It was new to me that nuclear industries were permitted by law to expose people routinely to ionizing radiation. I started to look back to see where these "permissible levels" began.
They were started in 1950 by the British, U.S., and Canadian physicists who had worked on the Manhattan Project, which produced the first nuclear bombs. After World War II, as early as 1946, they began exploding nuclear bombs in the Pacific. They had a theory that the radioactive fallout would only go halfway around the world--but discovered it went around two and a half times. Every country had its own radiation protection regulations and there was a fear that some of these would be violated. In fact, Britain, Canada, and the U.S. had three different sets of numbers. So between 1946 and 1950 the physicists hammered out a compromise they believed would allow them to do weapons testing. They could then establish themselves as an international recommending body accepted by other countries. They even stated quite clearly that this might not be protective of public health, but that they could find that out later. Meanwhile, they could undertake all the activities needed to build nuclear bombs and test them.
Most nations accepted these regulations and thought all was safe if they followed these numbers. They had no idea, for example, that the permissible level of radiation for members of the general public would be a bone marrow dose of 500 millirem per year--equivalent to the bone marrow dose of 100 chest X rays a year. Nuclear industry workers were allowed ten times as much.
When the medical and biological community began protesting these regulations in the late 1960s, the response was, "Well, we don't really pay attention to these numbers; we really operate ALARA--As Low As Reasonably Achievable, given the economic and social benefits of the activity." The operating mode is called risk-benefit planning. Risks are life and health--dying of cancer, having a deformed child. The benefit side is to make money or gain political power. The bad news is that the people who make these trade-offs for us are the same people who get the benefits. (It was only after decades of pressure that the International Commission on Radiological Protection (ICRP) voted unanimously in November 1990 to lower worker-exposure and public-exposure levels--the latter to 100 millirem. Although these are still too high, any progress is heartening.)
When there are such "incidents" as the Chernobyl accident--although radioactive pollution from local industries can be cumulatively greater than from Chernobyl--each is individually judged against these unreal standards. When it comes to an accident, there's no way to achieve a lower level, so special regulations for accidents are set to make them acceptable.
We are now in a no-win situation with radioactive materials, where it has become acceptable to have cancer deaths, deformed children, and miscarriages. The "benefit," oddly enough, is not the medical benefit, nor electricity--it is nuclear bombs. The same set of regulations is used for all three industries--energy, medical, and military--and when it comes to the bottom line, the cost benefit ratio is calculated on the basis of preventing a ten-megaton blast on London, Paris, or New York; the final judgment becomes what is needed for "national security."
Now nuclear power proponents have again mounted a synchronized international campaign to push nuclear reactors as a "solution" to the greenhouse effect. Like previous public relations programs at the time of the OPEC oil crisis and the acid rain discovery, these arguments are highly selective and unconvincing. The grain of truth in the propaganda is that nuclear reactors do not emit carbon dioxide or such gases as methane, nitrous oxide, and the chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs). However, the reactor is only one small part of the nuclear fuel cycle. It cannot function without the large supporting network of mining, milling, fuel fabrication, enrichment, waste disposal, decommissioning, and the web of transportation linking these steps. Claiming nuclear production of energy is "clean" is like dieting but stuffing yourself with food between meals.
What are the alternatives for industrialized countries? A case study of the Federal Republic of Germany using 120 different energy efficiency improvements demonstrated that the nation could maintain its standard of living with a 70 percent reduction in end-use of energy. A 1983 study at M.I.T. Energy Laboratory in the U.S. concluded that improving energy usage by one percent a year caused no social strain and could reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 50 percent by 2050.
Promoting nuclear technology raises false expectations, usurps money better spent in energy efficiency, and substitutes emissions of radionuclides for emissions of carbon dioxide. The intelligent customer will not substitute one pollution for another, but will rather eliminate both by more efficient energy use.
This is imperative, because we now find ourselves in a strange situation, where the military strategy to save industrialized countries is not only destroying the environment and the gene pool of those countries, but also destroying the biosphere, as radioactive material is circulated in the air, water, and food--whether or not we have a nuclear accident or war.
Mild mutations constitute a subtle undermining of the gene pool. It is not talked about or measured, but it is occurring. What you do is create a next generation that is physically less able to cope with hazardous material than their parents were. If you do two things at once--mildly damage the next generation (genetic damage) and increase the hazards in the environment--after two or three generations you are finished. People will be physically less able to cope, and they will have more to cope with. We are also talking about physical damage to the brain, inability to think as clearly and as well as previous generations. With aboveground weapons testing there was a decrease in general intelligence quotient as measured by standardized tests. Irradiation is the most efficient of the mutagens (99 percent of which are negative for humans), and most threatening in terms of species survival.
There is another property of radiation. When chromosomes are damaged and then damaged a second time before they have had a chance to repair, you have some bizarre problems. These are considered peculiar to radiation (most non-radioactive chemicals don't create these double breaks within a four- to six-hour period); a child developed from damaged chromosomes may have a broad spectrum of defects.
I would encourage chemists who have never worked with radiation to begin thinking about radioactive chemicals; these form a spectrum from low to high human toxicity. On the other hand, radiobiologists often know nothing about dioxins or other toxic chemicals; there needs to be dialogue between these fields because all human life is threatened. The hazards are all serious, but I would put nuclear pollution at the top of the list.
Our present path is headed toward species death--whether fast, with nuclear war or technological disaster, or slow, by poison. I see people reacting as they react to death, generally by denial or anger and frustration or by a certain barter where they try to come to terms with it, but not fully. I don't think that, as a species, we're depraved or locked in to committing mass suicide. I think we're stupid enough to do it and capable of doing it, but there is nothing necessitating our doing it.
The unmasking of the human species' terminal illness must involve dealing with violence: personal, family, city, national, and global. Some violence has been renounced, for example, a father's right to kill his child: but other forms of violence still are seen as "socially useful," for example, torture, imprisonment, killing children by sending them to war, and of course epidemic violence against women.
If, as a society, we are able to break out of this phase, it will be due to the careful building of a consensus in various social and political groups, which make an impact on the national power structures from within and from without. As they become more international in their thinking and acting, these groups are developing the infrastructure for the global village. Women, who have not become so unnaturally separated from their instincts, need to assume social roles for idea input, facilitating consensus decision-making, and seeing to the equitable implementation of plans and sustainability of the society's work.
In a special way, women attend to the birthing and dying within society, and we have now turned this concern toward the process of species death--or the birthing of a new way of conducting human affairs that might avert such a death. The inclusion of women and a feminist perspective in the idea, decision-making, and implementation sectors of society is vital for species survival.
This implies for males a general reduction of power over other human beings and a playing down of masculine values, including conflict and violence within nations, workplaces, and families. Although men have always said they go to war for the sake of the women and children, it is apparent that men are willing to hurt or kill women and children in order to go to war, thinking they are serving their nation. There are beautiful aspects of nationalism that we can keep, like customs, language, lifestyle, food. But there is no reason why we need to raise standing armies and kill people who don't agree with us.
We have much of the infrastructure in place; we have global communication, we have transportation, we know the way to cure most diseases, we have one and a half times as much food as we need for the global population. What we are talking about giving up is the right of a nation to force its own people to kill others, whether internally or externally. That is a very simple thing. Yet if we could do that we could begin to organize on the basis of a global village that would not only respect diversity, but be glad of it, because survival comes from an ability to cope with many changing situations, an ability to share when one part of the world has abundance and another part has need.
Our monoculture is another form of suicide; diversity gives us survival.
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