This is difficult. Despite the ham-handed reassurances of one press account after another, one public agency after another, here are the reasons I am torturing myself and our milk-loving children by having them take a big, long milk break:
1. Milk and rainwater are both testing positive in California for the radioactive iodide-131 isotope.
2. Cows concentrate radioactive iodide 1000 times in milk, a fact not included in the CA Dept of Health’s mention of milk. The thyroid gland, most active and vulnerable in children, then concentrates the iodine.
3. “Low level” only means that an individual child’s chances of ingesting the isotope are statistically low. It does not mean that it is safe to ingest the isotope. Public agencies look at statistical risk for the general population. I look at whether it’s urgent that my children drink milk right now.
4. Information in EVERY crisis improves over time. Soothing talking points from public agencies are always the norm in the first weeks, but with enough time, even the IAEA acknowledges the following:The main consequence of the Chernobyl accident is thyroid cancer in children, some of whom were not yet born at the time of the accident. Following the vapour explosion and fire at the Chernobyl reactor, radioactive iodine was released and spread in the surrounding area. Despite measures taken, children in southern Belarus and northern Ukraine, were exposed to radiation in the weeks following the accident , particularly by consuming milk from pastured cows and leafy vegetables that had been contaminated with radioactive iodine. The thyroid is a small gland located in the front of the neck. It concentrates iodine from the diet and blood to produce important hormones that help the body function normally. Thyroid cancer is a very rare disease. Since the thyroid gland concentrates iodine, it is highly susceptible to radiation damage from any intake of radioactive isotopes of iodine. Once ingested or inhaled, the radioactive iodine remains in the thyroid and can cause thyroid cells to become cancerous and tumours to form.
5. IF Japan gets under control (they are now using diapers, sawdust, bath salts & newspaper, no joke), this milk-ban could be for a short period of time. The height of radiation arriving in California, so far, was in the heavy rains of the weekend of March 20th, according to my lay reading of EPA monitors. I’m going all Scarlett O’Hara on the seawater question, as in tomorrow is another day, but in the meantime:From the CA Dept of Public Health: “Based on what we now know about Japan’s nuclear accident, radioactive iodine should decrease in the coming weeks. It is estimated that levels will be virtually undetectable soon and dissipate completely in the coming months.”
So to summarize, it’s just two weeks since the recorded fact that radioactive isotopes fell in rainwater from the Jet Stream onto California grass, where pastured cows ate it, and concentrated it 1000 times in their milk. Thyroid cancer in children who drank milk after Chernobyl was the number one health consequence, from the same substance, by the same basic biological chemistry.
Why would we wait for the report to come out 10 years from now, predictably showing that the public agencies once again played it down and got it wrong? There is no critical reason for children to drink milk when milk is testing positive for radioactive iodine.
Finally, a few excerpts regarding “low level radiation.” “Low level” is an irrelevant qualifier to the unlucky roulette loser who ingests the isotope.
We can’t avoid the airborne and we’re stuck with the cesium, but our children can wait out the radioactive iodide concentrated in the milk with (relative) ease. Japan is another story of course, an unspeakable river of loss. ***In honor of Japan’s ongoing catastrophe, do save the date: April 14th, 9:30am, Sacramento hearing on nukes & quakes; Rally after to replace PG&E’s Diablo with existing power.“The U.S. Department of Energy has testified that there is no level of radiation that is so low that it is without health risks,” Jacqueline Cabasso, the Executive Director of the Western States Legal Foundation.
Her foundation monitors and analyzes U.S. nuclear weapons programs and policies and related high technology energy, with a focus on the national nuclear weapons laboratories.
Cabasso explained that natural background radiation exists, “But more than 2,000 nuclear tests have enhanced this background radiation level, so we are already living in an artificially radiated environment due to all the nuclear tests.”
“Karl Morgan, who worked on the Manhattan project, later came out against the nuclear industry when he understood the danger of low levels of ionizing radiation-and he said there is no safe dose of radiation exposure,” Cabasso continued, “That means all this talk about what a worker or the public can withstand on a yearly basis is bogus. There is no safe level of radiation exposure. These so-called safe levels are coming from within the nuclear establishment.”
Risk at low doses
Karl Morgan was an American physicist who was a founder of the field of radiation health physics. After a long career in the Manhattan Project and at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, he became a critic of nuclear power and weapons. Morgan, who died in 1999, began to offer court testimony for people who said they had been harmed by the nuclear power industry.
“Nobody is talking about the fact that there is no safe dose of radiation,” Cabasso added, “One of the reasons Morgan said this is because doses are cumulative in the body.”
The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) published a report in 2006 titled Biological Effects of Ionizing Radiation (BEIR) report, VII Phase 2. NAS BEIR VII was an expert panel who reviewed available peer reviewed literature and wrote, “the committee concludes that the preponderance of information indicates that there will be some risk, even at low doses.”
The concluding statement of the report reads, “The committee concludes that the current scientific evidence is consistent with the hypothesis that there is a linear, no-threshold dose-response relationship between exposure to ionizing radiation and the development of cancer in humans.”
This means that the sum of several very small exposures to radiation has the same effect as one large exposure, since the effects of radiation are cumulative.
The Central Institute for Meteorology and Geodynamics of Vienna told New Scientist on March 24: “Japan’s damaged nuclear plant in Fukushima has been emitting radioactive iodine and caesium at levels approaching those seen in the aftermath of the Chernobyl accident in 1986. Austrian researchers have used a worldwide network of radiation detectors – designed to spot clandestine nuclear bomb tests – to show that iodine-131 is being released at daily levels 73 per cent of those seen after the 1986 disaster. The daily amount of caesium-137 released from Fukushima Daiichi is around 60 per cent of the amount released from Chernobyl.”
The same group of scientists stated, “The Fukushima plant has around 1760 tonnes of fresh and used nuclear fuel on site,” while, “the Chernobyl reactor had only 180 tonnes.”
According to a report from the New York Academy of Sciences, due to the Chernobyl disaster, 985,000 people have died, mainly from cancer, between 1986-2004.
Monitors have detected tiny radioactive particles which have spread from the reactor site across the Pacific to North America, the Atlantic and even Europe.
