Radioactive Rain Nearly 200 Times Above Safe Limit

During heavy rains two week ago, high levels of radiation were detected in rainwater on the University of California Berkeley campus. According to the Bay Citizen, the radiation levels were 181 times higher than what is considered safe for drinking water. Radiation was also detected in California milk samples, according to the LA Times.

UC Berkeley’s Department of Nuclear Engineering measured Iodine-131 levels of 20.1 Becquerels per liter on the roof of Etcheverry Hall. The federal maximum for drinking water is 0.111 Becquerels per liter. Their report can be read here. The good news is that I-131 decays rapidly, so it is unlikely that anyone received a prolonged exposure.

Today the UCB Dept of Nuclear Engineering published data showing no detectable radiation in tap water. On March 31, they detected I-131 in tap water at 0.024 Becquerels per liter, well below the safety limit. Elevated levels of I-131 were detected in milk (with a “Best if Used by” date of 4/4) that were six times the 0.111Becquerel per liter limit. However, one would have to consume 3,800 liters of this tainted milk to receive the same radiation one would receive from flying across the country.

Meltdown California: The World’s First Nuclear Accident

My students have been asking me all week about the risks of fallout from Japan’s nuclear disaster. Californians have been emptying drug stores of iodine tablets in preparation for the impending assault on their thyroids. (Hopefully they haven’t already started consuming them, as the risk of iodine overdose is far more likely). Nevertheless, the disaster in Japan is horrifying, particularly for those in the middle of it. And it is not yet over. It will be some time before we know the true extent of the damage.

While Chernobyl was the worst nuclear accident to date, it was certainly not the first. Nor was the meltdown at Three Mile Island, which miraculously had relatively minimal affects on people. The first nuclear accident occurred at the Santa Susana Field Laboratory (SSFL), also known as RocketDyne, in Ventura Country, California, in 1959.

According to Kim Vincent, who wrote California's Historical Nuclear Meltdown, the SSFL accident released far more radiation than Three Mile Island. The SSFL was used as a testing site for rockets and had a sodium reactor used for nuclear research during the Cold War. As such, it was fairly secretive. The details of the SSFL meltdown were essentially kept hidden from the public until UCLA researchers and few reporters tracked down the details in the afterglow of Three Mile Island’s meltdown in 1979, twenty years after the fact. Scientists and workers at the site were sworn to secrecy, one of whom never told a soul until he saw himself on a documentary about the event.

SSFL was the first U.S. commercial nuclear power plant. It was not well tested and workers were not well versed in the possible problems that could happen. On July 13^th, 1959, the reactor started to act up. Workers tried to determine the nature of the problem, but failed, and turned the reactor back on and ran it for another two weeks before discovering that 13 of 43 fuel rods had partially melted. While much smaller than the Three Mile Island reactor, SSFL is believed to have released up to 240 times more radiation than the 1979 disaster. The reason for this is that it did not have a concrete containment structure.

In 1989, the Department of Energy said that the SSFL site was still contaminated. Researchers have found increased levels of bladder cancer in the area. UCLA did a follow up report that determined that cleanup workers had cancer death rates three times higher than the general population. In 2007, the EPA declared SSFL a Superfund site.

Many workers at the site were enlisted to help clean up, including many from the rocket division who did not have any expertise in radiation containment, according to the Venture Country Star. Many were told not to wear their film badges (used to measure exposure to radiation) so they could continue helping the cleanup effort even after surpassing their radiation limits and they often wore nothing more protective than coveralls. Cleaning materials were often just dumped. They also released radioactive gas over the San Fernando Valley and did not inform the public, while the company repeatedly downplayed the event and denied there was any danger to the public.

Nuke Hysteria: U.S. Threatened By Its Own Plants

It will probably be a while before we know how bad the Japanese nuclear disaster really is, and even longer before we know how much the fallout will affect people in the U.S. According to the experts, the effects in California should be negligible.

