3CR
 Community Radio 855am

THE RADIO-ACTIVE SHOW

With Eric Miller and Linda Marks

Saturday at 10.00am

27th March 1999

Hello and welcome to the Radioactive Show brought to you by the Sustainable Energy and Anti-Uranium Service. I’m Linda Marks and with me in the studio is Eric Miller. (Good Morning) The Radioactive Show is a weekly program bringing you news and information on Nuclear, Peace and Energy issues.

On today’s show we commemorate the worst nuclear power accident in the Western World. That was the Three Mile Island accident in Pennsylvania in the United States. It happened on the 28th March 20 years ago and sadly the world has not learnt the lesson of this accident yet.

The voice of news broadcasters at the time of the accident, reporters, representatives from Metropolitan Edison:

An accident at the Three Mile Island, Nuclear Power Plant in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, forced the company to call a general emergency and shut down part of the plant for an unspecified period.

… Metropolitan Edison has given you enough conflicting information…

… I don’t know why we have to tell you each and every thing that we do…

Don’t you feel that you have a responsibility for the million people living around the plant?

We certainly feel responsible for the people who live around the plant but one of the things that the people who live around the plant have to realise is that we have to get on with our job … we’re on special alert, we don’t know if there are going to be any more emissions … I am advising those who may be particularly susceptible to the effects of radiation, that is, pregnant women, and preschool age children, to leave the area of a five mile radius of the Three Mile Island facility until further notice …

Linda Marks: On March the 28th in 1979, unit 2 of the Three Mile Island Power plant experienced a near meltdown. It had been operating for just one year. The nuclear core was uncovered for two and a half hours, until a shift supervisor finally guessed that water was leaving the reactor core through a valve that was stuck open. Workers shut the valve down but not in time to prevent much of the core from melting and much of the radiation from escaping. If the valve had been left open for another 30 minutes the core would have melted through the reactor vessel spewing radiation into the environment. It took weeks to bring down the core temperature, it had reached thousands of degrees. There were hydrogen bubbles in the core threatening to explode for days after. The operators had to vent radiative gases to bring the reactor under control. There was an enormous amount of confusion in the first week.

This program on the Three Mile Island accident has been put together with material from a report Ian Woods made for Watching Brief in 1985 plus more recent findings.

Over 200,000 people fled the area as radiation was released into the atmosphere. People fleeing the area were not told about the releases that occurred in the first few days following the accident. During the early stages of the clean up, krypton gas was released against the wishes of the local residents. It comes as no surprise that this has led to an increase in the reports of health problems suffered by people who live around the plant in the years since.

Here is the voice of local resident Jacqui Brokman in 1985:

Jacqui Brokman: The day, the Friday of the accident, there was a strong metallic taste. It tasted like you would put a penny, an old copper penny on your tongue. We tasted that subsequent times in the next 3, 4 years. When we went outside when they were reporting emissions you could taste that. Some days when they were not reporting emissions you could taste that.

My fiance was in good health until the summer of 1980 when he began tiring early. The symptoms got worse. He had a subnormal temperature for several months, he had severe night sweats, his back pain got worse, he had cracking and bleeding on his fingers and around his mouth. He got an attack so severe in January of 1981 that they took him to the hospital in the ambulance. The same weekend they took two neighbours who lived half a mile or less to the hospital. Their diagnosis was the same as his, cancer. As the disease progressed, the leukemia grew in severity. He died one year and 10 months after the diagnosis at 51 years of age.

During that time and since then, my daughter who was 12 at the time of the accident has suffered severe sinus attacks, headaches, frequent sore throats, bouts of nausea for days at a time, she sleeps long hours, 12, 14 hours at a time, and she is always tired. She has Chondromalacia which is a painful softening of the kneecaps and the joints. She has several friends in our church and in her school who suffer from this same thing, Chondromalacia and scoliosis both are bone problems and she had none of these problems or any sign of them previous to the accident.

Linda Marks: Experiences like those of Jacqui Brokman have been all too common, hundreds of people reported the metallic taste of iodine in their mouths around the Three Mile Island plant in March 1979. American servicemen experienced the same taste during the Atomic Bomb Tests. The official studies on the health effects of Three Mile Island have white washed the issue. Up until a few years ago the official line was that not enough radiation had got out for there to be any health effects. So a few years after the accident residents carried out their own survey of 110 households within an eight km radius of the plant, involving 315 residents. This is Norman Armont:

Norman Armont: There were a lot of cases, a lot of people who had experienced metallic taste in their mouth, reddening of their face, blisters on their lips, diarrhoea, loss of hair, subsequent regrowth of their hair. These are, all of us know, these are radiation type symptoms. So they thought they would go out and document these. To their horror they found, not just that, but all kinds of health effects. And among them a 7 fold increase in cancer mortality rate and a staggering high number of active cancers today.

