Mad Science: The Nuclear Power Experiment

by Joseph Mangano

  In late 1964, with the treaty in effect for nearly a year, President Lyndon B. Johnson acknowledged the hazards that fallout had caused:

  We cannot and we will not abandon the test ban treaty to which I just referred, which is the world’s insurance policy against polluting the air we breathe and the milk we give our children. Already that policy has paid off more than you will ever know, and since this agreement was signed and the tests stopped, the dread strontium-89 and iodine-131 have disappeared from the environment. The amount of strontium-90 and cesium-137 has already been, in one year, cut in half. This is technical language, but what it means is that we can breathe safely again.

  In addition to the proclamations by Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, other, more technical cracks in the staunch belief that bomb test fallout hadn’t harmed anybody were beginning to emerge. In 1967, Dr. Edward Weiss of the US Public Health Service published an article in the American Journal of Public Health documenting that high rates of thyroid cancer in Utah occurred shortly after upwind atmospheric atom bomb tests were conducted in nearby Nevada.

  Two years later, Dr. Ernest Sternglass published probably the most shocking paper on atomic bomb fallout to that point. Sternglass was a radiation physics professor at the University of Pittsburgh, who had received over a dozen patents for radiation-related inventions while working for the Westinghouse Corporation. His interest in health risks of the atom, which stemmed from the fact that both his parents were physicians, rose during the 1960s. His testimony to the US Senate in favor of the 1963 Partial Test Ban Treaty was based on an article he had just published on the susceptibility of the fetus to X-rays, and implications for hazards of bomb test fallout.

  Even after atmospheric tests by the Americans and Soviets were banned, Sternglass became keenly interested in calculating the number of casualties. In 1969, he published an article in Esquire magazine entitled “The Death of All Children.” The article started by describing how the US stillbirth rate had been falling steadily until 1950, when it leveled off until the mid-1960s. Sternglass added that long-term steady declines in US infant mortality had also suddenly stopped in 1950, as large-scale atom bomb testing above the Nevada desert began:

  Infant mortality had shown a steady decline in the period 1935–1950; but beginning with the Nevada tests in 1951, and continuing until just after the test ban in 1963, the rate suddenly leveled off in the US… Only after the major portion of the most violently radioactive material from the 1961–62 tests had disappeared did US infant mortality began to decline again in 1965, at a rate close to the previous 1935–1950 decline.

  Sternglass calculated the difference, during the bomb test years, between the actual death rate and an expected continuation of prior rates. His result was a shocking 375,000 “excess” infant deaths.

  Some factor(s) had caused this unexpected halt in the progress in lowering infant death rates. Sternglass had offered bomb fallout as the principal reason; and while many factors affect the risk of an infant dying, there was no other obvious cause. Actually, a continued decline in infant death rates should have occurred. The 1950s and 1960s were years of economic prosperity in the US, during which more people held jobs, lived in better housing, and ate more and better foods. Higher employment meant more people had health insurance, and more hospitals were being built, thus giving more people better access to medical care. The Esquire article noted that the National Center for Health Statistics had devoted a 1965 conference to the flattening out of infant mortality, but after considering numerous potential factors could not explain this abrupt and unexpected change.

  The Sternglass piece instantly received strong reactions. The November 1969 issue of Esquire featured supportive letters from Congressmen Cornelius Gallagher and Claude Pepper, high ranking members of Congress who were very involved in public health issues. Pepper described the research as “very interesting to me and I believe that this information coming from such an eminent educator should be given serious consideration.” Others disagreed with Sternglass, and the AEC enlisted Dr. John Gofman to rebut Sternglass; Gofman calculated a number of excess infant deaths of 4,000, far below the Sternglass figure but still too high for the AEC. Sternglass also published his findings in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, along with a comment from Princeton physicist Freeman Dyson, who had helped develop the American hydrogen bomb; Dyson conceded that Sternglass “… may be right. The margin of uncertainty in the effects of worldwide fallout is so large that we have no justification for dismissing Sternglass’s numbers as fantastic.”

  Dyson is correct in his belief that precise number of infant deaths from bomb fallout will probably never be known, but the poorest progress in infant death rates in the entire twentieth century was then, and remains today, the period 1950 to 1964, a phenomenon which still has no clear explanation half a century later.

  The growing contentiousness over bomb fallout risks during the 1960s had set the stage for a similar debate over nuclear reactors. But even before the bomb fallout debate began, there were some voices raised about hazards of nuclear power plants. Former AEC official John Bugher declared at the 1956 American Public Health Association meeting that atomic reactors would present a much greater health threat than nuclear weapons, because of the huge amounts of radioactive chemicals released into the environment from a large number of reactors. Several months later, Thomas Parran of the University of Pittsburgh expressed concern about the health risk posed by a full-fledged atomic energy program.

  Concerns about health risks of nuclear power plants even bothered those who otherwise were decidedly pro-nuclear. In 1963, former AEC Chairman David Lilienthal weighed in on the debate over whether to build a nuclear reactor in New York City, stating that “the pressure of engineering convenience and costs will bring down these plants more and more into densely populated areas. To start down that road without first completely licking the problem of risks, or dependability in a regionwide system, is a foolhardy course.”

