When this cancer
epidemic began,
20 years after
the fallout,
governments denied
its existence.
The US roped in
the professional
whitewash artist,
Sir Richard Doll
to explain it away
as an aberration
in statistics.
When it was too
significant to ignore,
the response was to
blame the victim:
it was caused by
smoking or by
excessive sunbathing.

At Sellafield
there is a persistent
ongoing leukaemia
cluster.
The incidence of
this terrible disease
in the area is
ten times the
national average

POISONING IN THE NAME
OF PROGRESS
The population of Earth has been exposed to unnaturally high levels of radiation now for over 50 years. And in increased cancer rates, childhood leukaemia and other deadly effects, the results are becoming clear. It is vital to understand that, whatever the nuclear industry might say, there is no such thing as a 'safe dose' of radiation. By Chris Busby

The systematic irradiation of the planet began after the Second World War, as the superpowers raced to make ever more powerful nuclear bombs and to demonstrate them to each other in the open air. From 1952 to 1963 there was an orgy of testing. In Nevada, the South Pacific, Australia and Kazakhstan, the mushroom cloud became a common sight. Radioactive fallout rapidly became distributed all over the planet's surface, driven by meteorology and modulated by rainfall.

Growth in Childhood Cancers
Childhood cancer and leukaemia rates began to rise as a direct result. In trying to discover the cause, Alice Stewart was the first to demonstrate the radiation sensitivity of the unborn child to obstetric X-rays (see box on page X), but she could only account for a fraction of the increase in childhood cancers. In the late 1950s, in Pittsburgh, USA, the scientist Ernest Sternglass was considering buying a fallout shelter. Using Stewart's findings, he quickly convinced himself that no-one could survive a nuclear war: that the children on both sides would die from low-level radiation exposure. He found evidence of this in national trends, and went to the journals and the Press. It was probably his energy and bravery, building on Alice Stewart's precise and incontrovertible research, which began the whole investigation into the health effects of low-level radiation. Fallout increased infant mortality all over the world.
In 1963, Swedish scientist Karl Luning began to look at the genetic effects of Strontium-90 on mice. A male mouse was injected with a small amount and mated within the hour. A significant fraction of the offspring died in the womb. For babies that survived, a significant fraction of their offspring also died in the womb. Infant deaths in the UK were caused by genetic damage and development defects, mainly in heart development. In Wales, where the rainfall is particularly high, the infant death rate was higher. Of course, the industry's fatuous 'averaging model' predicted no effect at the small conventional doses involved [see Rosalie Bertell on page XX]. Nobel prizewinners Linus Pauling and Andrei Sakharov both spoke out against nuclear testing, warning of generations of people with cancer and leukaemia. Eventually Sternglass got a memo through to President Kennedy, who had personal experience of leukaemia. Kennedy, against opposition from the nuclear-military lobby, forced through an end to atmospheric testing in 1963.

The Cancer Epidemic
But it was too late. As Kennedy had feared, genetic damage caused by the fallout began its deadly work. Hermann Muller, who discovered the genetic effects of radiation, said that, like murder, "genetic damage will out." The legacy of fallout doses in the period 1955 to 1963 is the increased rates of cancer we are now experiencing.
It was caused by pre-existing genetic problems (ignoring the source of these same problems). It was caused by eating habits: too much fat, too little fibre. It was caused by population mixing. Some scientists are still denying its existence altogether.
In Wales, where fallout was three times higher than in England, the onset of the cancer epidemic began earlier, in accordance with radiobiological laws. The time-lag was longer in England, where the dose was less, but the plague has now arrived there too. Instead of red crosses on doors, there are cancer charity shops, pink ribbons and buttonholes with flower motifs. The increases in cancer in Wales show very clearly that it was the fallout that caused the effect.

