ANS National Meetings/Sessions - 1999 "President's Special Session" ("Defending" the LNT)

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Report on ANS President’s Special Session on Low-Level Radiation Health Effects, June 21, 1999 (Defending the LNT)	In a panel session, the ANS President Ted Quinn organized and chaired a panel of "establishment" LNT supporters. Participants were: Keith Dinger, HPS President; Greta Dicus, NRC Commissioner; Charles Meinhold, NCRP President; Marvin Frazier, DOE Research Director; Evan Douple, BRER Exec. Director; Eleanor Blakely, UCSF Radiobiology Researcher; Ralph Anderson, NEI; and Kim Kearfott, UMich, ANS Board Member, and Session Organizer.	by the Low-Level Radiation Health Effects Committee, Biology and Medicine Division, ANS
	HPS President Dinger and NRC Commissioner Dicus made the first presentations. Both stated explicitly that we do not need to further evaluate the science on radiation health effects. Each stated explicitly that we should just commit to ICRP-60 standards, 100 mrem/year, because it is "manageable". Dicus also committed to allocating 25 mrem/year for decontamination. (Responding later to Klaus Becker’s statement on European waste of $100s Billions due to compliance to such extreme standards, below multiples of background radiation, Dinger disingenuously replied: "That’s what I’ve been calling for, cost-benefit analysis.") Dicus also presented the strong point on a slide, stating: "Who Pays?" and followed with a slide: "The Public" (whether through taxes or charges for electricity, etc). This seems particularly significant: Costs are not imposed on the industry, though the effect of making nuclear technologies "uneconomic" was not addressed. (Later, Meinhold unbelievably stated: "The LNT does not impose undue costs on nuclear technologies.")	[Dicus did not follow with the obvious next slide: "Who Gets Paid?" Clearly, this panel represents most of those receiving the $100 Billions from this wasteful cost to the public: the HPs’ Dinger, the regulators’ Dicus, the labs’ and researchers’ Frazier, the academics’ Kearfott, the permanent reviewers’ Meinhold and Douple, and the industry’s Anderson. Costs for which there is no public benefit. This is much more than an "appearance" of conflict-of-interest.]
	Mr. Meinhold again presented NCRP (and ICRP/BRER etc) as being "in the middle." He specifically stated that NCRP is between persons who are applying credible science and, in his words, such persons as John Gofman and a Rocky Flats anti-nuclear activist. (Mr. Meinhold has previously also identified Helen Caldecott as a qualified person "on the other side" vs., e.g., Bernie Cohen and Myron Pollycove as "extremists" in correspondence to the ANS.) He again stated, in effect, that: When one person says 2+2=4, and another says that 2+2=22, then "being in the middle" and saying 2+2=13 is therefore "about right." This seems to reflect the NCRP political basis, rejecting scientific bases, for its positions. But this is not how science, and regulation, should work.	[Note that NCRP continues to refuse to technically defend the LNT with and before competent scientists. This has been the case since Mr. Meinhold and Dr. Roy Shore appeared at the June 1995 ANS meeting (without papers or handouts) and were substantially criticized for their selective use and misrepresentations of data and sources. However, they nevertheless routinely present their LNT convictions using such unfounded data when presenting to unknowledgeable technical and policy groups. They also continue to falsely claim the Japanese survivor data is sound and relevant to chronic exposures as "the best data"; and that "the LNT is vindicated by the IARC study" that has been shown, including in our ANS sessions, to substantially misrepresent its own data.]
