Clouds of Deceit (21 page)

The simplest way to look at the effects of radiation is to divide them into two categories: those effects which are related to the size of the dose, and those which are not. In the first category comes radiation sickness, the illness which was graphically demonstrated to the world after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The victim suffers from a whole range of symptoms, including diarrhoea, sickness and exhaustion; if the dose received is very high, the victim will probably die within two months. The smaller the dose, the more likely it becomes that the person will survive. Below a certain dose, the victim will not suffer radiation sickness at all.

This means there is a threshold, a dose below which radiation sickness will not be caused. Other examples of this type of effect are hair loss and skin burns. If you are exposed to a low enough dose of radiation, you simply will not suffer from them.

The effects which fall into the second category, the induction of cancer and genetic effects, do not work in this way at all. There is no dose of radiation so small that it cannot produce cancer or a change that will appear in a future generation. Unlike radiation sickness, the severity of the effect is not
affected by the dose. You either get cancer or a genetic effect or you do not. If the dose gets bigger, it is
your chance of suffering the effect
that increases. Put simply, this means that the higher the dose, the more people in the exposed group will develop cancer or a genetic defect because of it.

This hypothesis is now accepted by members of the scientific community, from Dr Alice Stewart, of Birmingham University, a stern opponent of nuclear power, to Sir Edward Pochin, consultant to the director of the National Radiological Protection Board, who takes a much more optimistic view than Stewart of the effects of low-level radiation. But it took a long time for the lack of a threshold to be accepted; in the early days of radiation protection, the assumption of the scientific community was that a threshold did exist.

The conduct of the debate in the 1950s is a good example of how difficult it is for members of the public to obtain unbiased information about the subject of radiation. Pro-nuclear scientists argued confidently and noisily in favour of the threshold hypothesis, as if it were established fact rather than the subject of violent controversy. The public could certainly be forgiven if it was confused.

The idea that there was no threshold for genetic effects was articulated by a highly respectable scientific body as early as 1947. A committee set up in Britain by the Medical Research Council (MRC) reported in February that year that there did not seem to be any dose too low to produce a genetic effect. ‘All quantitative experiments show that even the smallest doses of radiation produce a genetic effect,' it reported, ‘there being no threshold dose below which no genetic effect is induced.'

But the debate did not move from the laboratory into the public domain until the early 1950s. The cause was the atmospheric bomb tests. For the first time, the public was being exposed to radiation in addition to that from the natural background - which comes from sources like the sun - through worldwide fallout from the explosions.

Very sensibly, people in Britain and the US became worried about fallout; their concern was unwelcome to their governments, who were busily letting off bombs and did not want to
stop. The tenor of the argument about whether a threshold existed was heavily influenced by this consideration; the claim that no harm was being done rested on the notion that the amounts of radiation to which the public was being exposed were too small to do any harm.

The debate was hardly conducted in a spirit of free and frank scientific exchange. In 1955, two scientists from Colorado University, Ray Lanier and Theodore Puck, challenged an assertion by the American Atomic Energy Commission that the tests posed an insignificant hazard. The Governor of Colorado, Edwin C. Johnson, responded by saying Lanier and Puck ‘should be arrested'.

In 1956, the prestigious US National Academy of Sciences set up committees to examine the hazards of radiation. One committee came to the same conclusion as the MRC in Britain, that there was no threshold for genetic effects. Curiously, another of the committees concluded there
was
a safe limit for one particularly dangerous radioactive substance, strontium 90.

The controversy continued in 1957. An article in
Science
magazine suggested for the first time that there was no threshold for leukaemia. The article, by E. B. Lewis, of the California Institute of Technology, came under attack in the US but received support from Andrei Sakharov in Russia.

At the same time, American citizens who wrote to President Eisenhower with their worries about fallout from the bomb tests were being sent a reassuring statement written by Dr Charles L. Dunham, director of a division of the US Atomic Energy Commission. ‘Most of the leading pathologists believe that a threshold dose of radiation exists below which exposure to radiation will not cause leukaemia,' Dunham said.

Another scientist, Dr Austin M. Brues, director of a research division at the Argonne National Laboratory, which is run by the US Department of Energy, was also arguing in favour of a threshold. ‘There are also good reasons from what we know about the nature of cancer to suspect that the hazard goes down faster than the initiating agent,' Brues said.

In an article in
Life
magazine in February 1958 entitled ‘The Compelling Need for Nuclear Tests', two more US-based
scientists, Dr Edward Teller and Dr Albert Latter, gave their view that radiation in small doses might not be harmful and might even be helpful.

Teller, a Hungarian scientist who went to the US before the Second World War, was known as the father of the American hydrogen bomb. He was also one of Linus Pauling's chief opponents in the argument about nuclear testing. Pauling was infuriated by all these statements from scientists which minimized the risk from fallout and suggested there was a threshold below which no harm would be done.

‘There is no safe dose of radiation or of radioactive material,' he warned in 1958. ‘Even small amounts do harm.' Pauling's view was quickly vindicated. From 1958 onwards, the body which sets international standards for radiation exposure - the International Commission on Radiological Protection - abandoned the threshold hypothesis when it was working out its recommendations on exposure.

It was far from being the end of the matter, however. The debate about the effects of radiation simply shifted ground. Once the notion of a threshold had been abandoned, it was no longer possible to set limits which would give people
absolute protection
from damage caused by radiation. The limits are actually levels at which the risk - of getting cancer or undergoing some kind of change which will appear in à later generation - is considered so small as to be acceptable. To do this, you need a pretty good idea of how many cancers are likely to be induced by a certain dose of radiation. That is a question to which scientists still cannot agree an answer.