  It was only a matter of time before the US atomic energy program became the subject of protest. In 1968, as the Vermont Yankee reactor was being built, the first public forum on health threats posed by a nuclear plant was held at picturesque (and nearby) Stratton Mountain. When the AEC initially turned down a request to send a representative to the conference, Vermont Senator George Aiken leaned on the Commission, which then sent thirty-nine members, including Chairman Glenn Seaborg, to another conference held the next year in Burlington. Aiken wasn’t the only national political leader to challenge the slogan that reactors were safe. In 1968, Massachusetts Senator Edward Kennedy proposed a moratorium on licensing new reactors until a review of health risks could be made. Three years later, Alaska Senator Mike Gravel made the same proposal, with an additional caveat that utilities should bear all liability in case of a meltdown, and not just the small portion limited by the Price-Anderson Act. The fight, pitting nuclear utilities and their AEC allies against concerned citizens and elected officials, was just beginning.

  In 1974, Congress abolished the AEC, because of the conflict of interest in its two missions of promoting nuclear reactor safety and expansion. In its place, a new Nuclear Regulatory Commission was established. But the NRC proved to be little different than the AEC, as its cadre of engineers dedicated to developing the industry continued to dominate the regulatory function. Many NRC staff had once worked at nuclear power plants. Moreover, NRC was structured so that about 90% of its funds would come not from public dollars, but from industry fees; the long shadow of nuclear utilities that had kept the AEC from acting objectively had merely been transferred to another bureaucracy under another name.

  The considerable questioning of reactor safety tended to be theoretical, and not accompanied by any studies of actual health trends near reactors. Sternglass performed the first such study. In the spring of 1971, he followed up his powerful article on infant deaths and bomb test fallout by presenting a paper at a meeting in Berkeley, California. The sixty-two-page report fe
atured infant deaths compared to radioactive releases from nuclear power plants. Sternglass examined trends in releases and infant deaths near five early reactors, but concentrated most closely on Dresden (fifty miles from Chicago) and Indian Point (just thirty-five miles from New York City). He found:

  – From 1964–1966, when large airborne releases occurred at the new Dresden reactor, annual infant deaths in Grundy County (the reactor’s location) steadily rose from seven to eighteen, and the annual number of babies born less than 5½ pounds soared from sixteen to forty-two.

  – From 1961–1966, as the new Indian Point reactor began operating, the infant death rate in Westchester and Rockland Counties, which flank the reactor, rose 13%, involving hundreds of infant deaths; the rate fell elsewhere in New York State.

  For the first time, actual data on radioactive emissions from reactors and disease/death rates were in play. Correlating the two is a difficult and complex task, but Sternglass had raised red flags, especially by showing how highly susceptible fetuses and infants may have been harmed near nuclear power plants. The data were heatedly discussed, and received strong criticism from government and industry, but also received support from some scientists with no direct ties to the American nuclear power program. One was Morris DeGroot, a statistician at Carnegie-Mellon Institute in Pittsburgh, who reviewed Sternglass’ data and found it to reflect a tentative correlation between radiation exposure and health risk to infants.

  That same year, Sternglass applied his statistical techniques to Shippingport, the first nuclear power reactor in the US, located just outside Sternglass’ home in Pittsburgh. This time, Sternglass extended his examination beyond just infant deaths, also finding elevated rates of stillbirths, low weight births, and childhood leukemia downwind from Shippingport. He also charged that officially reported levels of radioactive releases from the reactor had been misrepresented. Local media reported these charges, moving Governor Milton Shapp to appoint a blue-ribbon commission of three radiation health experts. The commission found that the system of radiation monitoring by Duquesne Light, which owned and operated the plant, was inadequate for accurately determining the amount of emissions from Shippingport. State health officials fought allegations that local infant death rates were high, but the gloss was off the reactor’s image, and it would close permanently a decade later.

  Sternglass continued his work for years, and remains a controversial figure. But the significance of his findings in the early 1970s was that now the debate over reactor safety would be conducted using evidence, not slogans or assumptions. Statistical evidence being made public would lift the veil of secrecy from reactors, challenge statements that reactors were “safe,” and force greater public accountability.

  Orders for new reactors in the 1970s dwindled, and many existing orders were cancelled. Several accidents raised public skepticism about nuclear power. One took place in March 1975 at the Browns Ferry plant in northern Alabama. Workers looking for leaks with a candle accidentally ignited a whole room of insulation cables that controlled the plant’s three reactors. The cooling system was rendered inoperable, but backup systems were not, and supplied critical cooling water to the core and waste pools at reactor #1. If not for this backup system, a meltdown would have occurred. Two Browns Ferry reactors were shut down for the next eighteen months for repairs; reactor #3 was still being constructed. Plant operators could not hide the obvious; the two brand-new reactors that promised to bring large amounts of electrical power to northern Alabama were sitting idle for years to come.

  Fueling public protests were a number of other accidents at reactors. The largest and most significant of these was the 1979 partial meltdown at the Three Mile Island plant in Pennsylvania. But there were others, and some involved radioactive releases into the environment. Official NRC records in the table below showed that radioactive releases from US nuclear power reactors into the air rose during the 1970s.