Linda Marks: The resident study was found by the authorities to be unscientific. The state health authorities did their own studies and found that the negative health effects were due to stress. In actual fact there were many thousands of people suffering from the effects of radiation exposure after the Three Mile Island accident. Norman Armont’s wife Marjory testifies about her experience:

Marjory Armont: And there was a light mist. I was cleaning my van. And I went inside. I was out just an hour and my eyes were tearing and my skin was tingling and pretty soon I sat down to supper but I started feeling nauseous. When I went to take my shower that night I noticed my face was bright red. I went to the doctor the next day and he said these are all high dose radiation effects but, no, you didn’t get them from the Three Mile Island accident. You didn’t get them from the accident because nothing is getting out over there. That’s what we were told.

Linda Marks: So the crux of the issue is, ‘how much radiation got out as a result of the Three Mile Island accident? If there are negative health effects, then a lot of radiation got out, and the plant operators, Metropolitan Edison must know.

Norman Armont: This was particularly important because for 44 hours the key in-plant records with regard how much got out have been, quote, ‘lost.’ Can you imagine that? Can you imagine, you know, if you’ve got an accident, if you were running a plant and you had an accident like this and you had strip chart recorders that tell you what’s going out, could you lose them if you tried? I just can’t imagine. Filters, big filters, that were used to collect iodine from the effluent, are, quote, ‘lost.’ They are so radioactive you can’t come close to them. How the hell do you lose them? Metropolitan Edison did.

Linda Marks: The radiation monitors at the plant went off the scale during the accident. The authorities however misrepresented one radiation monitor as having remained on scale during the accident. Now, years later, it has been found that it did not stay on the scale. The authority used the inaccurate information from this one monitor to deduce that exposure around the plant was 70 millirems a dose, and this dose, according to officials is too small to pose any significant health risk. Dr Ernest Sternglass, a former nuclear physicist with Westinghouse Corporation and now a radiation physicist with the Pittsburgh hospital explains why these claims were misleading:

Dr Ernest Sternglass: 70mn millirems is what you get from an entire year’s worth of gamma radiation, cosmic radiation and therefore it was easy for the government to say, look, it’s no more than getting one year’s of perfectly harmless natural radiation. The real crux of the matter was that the radiation that came out of Three Mile Island had no relationship to the kind of radiation I get down in my laboratory when we do work with x-rays. Furthermore it’s a brief exposure of external radiation only. And what’s measured on my badge is a pretty good indicator as to what I got. But at Three Mile Island it was altogether different, and there was gas coming out.

The Governor told the women to stay indoors and shut the windows. Well, the windows wouldn’t stop the x-rays from coming through the window glass. They were designed to minimise the amount that the women would inhale. Now, when you inhale a radioactive gas such as a fission product, such as iodine 131, then your dose to the internal organs from the radiation is many, many times what you get on your radiation badge. Naturally it is to the advantage of the industry to mention a very low figure of the average exposure to the people within 50 miles.

There are about 2 million people living in that area so if they therefore average it out using only the external radiation badges as recorded by their monitors that were dispersed then they would come out with a figure of a few millirems or less per person. Now, for the people living nearby, that average doesn’t mean anything. They are getting the most contaminated air and milk and their levels are not at all representative, the averages are not representative of the people of Middletown and living within a few miles.

Linda Marks: If Doctor Sternglass is correct, negative health effects should become noticeable to local doctors. Dr Joseph Lessor is a family practitioner in Middletown just across the Susquehanna River from the Three Mile Island plant.

Dr Joseph Lessor: … that’s the intriguing question that a lot of the symptoms that we did see were symptoms that are classic textbook symptoms of exposure to radiation. For instance, nausea, vomiting, diarrhoea, a general feeling of malaise, even a certain amount of depression and anxiety. When we would do routine blood chemistries on patients, a patient might come in and we might suspect that they have anaemia or some other problem, or an infection, we do a complete blood count, a CBC. We began to notice that eosinophils were elevated, which is one of the series of white blood cells, were elevated. The intriguing thing is that this is one of the things that you expect to see in a person that has been exposed to radiation is an increased eosinophil count.

Ian Woods: Do you know if any other local doctors saw similar increases?