The 'Downwinders'
By 1970 everyone on the planet had plutonium and strontium in their bodies, and their genes had been scrambled like those of Luning's mice. But just as the test ban of 1963 stopped the weapons fallout, a new source of planetary contamination began: the nuclear fuel cycle. The accidents at Windscale in Cumbria (now Sellafield) and at Kyshtym in the Soviet Union had added to the fallout and given a taste of things to come. Full-scale government-licensed releases into the biosphere from nuclear power stations and reprocessing plants took over in the 1970s from bombs as the source of radiation exposure to the world population. Their health effects soon became clear. By the early 1980s, Sellafield had become synonymous with childhood leukaemia, and by 1995 all the other main nuclear pollution sources in Europe - Dounreay, La Hague, Aldermaston and Harwell - had their studies showing cancer and/or leukaemia increases. The figure for Dounreay is eight times, for La Hague in France, 15 times. The supposedly independent government Committee on Medical Aspects of Radiation in the Environment (COMARE) reported that radiation cannot be the cause because the doses are too low.
Despite the reassurances of learned committees, the 'Sellafield Blight' has now extended from Seascale (where the leukaemia cluster was reported by Yorkshire Television) to the estuaries and sandy shores of Wales (where our findings of increased risk of cancer near the North Wales coast were also reported by TV in February of this year). This coastal effect was found in north-west England by researchers from Lancaster University in 1987, and for estuaries on the west coast of England by Leukaemia Research Fund researchers in 1990. The concerns of the people of Ireland over Sellafield and the Irish Sea have now become translated into a court case against BNFL.
Plutonium from Sellafield has been measured in the lymph-nodes of cadavers from Cumbria and from all over the UK. It has been found in sheep droppings from the west coast to the east coast. Parents should be shocked to learn that plutonium has been found in children's teeth, continuously decreasing in concentration with distance from Sellafield across the whole of the UK. In the USA, Sternglass turned his attention to those unfortunate citizens living downwind of nuclear sites. He has recently applied his infant mortality analysis to every State in the US, and been able to explain much of the trend in rates for infant mortality and, with Jay Gould, for female breast cancer on the basis of nuclear contamination from fallout or from local nuclear site releases. In Europe, there are many other dirty nuclear sites - for example, Barsebaeck near Malmo in Sweden, just across the straits from Copenhagen. Near Barsebaeck there are significant local excesses of leukaemia and other cancers (between 2- and 5-fold). There is an abnormal level of child leukaemia mortality in the area surrounding Harwell and Aldermaston. The Aldermaston cluster had already been reported in the mid 1980s, and Molly Scott Cato and I recently found a doubling in risk of the child leukaemia mortality. We published our findings in the British Medical Journal.
Although the area around Aldermaston is generally known to be highly contaminated, recent information suggests the contamination is even worse than we thought. Thus, the Annual Reports of the Atomic Weapons Establishment, Aldermaston, include figures for dust on filters deployed around the sites and further afield. Dust from filters near the site is radioactive, but dust from distant filters is also radioactive. In some filters, the activity was as high as 50,000 becquerels per kilogram, over 100 times higher than low-level radioactive waste, which must, by law, be sent to Sellafield for safe storage. The people of Reading, Basingstoke, Newbury and probably everywhere in the UK are inhaling this stuff daily. But where does it come from?
A proportion is natural. But most comes from weapons fallout, from Chernobyl and from releases from Aldermaston and Harwell into the Thames valley. And there is another unexpected source. According to Professor Roy Harrison, Chairman of the government's Airborne Particles Expert Group (APEG), up to 30 per cent of airborne particles in the UK derive from the sea.

Regulating the Truth
Today, as the cancer rate rises inexorably, governments throughout the world pour money into bogus cancer research, but do nothing about reducing its growing incidence. Needless to say, the 'experts' of the Nuclear Establishment have never ceased to assure us that nuclear radiation is quite safe, save at very high doses, to which we would rarely, if ever, be exposed.
The International Commission on Radiological Protection (ICRP) originally set safety levels that reflected this assumption. However, the more we learn about nuclear radiation, the more it is seen that the safety levels must be still further reduced. As will be seen from the following table, the 'acceptable level' for people exposed to occupational radiation has been reduced six times since 1931, and is now more than 36 times lower than it was then, while the acceptable level for the general public has been reduced from 0.5 rem per annum in 1977 to 0.1 rem per annum in 1990.

In fact, evidence has been piling up for years that there is no safe dose of radioactivity - a fact that even the National Radiological Protection Board (NRPB) conceded in 1995, 100 years after Roentgen's discovery of radioactivity.13 In the words of the NRPB "There is no basis for the assumption that there is likely to be a dose threshold below which the risk of tumour induction would be zero."

