the white-hot rage of the Vietnam War – whoopee, we’re all gonna die! And yet at the same time, because I was so young, I didn’t know anybody else who was even sick, let alone a cancer victim. Back then there were no cancer support groups, no proud survivors wearing colorful scarves during their chemotherapy phases. No doctor suggested to me that I might find a little counseling helpful.

As I wandered through my twenties and early thirties, I kept an ear cocked for any information I might come across about what causes thyroid cancer. In 1986 – the Chernobyl year – I learned that the link between exposure to ionizing radiation and thyroid cancer was far and away the strongest of all the disease’s possible causes. So I began pondering how I might have been exposed to such radiation.

That’s when things really started to get ugly. I found an embarrassment of riches. I had grown up in a kind of Nuclear Triangle. Ninety miles north of my home town of Pocatello, Idaho, the Idaho National Laboratory squats in the desert. When I was six months old, the first nuclear-generated electricity in the world was produced there. The site has the highest concentration of reactors in the world – fifty-two (most now mothballed). Although no one admits to any large airborne releases of radiation, at least 11 billion gallons of radioactive waste were injected into the Snake River aquifer between 1953 and 1984.

A few hundred miles to the northwest, a similar cluster of deceptively bland buildings crouches on the Columbia River basalt at Hanford, Washington. During production of the plutonium used in some of the world’s first nuclear weapons, millions of curies of I-131 were released to the air at Hanford.

The government knew at least as early as the mid-1940s that potassium iodide was protective against I-131 absorption by the thyroid. The government neglected to tell the public this, or notify downwinders either ahead of time or afterward about any releases of I-131 from any of its facilities. In fact, the government rarely acknowledged public risk from radiation released at any of its weapons facilities around the country. When forced to, the feds insisted there was no danger. Just like the Japanese and U.S. governments are doing today.

I thought the Idaho and Washington sites were the most likely places where I could have intersected with a cloud of radioactive iodine, because my family had taken many vacations either in Idaho’s central mountains (which we reached by driving through the Idaho nuclear reservation past signs warning of arrest or worse if a motorist should stop for any reason), or in trips down the Columbia River highway to visit relatives in Portland.

But in fact the most likely source of that I-131 lay to the southwest: the Nevada Test Site near Las Vegas. I knew almost nothing about the NTS, but by 1997 I had begun to learn. That year the National Cancer Institute published a map of where the many clouds of I-131 had traveled from the 925 nuclear tests in Nevada between 1951 and 1963. While my county was not the hardest hit, it had definitely been hit multiple times. The National Cancer Institute exposure calculator says I probably received a total of 10 rads of I-131 from 47 separate tests between 1951 and 1966. A USEPA table of health effects indicates changes in blood chemistry appear at 5-10 rad/rem, but this is still considered a relatively low dose, not expected to cause acute symptoms of radiation sickness.

As I gleaned more information my resentment continued to smolder. Then in about 2004, an Idaho native named Sheri Garman decided enough was enough. Dying of thyroid cancer that had spread to her breast and liver, Sheri spent the last year or so of her life making Idahoans aware of how much fallout the state had received and making Idaho politicians push for compensation for those of their citizens whose lives had been lost, shortened, or made a living hell by federal policy.

Four of the five counties in the nation hit hardest with I-131 are in Idaho (the top county is in Montana). Sheri Garman’s home town of Emmett, an idyllic dairy-and-cherry heartland gem near Boise, got the most I-131 in the state. Most Idahoans had no idea they’d been exposed to so much radiation, but as the penny dropped, they rallied around Sheri and demanded the chance to tell their own stories of pain, heartbreak, and financial ruin by medical bills.

Rage really churned up when it emerged that the NTS decision makers had routinely waited to detonate their bomb tests until the wind was blowing exactly toward Idaho. One government document characterizes people living under that plume trajectory as “a low-use segment of the population.” (This was well known to Utah downwinders, who’d understood their experience far earlier than Idahoans did.)

Sheri Garman lived just long enough to get a bill introduced that would make Idahoans eligible under the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act and to see her daughter graduate from high school. Seven years later, Idahoans are still waiting as the bill languishes in committee. Baby boomer downwinders know that politicians and policymakers are playing a waiting game: as soon as we all die off, the pressure on them to act will evaporate – unless, of course, a new collision of natural forces and human error creates a new generation of downwinders. Which is starting to look more likely as of this writing.

Throughout this long journey I have struggled to understand the nature of radiation risk. Between the discovery of the growth and the moment when I regained consciousness after my thyroidectomy, my ears had been filled with the voices of doctors thinking they offered comfort when they assured me that “99% of these tumors are benign.”

For the person falling into that last 1%, the world’s underpinnings shift. Instead of a probabilistic world where we are comfortable making decisions according to, say, the odds of thunderstorms ruining a picnic, we are thrust into binary hell, where the choices and chances are only two: win or lose, white or black, benign or malignant.