Maybe they are right. After all, the affects of Chernobyl were small beyond 1,500 miles, and Japan is several thousand miles away from California. However, as a father of a three-year old, I am very concerned. Children in Scandinavia did have an elevated risk of birth defects and developmental damage as a result of Chernobyl and the Japanese disaster will certainly increase background radiation levels. But what concerns me much more than this and what should really concern Americans is not the fallout from Japan, but the risks of our own nuclear industry, which has had dozens of near crises and is equally susceptible to severe earthquake damage.

The California plants in San Onofre and Diablo Canyon were built to withstand earthquakes of 7.0 and 7.5, respectively, according to SFGate. But California is known to have had quakes in excess of 8.0. Furthermore, both nuclear plants are on the coast, making them susceptible to tsunami damage. According to the Huffington Post, Diablo Canyon is less than 1 mile from an offshore earthquake fault. The Cascadian subduction zone is thought to be able to generate quakes in the 9.0 range, along with cataclysmic tsunamis. It did, in fact, cause a tsunami that devastated what is now Humboldt County in 1700. Furthermore, the San Onofre plant sits less than 100 miles from San Diego and Los Angeles, with a total population of well of 10 million in the near vicinity. Then there is the additional threat of the rising sea levels and increasingly violent storms accompanying climate change.

It is not just California that is at risk. Regulators have known for six years that the nuclear plants in the central and eastern U.S. are at far greater earthquake risk than previously assumed. The New Madrid fault in Missouri, for example, has had quakes in the 19^th century that are thought to have surpassed 8.0 on the Richter scale. In 1986, a quake in Cleveland damaged the Perry Nuclear Power Plant, according to a report in Common Dreams. Also, a recently discovered fault runs beneath the Indian Point plant less than 50 miles from New York City, making it arguably the most dangerous nuclear power plant in the country.

Compounding the earthquake risk is years of lax regulation and maintenance. Democracy Now reported that the backup diesel generators at the Fermi 2 reactor in Michigan were inoperable for 20 years. Had there been a disaster in that plant, there would have been no backup energy and potential disaster for Toledo and Windsor. Likewise, the Palisades reactor in Michigan has been storing radioactive waste in silos along Lake Michigan since 1993, in violation of NRC regulations, putting at risk the drinking water of millions of people. There are also dozens of nuclear power plants in operation in the U.S. with obsolete containment systems that could fail in an accident. In 1985, the NRC warned of this risk, saying plants like Dresden, in Illinois, or Vermont Yankee, had a 90% chance of failure in a severe accident.

Compounding the risk even further still are the woefully inadequate and ill-conceived general disaster-preparedness plans in the U.S. For example, there are only evacuation plans for 10 miles around U.S. plants, yet the U.S. is insisting on evacuating U.S. citizens within 50 miles of the Japanese plants. Even this could be inadequate. A one-hundred square mile zone around Chernobyl is now uninhabitable it is so radioactive. Should one of the U.S. plants go level 6 or level 7, particularly near a densely populated region such as Indian Point or San Onofre, it might be impossible to quickly evacuate everyone within 50 miles, let alone 100. Also, in light of the pathetic U.S. response to hurricane Katrina, it is hard to believe that the government is in any shape to deal with a disaster of the magnitude of the one unfolding in Japan.

Hopefully the current hysteria around nukes, whether misplaced or well-founded, will reinvigorate the anti-nuclear movement and inspire mass protests like we saw in the 1980s and we are currently seeing in Europe. Ralph Nader seems to think the move to increase nuclear power in the U.S. is temporarily dead in the water. However, Obama has asserted that the Japanese disaster will have no effect on U.S. plans to increase its nuclear power plants. He made true on similar threats in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon disaster, okaying deepwater oil exploration less than a year after, so there is no reason to think he won’t continue to push nukes, too, unless the anti-nuclear movement grows rapidly in size and militancy.