Illogical Science
It is now well-established that the appearance of cancers is not proportionate to the dose - they are much more frequent than previously expected at much lower doses. The reason seems to be as follows: Cells are exquisitely sensitive to radiation whilst they are replicating, a fact that, in theory at least, enables radiotherapy to kill the dividing cancer cells but spare the non-dividing normal cells. There are always some cells that are naturally in the cell-division phase, which means that there are two populations being irradiated - sensitive ones (1 per cent) and insensitive (99 per cent). Evidence has been piling up for years that there is no safe dose of radioactivity - a fact that even the National Radiological Protection Board conceded in 1995. The real cancer dose response relationship reflects this. Very low doses of radiation damage these sensitive cells and cause mutations and an increase in the cancer level. As the dose increases, however, there is a point where cell death rather than cell mutation occurs and the cancer yield falls. Later it rises again as the insensitive cells are mutated. Real measurements made on people subjected to radiation clearly show this effect but, since physicists cannot understand how you can increase a causal factor without increasing the effects, they assume that the effects are directly proportionate to the cause. In Russia, where researching the effects of low-level radiation has recently become very important, Elena Burlakova of the Moscow Academy of Science has recently discovered that, if one plots the results of all radiation leukaemia studies, this 'bi-phasic' response becomes evident. To get this principle accepted in scientific circles is so important that I tried to present Burlakova's dose-response curve to the European Parliament in 1997.14 This bi-phasic response is also very clear in the latest results of the study of cancer in nuclear workers (see Chernobyl box on page XX). It is particularly relevant to the understanding of what is happening to people living in the area of Sellafield.

The Hiroshima and Nagasaki Survivors
The method generally used to relate the doses received by people to the measured effects is based on the experience of a sample of the survivors of the atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. These survivors were rounded up some five years after the events and became the object of a 'Lifespan Study' on which the calculation of radiation risk factors is based. These people had survived because they were either too far away from the explosion to be atomised, incinerated or to suffer terminal cellular disruption. The dose they received was nevertheless a big one, it was mainly external and it was a single dose. So their experience was not of much use for estimating the effect of continual small doses over a long period, many of which are derived from internal radiation, which is the case with people living near Sellafield or other nuclear installations. In addition, there is no way that the doses received by the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki could have been measured properly. They were only roughly estimated. Nevertheless they were related to the cancers that subsequently appeared in the population on the basis of current assumptions. A straight line was drawn on some graph paper from a point corresponding to the maximum dose received, and no attempt was made to estimate the effect of any internal dose received from fallout. It is this straight line that is still used to predict the cancer levels caused by exposure to radioactivity. The large, single, acute flash is still assumed to have exactly the same effect as a long succession of small exposures. However, the doses received by the inhabitants of the area around Sellafield are at least 00 times lower than those to which the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were subjected. At such high doses, cells are killed rather than mutated - giving rise to a disproportionately lower increase in the cancer rate. Yet this fact is not taken into account. The official position is totally unacceptable for another important reason: it does not distinguish between external and internal radiation. Now we are exposed to radiation in two very different ways - externally as with solar and cosmic radiation and X-rays, and internally, largely by inhaling or ingesting unstable radioactive atoms called isotopes.

Internal isotopes
Internal isotopes behave in curious biochemical ways and concentrate in particular living structures with which they have a chemical affinity. But it is not only internal radioactive isotopes that are so dangerous: particles of radioactive dust can also get into the body, by inhalation into the lungs and through the lung into the lymphatic system or else by ingestion. Tiny 'hot particles', as they are called, cause massive local doses which can lead to cancer. These particles line up at membrane surfaces, like caesium-137, or attach themselves, like strontium-90, to chromosomes, where they irradiate local tissue with massive doses that can lead to cancer.
A tiny invisible dust particle, for instance, containing the oxide of plutonium-239, can be inhaled, pass through the lung and become trapped in a lymph-node, where it can emit alpha particles again and again. Electron microscope photographs of these lymph-node 'alpha stars' have been published. Whether they are radio-isotopes or radioactive particles, inhalation and ingestion are increasingly important for those of us examining the effects of Sellafield radioactivity on health. Here again, with official statistics, their effects are still averaged over the whole body, or the whole lung or some other large mass of tissue - masking in this way the real seriousness of the local damage caused.

Natural and Man-made Radiation
There is an important fundamental difference between external natural radiation (cosmic and gamma radiation from rocks) and the internal exposures from artificial man-made radiation. The human race has evolved in the presence of natural background radiation, but until this century has never been exposed to atoms of the man-made radioactive isotopes. Just as we have evolved responses to sunshine by tanning, we have evolved responses to natural background radiation in the form of cell repair mechanisms. But these repair mechanisms cannot deal with the novel man-made radioisotopes which may attack in wholly new ways.
A great many of them mimic natural elements. Strontium-90 mimics calcium, biologically an extremely important element, and concentrates in bone and in chromosomes. Because it follows calcium, it concentrates in milk and is absorbed into the body. It attaches to chromosomes to cause sub-lethal damage. The cell enters the irreversible repair-replication procedure developed through evolution as a response to natural background radiation. But unlike cosmic rays, strontium has a radioactive 'daughter product', and can hit the cell a second time during the replication period, causing mutation, which leads to cancer.
Another radioisotope which has been massively increased by nuclear activities is tritium. Tritium is a form of radioactive hydrogen, and can exchange with normal hydrogen in water or as part of a critical cell enzyme. When it decays, it suddenly changes into helium, and may cause a whole enzyme, with its complex arrangement of hundreds of thousands of atoms, to fail. It is astonishing how current safety standards neglect to take these critical and well-documented radio-isotope facts into account.

