To: Tim Steadham <tstead@ntirs.org>
From: "Russell D. Hoffman" <rhoffman@animatedsoftware.com>
Subject: Re: [downwinders] Eugene Cronkite, Dies at 86; Found Cancer's  Links to Radiation
In-Reply-To: <20010711202830.70472.qmail@web9106.mail.yahoo.com>
References: <4.2.0.58.20010711100545.009ff720@mail.adnc.com>

To: Tim Steadham
From: Russell Hoffman
Re: You are misquoting my remarks and turning away from the debate you say you are ready for
Date: July 11th, 2001

Sir,

Wait a second:

Where did I or anyone else say what Dr. (not Mr.) Cronkite died of?  His studies were of interest to our discussion, and the fact that a pioneer of those studies would only now be dying (of whatever) shows just how young this whole problem is.

Since you've written an answer that is totally irrelevant to the email you're supposedly answering, here are some more random FACTS for you to respond to:

Some problems society has uncovered so far with nuclear power:

* Nuclear power's energy is not "too cheap to meter", it's the most expensive.
* Nuclear power is prone to outages, both planned and unplanned.
* No one wants the waste.  Nevada, this fall, will start a multi-million dollar media campaign to prevent Yucca Mountain, as if scientific grounds weren't enough to condemn the idea.
* No one has any idea of what to do with the waste although hundreds of ideas have been considered and billions and billions of dollars have been spent.
* Whatever we eventually do with the waste will cost a lot more than expected or promised.
* Nuclear proliferation is a constant threat (see related article, below).
* Nuclear regulatory agencies are heavily lopsided towards "big, centralized government" which is the antithesis of what Americans usually prefer.
* There is no known minimum dose which cannot cause the full spectrum of health effects.
* There is no cost-effective way to "put the Genie back in the bottle"; radioactive particles in the environment cannot be easily cleaned up.  An accidental release renders areas uninhabitable for eons.
* There is no cure for cancer.
* Children are affected at about 10 times the rate of adults but regulations don't reflect this fact because it wasn't discovered right away and we still live (and die) under old regulations.
* Plutonium may be fatal in doses of micrograms, certainly it takes less than a milligram.

In our ongoing discussion, I think you should be working up a number which, in your opinion, would be a sufficient amount of plutonium to kill everyone on Earth, if systematically and evenly distributed to everyone in some hypothetical and diabolical experiment.  After all, you've said that one pound of weapons-grade Pu would not be enough, and your figure of less than twelve dead indicates to me that you think we would need 250,000 tons of plutonium, which is pretty ridiculous.  So where does your opinion actually sit?  What is the number of pounds you would accept as sufficient to do the job?  10 pounds?  100 pounds? 10,000 pounds?

I mean, you've rejected Dr. Caldicott's value, but replaced it only with an absurd calculation that produces a fantasy.  What number would you substitute for Dr. Caldicott's?  And what (more specifically WHO) do you base your figure on?  Name the scientists you follow.  I want to interview them.

There are many differences between natural background radiation (such as radiation from the sun) and what the nuclear industry is adding to the environment, the main difference being that the vast majority of naturally occurring background radiation stays outside the body where it belongs.  It can still cause damage, but as I said before, skin and hair protects us from much of that potential damage.  The nuclear industry, on the other hand, produces particles of plutonium which get inside us and irradiate the local area terribly.  A 1/10th of 1% increase in radiation could have a significant impact on global health whether you have devised a method you consider satisfactory to measure it or not.  If it increases cancer by 1/10th of 1%, that is millions of people.  That matters.  People should worry about it because, unlike natural background radiation, there are many things society can do to reduce manmade radiation levels, or at least stop them from rising so quickly and persistently, as they have been over the years, thanks to weapons testing, Chernobyl, and the thousands and thousands of "little" spills, leaks, etc. that occur each year throughout the industry, and not to mention the industry practice of diluting radioactive waste to "below regulatory concern" and then freely releasing millions of Curies of radioactive waste into our rivers, lakes and oceans, into our atmosphere, and throughout our land.

And what I call "natural radiation" and what you call "background radiation" are two different things.  I believe every mREM of added radiation is a bad thing, and your "background radiation" level, which includes all the crap being thrown into the environment daily, is a moving target.

Meanwhile, billions of people who are alive today will die of cancer.  If we can reduce those deaths by 1/10th of 1% or even 1/100th of 1%, that would be a wonderful thing.  We can reduce cancer deaths, for example by switching away from nuclear power and towards renewable energy solutions.  As you say, you have to look at the risks.  Since you think one pound of Pu would only kill 12 people if spread into everyone's bodies, I'm quite sure you haven't assessed the risks properly regarding nuclear issues.

As to "agreeing to disagree", I assume you will publish these "debates" at your web site. Since you have answered virtually none of my questions, I'm sure you will find that embarrassing, but nevertheless, you should consider it your duty since you say you encourage debates, and I've certainly offered you the opportunity to debate these issues.  If you simply "agree to disagree" then you are not debating, and you have lost.