Dr Joseph Lessor: Yes. I talked to some other doctors in the area and they had also mentioned, and again this is an empiric observation on our part, but they did see increase eosinophils. I’ve also talked with several vets, veterinary medicine specialists that work, friends of mine since I also raise horses and they also noticed an increase in eosinophilia in animals.

But I’ve never talked to anyone in the State Health Department. They’ve never come down to talk to me, or as far as I know, any of the doctors in this area. And I know that some of them have down played the increased eosinophilia saying this was around the time of allergy season. But my concern is that the people living right in the immediate vicinity of the Island and the people who worked on the Island, may have been exposed, and I say may have been exposed to more radiation than was generally accepted or was generally felt to be the case. These people were not tested and that we did not really take a look at whether or not they received a burden of radiation that was a little bit more than is generally expected.

All of the gauges, all of the monitoring devices were all stuck at the highest level. The intriguing question is how much more than that maximum was actually released, and how many more people were actually exposed to this? That we don’t know. They were looking for radioactive iodine and they started scanning a week or two weeks after the accident. So as a consequence, the radioactive iodine has a relatively short half-life so that a good proportion of the radioactive iodine is not going to be picked up because it’s been dissipated already. Surprisingly, that long after the accident they still found 30 or 40 people who relatively high body counts of residual radioactivity. But that was attributed to various other sources. They felt that it was not attributable to the accident. They felt that these people lived in stone houses or brick houses and they had lived there for 20, 30, 40 years and as a consequence they had been exposed to a lot of background radiation. I find it difficult to believe they would find 30 or 40 people with high levels of radiation right after there has been the worst nuclear accident in the world and not at least raise that as a possible supposition. I don’t know what the exact figures were but they were at least one or two standard deviations above normal.

Ian Woods: And what sort of effects would this be likely to have, short term and or long term?

Dr Joseph Lessor: The most common supposition would be that these people would probably more at risk of thyroid cancer. The testing really should have been done very early, within the first couple of days. And they should have been doing CBCs, complete blood counts, eosinophil counts and then following that up at intervals, at so many week intervals to see whether or not there was in fact an increase or decrease. They might have taken urine specimens to look for tritium and tritium bi-products, and they might have done breath samples for radioactive carbon 14.

They should have done more animal studies too. Because animals are foraging creatures and they are eating the vegetation that may or may not have been contaminated. We are talking about rabbits, mice, foxes, all of the wild animals that are out there. Because one of the things that happened was that farm animals were kept inside, so as a consequence there was not really that much contamination of those animals. You heard a lot about radioactivity in the milk and of course the Agriculture Department could reassure most people and say, no, don’t be afraid of Pennsylvania milk or Middletown area milk. And the reason for that was that those animals weren’t out there eating the damn stuff. They were eating the hay that was in storage.

Linda Marks: That was a local doctor with Ian Woods in 1985. Metropolitan Edison insurance pool, in 1985 paid more than $US3.9 million for out of court settlements for personal injury lawsuits, many involving children. The largest settlement, over $US1 million was for a child born with Down’s Syndrome. State law requires certain legal matters involving children to be made public. Had it not been for the children’s settlement agreements, we may never have learned of this or other cases settled because stipulations incorporated into the settlement agreements prohibited plaintiffs from discussing their settlements. Funds from the $US560 billion Price-Anderson Act insurance pool, paid these settlements. More cases are pending, such as the actions filed by a group of veterinarians and by the tourism industry, but these matters must await the outcome of the personal injury cases. Any moneys left over may then be applied to settle the remaining cases.

When President Clinton took the studies of Health and Radiation data away from the Department of Energy, which coincidentally is the same department that looks after the nuclear power industry, it was farmed out to other bodies such as universities. The official line was still that, ‘there was not enough radiation released from the Three Mile Island accident in 1979 for there to be any health risk.’ Now, after 20 year there are over 2,000 plaintiffs who have suffered harm still waiting for their day in court.

A recently published study by Dr Steve Wing of the University of North Carolina has verified increased cancer incidence around Three Mile Island. Dr Wing also states in his re-analysis of the Columbia University study that Columbia found positive results but interpreted them as negative. In fact, studies conducted by Columbia and the Pennsylvania Department of Health have shown increases in adverse pregnancy outcomes as well as cancers despite their conclusions to the contrary.

Now to Dr Steve Wing:

Dr Steve Wing: There has been since the 1980s a class action suit in which some 2,000 odd people claimed that they were injured by radiation released during the 1979 accident at Three Mile Island. The Government claims that no-one was exposed to more than background levels of radiation. And this is very much in conflict with the observations of citizens who lost farm animals, pets, who experienced vomiting and nausea and rashes, hair loss and other acute affects that they attribute to radiation from the accident.