	Dr. Frazier presented the new DOE research program, initiated by Senator Domenici in response to challenges to the LNT and to permissible radiation levels that are small fractions of the variation in background.	[Unfortunately, DOE approaches this program as a de novo effort to apply $20M+ per year for 10 years to new cellular and molecular biology research. They do not address the fact that this funding is small compared to $2-3 Billion already expended on radiation research, with findings that contradict the LNT, that they explicitly ignore and suppress. They do not reflect the existing cellular and molecular biology research that shows that low dose radiation stimulates immune and physiological functions that produce beneficial health effects, to the extent of successful treatment of cancer, including clinical trials. Nor do they consider that sub-ambient doses lead to dysfunctional cells and animals, indicating that ionizing radiation is essential to biological functions, including Oak Ridge research with potassium from which the radioactive K-40 had been removed that caused debilitating effects in cells and animals.] [For example: Charlie Willis of the NRC and HPS stated to a Joint Subcommittee of the ACRS and ACNW in 1996 that: "But it's clear to many of us that we are not seeing the predicted ill effects at low doses, as has been pointed out to you. (Ed: In the Testimony of Muckerheide and Pollycove.) I personally came to this hormesis observation fairly late in the game. It wasn't until 1958 that I was working with the laboratory situation (Ed: Oak Ridge) where we were doing experiments with below-background levels of radiation, taking the potassium-40 out (of potassium) and seeing what the effects would be on the cellular level, when we saw that the cells looked good but they didn't function. So we couldn't publish the results, another ill effect of the paradigm about the linear hypothesis." (Ed: From the ACRS/ACNW Joint Subcommittee meeting transcript.)] [Further, DOE largely funded the same researchers and groups as before, including an "oversight and advisory" work scope to ORNL and PNL researchers, one of whom was a member of the highly-biased BEIR VI Committee. The scientists that have conducted research that shows that the LNT is invalid are not invited.] [Substantial presentations in the afternoon session by knowledgeable, credible, scientists, who do not have these enormous conflicts of interest, were not attended by these panelists, who presumably "don’t want to know," or more likely, "do know full well."]
	Dr. Douple stated that "the new BEIR VII Committee is more open and unbiased" (although no Committee advises that it is biased when established, notwithstanding common knowledge and obvious results.) He stated that the this time the Committee would not be made up of the "same old boys network participants." He noted that comments were being invited on the makeup of the Committee. (He didn’t report that Congress imposed this requirement to prevent full NRC/NAS conformance to the Federal Advisory Committee Act after the Supreme Court found that NRC/NAS was subject to FACA in a case that claimed that NAS/NRC established "secret" biased Committees and results to support a DOE decision.)	[Later review of the proposed Committee showed that it was highly biased, though perhaps not as definitively biased as BEIR VI or NCRP SC 1-6. Comments were submitted that requested that the Committee be revised to: 1) eliminate those committed to the LNT, especially the several ICRP/NCRP/BRER representatives (contrary to the promise of ‘independence’); and 2) eliminate "experts in risk communication" as being both irrelevant and explicitly biased, including financial conflicts of interests, on the scientific determination of whether low-dose radiation has any risk at all. A list of potential candidates was also submitted, from the knowledgeable, credible, scientists that have produced some of the extensive scientific data that contradict the LNT, who are without conflicts of interest, and without any such extreme critics of the LNT as the more extreme Committee LNT supporters.] [The NAS/NRC cancelled a June 27-28 initial meeting of the Committee in order to address comments on the biased makeup of the Committee. Anti-nuclear activist comments also said that the Committee is biased toward the industry, identifying, e.g., Mossman and Whipple as such persons. Our comments noted that such organizations be invited to propose persons with scientific credentials, subject to review, to participate on the Committee if this is to be perceived as an "open" process, with scientists knowledgeable and responsible for the research and data that contradict the LNT. The BEIR VII Committee has since been reconstituted. It is now more explicitly biased than before. Mossman has been dismissed (without explanation to him), and Herb Abrams, a founder and board member of anti-nuclear political activist organization "Physicians for Social Responsibility" has been added, plus 4 additional members, none of whom can be initially identified as representing knowledgeable scientists and researchers.]