I do not "agree to disagree".  You are in serious error, human lives depend on us understanding these issues and you clearly don't, your web site is insulting to good scientists, your letters to me have been at best evasive, and your shutting down the discussion makes a mockery of your claim to be willing to debate the issues.

Sincerely,

Russell Hoffman
Carlsbad, CA

Attachments (3): 
Your letter to me.
A news item about keeping track of nuclear materials.
My previous email which you are misquoting.

======================================================

At 01:28 PM 7/11/01 , you wrote:
Now, Russell, I'm ashamed of you (more so the
Downwinders).  You should know that of all the cancer
types that radiation is known to cause, none can be
differentiated from non-radiation causes.  What type
of cancer did Mr. Cronkite die from and how do people
know that it is related to radiation?  Do they just
assume it because it sounds good????  Did Mr. Cronkite
have any other health problems that lead to his death?

I don't dispute that radiation is dangerous, I dispute
that radiation at low levels is proportionately as
dangerous as it is at higher levels.  I consider
something dangerous if it will take years off of my
projected life, not days and I think most people would
agree.

If most people thought that background radiation were
"dangerous" then we'd have mass hysteria and billions
of neurotic people.  If people aren't neurotic about
natural background, then why are they so neurotic
about something that adds less than one tenth of one
percent to their annual dose?

You have to look at the risks and decide if those
risks are acceptable or not.  That's the same reason
why we don't use API-682 seals on every pump sold
today (sorry, had to interject that...I'm a pump
design engineer and that is what pays the bills - not
nuclear engineering.  I guess we have something in
common...)

Apparently, you are one of many that think that the
risks from increasing our normal yearly radiation dose
by less than 0.1% outweigh the benefits of a
non-polluting (and proven safe) form of power
generation.  If that is the case then we will just
have to agree to disagree because I will never change
your mind and vice versa.

Or do you think that the govt has lied to us and the
value is actually much more than 0.1%?  I guess if you
can answer that question then I'll be in a better
position to know how you feel.

Tim

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Date: Wed, 11 Jul 2001 10:59:13 EDT
Subject: [DOEWatch] LANL commits loss of nuclear materials tracking nationally and internationally
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit


                   NUKES: A LESSON FROM RUSSIA
       Washington Post Op. Ed. -- Wednesday, July 11, 2001
                        by Bruce G. Blair

    Although the United States spends nearly $1 billion every year to
help Russia protect its vast storehouse of nuclear weapons materials
from theft or sale on the black market, few Americans know how this aid
helps strengthen America's own nuclear safeguards.
    Russian experts at the Kurchatov Institute, the renowned nuclear
research center in Moscow, recently found what appears to be a critical
deficiency in the internal U.S. system for keeping track of all
bomb-grade nuclear materials held by the Energy Department -- enough
material for tens of thousands of nuclear bombs.
    Kurchatov scientists discovered a fatal flaw in the Microsoft
software donated to them by the Los Alamos National Laboratory. This
same software has been the backbone of America's nuclear materials
control system for years. The Russians found that over time, as the
computer program is used, some files become invisible and inaccessible
to the nuclear accountants using the system, even though the data still
exist in netherworld of the database. Any insider who understood the
software could exploit this flaw by tracking the "disappeared" files and
then physically diverting, for a profit, the materials themselves.
    After investigating the problem for many months, the Russians came
to believe that it posed a grave danger and suspended further use of the
software in Russia's accounting system. By their calculations, an
enormous amount of Russia's nuclear material -- the equivalent of many
thousands of nuclear bombs -- would disappear from their accounting
records if Russia were to use the flawed U.S. software program for 10
years.
    Then, in early 2000, they did something they didn't have to do: They
warned the United States, believing that an analogous risk must exist in
the U.S. system.
    Although neither Los Alamos nor the U.S. Department of Energy has
publicly acknowledged the possibility that innumerable files on American
nuclear materials might have disappeared, the Russian warning caused
shock waves at the highest levels of the Energy Department.
    Unlike the Russians, who did not throw away their manual records of
their nuclear stockpile -- the infamous shoe box and hand-receipt system
that U.S. assistance was intended to supersede -- the United States has
long since discarded its old written records. To reconstruct a reliably
accurate accounting record, the Energy Department may need to inspect
all of America's nuclear materials -- a huge task that could cost more
than $1 billion and still might not detect the diversion of some
material, should it have occurred.
    The importance of the goodwill and trust that had grown up between
American and Russian nuclear experts over years of working together in
this area is clear. When the Russian scientists first discovered the
computer flaw, the initial reaction in some high-level Moscow circles
was to suspect an American Trojan horse, a bug planted deliberately to
undermine Russian security. After complaints by their Russian
counterparts, scientists at Los Alamos suggested that the Russian
scientists instead use a later version of the same program. Kurchatov
then discovered the upgraded program not only contained the same bug
(though much less virulent) but also had a critical security flaw that
would allow easy access to the sensitive nuclear database by hackers or
unauthorized personnel.
    But trust overrode suspicion. The Russians concluded that the
glitches were innocent errors, not devious traps. Thus, they feared the
U.S. database, unbeknown to Americans, was not only prone to lose track
of nuclear materials but was also accessible to unauthorized users.
Russia reported both problems to Los Alamos, which subsequently verified
the defects, as did Microsoft. Though a fix remains elusive, Kurchatov
scientists also have shared a partial repair they developed.
    This Russian feedback may be causing American embarrassment -- U.S.
officials apparently have tried to muzzle the Russians and censor their
scientific papers on the fiasco -- but it surely represents a high
return on the American investment in Russian nuclear security. The
lesson is that nuclear cooperation is a two-way street, is paying off
and deserves continuing support.

