Beyond Nuclear International

Health physicists fear lawsuits more than nuclear accidents

By Kate Brown

In 1987, a year after the Chernobyl accident, the US Health Physics Society met in Columbia, Maryland. Health physicists are scientists who are responsible for radiological protection at nuclear power plants, nuclear weapons plants, and hospitals. They are called on in cases of nuclear accidents. The conference’s keynote speaker came from the Department of Energy (DOE); the title of his talk drew on a sports analogy: “Radiation: The Offense and the Defense.” Switching metaphors to geopolitics, the speaker announced to the hall of nuclear professionals that his talk amounted to “the party line.” The biggest threat to nuclear industries, he told the gathered professionals, was not more disasters like Chernobyl and Three Mile Island but lawsuits.

After the address, lawyers from the Department of Justice (DOJ) met in break-out groups with the health physicists to prepare them to serve as “expert witnesses” against claimants suing the US government for alleged health problems due to exposure from radio­activity issued in the production and testing of nuclear weapons during the Cold War. That’s right: the DOE and the DOJ were preparing private citizens to defend the US government and its corporate contractors as they ostensi­bly served as “objective” scientific experts in US courts.

Health physics is an extremely important field for our everyday lives. Health physicists set standards for radiation protection and evaluate damage after nuclear emergencies. They determine where radiologists set the dial for CT scans and X-rays. They calculate how radioactive our food can be (and our food is often radioactive) and determine acceptable levels of radiation in our workplaces, environments, bodies of water, and air. Despite its importance, as it is practiced inside university labs and government organizations, health physics is far from an independent field engaged in the objective, open-ended pursuit of knowledge.

Compromised Science

The field of health physics emerged inside the Manhat­tan Project along with the development of the world’s first nuclear bombs. From the United States, it migrated abroad. For the past seventy-five years, the vast major­ity of health physicists have been employed in national nuclear agencies or in universities with research under­written by national nuclear agencies. As much as we in the academy like to make distinctions between apoliti­cal, academic research and politicized paid research outside the academy, during the Cold War those distinc­tions hardly made sense. From the end of World War II until the 1970s, federal grants paid for 70 percent of university research. The largest federal donors were the Department of Defense, the US Atomic Energy Agency, and a dozen federal security agencies.

Historian Peter Galison estimated in 2004 that the volume of classified research surpassed open literature in American libraries by five to ten times. Put another way, for every article published by American academics in open journals, five to ten articles were filed in sealed repositories available only to the 4 million Americans with security clear­ances. Often, the same researchers penned both open and classified work. Health physics benefited from the largesse of the Pentagon and the Atomic Energy Com­mission, which produced nuclear weapons for US arse­nals. Correspondingly, the field suffered from a closed circle of knowledge that has had a major impact on our abilities to assess and respond to both nuclear emergen­cies and quotidian radioactive contamination.

Early reactors were primarily intended as producers of plutonium

By Linda Pentz Gunter

Atoms for Peace had a nice ring to it. But it was a fantasy at best, at worst, a lie. Atoms for Peace was never the intention. Atoms for war, as it turned out, was brewing in the background even before Dwight Eisenhower became president of the United States.

After summarily tossing aside the Paley Commission report delivered to his predecessor, President Truman, and which advocated the US choose the solar pathway for energy expansion, Eisenhower embraced a very different report. In 1953, the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) delivered a series of studies on Nuclear Power Reactor Technology from four groups of private industry companies.

On the cover of the report is a familiar rogues’ gallery of corporations, including Dow, Monsanto, and Bechtel.

These reports, an initiative of the companies themselves, were designed to find a way to bring private industry into the nuclear power sector. Hitherto, the nuclear sector — almost entirely focused on weapons of course — was firmly under the control of government and the military.

Whose idea was it? Says the AEC:

“Accordingly, when Dr. Charles A. Thomas, of Monsanto Chemical Co., in the summer of 1950 proposed that industry might with its own capital design, construct and operate nuclear reactors for production of plutonium and power, the AEC gave the suggestion interested consideration.”

Plutonium and power. Note which came first.

Before long there were four groups all vying to come up with the best proposal for a dual-purpose reactor — and that’s what they called them — that would make plutonium for the nuclear weapons sector, and oh yes, as a by-product, also generate electricity.