	Dr. Blakely presented a largely uninformed treatise on "radiation health effects" that included no low level radiation health effects data. Her expertise is in radiotherapy/radiation oncology – tissue effects at high doses. In one slide she presented "straight lines" with a lowest dose at 3,000 Gy (300,000 rad). Another started at 52 Gy (5200 rad). In one slide that showed zero dose, the first tick was at 1 Gy, and no data existed that addressed doses under 10 cGy, much less 1 mGy, though the data was presented as though it was relevant. She then presented boilerplate on the Japanese survivor data without reference to: 1) the dosimetry that is substantially erroneous and biased (and without fallout doses); 2) the substantial evidence that the low dose groups show no adverse and some beneficial effects, including longer than normal lifespan; and 3) the general conclusion, even by RERF itself in the IAEA Conference in Seville, that the instantaneous neutron+gamma atomic bomb doses are irrelevant to assessing chronic, low-dose-rate, low-dose radiation health effects. She then read from a radiation protection establishment "review" commissioned by NEA that does not assess relevant data, but restates the ICRP/NCRP/BRER mantra that "the science is not sufficiently definitive to justify abandoning the LNT.’ This standard establishment rhetoric does not even pretend to consider the science, unlike the biased reports by NCRP SC 1-6, and BEIR V and VI.	Blakely’s presentation was acknowledged by Kearfott to be "the only science presentation," thereby conceding that this panel presented no consideration of the substantial science that contradicts the LNT. They did not address the substantial data in dozens of papers presented to the ANS as part of the Low-Level Radiation Health Effects series of sessions, from Nobel Laureate Dr. Rosalyn Yalow in Nov 1994 to Dr. Shu-Zheng Liu, former President of Norman Bethune University School of Medical Sciences, currently head of its molecular and radiation biology laboratory, in the Ministry of Health, who traveled from Changchung China, in June 1999 to present definitive evidence in the ANS Transactions and sessions that afternoon. These presentations have been almost entirely based on the substantial and extensive peer-reviewed literature that contradicts the LNT, while no such substantial and confirmed studies support the LNT (and studies that COULD support the LNT, if it were true, do NOT support the LNT).]
	The science and regulatory panel members, representing the "radiation protection regulation industry", stated, in essence, that radiation protection policy should not consider the scientific data, but simply set conservative, "workable" [and profitable?] radiation protection limits. They also made several implications to the effect that: "A non-LNT dose-response would lead to an ‘unmanageable’ regulatory regime." However, they fail to address how other toxic materials, some of which are in our vitamin and mineral supplements, some of which are not "natural," can be regulated, even with the "Delany clause" in law that requires any carcinogen be eliminated.
	Mr. Anderson confirmed previous NEI/industry statements that this is an issue in which they will not take part. NEI says it has "no expertise."	[This is like the chemical industry stating that they "know nothing about chemical toxicology." Or even that the electric industry knows nothing about EMF health effects. Such ignorance should be a matter of shame and embarrassment, and the height of irresponsibility. This is contrary to other private industries that take responsibility for the health effects science that affects their operations, regulations, and risk assessment. It is grotesquely irresponsible for the nuclear industry to fail to know or consider, or even understand, radiation health effects, the LNT, and its direct effect on making nuclear technologies "uneconomic." Perhaps this is because the industry does not "pay the costs," which, as Dicus emphasized, "are paid by the public." In fact, perhaps it is because the industry, and the HPS and ANS members organizations, get most of the $100s Billions in public funds that are wasted for no public health benefit due to the LNT. ANS’ performance in this panel, and the gutting of the ANS Position Statement, and the failure to review the actual radiation health effects data, seem to question the ANS’ role.] [This continuing shortsightedness may again fail, as when nuclear power cost failures could no longer just be "stuck to the ratepayers" to generate "return-on-capital" profits, and were rejected in rate cases after they were fully committed. (This may have started. Yankee Rowe decommissioning used FERC to stick any decommissioning funds to its ratepayers. Future decommissioning projects may be more aggressively questioned. However, with massive decommissioning funds, cost-effective decommissioning could beg questions about who owns those ratepayer-funded trust funds. Is there any interest in cost-effective decommissioning?)]
