Greetings – Here are some fresh, local milk testing results thanks to UC Berkeley’s Dept. of Nuclear Engineering, with no thanks at all to our EPA, which stopped publishing new water or milk testing data two weeks ago. (According to EPA’s site, it takes 4 hours to get results, and 3 days to analyze them. EPA data result pages say “Updated April 6th,” but the actual tables show nothing collected after March 26th.)

Anyway, the UC Berkeley results shown below only confirm that radioactive iodine-131 does show up in Bay Area milk samples, with a spike in milk bottled around March 18th showing a “best by” date of April 4th, and decreasing after that. It does not solve for you what decisions to make about health impact. For our family, there is no drastically urgent need for children in particular to drink milk right now. Plus we’re just irritated by the ratio of placation to actual information. “Far below levels of concern” is the repeated guidance from the EPA and other public agencies.

The long-documented problems with the basis for public “safe level” standards are highlighted in separate posts. These include the fundamental difficulty that these standards are based on external exposure data collected from the one-time blasts at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and are not based on the internal ingestion effects documented in long-term, large scale epidemiological studies available from Chernobyl health data. In addition, thyroid cancer among children resulting from the ingestion of radioactive iodine-131 isotopes in milk (and to be accurate, leafy greens) was the most significant health effect of Chernobyl, and is not reflected in the basis for “safe levels” of exposure determining EPA and other public guidances. Good news is, it breaks down quickly. Bad news is, tomorrow we have to figure out Cesium.

But here’s Berkeley:

The following are results for milk samples obtained from a Bay Area organic dairy where the farmers are encouraged to feed their cows local grass. We have detected I-131, at 0.70 Becquerels per liter and lower, as well as Cs-134 and Cs-137.

Because the “best by” date on milk is approximately 17-19 days after the milk has been bottled, our milk sample with a date of 3/25 represents milk bottled on approximately 3/5. Since this is before the Fukushima crisis, we do not expect to see any fission product radioisotopes and do not see any within our sensitivity. Our first sample of milk showing any signs of radioisotopes has a date of 4/4, which means it was bottled around 3/18. This is approximately when the trace radioactive isotopes were first seen in the Bay Area.

The first two milk measurements were done with the same setup as the Rainwater Collection Experiment, except that the milk is not distilled first before counting it with the germanium detector. The remaining measurements are being performed with a mechanically-cooled germanium detector on loan from ORTEC and AMETEK. The new detector is larger than the previous detector, and we can fit almost an entire gallon of milk in the Marinelli beaker (previously, we could measure only one quart of milk). This leads to an improvement in overall sensitivity to radioactive isotopes.

Wouldn’t you love to read that headline in the otherwise crap morning news? It’s time to take this nuclear angst on the road. Diablo Canyon is too close to all of us, we don’t need its power, it’s run by the same bumbling PG&E that can’t map a gas line or get a story straight, and it decides if our families get to survive an earthquake or not.

So can you slam a carpool of similarly worried people together and haul up to Sacramento the morning of April 14th? There’s a key Senate Energy Committee hearing titled “After Japan: Nuclear Power Plant Safety in California.” Timing is a little TBD, as it says it starts at the “adjournment of session.” 9:30 with a good book and a sack of snacks? Hearing will be in the Capitol Building Room 4203, public comments needed. Parking garages available at 10th & L, 11th & I.

THURSDAY, APRIL 14, 2011
ENERGY, UTILITIES AND COMMUNICATIONS
PADILLA, Chair
Upon adjournment of Session
John L. Burton Hearing Room (4203)
“After Japan: Nuclear Power Plant Safety in California”

Meanwhile, did you know PG&E has so much surplus power capacity every year you could shut down at least FIVE Diablo Canyon nuclear plants? Yes. The two reactors at Diablo Canyon total 2200 megawatts of power, while PG&E’s own documents show them running an average surplus power capacity every single year of over 12,000 megawatts. Call me simple, but that math tells me you shut Diablo down tomorrow, replace it with surplus power immediately, and then retrain its 1405 employees to install and manage new efficiency resources and renewables all over the place. Because when’s the last time you heard of a massive solar panel catastrophe with global health implications for all time?

This is difficult. Despite the ham-handed reassurances of one press account after another, one public agency after another, here are the reasons I am torturing myself and our milk-loving children by having them take a big, long milk break:

1. Milk and rainwater are both testing positive in California for the radioactive iodine-131 isotope.

2. Cows concentrate radioactive iodide 1000 times in milk, a fact not included in the CA Dept of Health’s mention of milk. The thyroid gland, most active and vulnerable in children, then concentrates the iodine.

3. “Safe Levels” of radiation used by the Nuclear Regulatory Agency, the EPA and others are based, problematically and inexplicably, on external exposure effects at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They extrapolate guidances regarding the internal ingestion of radioactive isotopes, isotopes which lodge and concentrate in specific locations of the body, from the health effects of generalized external radiation. These “safe levels” ignore readily available long-term, large scale epidemiological studies showing how ingested radioactive isotopes actually impacted health after Chernobyl. I look at this, and decide whether it’s urgent that my children drink milk right now or not.