Earlier, a class action suit that was settled over property damages led to the creation of a fund to support research. As a consequence of one of the studies, the cancer cases in the area were counted carefully and the place of residence of the patients was noted. The published research, it was said, provided evidence that there was no effect of the accident on cancer. This is where our re-evaluation came in. We saw when we took another look at the data that cancer rates after the accident went up very strongly in the direction downwind where the radioactive plumes were released.

Linda Marks: That was Steven Wing from the University of North Carolina.

So maybe after 20 years the residents around the Three Mile Island plant might have some chance getting their cases recognised. But the biggest effect that the Three Mile Island accident has had on the US nuclear industry is that in March 1979 there were over 400 nuclear power stations that were either operating, under construction or on order. Today there are about 105 operating plants, and none on order or under construction.

And Eric, the nuclear industry still thinks that it has a future in Australia. What’s been in the papers recently?

Eric Miller: Lots has been in the paper. The Beverley uranium mine has been given the go ahead from Senator Hill. This means that within 42 days Senator Minchin has to give his approval and I don’t think that it will be far behind. We have a lot about this Beverley uranium mine on the show, that it pumps acid into the ore body to dissolve the uranium and then dumps its waste back into the aquifer back under the ground. There has been quite a bit of concern about this new uranium mine.

The waste dump is in the news again. We’ve been hearing, ever since the Pangea video came out that the Government hadn’t been talking to Pangea at all, and the person who runs the company said that he hadn’t talked to anyone in the Government. We have now heard that the company have been talking to the Government, to Wilson Tuckey. He had a meeting with James Voss of Pangea Resources in November. While Nick Minchin was saying that the Government was having nothing to do with this company, there was Wilson Tuckey sitting listening to this and he said he didn’t know. Well, I’m sure that he does read the papers, there was a lot in the paper, a lot on radio, and a lot on TV about this. So here we have it, each week we get a little bit more unveiling about this international waste dump for Australia.

Earlier on this week there was a very concerning thing about Kakadu and Jabiluka uranium mine. Within the Jabiluka lease there are over 200 sacred sites. These are meant to be controlled by the Mirrar people who own these sites. But ERA has put it to the Mirrar people that if they want these sacred sites put into the national park and come under government control, then the company will do this if the Mirrar people speak to them. So if the Mirrar people agree to the mill at Ranger processing the Jabiluka ore then maybe they can get their sacred sites put into the national park. I don’t know if the company thinks that this is honest, it seems quite evil to me that this is happening.

And this week North Ltd took out an add against the blockade that’s happening all this week outside of North’s. The Blockade being put on by the Jabiluka Action Group. North Ltd are protesting that they won’t be able to get to work and that people will be spitting on them, kicking them and verbally abusing them as they try to get to work and that in the past North Ltd’s offices have been painted and vandalised. Well, the Jabiluka Action Group has always carried out peaceful actions. The protests there have always been to stand in front of the building during blockades and they stand there in civil disobedience. The police could arrest them but they don’t. When the building was painted, if North Ltd had said, ‘come on officer, we have someone painting our building we want to lay charges,’ the police would have arrested them. But we are sure that North Ltd don’t want anyone arrested at those blockades because they will get publicity and it will work against them. So they finish up in the add that they do not support terrorism or blackmail. I just wonder about this proposition they have taken to the Mirrar people where they have got control of their sacred sites and their paintings, and now they are offering them to sell their souls to negotiate with them. Is this blackmail or not? To me it seems really outrageous that it is happening and you can show your outrage by going to the Palm Sunday Rally this Sunday.

And that is what’s in the news this week Linda.

Linda Marks: Yes, the Nuclear Industry and their supporters in the Government must really be feeling under fire now that they have been exposed in this way and the Palm Sunday Rally kicks off at 1.30 at the State Library. And the Peace Presence will take place over the 4 following days on the Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. It will be very peaceful and not at all conducted by terrorists and we encourage people to go to the Palm Sunday Rally and then to spend some time down at the blockade. If you’ve got time during the day there are going to be so many activities that are going to be terrific and in the evening there are going to be films. So there will be something for everybody down at the blockade in the week after Palm Sunday.

Eric Miller: And that’s all we have time for in the Radioactive Show today, so it’s goodbye from Eric.

Linda Marks: And it’s goodbye from Linda. Listen in again next week.

Transcript produced by Linda Marks - with much thanks!!!
Page last updated April 28, 1999.
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