"Ethical issues in Waste Disposal: a Discussion Paper"
Response from Richard Bramhall, of the Low Level Radiation Campaign

I am not sure who has written this "Ethical issues" paper (received 8th December); no source is identified, I've no idea who it's been sent to, and there's no address for responses. Did I miss something?

I'm confining my remarks to the section "LNT and its consequences". It is strange that the author confines discussion to the question of whether the Linear No Threshold model is valid. I'd agree that if a threshold could be demonstrated, then yes, arguments against dispersing radioactivity into the environment (either soon or in the far distant future) would mostly collapse. But LNT is scarcely a bulwark against such dumping.

Even under the present regime where collective dose calculations are applied, LNT allows the health effects to be written off as "trivial" and "acceptable". That's why Roger Clarke  - by training a nuclear physicist - is keen to dump collective dose. Incidentally, I don't see him using the alleged economic arguments against a threshold -the establishment knows damn' well they cannot demonstrate a threshold, let alone hormesis - "little doses are good for you". The scientific argument is going in the opposite direction. I will not rehearse it all here. Please take a look at www.llrc.org/rat4211.htm. It's a report of a scientific meeting in October and shows that LNT itself is a wild approximation; mainstream radiation biologists are saying that basic concepts like absorbed dose and relative biological effectiveness (which support the present model) are meaningless at the low doses we are concerned with in environmental pollution. So all bets are off, even in the conservative and inherently pro-nuclear world of the Health Physicists. The best they can come up with is the slogan ATLAS - "At These Levels Act Scientifically". Lets be a bit sympathetic - the "truths" they have lived with for half a century are collapsing into chaos - they must be feeling lost, poor dears. ATLANTIS - the "Assumption That Linear No Threshold Is Safe" - is sinking. We have been pointing out for ages that it is in respect of internal radiation that the standard dose response model breaks down. This is the area of greatest interest if one is thinking about emissions and releases, because the radioactivity is blowing around and getting into everyone's air and food.

According to the establishment, studies like the Record Linkage Study fail to show a link between radiation and disease because there is no correlation with exposure. But the claims are false because the exposure is estimated on the basis of film badges - just look at the detail beyond the abstracts and the press spin and you can see that where internal contamination is suspected (emphasise "suspected" - it doesn't even have to be certain) cancer and leukaemia risks are markedly higher. Similarly, studies which are claimed to show no higher leukaemia risk after Chernobyl [e.g. Parkin's pan European study] or at the time of weapons test fallout [Darby and Doll's Nordic study] actually show the opposite.

And the clincher - Busby's recently published paper on infant leukaemia after Chernobyl [ref*] shows that ICRP/NRPB's radiation risk factors contain a 100-fold error. Now, the big question is: It's in the literature, how could you discount it? Repeat: How could you or the nukes discount it? Here's the detail: a sharp peak in leukaemia in babies shortly after the Chernobyl accident was reported from five countries:- Wales, Scotland, Greece, Germany and the USA. NRPB calculated the radiation doses in UK and said that theoretically leukaemia would increase by a fraction of one case (if you can image a fractional leukaemia victim). But the number of cases actually diagnosed was at least 100 times NRPB's prediction. It could be as much as 2000 times, depending on which exposure route was responsible for the actual incidence.  The huge number of babies in the at risk population means that these results are statistically rock solid, and it's only the radiation that could have caused the disease - they weren't born or in many cases even conceived at the time of the accident; there's no population mixing in the womb, and nobody washing their babies too much, or any of the other bullshit explanations for leukaemia, so how does anybody answer this finding - especially when we know the accepted radiation risk model is guesswork? The problem here is that Busby's paper puts such a large number on the scale of the error that you - dyed in the wool anti-nuclear though you may be - don't dare to believe it.

But just think - it does not mean that ICRP have got ALL their predictions wrong; it doesn't mean that even the hormesis curve is totally wrong - it just means that the error is in the very low dose region - the very region where the academics who addressed the SRP in October said all bets were off. And it probably means that the hormesis curve is part of the whole picture - they've failed to look at the very low dose region. This idea of a large error at low dose but broad agreement (maybe) at higher doses is exactly in line with the biphasic dose/response curve demonstrated by Burlakova [ref**] and also visible in leukaemia incidence after Chernobyl, according to World Health Organisation data. WHO has given approximate exposure levels in Greece, Germany and the United States, so it is possible to examine the leukaemia yield in the infant 'exposed cohort' reported by several studies (they're all referenced in Busby's paper) and establish a dose response relationship. The dose/response curve has a curious shape which goes up, down and up again - i.e. the biphasic curve. I'll put this on the web site as soon as I can. The URL will be www.llrc.org/durs.htm#biphasic

Please contact me if you don't find it when you need to. A biphasic dose/response curve is also visible in data used by NRPB's chief epidemiologist and anorak Colin Muirhead but ignored by him - he just draws his straight LNT line avoiding the low dose/ high effect data points, presumably because he thinks they are anomalies. The bottom line is that LNT is a guesstimate the nuclear establishment can live with, while real world data show something far more dangerous at low dose. End of argument for all nuclear processes which entail environmental releases - that's ALL nuclear processes, unless they clean up their act pretty drastically. We can't consider waste strategies without thinking about emissions, dilution, site delicensing, decommissioning and environmental dumping. Certainly the authorities don't.

Look at "RWMAC's advice to Ministers on the problems of small users of radioactive materials" (this is very recent). They openly advocate easing restrictions on disposal and argue for adoption of the so-called latest science on radiotoxicity which the pro-nuclear IAEA has been pushing for 10 years or more - inappropriate science based on physics, not on biology or medicine, and moving strongly in the direction of more latitude for disposal and looser standards for decontaminating land that the nukes want to wash their hands of and sell for housing.

The stakes are stupendously high. Cancer rates going through the roof -growth is roughly 1% per annum globally. The government said for years that cancer was a disease of old age and that if cancer semed more prevalent it was because people weren't dying of other causes, but the latest figures from  ONS show a 51% increase in UK between 1971 and 1997 - much faster than can be accounted for by the ageing of the population. And a recent scientific meeting in Kos (report in next Radioactive Times) agreed by consensus that a major factor in the world wide epidemic of cancer is involuntary exposure to environmental levels of man-made radiation. 8 million new cases a year is a lot of human suffering. With many papers and letters we have overpassed the peer review hurdle that both the nukes and the environmental movement have demanded of us and we have produced incontrovertible evidence to refute LNT. The nukes will ignore it for as long as possible, greens should be rubbing their noses in it.

regards to all

Richard Bramhall
email: bramhall@llrc.org
tel: 01597 824771
The Knoll
Montpellier Park
Llandrindod Wells
Powys LD1 5LW

refs:
* Busby, C. Scott Cato, M. 2000 Increases in Leukaemia in Infants in Wales and Scotland Following Chernobyl: Evidence for Errors in Statutory Risk Estimates. Energy and Environment Vol. 11 2000, No. 2 127-139

** Radiation Protection Dosimetry: Radiobiological Consequences of nuclear accidents: contamination, radioecology, radiobiology and health. Eds. E. B. Burlakova, V. Naidich J. B. Reitan. Nuclear Technology Publications, 62 1-2 1995 pp 13 - 19 ISBN 1870965 41 8