The writer, a former Minuteman missile launch officer, is president of
the Center for Defense Information.

==========================================================

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To: Tim Steadham
From: Russell Hoffman
Re: Eugene Cronkite, Dies at 86; Found Cancer's Links to Radiation
Date: July 11th, 2001

Sir,

This item is of interest to our debate, among other reasons because it points out how young the scientific studies of radiation dangers, and specifically the link between radiation and cancer, must be, considering that one of the discovers of the connection has just died as we debate (or shall I just say you deny) radiation's dangers in our correspondence?   Statistics too, is a relatively young field.  Pump design, for example, on the other hand, has gone on for millennia and still goes on.  So imagine how much further the study of radiation's dangers has to go.  Imagine if it was just 40 or 50 years ago that Archemedes invented his water lifting devices, and they were the first ones invented.  Would the amazing new designs such as the Ball Piston Pump, the Recessive Spiral Pump, the Wolfhart Principle Pump, the Cylindrical Energy Module Pump, or any of the other wondrous new designs have likely been invented yet?

The nuclear industry does not really know what it's dealing with.  They thought there would be a solution to the waste disposal problem by now.  But no solution --certainly not Yucca Mountain -- is in sight.  They thought there would be much higher reliability than the industry has had.  They thought the energy nuclear power produced would be "too cheap to meter" (or at least that's what they claimed).  They thought there would be a "cure for cancer" by now, so one of the main dangers from radiation wouldn't matter -- but no very effective solution is in sight or in use, and most solutions that do exist are only effective sometimes (say, 10% or 20% of the time, or maybe 80%, but its rarely that high).  Many of these procedures involve dangerous operations with painful recovery periods, nauseating drugs, expensive drugs, and drugs which cause more radioactive waste to be dumped into the environment, and which cause new cancers later in life, especially for the person who receives the treatment.

Besides all that, wind energy is cheaper and all the other renewable energy solutions would be too, if there was a fair accounting of the waste costs and the development costs which the government incurred in giving us the nuclear "solution" to our energy problems.

Sincerely,

Russell D. Hoffman
Carlsbad, CA

My Internet Glossary of Pumps:
http://www.animatedsoftware.com/pumpglos/pumpglos.htm

P.S. I am composing a response to your email of this morning as time permits.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/11/obituaries/11CRON.html?pagewanted=print

 JUL 11, 2001

Eugene Cronkite, Dies at 86; Found Cancer's Links to Radiation

By ANAHAD O'CONNOR

r. Eugene P. Cronkite, an expert in radiation biology who was among the first to recognize and report on links between cancer and exposure to sublethal levels of radiation, died on June 23 at his home in Setauket, N.Y. He was 86.

In addition, Dr. Cronkite developed a center for the treatment of acute radiation injury at Brookhaven National Laboratory.

After finishing medical school, he served in the Navy as a Medical Corps lieutenant in World War II and directed the Naval Medical Research Institute in Maryland.

In 1954, he left the Navy to direct a project that studied the effects of fallout from nuclear weapons testing in the Pacific on inhabitants of the Marshall Islands. The work he did there described the likelihood of survival under varying degrees of radiation exposure and its effects on the nervous system and brain.

In addition to being one of the first to report on the cancer-inducing effects of radiation exposure, he studied its effects on bone marrow cells and developed a method of treating leukemia.

The procedure, extra-corporeal radiation, used a tube inserted into the patient's arm to direct blood out of the body and behind a lead shield, where it was irradiated. With the patient's heart serving as the pump, the blood was then directed back into the body.

The treatment destroyed diseased cells without killing too many healthy cells and was first conducted by Dr. Cronkite in 1965 at Brookhaven. It helped some patients and was considered an important advance at the time. It was replaced by newer forms of radiation treatment and chemotherapy.

In the 1970's, while chairman of the medical department at Brookhaven, Dr. Cronkite helped develop a way of growing human blood and blood- forming cells from the bone marrow, outside the body. This process made it possible to grow cells from leukemia patients and use them to test the effectiveness of drugs.

Dr. Cronkite was a founder and president of the International Society for Experimental Hematology in 1977. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1981. He also was editor of The Journal of Hematology for 15 years. Born in Los Angeles, he did his undergraduate studies and received his M.D. at Stanford University.

Dr. Cronkite's wife of 60 years, Elizabeth, died in 1999. He is survived by a daughter, Christina Cronkite of Hayward, Wis.

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