Newsgroups: alt.folklore.urban
From: hoey@aic.nrl.navy.mil (Dan Hoey)
Date: 28 Mar 1995 22:24:41 GMT
Subject: Re: Plutonium debunked in the Atlantic

> hoey@aic.nrl.navy.mil (I) wrote:

> > The new Atlantic Monthly has a good article on the myth of plutonium
> > as the "deadliest substance known to man".  The explanation seems to
> > be that in the 1940s and 1950s it was difficult to get people
> > concerned about industrial toxins.  Administrators in the nuclear
> > program exaggerated plutonium's toxicity in hopes of averting the
> > kind of carelessness that led watch-dial painters to lick their
> > radium-contaminated brushes.

kei...@guvax.acc.georgetown.edu replies:

> No doubt there's a bit of straightening-out to be done on that score,
> but the explanation above (I am responding only to this post - have
> not yet checked the source) is simple double-talk.

To attack a statement on the basis of no information is intellectually
dishonest.  In case you need specific reference, the article is
"Atomic Overreaction" by Jeff Wheelwright, in the April 1995 _Atlantic
Monthly_, p. 26 ff.  Come back when you know what you're talking
about.

My article also mentioned "Plutonium's Bad Rep" by David Schoonmaker,
in the March-April 1995 _American Scientist_, pp. 132-33, which
discussed the press's exaggeration of the mass-contamination dangers
in the Munich plutonium-smuggling case.

> Pu *is* "deadly" and "a small amount can cause cancer in all humans
> who ever lived and their dogs", in the sense that the radiation dose
> likely to cause cancer if delivered to a small area of tissue is
> available from a small particle of Pu in less than a person's
> lifetime.

If you cited your sources, I might suspect you have some facts,
instead of just parroting someone's exaggerated parroting of someone's
exaggeration.

> Thus it is true that Pu dust, if powdered and inhaled by
> the entire population, would be a bad thing,

Of course, Pu dust *was* powdered and inhaled by the entire
population.  As Wheelwright notes that atmospheric bomb testing has
left everyone over the age of 30 with plutonium oxide particles in
their lungs, in amounts that are detectable on autopsy.  But they
don't seem to be dying of it.

> ...and the total amount of dust necessary to cause this bad thing,
> if the theoretical minimum were used and none were wasted, is a
> fairly small lump.

A lump bigger than a breadbox?  Smaller than your brain?  Try some
numbers, and compare them with the workers in the "UPPU club", who
were exposed to significant amounts of Pu dust in the 1940s--more, for
instance, than Karen Silkwood--and were still healthier than the
average population after forty years.

[ As an aside, Joel Furr last year claimed that while soluble Pu salts
are highly carcinogenic, Pu dust is not a carcinogen.  He cited his
father, a nuclear physicist and radiation safety officer, for the
claim that the body deactivates Pu particles by encysting them in scar
tissue (It doesn't take much to stop alpha particles).  Wheelwright's
article, though, states that the major cancer danger of Pu is as
submicron dust particles that are trapped in the lungs.  He also says
that George Voelz's study of dust-exposed workers measured Pu in their
urine forty years later.  Someone who's got the Pu data might be able
to explain the apparent contradiction; I can't. ]

> ...  It's also true that you don't care much if everyone else in the
> world gets cancer or not if *you* happen to be the one who got
> dosed; this may be a reason to contain Pu whether or not it's likely
> to get snuffled up by the entire world in small doses.

I don't know what you are blithering about, but it sure is blither.
John Donne and I care a whole lot about the general population's
health, quite aside from our own.  But I do not think that the
population's health is served by the exaggeration of tiny risks at the
expense of realistic ones.

> [ The scare over plutonium is overblown.... ] But the noise above is
> just nonsense.  The *nuclear industry* deliberately overstated the
> dangers of its own materials out of humanitarian concern for those
> stupid workers who just wouldn't stop gobbling the stuff up no
> matter how much protection they were given?  Nonsense.

It's easy to say "noise" and "nonsense", especially through your hat.
Wheelwright says that it was indeed very difficult to keep nuclear
workers from careless and intentional self-contamination.  Perhaps if
you deign to read his article you will have some informed comment.

> The common claim about Pu is a way of stating the fact that it is
> dangerous in very small amounts, and that relatively large amounts
> of it are available in reactor waste and bomb materials.  This is an
> important point to make, though it has certainly also become
> something of a scare tactic.  But however that point arose and how
> it got used or misused, it certainly was not just a public service
> message gone awry on the part of nuclear waste managers who only had
> our health and safety at heart.

Do you think the Manhattan Project managers were trying to kill the
workers?  Of course they warned the workers to take precautions.  And
being more fearful of having the warnings ignored than about having
them exaggerated, they were probably not too careful about starting
the folklore.  I certainly don't think they were the only ones who
exaggerated the Pu hazard, but it looks like they may have given it
the first push toward insertion into the Guinness Book of Records.

> Note the clever perversity of the claim: whatever (tiny, *tiny*)
> danger there is from radioactives, ordinary citizens brought it on
> themselves.  The nuclear industry was merely trying to protect them,
> and used that harmless substance, plutonium, as a kind of
> Redi-Kilowatt safety messenger to spread the word about the bad habit
> of eating unstable isotopes.  And now those silly environmentalists
> just *wouldn't* understand and got themselves all worked up about
> cancer and all that.  Uh-huh.

Uh-huh, I note your "claim".  If you were aiming for clever
perversity, you accomplished it.  Of course, we were talking about the
Atlantic article, and my remarks on it, which have nothing to do with
this clever little piece of perversity you invented.

No one denies that plutonium is carcinogenic.  The point is that
plutonium is not the extreme example of a carcinogen that has become
current in folklore (Remember folklore?  This is a newsgroup about
folklore.)  And Wheelwright's article makes what seems to me a good
case for the origin of the exaggeration, in the nuclear worker safety
programs of the 1940s and 50s.  That is an noteworthy claim, from a
folkloric standpoint.

On the other hand, your presentation of unexamined, unsupported,
innumerate propaganda is not a statement _about_ folklore, it is
itself folklore.

As for sla...@logica.com (Graham Slapp)'s comment,
> I don't suppose the original posters address ending 'navy.mil' is
> coincidental?

My posting from the Navy Artificial Intelligence Center on my off
hours has as much to do with the Atlantic Monthly article as (I
imagine) Graham's posting from Logica UK Limited has.  Which is to
say, none.  I generally don't follow the custom of claiming not to be
a "Navy spokesman" in all my messages, because that always has been,
and should be, the default assumption.  I have, though, noticed a
marked increase in the number of newsweasels who, lacking substantive
comment, want to make something of it.

Dan Hoey
Hoey@AIC.NRL.Navy.Mil

ObUL: (Tb) We're all gonna die!