That a controversy exists over the effects of low-level radiation is something you would never begin to suspect if you confined your reading to official British statements about the bomb tests. Government ministers have simply ignored the issue by referring to international standards set for exposure to radiation in industry today.

‘Safety precautions were taken that compare favourably with the international standards in force today,' the junior Defence Minister, Geoffrey Pattie, told MPs in March 1984. ‘These limits
were comparable with those which apply to radiation workers today,' the Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, said in January 1985.

Of course, the degree of trust that can be placed in those limits depends on the standing of the organization that recommended them. In this case, the body which makes the recommendations is the International Commission on Radiological Protection (ICRP). It is an organization with close links to the nuclear industry, with a poor record when it comes to speaking out on man-made radiation hazards, and which has itself admitted that its limits are set at a level which does not hinder the commercial development of nuclear power.

Scientists interested in radiation held their first congresses in the 1920s. In 1928, they set up an organization which was the forerunner of the ICRP, the International Commission of X-ray and Radium Protection. Its last meeting before the Second World War took place in 1938; it did not meet again until 1950, when it held a congress in London and turned itself into the ICRP. From time to time, after reviewing the available evidence, it issues recommendations on the radiation doses permitted for workers in the nuclear industry and for members of the public. In one form or another, these limits, which themselves have no legal status, are incorporated into law by many countries throughout the world, including Britain.

The commission has thirteen members who sit for periods of four years. New members are elected by existing members. The ICRP also has four expert committees to advise it on subjects like the effects of radiation. Members of the commission and its committees are supposed to be chosen for their expert knowledge of radiation protection; in fact, it is almost unheard-of for any outspoken critics of the nuclear industry to get on to the commission. It is dominated by scientists who have links with either the commercial exploitation of nuclear energy or governmental organizations concerned with the development of nuclear energy.

Dr Rosalie Bertell, an expert on cancer and probably its most implacable critic, says that the ICRP's structure has ensured that ‘participation in standard-setting has been dominated by
colleagues from the military, the civilian nuclear establishment and the medical radiological societies, who nominate one another'. These people, she says, have ‘a vested interest in the use of radiation and depreciation of the risks in its use'.

A more surprising critic is the American physicist, Professor Karl Z. Morgan, until 1973 a member of the commission and chair of one of its expert committees. Morgan expressed his doubts about it when he spoke to a conference at Guy's Hospital in London in 1979. The ICRP ‘has never been willing to offend the establishment and I'm not sure it's an organization I would trust with my life,' he said.

In January 1985, a British academic called Patrick Green published an MSc thesis on the low-level radiation controversy in which he analysed membership of the ICRP from 1959 to 1981. In that period, a total of ninety-one scientists could have served on the commission if each member had retired after one four-year period. Only thirty-seven had, demonstrating the self-perpetuating nature of the body.

Green found that the dominant influence on the ICRP in this period came from scientists connected with the nuclear industry. Two men each had a total of twenty-six years' service on the commission and its committees; they were John Dunster, a British physicist who also held senior positions with the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority, and Henri Jammet, a French physicist who headed a department at the French atomic energy commission.

After these two, there were three scientists who had served for twenty-three years each; all had connections with governmental nuclear establishments. One held an important position with the Argentine atomic energy commission, for instance.

In the period Green looked at, fourteen of the thirty-seven scientists who sat on the commission were physicists, always the most hawkish people in the scientific community on the subject of nuclear energy. ‘The biological and environmental sciences have been poorly represented,' Green commented.

His conclusion on the ICRP is damning. Far from being concerned with examining the fundamental principles of radiation protection, he says, it ‘has shown itself to be an organization
concerned with the commercial exploitation of nuclear energy'. The ICRP's own publications suggest as much. When it issued recommended levels of exposure in 1966, it accompanied them with this revealing statement: ‘The commission believes that this level provides reasonable latitude for the expansion of atomic energy programs in the foreseeable future.' It even went on to admit that the limit it suggested might not have got the risk right.

The commission was in a unique position when it reformed itself in the 1950s to act as the public's watchdog on fallout from the atmospheric tests: it did not. So it is hardly surprising that British ministers feel quite safe hiding behind the ICRP's skirts when it comes to defending their record on the bomb tests.

The radiation limits set for the British tests are, to some extent, a red herring. What matters is the kind of dose people received, not the amount to which they could, in theory, have been exposed. The prescribed limits do, however, give us a glimpse of just how dismissive British scientists were of the risks of radiation.

Any discussion of doses of radiation is bedevilled by the multiplicity of units used to measure it. Substantial changes in terminology have taken place since the 1950s. The standard unit now in use to measure the impact of radiation on the body is the sievert, which is in turn divided into millisieverts, each representing a thousandth of a sievert. The sievert is simply a unit which takes into account the effect of different types of radiation on human beings: for the sake of simplicity, I have adopted it in this book and converted the units used at the time of the tests accordingly. The only other unit which occurs in this text is the roentgen, an outmoded measure of only one type of radiation, gamma rays; it appears in the text simply to demonstrate how the British chose to ignore an important ICRP limit at the tests.

The limits adopted for the British tests were based broadly on recommendations made in 1950 by the ICRP for workers in the nuclear industry. They permitted workers to be exposed to 150 millisieverts a year, three times the limit now in force in the industry.

But the ICRP also suggested a weekly limit for exposure to
gamma rays. British scientists decided to ignore this limit. Instead of limiting exposure to 0.5 roentgens a week, they said it was all right for individuals to be exposed to 3 roentgens at one go - six times the ICRP limit for radiation workers at home. This limit would apply to men who had been given jobs considered essential to the success of the tests, such as retrieving records from contaminated areas after the bomb had exploded. Nine men allotted this task at the Hurricane test got this dose in spite of wearing protective clothing.