Posted on 09/04/2004 5:49:28 PM PDT by neverdem
EMMETT, Idaho, Aug. 31 - In the 1950's and early 1960's, at the height of the cold war, people in this southeastern Idaho town thought what they occasionally saw dusting their fruit orchards and cow pastures was frost - only it was not cold to the touch, several longtime residents said. Others described it as a gray-white powder that seemed to come out of nowhere.
The residents of this town of dairy and cattle farmers did not know it then, but half a century ago, northern winds blew radioactive fallout into southeastern Idaho when the federal government set off about 90 nuclear bombs at its Nevada test site near Las Vegas.
There is not any doubt that Emmett, population 5,500, and other towns in four Idaho counties were exposed to high levels of radiation from the open-air atomic bomb blasts, receiving among the highest doses of a radioactive chemical that has been linked to increased risk for thyroid cancer. The National Cancer Institute in 1997 released a detailed study and a map plotting the locations of the fallout across the country, ranking concentrations of Radioactive Iodine-131, an isotope released when a nuclear bomb is detonated, from Nevada to upstate New York. The study put the four Idaho counties - Gem County, which includes Emmett; Lemhi; Blaine; and Custer - and one in Montana at the top of that list.
But few Emmett residents heard about that study, dozens said in recent interviews. Even as sick residents of other Western states received compensation from the government, the question of how Idahoans may have been affected by the nuclear tests received little attention. But now a furor has erupted here and elsewhere in Idaho, set off by one Emmett native, who survived thyroid cancer but is dying of breast cancer that has spread to her liver and her bones.
The native, Sheri Garman, 52, who now lives in Vancouver, Wash., wrote a long letter to an Idaho state legislator - a high school classmate - after learning that the National Academy of Sciences, at the request of the federal government, is currently re-evaluating the extent of the fallout from the Nevada test site and its connection to other cancers and diseases besides thyroid cancer.
The academy's Board on Radiation Effects Research has held three hearings on the matter over the last year, two in Utah, including one on July 29, and one in Arizona.
"I think Idahoans were severely misled on the seriousness of the situation," Ms. Garman wrote on July 14 to Kathy Skippen, a state representative from Gem County. "It's not just thyroid cancer. It's not insignificant. It's deadly, expensive and it is known."
Like many Emmett residents, Ms. Garman grew up on a dairy farm, drinking fresh milk. Children of her generation living in places like Emmett, where the 1997 cancer institute study showed residents had received large doses of Radioactive Iodine-131, are at greater risk for developing thyroid cancer because the cows ingested contaminated grass.
The study, of 3,071 counties, concluded the fallout caused or would eventually cause tens of thousands of cases of thyroid cancer. Radiation from fallout is measured in rads; one rad is equivalent to the amount of radiation absorbed by the thyroid of a person who has 10 X-rays in the neck area. Residents of the four Idaho counties, the study said, received average thyroid doses of 12 to 16 rads, but the dose to some children may have been as high as 100 rads.
Idaho officials, including Gov. Dirk Kempthorne, then a United States senator, responded to the study by calling the situation an "outrage" and demanding further investigation. At the time Mr. Kempthorne also asked that Idaho be included in a government compensation program that now provides $50,000 each to residents of 21 counties in Utah, Nevada and Arizona whose illnesses have been diagnosed with any of 19 cancers. But Idaho residents were not included in the compensation program, which has thus far paid $780 million to other "down winders" exposed to radiation during the bomb tests as well as employees at the weapons testing sites and uranium mine and mill workers.
"What we need now," Ms. Garman said in a telephone interview, "is to get public hearings in Idaho. We need our politicians to be our watchdogs. We're too sick, and we're not all going to be there when this happens."
Critics say that Governor Kempthorne and other officials, after initially expressing concern, have ignored the public health threat to Idaho residents. Nuclear watchdog groups have also questioned whether the officials' reluctance to press the issue was intended to protect Idaho's nuclear power industry, a major employer in the state, or because they supported the idea of resuming nuclear testing, as was proposed in a Pentagon report in 2002. State officials denied such motivations.
The controversy prompted Mr. Kempthorne and Senator Larry E. Craig, both Republicans, to take the unusual step of defending themselves two weeks ago on the editorial pages of the state's largest newspaper, The Idaho Statesman.
The governor, in an article published on Aug. 18, said, "I urge anyone with a story to tell to come forward."
But he also cited a 1998 study by the Cancer Data Registry of Idaho that found an increasing rate of thyroid cancer in Blaine and Custer Counties, but was unable to attribute the rising rates to a specific cause.
Asked why the governor had waited until now to urge Idaho residents to come forward if they suspected fallout had made them sick, a spokesman for Mr. Kempthorne, Mike Journee, said that the governor was waiting for concrete proof. He said the governor would support compensation for Idahoans if there were evidence "comparable to the evidence that was used to compensate folks in Utah."
Yet when the compensation program was amended in 2000 at the urging of Senator Orrin G. Hatch of Utah to include more counties in his state and in Arizona, Utah officials had the same scientific information- the 1997 Cancer Institute study - available to them as Idaho officials did. Utah officials cited testimony of residents from Utah and Arizona that was made available to Mr. Hatch's office as a rationale for including five more counties in those two states.
Senator Hatch, a Republican, wrote the original 1990 law that mandated compensation, known as the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act; the payments are administered by the Justice Department.
Mr. Journee said that Utah residents had been more vocal about their illnesses than Idahoans had.
"They were engaged," he said. "The reason folks down in Utah got compensation is that they told their stories. That's what the governor wants the people of Idaho to do."
[On Friday, Mr. Kempthorne wrote in a letter to the National Academy of Sciences board studying the issue, "I call upon the board to compare exposure information for Idaho with the areas currently included" in the compensation program. "Fairness," he wrote, "must recognize the human faces behind cold, and often inconclusive studies and statistics."]
Here in Emmett, residents have spent the last several days making lists of relatives and neighbors - living and dead - with cancer. They have rushed to a local bakery, aptly named the Rumor Mill, where the owner, Tona Henderson, has produced a form letter of her own that residents can fill out and send to the National Academy of Sciences.
A committee of the academy is taking public comment for a study on nuclear fallout and public health to be submitted to the Department of Health and Human Services, said Bill Kearney, a spokesman for the academy. While many scientists and medical experts have said there is a connection between exposure to Iodine-131 and greater risk of thyroid disease and thyroid cancer, a link between the fallout and other diseases has not been established.
Still, in Emmett, dozens of residents have gathered in coffee shops and farmhouses to talk about cancer. Many furiously said they suspected their radiation exposure was connected to their cancers.
"This whole thing is wrong," said Richard Rynearson, 62, who is dying of colon and liver cancer, and who ran a heating and air-conditioning business until he became too sick to work. "Somebody needs to own up to the fact that they messed up."
Mr. Rynearson, who recalled seeing that strange gray dust on the dairy farm where he grew up, said he first learned of the nuclear fallout last week.
"I always thought maybe there was something wrong in this valley," he said. "But I would have liked to have known 10 years ago if we had this problem. Maybe I could have gotten checked out."
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.
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