Posted on 09/04/2004 5:49:28 PM PDT by neverdem
Once I was discussing one of these cancer clusters with a physician. He wrote it off as a natural statistical fluctuation. But this got me thinking. How can one tell if a cluster is a normal fluctuation or due to some definite cause? Suppose one computes the number of clusters of a given size to be expected in the US population. Perhaps the number is at least one. How do you then know that there are not other clusters that have not been accounted for? And how do you know that the underlying "random" cancer incidence level is not all or in part due to causes which are merely undetermined? The combination of the difficulty in analyzing this type of situation with the tendency of each side to want to bend the analysis to their pre-determined point-of-view must make it very difficult to get at the truth.
Yup. The one standing on top of the containment vessel. The building pretty much contained all the radiation. The reactor also was in a remote area and was subsequently cleaned up.
FYI, I got to sit on the rim of a university reactor with only water between myself and the core. Turned out the lights in the reactor room and cranked it up to a few megawatts. I got to see the blue glow of the reactor core with my own eyes. It lit the room up. :-)
I didn't write a caption for that map, but it shows the total estimated average number of rads received by people in each county over the 12 or 13 years of atmospheric testing. The risk was greatest for kids because of their milk consumption. Kids who drank a lot of milk got 20-30 times the average dose. So if you grew up in central Kansas, say, your exposure over the 12 years could've been as high as 200 rads or so. Sounds pretty bad when the average chest x-ray is only 0.015 rads. OTOH, five weeks of chemotherapy will expose you to about 5,000 - 7,000 rads. Still, I'm glad we're not doing atmospheric testing anymore!
That's the reason that most carcinogens are determined based on common cancers from unique agents (like the evidence for iodine-131: it causes a specific kind of cancer, thyroid, and is itself a single and identifiable agent). I read somewhere (I think it was in a Michael Fumento book) that almost no cancer clusters have ever resulted in a sound carcinogen diagnosis, because the conditions in each cluster were just so diverse. The only ones that have (like Thalomide) were based on very high effect rates with very focused results (I think Thalomide had a 30% rate of causing specific kinds of birth defects)...
I do not recognize the names of any of the people talked about here, and do not believe the town is in any type of an uproar.
The Rumour Mill is a small, inoucous place that is not at all a part of the "main stream" in Emmett...and main stream and main street in Emmett are not big things at all (we like it that way)...so whatever is happeneing at the Rumour Mill is very small indeed.
There are quite a few Dairy Farms, but the valley is much more well known for its Cherry festival and fruit trees, which sadly have been on the rapid decline the last five or six years inparticular as most of that has gone "off shore".
I'll keep my ear to the ground, but the eastern press is making much, much more of this than what I have seen here.
One glaring issue for me is this. Ada county, the most populous county in the state and the county in which the state capital, Boise, is located, lies on a direct line between Gem County (Emmett) and the test sites. Ada County is not mentioned in the studies. Why? It would seem to me that it would have a lot greater chance of producing higher numbers of those impacted, yet it is not mentioned.
The worst of Plumbbob was the test code named "Hood". While the DoD/DoE said that all of the tests in Nevada were low yield, non-thermonuclear, Hood was actually a thermonuclear test. Due to its fairly high yield (74 kilotons, the largest atmospheric test done at the NPG) and the fact that most of its energy didn't come from the fusion boost, it produced a very large amount of radioactive fallout. Also, Plumbbob was the largest series of atmospheric tests ever conducted within the continental United States so there were far more detonations creating fallout than any other series.
I'm also one of those kids. I've been extremely fortunate though in the great, grand scheme of things. The health is starting to fade a little bit now, but it's not serious yet and I can't blame it on anything but aging, genes, and perhaps also my own smoking habits when I was younger. Blame is easy to toss around. Accepting the hand God dealt you and taking responsibility for your mistakes is a lot harder.
And now for my soapbox cheer: BRING BACK ORION!!! It'd only expose people to one rad or so at most during the testing and launching phases. Well worth the risk, imho.
Thanks for your sympathy, Lib - he's fine, though, don't worry. He quit smoking with any regularity about 15-20 years ago, and had about a third of his left lung removed maybe five years ago. He's in reasonably good health overall, aside from the lingering effects of Lyme disease that the State of Kansas vehemently denies he could have gotten there.
NRTS had a very interesting incident in which a jealous lover/husband deliberately fried himself along with his lover and rival at one of its reactors. Somewhere in my dusty files I have a newspaper account of it.
I worked in Nampa, ID (Canyon Couny, not far from Emmett) in 1958 and '59. My oldest daughter was born there in '59 and has suffered terrible thyroid problems (Hashimoto's) though thankfully not cancer as yet. I've long believed there was a link between her problems and the nuclear fallout at the time. I imagine milk from dairy herds in Emmett and other areas is distributed throughout the Gem-Canyon-Ada county area. Radioactive iodine is listed as a cause of Hashimoto's.
She's grateful to be free, a mother and grandmother, to know her Savior, and to live out whatever years God in Heaven has in store. She's a great example in that way. We all are living in similar conditions, whatever our circumstances.
He flew B-29's in the early 50's collecting radiation samples from the Russian tests. He once told me some of those radio active clouds were "very hot" as he put it. He also was a WWII pilot and later flew U-2's.
When he was first dianosed I asked him if he was going to get any assistance from the Air Force and he said he didn't want any.
He said the country had been very good to him and he didn't feel entitled to anything more.
God bless him for his service to our Republic and to liberty...and God rest his soul.
I don't believe I said anything about that or even hinted my daughter would be looking for government compensation. I was just adding another data point to the geographical graph.
Simply stating what my wife feels in regards to the overall tone of the article and establishing that as another data point.
While I was in Idaho and Utah during the period in question I don't remember many reports of fall-out from NV tests except those blowing toward the east. At that time we got lots of reports of Russian above-ground tests that were very dirty. They sent huge clouds of fall-out loaded with strontium 90 over Canada and the northern tier of states including ID. Later the Chinese tests did the same.
The information in this thread is new to me. I don't recall anything like it being publicized at the time but memory can be faulty. I do remember that the dangers of fall-out were greatly downplayed at the time, far too much so. I knew a wire service reporter who was present for the Eniwitok H-bomb tests. The media and Navy personnel were positioned very close to them -- much too close for safety in my estimation. I think we were simply too ignorant then to know how dangerous this stuff can be. Thanks to that miscalculation we've now gone too far the other direction.
Thanks for the link.
"NRTS had a very interesting incident in which a jealous lover/husband deliberately fried himself along with his lover and rival at one of its reactors. Somewhere in my dusty files I have a newspaper account of it."
Wasn't that the original speculation about the SL-1 meltdown? I read that the actual cause was that the core would melt down if even one rod was pulled too far out, and the technician yanked on one that was stuck. Then the water in the reactor flashed into steam, the vessel popped up into the ceiling, and pinned the hapless tech to the roof. Two others in the facility died of radiation overdose.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.