Yet the innards of atoms also follow probabilistic patterns. At that scale, cause and effect cannot be linked in straight lines. No one can say just which subatomic particle will be ejected from which atom with what amount of energy, or who will absorb how many of those particles, or which of a person’s cells will be hit by them, or whose immune system will be unable to repair the damage done by these tiny loose cannons rocketing through their tissues. “Experts” generally say things like, “There might be X number of additional cancers” in a particular exposed population, but they cannot say who will get those cancers – a handy out when it comes to apportioning right and wrong and assigning moral accountability. The problem is converted from a concrete one affecting real human beings to an abstract one affecting nobody in particular. Most of us are fine with that sort of risk as long as it’s not us on the operating table.

As the terrible news from Japan keeps breaking in ever-worsening waves, and as I sample the boiling Twittersphere, the pontificating of experts, and worst of all the drivel spouted by government authorities, I get angry all over again. Everywhere I turn, I hear that unless radiation levels get improbably high, nobody will get sick, as if acute radiation sickness is the only consequence of exposure. Read my lips: There is no such thing as a guaranteed “safe” level of exposure to ionizing radiation. Certainly, distance from the source and dilution in the atmosphere lowers exposure risk. Sure, you can swallow some potassium iodide to prevent your thyroid gland from absorbing I-131, although it won’t protect you from the cesium-137 or the strontium-90 or the plutonium.

The official focus on high short-term doses is deceptive. Emerging science suggests that low doses of radiation exposure can have numerous long-term effects, possibly passed from one generation to the next. And almost all the discussion about – and the scientific research on – radiation exposure focuses on cancers. There are certainly many cancers that radiation can induce in addition to thyroid cancer, from breast and prostate cancer to various leukemias. These cancers are thought to result from energetic particles striking DNA, breaking strands, and interfering with gene replication. Faulty genes lead to faulty cells, is the thinking. But there may also be epigenetic effects – that is, changes in the way normal genes are organized and allowed to function – and these may result in disorders other than cancer, such as thyroid diseases, autoimmune problems, and hormones gone haywire.

To make matters worse, how old you are when you’re exposed makes a big difference too. Prenatal insults including chemical and radiation exposure can create epigenetic patterns of gene expression that will stay with you forever, even if your actual genes are undamaged. And it can take 50 or more years for the timer set in the womb to trip the fuse and trigger a full-blown disease.

In a 2009 review article, Canadian researchers Carmel Mothersill and Colin Seymour of McMaster University nicely expressed the emerging state of knowledge about the effects of low-level radiation exposure:

“Our understanding of the biological effects of low dose exposure has undergone a major paradigm shift….[W]e understand, at least in part, some of the mechanisms which drive low dose effects and which perpetuate these not only in the exposed organism but also in its progeny and in certain cases, its kin. This means that previously held views about safe doses or lack of harmful effects cannot be sustained.”

I’ve spent a lot of time in that miserable state of anxiety where I can almost feel each invisible ray invading my body, leaving me paralyzed by fear. This is not a useful condition to be in. I have learned to resist it, in large part because every minute I spend terrorized is another minute of my life paid over to the patronizing hubris of the military-industrial complex.

On the bright side, it’s true that you’re not necessarily totally doomed if you’ve been exposed to some ionizing radiation. Your body probably does have defenses. There are far better treatments for cancers now than ever before, and survival rates are improving. As one doctor said to me, “If you’ve got to have cancer, thyroid cancer is the one to get” because it grows slowly and is unlikely to metastasize before it’s caught. Many other cancers are also treatable. But no one can say who will dodge the glowing bullet, and who will not. Nor do the cavalier shrugs of politicians and pundits take into account the inevitable emotional distress, the life disruption, and the financial strain that accompany any cancer diagnosis, even one with a cheerful prognosis.

The NTS bomb-makers let their fallout descend upon the “low-use segment of the population” because there would have been too much squawking had they let it rain on Los Angeles instead. We hear a similar concern for Tokyo now. Probably this worry derives from the difference in population density between urban and rural or small town areas, but there is a tacit implication that non-urban dwellers are more expendable than urban dwellers. How large – or rich, or well-educated, or “citified” – must a sacrifice population be for the sacrifice to be unacceptable?

In the current crisis, the constant emphasis in official pronouncements and media commentary on the very low likelihood of high enough exposures to make a person immediately sick obscures the fact that as long as we use nuclear technologies, we cannot prevent radiation exposure, and that some people are going to get sick from our use of them. The world’s Faustian bargain with these technologies requires payment. There is always somebody downwind.

