Radiation and health

A mounting number of studies are coming to some surprising conclusions about the dangers of nuclear radiation. It might not be as deadly as is widely believed.

When I was studying the subject in graduate school, I encountered an article by T.D. Luckey in the Health Physics journal on the subject of "radiation hormesis". It was a review article, and the point it made was that it seems a little bit of radiation is actually healthier for most organisms than none at all. For humans, the optimum dose seemed to be around 5 rem/year (0.05 Gray/year). (Boy, did I just date myself there!) Now there's this piece in Der Spiegel:

There is no doubt that the workers at this plant east of the Ural Mountains performed dangerous work. Enveloped in a permanent atmosphere of fear -- with intelligence agents in black coats constantly hurrying through the hallways -- about 150 men would lift the warm, spent fuel elements from the reactors and carry them to the radiochemical plant.

There, in a long brick building, workers, including many women, sat in a dimly lit environment and placed the encrusted rods into nitric acid, triggering a process that allowed them to remove the weapons-grade plutonium. While the same work was performed with remote-controlled robotic arms in the West, the Soviet workers were not even given masks to wear. There was nothing to stop plutonium gases from entering their lungs.

And yet the amount of health damage sustained by these workers was astonishingly low. The GSF study has examined 6,293 men who worked at the chemical plant between 1948 and 1972. "So far 301 have died of lung cancer," says Jacob. "But only 100 cases were caused by radiation. The others were attributed to cigarettes."

the Japanese and the Americans launched a giant epidemiological study after the war. The study included all residents of Hiroshima and Nagasaki who had survived the atomic explosion within a 10-kilometer (6.2-mile) radius. Investigators questioned the residents to obtain their precise locations when the bomb exploded, and used this information to calculate a personal radiation dose for each resident. Data was collected for 86,572 people.

Today, 60 years later, the study's results are clear. More than 700 people eventually died as a result of radiation received from the atomic attack:

• 87 died of leukemia;

• 440 died of tumors;

• and 250 died of radiation-induced heart attacks.

• In addition, 30 fetuses developed mental disabilities after they were born.