  Source: Tichler J., Nordem, K., and Congemi, J. Radioactive Materials Released from Nuclear Power Plants: Annual Report 1986. Prepared for the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission: NUREG/CR-2907. Upton NY: Brookhaven National Laboratory, 1988.

  The above table includes only iodine-131 and particulates, or radioactive chemicals with a half life of eight days or more, and thus those likely to enter the food chain. Although there is some question about the precision of these figures, they are often used as a proxy for total environmental emissions. From 1970 to 1974, the number of curies emitted soared from 5.85 to 37.77, only to level off thereafter. Naturally, NRC officials viewed these numbers with no concern, as they were well within federally-prescribed limits. They were often referred to as “routine” releases.

  Rising levels of routine emissions, a meltdown at Three Mile Island, other accidents at places like Browns Ferry, and growing public suspicion that reactors were harming people all came to a head in the 1980s. Finally, scientific studies examining the health of Americans exposed to radioactive emissions from power reactors were conducted.

  The question of how many people living near nuclear plants develop cancer is a very basic one. Nonetheless, there was no huge rush by researchers to conduct studies of cancer near nuclear reactors. Government health officials were the logical ones to undertake this task, but they were not going to volunteer for duty. Doing so risked incurring the wrath of the nuclear establishment within the government – not just the NRC, but the Energy and Defense Departments – and possibly cost researchers their jobs. Moreover, government health officials were politically handicapped by the fact that large utilities were significant contributors to political campaigns; whoever occupied the Oval Office had been the recipient of substantial donations of these politically savvy companies. State and local health officials were in the same predicament, as the Governor of a state was highly likely to have been the recipient of largesse from nuclear utilities.

  The other logical group which should have been conducting studies of cancer near nuclear plants was health professionals at universities, who typically spent a large portion of their time conducting research. But once again, the political impasse in Washington blocked studies. University-based health researchers often receive a large portion of their funds from the federal government, especially the National Institutes of Health. Nobody with the means to do the needed studies was willing to face the prospect of losing funds or losing their jobs. And this potential backlash was real. John Gofman had lost his funds from the AEC when he dared publish research that concluded up to 32,000 cancer deaths a year could occur under current legal limits of radiation releases from reactors, and soon resigned from his position at Lawrence Livermore Lab. Thomas Mancuso of the University of Pittsburgh was stripped of his grant from the Energy Department because he discovered and announced that workers at the nuclear weapons plant in Hanford were suffering from cancer in unexpectedly high numbers. Even those with tenured faculty positions, who are virtually guaranteed against being fired, were not going to take the chance of becoming involved in research on the cancer link with nuclear reactors.

  One exception in the 1980s to this paucity of needed research was Carl Johnson, a physician who also was the director of the Jefferson County Health Department in Colorado. Johnson had become interested in the radiation-cancer link because the Rocky Flats plant that produced plutonium triggers for nuclear weapons was located in his county. In 1981, he published an article in the journal Ambio about elevated cancer rates near Rocky Flats. Two years later, Johnson shifted his focus to nuclear power plants; he wrote a response to an article in the American Journal of Public Health that had concluded that child cancer mortality near the San Onofre plant in Southern California was not especially high. Johnson took issue with this conclusion, and presented data on cancer incidence to support his position.

  In the late 1980s, the issue of cancer rates near US nuclear plants finally came to the national forefront. Two principal factors brought the issue to a head. British researcher Martin Gardner found an elevated rate of chi
ld leukemia near the Sellafield nuclear reprocessing plant in northern England. About the same time, in December 1987, Boston University professor Richard Clapp published a study that found high leukemia rates in census tracts near the Pilgrim nuclear power plant in Plymouth, MA. Clapp’s article was published in the prestigious British journal Lancet, and drew some attention.

  The attention paid to Clapp’s article did not elude Senator Edward Kennedy and his staff. Not only was Pilgrim located in Kennedy’s home state of Massachusetts, but Kennedy was the Chair of the Senate Committee on Labor and Human Resources, and had a longstanding interest in health issues, including environmental health. Just one month after Clapp’s article was published, Kennedy sent a letter to James Wyngaarden, the Director of the National Institutes of Health, and urged a study of national cancer near US reactors be undertaken. Kennedy emphasized the concerns from radioactive releases, along with the lack of studies in his letter:

  [Citizens and groups] are obviously concerned about those dangers in the context of potential nuclear power plant accidents. They are also concerned about those dangers as a result of the possibility of low-level radiation emanating from such plants… In view of the number of incidents and situations which have prompted legitimate concern, and because of the dearth of data relating to this subject, it would be helpful for the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to conduct an appropriate inquiry into this entire question.

  The issue of cancer rates near nuclear power plants had been ignored by the federal health establishment for over three decades, but a powerful member of Congress such as Kennedy had to be dealt with. Three weeks later, Wyngaarden responded to Kennedy by stating that a nationwide study of cancer deaths near US nuclear plants was already under way – a dubious claim, since NIH had never publicly announced such a study.