7 Nuclear Workers: Radiation on the Job
While the use of radiation in medicine has led to some unpleasant surprises, its presence in the workplace has served as a sort of early-warning system to the general population. "Since workers are first exposed and most heavily exposed," writes Dr. Irving Selikoff, "the workers give us first indication. Most things that cause cancer in society are discovered in the workplace."1 Ever since Czech miners began digging for uranium four centuries ago, evidence has been piling up to indicate that radioactivity has been killing and debilitating people who work with it.
Unfortunately the nuclear industry and its supporters in government have consistently resisted that conclusion, even to the point of suppressing numerous broad-based studies they themselves commissioned and then quashed when the conclusions went the "wrong" way.
The key point of debate has centered on how much radiation was really considered safe. Since 1898, when Pierre and Marie Curie began working with radium in a run-down shed outside Paris, millions of people have worked in diverse industries that use radioactive materials in such varied applications as the making of false teeth and numerous industrial products, the painting of watch dials, the shooting of X rays, and the building of atomic bombs and power plants.
Because it cannot be smelled, tasted, seen, heard, or felt, early physicists assumed that radiation was not dangerous unless it produced immediate, visible effects, such as skin burns. Soon it began to dawn on those close to the field that there might be other effects, and standards began to come into existence in succeeding years on a hit-and-miss basis. The first exposure standards, set in the 1920s, allowed workers to receive as much as 730 rems per year—146 times the current U.S. limit.2 By the 1940s it was widely acknowledged that radiation did cause cancer.
But the prevailing scientific view at that time was that there was a safe "threshold" of exposure below which radiation caused no harm. If that particular "harmless" dose could be found, then a permanent standard could be set. While the search for the threshold went on, it became well known that radium-dial painters who had ingested bits of radium in their work were suffering agonizing deaths from cancer. In 1941 a standard that limited radium ingestion was set based on their experience.3 By 1959 industry-wide concern over genetic damage and other radiation-related disease had grown to the point where an across-the-board limit of five rems per year was set for all radiation-related work. The formal limit persisted through 1981, but various loopholes in the standards allowed a worker to legally receive as much as forty-two rems per year. And in the late 1970s industry and its supporters began a concerted move to raise exposure limitations in the workplace.4
Meanwhile, by 1980, EPA estimates put the number of Americans working with radiation at 1.5 million. At least eight federal departments, two independent scientific advisory committees, and fifty states have some authority over worker protection.5 As an editorial in the prestigious journal Health Physics put it in August 1980: "Policies vary from location to location. Regulations and regulatory guidance are in such a hopeless muddle that it is impossible to derive consistent practices. Thus many exposures . . . go unrecorded or unrecognized."6
Perhaps more important for the general public, the debate over what is thought to be a "safe" dose of radiation rages on, with people who work with radiation serving as society’s guinea pigs. By the mid-1970s the federal government and the broad mainstream of independent radiation specialists had agreed that it was simply impossible to set a 100 percent safe level of exposure. The extreme vulnerability of children, the potential for genetic damage, and variations in individual susceptibilities made even the tiniest bit of exposure potentially lethal. As the studies of Hewitt, Stewart, and Kneale had shown in England, small doses of X ray had already proven far more dangerous than previously believed.
And now, with billions of dollars invested, radiation and its dangers became the core of yet another debate, this time with the health of workers at center stage, but with serious implications for the well-being of the global community at stake.
1. D. Zinman, B. Wyrick, and B. Hevisi, "Job-Related Diseases Kill 300 a Day," Newsday, February 9, 1977.
2. David M. Scott, "A Review of Radiation Protection Principles and Practices and the Potential for Worker Exposure to Radiation," a research report for the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), March 30, 1980, pp. 10-13 (hereafter cited as "Scott/NIOSH Report").
3. Ibid.
4. According to Volume 10 of the Code of Federal Regulations, Part 20 (10 CFR), a radiation worker can receive three rems per quarter or twelve rems total body exposure in a given year using the 5(n-18) age averaging formula. By adding the thirty-rem bone or thyroid dose permitted under these regulations, the forty-two-rem figure is arrived at. In 1977 the International Commission on Radiological Protection (ICRP) issued worker exposure recommendations in their Publication No. 26 (ICRP No. 26, Pergamon Press) which would have the effect of increasing single organ exposures significantly. For example, the current thyroid dose of thirty rems would be raised to fifty rems in cases where radiation is deposited in one organ alone. ICRP No. 26 in terms of regulations
would raise twenty-three out of forty-nine maximum permissible concentrations of airborne radioactivity in the workplace—such as strontium 90, which would be increased by a factor of seventeen.
5. Robert Alvarez, "Statement before the House Government Operations Subcommittee on Energy, Environment, and Natural Resources, July 14, 1978" (available from the Environmental Policy Center, 317 Pennsylvania Ave. SE, Washington, D.C. 20003).
6. Ronald Katheren, "What Is Occupational Exposure?" Health Physics, 39, No 2 (August 1980): 141.