Anachroonistic Models
The model used by the nuclear establishment to calculate the health effects of radiation is the same physics-based one which was developed in the 1920s. It pre-dates even the discovery of DNA and involves no consideration of the micro-distribution of inhaled or ingested isotopes or of the cell's response to low-level radiation injury. Dose is simply calculated in terms of the absorption of energy. Measures of radioactivity that are still in general use among scientists such as 'Rads' and 'Grays' are no more than measures of the average energy absorbed per unit of mass.
Responsible scientists are at last beginning to question the validity of this model. Two US scientists, Ernest Sternglass and Jay Gould have argued persuasively that the radiation effects are seriously increased by immune-system damage from the internal exposure, notably from strontium-90, and point to the work of the Canadian Abram Petkau, who showed that low doses have great effect on biological membranes. John Gofman demonstrates that the Hiroshima sums for external exposure are simply wrong. Last year, Alice Stewart, using new data that she succeeded in extracting from the Hiroshima study, realised her ambition of proving that the 'bomb survivors' were not even a suitable representative group.

The Cracks Appear
Cracks are now beginning to appear in the Establishment faade. Government biologists can no longer swallow the inadequate physics-based model, and the Medical Research Council (MRC) is expressing doubts. The MRC has just discovered a new and unexpected effect: genomic instability. Eric Wright (a research scientist at Harwell) can hit single cells with plutonium, and hence alpha particles, (which are very short range but by far the most biologically destructive) and has shown that not only the cells themselves, but the progeny of those cells, and even that of their near neighbours who were not hit, are susceptible to general genetic mutation. Equally important, Brian Lord of the Christie Hospital, Manchester, working with Wright, found that exposure to plutonium can increase the leukaemia rate in the offspring of mice whose fathers were injected with it.

Chemicals and Radiation: the Link
Lord's work also shows that there were serious increased rates of leukaemia in the offspring of fathers exposed to plutonium induced by secondary exposure to a chemical called methyl-nitroso-urea. Very recently, in a study from the USA, exposure to the ubiquitous insecticide 'lindane', that for years was used in sheep-dips in the UK, and that is closely associated with breast cancer, was shown to seriously increase the effects of radiation-induced genomic instability.
That there is an important synergic effect between chemicals and radiation was first put forward in 1962 by Rachel Carson in Silent Spring. Since then, the principle involved, which is of course totally obscured by the physics-based model, has been firmly established. For example, uranium miners who smoke are known to have a much higher rate of lung cancer than could be predicted from what we know of the individual relationship between smoking and lung cancer, on the one hand, and working in a uranium mine and lung cancer on the other.
Professor Bryn Bridges, now the director of COMARE, complained in The Ecologist [Environmental genetic hazards: the important problem, The Ecologist, June 1971] 28 years ago, of the absurdity of existing safety standards in view of the large numbers of mutagens to which each member of the modern population was exposed. "What is a suitable recommendation for one mutagen (i.e. radiation)," he wrote, "will not suffice when each of a number of mutagens is considered." It has been estimated that about 1,000 to 1,500 new chemicals are introduced into the environment each year, of which no more than a minute fraction is tested for mutagenic activity. If a thousand mutagens were each allowed at population doses which doubled the spontaneous rate, then the overall rate might go up a thousandfold quite apart from any synergistic interaction which might occur."
Bryn Bridges is today one of the most important, most respected figures in this whole field. This statement alone, made 28 years ago, makes complete nonsense of the safety standards for exposure to chemicals as well as to different types of radioactivity that are still in use.

Something Must be Done
Today, 30,000 women in the UK die of breast cancer every year. A man's chance of getting prostate cancer corresponds roughly to his age. If he is 60 he has a 60 per cent chance, if 80 an 80 per cent chance. Cancer now kills one man out of two and one woman out of three. The incidence of cancer among the general public of all ages is increasing at the rate of 1 per cent per annum [See The Ecologist, March/April 1998. page 71].
We know that one of the major factors involved is exposure to radioactivity - which, like carcinogenic chemicals, is everywhere in our environment. Yet everything is done to avoid taking the essential measures required to address the real causes of this disease, simply, it seems, in order to avoid having to close down the nuclear industry. In countenancing, indeed promoting, this outrage, government leaders are colluding in the murder of tens of thousands of people a year in this country alone.