4. Information in EVERY crisis improves over time. Soothing talking points from public agencies are always the norm in the first weeks, but with enough time, even the IAEA acknowledges the following:

The main consequence of the Chernobyl accident is thyroid cancer in children, some of whom were not yet born at the time of the accident. Following the vapour explosion and fire at the Chernobyl reactor, radioactive iodine was released and spread in the surrounding area. Despite measures taken, children in southern Belarus and northern Ukraine, were exposed to radiation in the weeks following the accident , particularly by consuming milk from pastured cows and leafy vegetables that had been contaminated with radioactive iodine. The thyroid is a small gland located in the front of the neck. It concentrates iodine from the diet and blood to produce important hormones that help the body function normally. Thyroid cancer is a very rare disease. Since the thyroid gland concentrates iodine, it is highly susceptible to radiation damage from any intake of radioactive isotopes of iodine. Once ingested or inhaled, the radioactive iodine remains in the thyroid and can cause thyroid cells to become cancerous and tumours to form.

5. IF Japan gets under control (they are now using diapers, sawdust, bath salts & newspaper, no joke), this milk-ban could be for a short period of time. The height of radiation arriving in California, so far, was in the heavy rains of the weekend of March 18th-20th, according to my lay reading of EPA monitors. I’m going all Scarlett O’Hara on the seawater question, as in tomorrow is another day, but in the meantime:

From the CA Dept of Public Health: “Based on what we now know about Japan’s nuclear accident, radioactive iodine should decrease in the coming weeks. It is estimated that levels will be virtually undetectable soon and dissipate completely in the coming months.”

So to summarize, it’s just two weeks since the recorded fact that radioactive isotopes fell in rainwater from the Jet Stream onto California grass, where pastured cows ate it, and concentrated it 1000 times in their milk. Thyroid cancer in children who drank milk after Chernobyl was the number one health consequence, from the same substance, by the same basic biological chemistry.

Why would we wait for the report to come out 10 years from now, predictably showing that the public agencies once again played it down and got it wrong? There is no critical reason for children to drink milk when milk is testing positive for radioactive iodine.

Finally, a few excerpts regarding “low level radiation.” It is denied that low level radiation has any impact at Three Mile Island, but independent health studies have shown 600-fold increases in cancers there. “Low level” is an irrelevant qualifier to the unlucky roulette loser who ingests the isotope.

We can’t avoid the airborne and we’re stuck with the cesium, but our children can wait out the radioactive iodine concentrated in the milk with (relative) ease. Japan is another story of course, an unspeakable river of loss. ***In honor of Japan’s ongoing catastrophe, do save the date: April 14th, estimated start time 9:30am, Sacramento hearing on nukes & quakes. It’s time to replace PG&E’s Diablo with existing power.

In other notes:

“The U.S. Department of Energy has testified that there is no level of radiation that is so low that it is without health risks,” Jacqueline Cabasso, the Executive Director of the Western States Legal Foundation.

Her foundation monitors and analyzes U.S. nuclear weapons programs and policies and related high technology energy, with a focus on the national nuclear weapons laboratories.

Cabasso explained that natural background radiation exists, “But more than 2,000 nuclear tests have enhanced this background radiation level, so we are already living in an artificially radiated environment due to all the nuclear tests.”

“Karl Morgan, who worked on the Manhattan project, later came out against the nuclear industry when he understood the danger of low levels of ionizing radiation-and he said there is no safe dose of radiation exposure,” Cabasso continued, “That means all this talk about what a worker or the public can withstand on a yearly basis is bogus. There is no safe level of radiation exposure. These so-called safe levels are coming from within the nuclear establishment.”

“Nobody is talking about the fact that there is no safe dose of radiation,” Cabasso added, “One of the reasons Morgan said this is because doses are cumulative in the body.”

The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) published a report in 2006 titled Biological Effects of Ionizing Radiation (BEIR) report, VII Phase 2. NAS BEIR VII was an expert panel who reviewed available peer reviewed literature and wrote, “the committee concludes that the preponderance of information indicates that there will be some risk, even at low doses.”

The concluding statement of the report reads, “The committee concludes that the current scientific evidence is consistent with the hypothesis that there is a linear, no-threshold dose-response relationship between exposure to ionizing radiation and the development of cancer in humans.”

This means that the sum of several very small exposures to radiation has the same effect as one large exposure, since the effects of radiation are cumulative.

The Central Institute for Meteorology and Geodynamics of Vienna told New Scientist on March 24: “Japan’s damaged nuclear plant in Fukushima has been emitting radioactive iodine and caesium at levels approaching those seen in the aftermath of the Chernobyl accident in 1986. Austrian researchers have used a worldwide network of radiation detectors – designed to spot clandestine nuclear bomb tests – to show that iodine-131 is being released at daily levels 73 per cent of those seen after the 1986 disaster. The daily amount of caesium-137 released from Fukushima Daiichi is around 60 per cent of the amount released from Chernobyl.”

The same group of scientists stated, “The Fukushima plant has around 1760 tonnes of fresh and used nuclear fuel on site,” while, “the Chernobyl reactor had only 180 tonnes.”

According to a report from the New York Academy of Sciences, due to the Chernobyl disaster, 985,000 people have died, mainly from cancer, between 1986-2004

NEW YORK—“Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment,” Volume 1181 of Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, published online in November 2009, was authored by Alexey V. Yablokov, of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Alexey V. Nesterenko, of the Institute of Radiation Safety (Belarus), and the late Prof. Vassily B. Nesterenko, former director of the Belarussian Nuclear Center. With a foreword by the Chairman of the Ukranian National Commission on Radiation Protection, Dimitro M. Grodzinsky, the 327-page volume is an English translation of a 2007 publication by the same authors. The earlier book, “Chernobyl,” published in Russian, presented an analysis of the scientific literature, including more than 1,000 titles and more than 5,000 printed and Internet publications mainly in Slavic languages, on the consequences of the Chernobyl disaster.