Park Board says no to racking up expenses

Clashing theories: Government under fire for concerns about low-level exposure

 JOLIET — Scientists from around the world dispute the notion that exposure to low levels of radiation can be harmful to the body.

   Some leading radiation experts oppose the theory used by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to determine the maximum level of radium to allow in municipal water supplies.

   All agree that exposure to high levels of radiation can cause cancer or other deadly diseases. On the other hand, everyone is exposed to some degree of radiation every day. No one knows for sure what level of exposure should be considered safe.

   The EPA's ruling relies on a model known as the linear no-threshold theory. The U.N. Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR) proposed the theory in 1958. The theory holds that the effects of low doses of ionizing radiation can be estimated by studying the effects of exposure to high doses, then mathematically extrapolating the data. In other words, if exposure to a certain level of radiation kills 100 percent of those affected, then exposure to a level one-tenth as great should result in 10 percent as many deaths.

   Theory advocates, including Linus Pauling and Andrei Sakharov, pointed out that if the harmful effects of radiation were proportional to dose, the observed effects of high doses would predict millions of cancers and other serious genetic diseases from much smaller individual doses.

   The theory holds that there is not any safe dose because even very low doses of ionizing radiation produce some biological effect. But opponents argue that the Cold War-era theory is outdated and irrational.

   "These rigid standards are part of a concerted effort to promulgate false science at the public's expense by EPA and the other regulatory agencies," said Jim Muckerheide, co-director of the Center for Nuclear Technology and Society at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Worcester, Mass. Muckerheide is one of many nuclear scientists who formed Radiation, Science and Health Inc., a public policy group that is suing the EPA over radium standards in drinking water.

   "The enormous direct evidence that low-dose radiation is not harmful, and is indeed beneficial — including explicit evidence that it can prevent and cure cancer and other diseases — must be achieved in the face of a relatively small group of U.S. and international scientists that are funded by the regulators to misrepresent the scientific results," Muckerheide said.

   Opponents allege that strict radium standards are the result of a conspiracy by scientists working for government-funded agencies like the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurements, who want to maintain high levels of federal money for those agencies.

   "We anticipate challenging the individual scientists on scientific misconduct, specifically falsification, by documenting their misrepresentations on behalf of their funding agencies in order to maintain the scientific veneer for massive radiation-protection funding," Muckerheide said.

   In a 1999 position statement, the American Nuclear Society concluded that "there is insufficient scientific evidence to support the use of the linear no threshold hypothesis in the projection of the health effects of low-level radiation." The society called for the formation of an independent group of scientists to review the theory.

   The U.S. Department of Energy has committed $200 million to fund the Low Dose Radiation Research Program. The program's Web site informs visitors that: "We don't know if there are radiation doses or energies below which there is no significant biological change or below which the damage induced can be effectively dealt with by normal cellular processes. If there are, then there should be no regulatory concern for exposures below these thresholds since there will be no increase in risk."

Into political arena

   In light of the mounting evidence that the linear no-threshold theory is flawed, the EPA in 1991 began considering relaxing the standards for radium. But five years into the process, Congress passed the Safe Drinking Water Act, which the EPA interpreted as saying that no existing standard could be loosened.

   "We were hopeful that the proposal from EPA in the 1990s to raise the radium standards ... meant that some rationality was finally coming into play. However, EPA has interpreted language in the renewal of the (Safe Drinking Water Act) as forcing them to retain the old standards," said Richard Toohey, program director for the Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education. Toohey holds a doctoral degree in nuclear physics and is former director of radiation safety at Argonne National Laboratory near Lemont.

   "There are some legal opinions that indicate the EPA is incorrect in their interpretation, so we can hope that radium will go the way of arsenic in the new (Bush) administration," Toohey said.

Radium controversy

   Radium was discovered in 1898 by Marie and Pierre Curie, who five years later shared the Nobel Prize in physics. Pierre died in 1906 when he was run over by a horse-drawn cart. Marie, who also won the 1911 Nobel prize for chemistry, died in 1934 of leukemia caused by her extensive exposure to the high levels of radiation involved in her studies.

   Government scientists based their conclusions about radium standards for drinking water on studies about survivors of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and those who licked the tips of brushes dipped in irradiated paint they applied to watches. But both groups were exposed to massive doses of radiation. Critics of the theory argue that using those studies to calculate the risks of exposure to low levels of radiation is simply illogical.

   Polish scientist Zbigniew Jaworowski presented perhaps the most convincing argument against the linear no-threshold theory. In the article "Radiation Risk and Ethics" published in Physics Today in September 1999, Jaworowski, an UNSCEAR member, wrote that the established worldwide practice of protecting people from radiation costs hundreds of billions of dollars a year to implement and suggested that the current population dose threshold could be 10 times higher.

   "The concern about large doses is obviously justified. However, the fear of small doses ... is about as justified as the fear that sipping a glass of claret is harmful because gulping down a gallon of grain alcohol is fatal," Jaworowski wrote.

Standards likely to stick

   Even with the Bush administration considering relaxing standards for arsenic in public water supplies, few expect any change in the standards for radium.

   "As a physicist, I don't agree with that (linear no-threshold) model. I think it has a fatal flaw," said Jim Volk, a city council member in Batavia who holds a doctoral degree in physics and works as a research scientist at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory.

   "But I don't think (Bush is) going to stick his neck out much further on environmental regulations. We have no choice but to comply," Volk said.