If there’s anything the Fukushima disaster can teach us, it is that the public should stop tolerating the condescending sneers we’ve heard since the 1950s about the risks of nuclear technologies. Instead, we should demand honesty. Downwinders deserve to be told the truth, and allowed the chance to protect themselves. Governments and corporations must be held to that standard. For our own part, we must open that blind eye we’ve been casting on the dark side of our energy gluttony. Let’s tot up the real cost of doing nuclear business.

Personally, I don’t think that price is worth paying. And anyway, my Chernobyl necklace can’t be pawned. I’m stuck with it.

 

[Photos: Nevada, Spring 1956, Harold Edgerton]

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Reservations Halted for Nissan’s LEAF Electric Car

[Original image from Nissan Leaf website]

With 20,000 reservations in hand, (and with the Autumnal equinox only hours old) Nissan issued a notice Thursday that reservations for their much-anticipated fully electric car, the “Leaf,” had dropped out of reach. Nissan won’t be accepting any more sign-ups for awhile.

The news arrived via E-mail from Nissan USA:

We have completed the first phase of reservations. In order to provide the best level of customer service and premium ownership experience to the first Nissan LEAF drivers, we will not be accepting new reservations until the next phase begins. A subsequent phase of reservations will begin next year, after current reservations and orders have been processed.

This doesn’t mean that 20K Americans have ponied-up anything close to the announced MSRP for the basic model (SV) of $37,720 — just that they had paid a $99 refundable fee. (That MSRP doesn’t include rebates and tax incentives that should bring the net price down to a more modest $25,280, according to Nissan.)

DOE grant recipient

I’ve devoted a lot of column inches (pixels?) covering the Leaf, starting with an August 2009 DOE $2.4 billion grant for Electric Vehicles (EVs) design and production. Part of that money is being used to install 12,000 public EV charging stations as a pilot program in EV infrastructure.

The Dash

Leaf dashboard

In January 2010, when the Leaf visited Phoenix on a multi-city tour, I went to see the new EV and wrote about the “first look” at the 100-mile/charge vehicle. Later, I test drove the Leaf and described the ride at OnEarth magazine.

Ultimately, the Leaf’s success as an environmentally friendly alternative to gas-powered engines depends on the source of the electricity it uses. If you can generate all its fuel from your own rooftop PV array, or windmill, that’s a clear winner. Otherwise, the equation quickly gets more complex. Whatever the grid is serving in your area is what feeds the Leaf’s battery.

If you live in a state with a Renewable Energy Standard (RES), a portion your local utility’s electricity comes from renewable sources (RESs vary by state. Check the North Carolina Solar Center website, DSIRE, to see if your state has a RES and what it mandates).

If most of your electricity comes from a coal-fired generating plant, trading in a fuel-efficient newer model small car for a Leaf will likely be a net-loss, environmentally speaking. In Phoenix, most of our electricity comes from a nuclear power plant which is not just a low-carbon emitter, but is (I believe) the only nuclear power plant in the country that uses only treated waste water for cooling, which means it has a low water footprint as well. Strictly from a climate perspective, a Leaf seems to be a good idea here.

Of course, nuclear power comes with myriad environmental (and financial and security) debating points, all of which are beyond the scope of this article. The point, however, stands: focusing solely on what powers the vehicle, regardless of how that power is generated, may make us feel good — but it avoids the fundamental realities of how our choices increase or decrease climate change.

Still, EVs like the Nissan Leaf are an important milestone on the path to a sustainable energy future. We just have to keep on going if we are to arrive at our intended destination.

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Guest Post | The Myth of Technological Infallibility

Guest post by Roger Witherspoon

Veteran energy reporter, Roger Witherspoon, is one of the most trusted voices in the business. A long-time member of the Society of Environmental Journalists, Witherspoon has forty years experience working for newspapers (primarily in the NY/NJ area), TV (CNN and NBC) and has freelanced for many publications including Time, Newsweek, Fortune, Essence, Black Enterprise and the Economist.

This post first appeared in Witherspoon’s blog, Energy Matters. We’re grateful for his permission to reprint it here.

The unfolding events in the Gulf of Mexico . . .

underscore the importance of journalists not falling for the industrial mantra that catastrophic events can’t happen today because of “robust” safety systems and “built in redundancy” that ensure environmentally safe operations.

Oil companies have been drilling in the Gulf for decades and their work has come a long way since the 1979 blowout of the Ixtoc 1 oil well in the Bay of Campeche. That disaster gushed for months and dumped at least 140 million gallons of crude into the waters on the Mexican side of the Gulf.

Fail Safe Oil

The technology has improved markedly since then, however, and the revenues flowing in to the coffers of Gulf state governments and political campaigns have grown even further. Yet the script is an old one. The BP well which exploded, burned and sank with the bodies of 11 oil workers incorporated the latest safety technology, including a 450-ton, four-part, “fail safe” clamp on the ocean floor which was intended to shut down the well at the interface between the water and the sea floor.