The Fallacy of Novelty

One day we were cleaning the biology store room and found a big bucket covered with trefoil radiation warning stickers. Back in the day, it was not uncommon to use radioactive materials in chemistry classes. I even remember using a Geiger counter in my own high school chemistry class. Nowadays there is really no need to possess actual radioactive materials at school, as it is just too dangerous and all relevant content standards can be taught through simulations, reading and lecture.  

I alerted my department head about the radioactive bucket, who alerted the assistant principal, who completely disregarded it. The next morning, the principal passed by the science wing and remarked, “My, you all have a healthy glow today!”

We convened a departmental meeting. Should we go to OSHA? The school board? Alert parents? What was actually in the bucket? We had no radiation safety equipment to don for an investigation. Even if it was harmless, it would still need to be disposed and not by simply chucking it in the garbage. In the end, I believe the district brought in a haz. mat. specialist to remove the item.

One science teacher, who had been around for 30 years, told us how common it was in the old days to let kids handle radioactive materials. Then he brought out a horrifying ancient device called The Radium Ore Revigator, a pseudoscientific piece of quackery from the 1920s that was supposed to prevent arthritis, rheumatism and flatulence. Water flowed over radium in the device, one of the most radioactive substances known to science, and was then drunk for its salubrious properties.

Back around the turn of the century doctors touted radiation as a panacea for many ills. In 1903, Alexander Gram Bell proposed using radium to treat tumors. This later became a common practice. Henrietta Lacks, whose prolific cervical cancer gave rise to the ubiquitous and famous HeLa cell line, was initially treated with radium blocks inserted into her uterus, causing terrible burns and internal injury. (See The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, by Rebecca Skloot, a wonderful biography that not only makes the science very understandable, but also clearly lays out the complex ethical issues around the patenting of human tissues and the history of racism by the medical establishment).

A common fallacy is the Appeal to Novelty: if something is new, then it necessary must be better than its predecessor. Early excitement over radiation’s medical benefits certainly fell into this category, even if scientists have since learned how to use it effectively for certain medical procedures. In our society, novelty is equated with progress. In science, new data often helps provide a better explanation for phenomena, better treatments, and more sophisticated machines, but not always (e.g., thalidomide, DES, Vioxx, Fen-Phen). Manufacturers love to put the word “new” in front of an old product name, perhaps change the labeling and modify the formulation slightly, because we are so quick to accept that newer is necessarily better.

Teachers are no better than others at seeing through this bunkum. In fact, we may even be more susceptible. Consider that most teachers truly want to do a better job, inspire and reach more of their students, help more of them to graduate and become successful in life. Also, consider that we have so many students slipping through the cracks, dropping out, reading below grade level. We are hungry for tools that mitigate these problems and that give us a leg up in our desire to help kids. Enter the snake oil peddlers. Some are CEOs, pundits, politicians who claim business models work for them, so they should work in schools, too. Others are academicians, with scholarly literature to back their claims.

In my fourteen years of teaching I’ve been compelled to try dozens of the “newest,” “best,” and “evidence-based” remedies: Smaller Learning Communities, Differentiated Instruction, Service Learning, Project-Based Learning, Complex Instruction, Constructivism, Professional Learning Communities, ad nauseum. Most of these have their merits, theoretically, but they also require a phenomenal amount of training, planning, preparation and resources. There is no compelling data that any of these techniques can erase the achievement gap or solve the problems of underperforming schools (although some, like Smaller Learning Communities, attract more high achieving students, thus changing the demographics and, subsequently, test scores).

Many argue that they’re still worth doing because they are pedagogically sound and will certainly benefit some students. Perhaps this is true, especially if funding was sufficient. As educators, whenever presented with a new technique, structure or system, we must carefully analyze the costs, and not just accept that the benefits will be worth the trouble. Ultimately, though, we have to address the 500 pound gorilla in the room, class, an issue that cannot be remedied through new and improved curriculum, school restructuring, privatization or union busting.

Educators are not sharks. We will not die if we stop moving forward (nor will our students).