	Dr. Yuan-Chi Luan, who came to Boston from Taiwan to discuss the data on the 1700 residences with ⁶⁰Co-contamination since 1982, attempted to ask about the data with a first-year mean dose estimated at 48 mSv (4.8 rem), and the "Victims Association" itself identifies only 6 cancers in about 10,000 persons. But he was interrupted by Quinn with a prescripted preemptory challenge: "Excuse me! Has this data been published in any peer-reviewed publication!?" Luan simply noted that the Taipei general population has about 160 cancers in 15 years in a population of 10,000, vs. 6 known in the contaminated population. City and national authorities have thanked Luan’s group for reducing residents’ concerns by informing them of these (absent) effects. The cancers seem reasonably firm. (At least 2 were children, in very low dose groups, e.g., one died of leukemia at 15 in 1996 who was in a kindergarten for 10 months that had contaminated steel in the security gratings over the windows.) Of course, the consistent immune function stimulation by low-dose radiation that controls cancer and other diseases, has an immediate effect, as shown in some cancer cures within weeks. Various responses are found from minutes to days, as presented by Dr. Shu-Zheng Liu who came from Changchung China to present their current results. Therefore hormesis from chronic exposure can be readily seen, as is the case with animal studies of immunologically "whole" animals in normal pathologies. However, they are constrained by the typical lack of cooperation (research suppression) by Taiwan and world radiation protection interests. They are unable to obtain detailed epidemiological data. Radiation protection interests are expending $ millions for "dose reconstruction," extensive blood tests and medical examinations, most of whom, except for the very highest dose group to almost 1000 mSv/year (100 rem/year) in the first year, still live in their homes (now about 3 half-lives decayed). But no age-adjusted comparison of this population to the Taiwan or Taipei general population has been performed; nor is age data provided for other epidemiologists to perform that evaluation. U.S. agencies have been involved. They need help to get qualified, unbiased researchers to consider this data. Instead they get an ANS rejection, complicit with the radiation protection agencies.	[It continues to be effective for LNT interests, now ANS, to prevent studies, and prevent publication, or to "adjust" statements in results, or discount studies as "in obscure journals" when not in the radiation establishment journals (which have high barriers to publishing data that contradict the LNT). Of course, they also ignore and discount relevant work in the Health Physics Journal, Radiation Research, the International Journal of Radiation Biology, etc., when considering radiation protection policy also.] [Rather than harassing persons whose work questions the LNT orthodoxy, we must consider the results, and we must assess the data. Such studies must be supported; and tested by persons without a conflict of interest in supporting the LNT. To do less is to collaborate with the forces that have contributed to the disinformation of the last 40 years that low-level radiation is hazardous at any dose, while the data show that it is more likely to be essential to life, that have succeeded in largely destroying nuclear technologies.]
	According to the President Emeritus of the NCRP, Lauriston Taylor, writing in 1980: "no reduction in occupational dose from that established in 1934 has been justified by actual risk of adverse health effects, but only by the ‘reasonable’ effort to readily meet lower standards;" and that the application of the LNT to assess risk is "an immoral use of our scientific heritage." The internationally known radiobiologist and associate of Rolf Sievert, a member of UNSCEAR and other international committees on radiation health effects and radiation protection, Prof. Emeritus Gunnar Walinder of Sweden, documented the actions of the international community to discount and suppress data that contradict the LNT, and who says even without addressing hormesis data: "I do not hesitate to say that this is the greatest scientific scandal of the 20^th Century." (In response to my inquiry, this is to include Lysenko, the infamous Russian biologist who conformed Russian biology to Stalin’s ideology, contrary to Mendel’s genetics theory, at great cost to Russian agriculture. I did not ask him about the proposals of "creationist scientists", but at least they do not yet have major political backing, outside Kansas.)	[This panel largely represented the core of that scandal. It is now reasonable to conclude that the ANS is implicated in that "suppression of the data."]
	We are disappointed that the ANS Board failed to take any action to address the failures of the ANS "leaders"? who acted to suppress the data on behalf of the federal agencies? and? … Is it reasonable therefore to presume that the Board itself? can also now be considered complicit in this effort to intentionally defraud the public?	Postscript: The secret gutting of the ANS Position Statement succeeded in enabling Greta Dicus to state that she can "concur with the ANS" in the misinformation that "we do not have the data to question the LNT, which can not be known until we have more (well-funded, indeterminate, misdirected) research." (But this is being undertaken by the same research administrators and researchers that have failed to produce and acknowledge the research results of the last 50 years.) This can presumably be the intent of those persons who gutted the statement. Post-Postscript: Dicus has since been appointed to the ICRP !?

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06/14/06