Each of its four clamps should have been able to do the job — a redundancy which the industry claimed guaranteed that blowouts could not happen again. And they haven’t had one for 20 years, though there are some 4,000 rigs out there.

It was this notion of technological infallibility which led President Obama to declare April 2 that: “It turns out, by the way, that oil rigs today generally don’t cause spills. They are technologically very advanced. Even during Katrina, the spills didn’t come from the oil rigs; they came from the refineries onshore.”

But the notion that it was impossible to have a catastrophe was always arrogant and never defensible. To hold the belief in technological infallibility so strongly that disaster preparations are neither contemplated nor enacted is logically unjustifiable and reckless in the extreme. For journalists to parrot that line like paid stenographers rather than examining it thoroughly and questioning its premise is professionally indefensible.

Only weeks after the spill did federal officials or the mainstream media bother reading BP’s emergency environmental plan and find it was fiction, replete with statements from dead scientists and plans to save the habitats of walruses and other creatures never found in the Gulf. Even worse was the discovery that the other major oil drilling companies had each submitted the identical creative writing for federal approval – and got it since no one in authority or in the newsrooms bothered to read the documents.

It was pathetic to hear Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Dr. Lisa Jackson state in a May 24 press conference that there were no emergency plans and no adequate systems for coping with the spreading oil spill because “we were told over and over by the industry that it could not happen. So we have few tools out there.”

Fail Safe Nuclear

The same mantra is incorporated in President Obama’s energy legislation, which would allow the nuclear industry to tap the taxpayers for some $1.2 trillion to build “safe” nuclear power plants. In discussions of the next generation of nuclear power, all too often uncritical reporters have generated stories stating as fact that the new breed of reactors — which exist only on paper and, where they have progressed from the drawing boards, have failed all tests — are so safe that they can be placed in residential neighborhoods with no problems.

Such willful dispensation of critical thinking is understandable with politicians, who are paid by energy companies to win elections. But reporters are paid to represent the public interest.

Duct tape repair at Indian Point nuclear power plant

There is no technology – from roller skates and clothes irons, to oil platforms to nuclear reactors – which can’t be screwed up by the humans that make it, operate it or, in the tragic case of the Deepwater Horizon, factor finances into decisions about how thin their critical safety margins need to be. And human decision makers playing the odds with public safety are not helped by the unforgiving real world – in BP’s case, the intense, ton-per-square-inch pressures generated by the weight of four miles of seawater and rock.

In writing about any technological development coming through a region of this ecologically diverse country – gas lines, high tension lines, reactors, airports, chemical plants, etc – journalists do readers a disservice if they quote officials touting how safe their operations are without giving equal emphasis to the possibility of calamity. The potential damage is always just as important as the potential boon to the local economy. The documents which are now being reported about were available long before the Deepwater Horizon blew up and sank.

That mindset on the part of regulators is not limited to the discredited Minerals Management Service.

Twenty years before 9/11/2001, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission had the foresight to order a study of the potential impact of commercial jets on nuclear reactor sites. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ analysis found that the damage from such a crash directly into a containment building or spent fuel pool, at speeds above 466 miles per hour, would be catastrophic. But the risk assessment prepared in the 1980s by Consolidated Edison of New York, which owned the Indian Point nuclear power plant found that the odds of a crash were so slight that it did not warrant much consideration. That conclusion came despite the presence of five major airports in the region and the fact that the Hudson River landing corridor was just 250 feet directly above the plants.

Con Edison: Deliberate crash by aircraft into containment building not worth considering

Con Edison did raise the issue of a hijacked aircraft ramming the reactors, but concluded

a commercial jet could cause extensive damage but the notion of a deliberate crash into the containment building is so out of the range of probability that we have not calculated odds for it in this risk analysis.

It would be 20 years before a hijacked United Airlines jet flew directly over the twin containment buildings jutting into the midst of the Hudson River from the promontory at Indian Point en route to their destination at the World Trade Center. The federal 9/11 Commission would later conclude that Indian Point was the terrorists’ backup target.

In this case, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission belatedly recognized that terrorism cannot be dismissed. Unfortunately, there is no experience to factor such an event into the long-established formulas used for risk assessment. As a result, the NRC has decreed that preventing terrorism is a federal responsibility and the commercial nuclear operators do not have to plan for such an event.

Recognizing the possibility of a nuclear disaster represents progress, of sorts, from the discredited view of oil industry regulators that a disaster is impossible. But the outcome would be more disastrous for those living in the wide ranging path of meandering radioactive clouds than it is for the millions of citizens and businesses affected by the lakes of crude oil meandering a various depths throughout the Gulf of Mexico.

It would be unfortunate if the spreading calamity in the Gulf did not awaken the mainstream media to the potential for catastrophes all around.