Post by kay on Nov 19, 2016 22:38:49 GMT -5
NUCLEAR WITNESSES, INSIDERS SPEAK OUT:
DR. ERNEST J. STERNGLASS, PHYSICIST
. . . I could not remain quiet about nuclear reactors. If I had, it would have been criminal on my part. Secrecy is the one way an open society can be controlled--namely by keeping things from the public.
The military supports secrecy, and the military is behind the entire nuclear reactor program, and behind the entire Plowshare Program. It's behind everything connected with nuclear energy--even artificial hearts powered with plutonium pacemakers.
"Back in 1947 they knew. The data had been gathered at Argonne National Laboratory.[1] They knew that the newborn puppies, whose mothers had been fed small amounts of radioactive strontium-90, were dying of underdevelopment and serious birth defects. The government knew, and decided to keep it secret. The government set up the study. The government knew the results. And the government kept those results from the American people. Why?"
We are at the University of Pittsburgh Medical School in the office of the director of the Department of Radiological Physics, Dr. Ernest Sternglass. . . . He came to the United States from Nazi Germany when he was fourteen, in 1938. He leans forward, gesturing with his hands. "I know how a government can be totally destructive of its own people, how people in the highest level of government can use lies to achieve their political purposes."
Dr. Sternglass has been working for almost twenty years to publicize the dangers of low-level radiation. His article on the increased incidence of leukemia from fallout was published in Science in the spring of 1963. The Atomic Energy Commission "pooh-poohed the whole thing." They said his statistics "weren't good enough." His findings threatened the nuclear establishment. The government and the nuclear industry tried to discredit him. The year 1947 was a turning point for Sternglass. . . . [he] had the opportunity to meet Einstein in person.
. . . we talked for five hours. All afternoon. . .
He returned in a few minutes. "Tell me," he said, "Are you planning to go back to school?"
"Yes, I'm thinking about it."
"Don't go back to school. They will try to crush every bit of originality out of you. Don't go back to graduate school."
"Well, I--"
"Be careful. There will be enormous pressures to conform."
And then he told me about his own life and the mistakes he had made. "Don't do what I've done," he said. "Always have a cobbler's job. Always have a job where you can get up in the morning, face yourself, that you're doing something useful for humanity. Because nobody can be a genius every day. Don't make that kind of mistake. You know, when I accepted a job at the University of Berlin, I had no duties really. Nothing to do except wake up and solve all the problems of the universe every morning. Nobody can do that. Don't make that mistake.". . .
While I was opposed to bomb testing and concerned about the misuse of medical X-rays, I still believed that you could keep radioactivity inside a nuclear reactor. All you had to do was make it airtight. I believed we could have thousands of nuclear reactors without danger of radiation. . . . But in 1970 my view changed.
Early in May 1970 I gave a talk at a meeting of physicists in Wisconsin. At that meeting I secured a report put out by the Bureau of Radiological Health about radioactive releases from nuclear power reactors. On the plane home, I opened this thing, and there I saw that instead of .001 or .0001 curies[24] coming out of nuclear reactors, as I had been told about Shippingport,[25] some reactors were discharging hundreds of thousands of curies--millions, hundreds of millions times more than what I had been led to believe.[26] It was all in the official tables.[27]
I was shaken up, and I said to a group of my medical students at Pittsburgh, "What do we do now? If I'm right about fallout, and these figures are right about radioactive releases, then there must be increases in infant mortality around every nuclear reactor in the United States."
So the students went to the library. I told them to take a look at the Dresden reactor near Chicago.[28] And what we found was exactly what we expected--the closer you got to the reactor, the more babies were dying. When radioactive releases went up, so did infant mortality; when they went back down, so did infant mortality. Babies were dying of respiratory failure, of all sorts of ordinary conditions normally associated with prematurity.
Some would say, "Well, the baby was premature. That's why it died."
But when we looked at the statistics we found that prematurity grew 140 percent in the county when the radioactive releases went up and declined again when the leaky fuel rods were replaced. I got a friend of mine, Dr. Morris DeGroot, head of the Statistics Department at Carnegie-Mellon University, to look at some of these things. He did his own study, using a different technique, and he found definite, positive relations between releases of radioactivity and infant mortality.[29] . . .
Until 1970 or so I had really believed that one could trust our scientists and engineers to be honest. I really believed that our bureaucrats in Washington were honest people. And some of them were. They had written a report telling about the large leaks of radioactivity coming out of nuclear reactors.[42]
Little did I know that soon those honest people would be fired, stripped of their power to do any further detailed investigations of nuclear reactors. Their authority would be transferred from the Environmental Protection Agency to the newly created Nuclear Regulatory Commission--really just a bunch of AEC boys that would be moved over.
Nixon did this. I think he got a big payoff from the utilities, the oil companies, the banks, and all the other big corporations that had a heavy investment in uranium. The facts were devastating. The big corporations that were violating environmental laws and worker safety laws made payoffs so that the Nixon administration would go easy on enforcement. And Nixon promised the big energy companies, "No more regulation. We're going to hold the regulators down."
All attempts to enforce tighter regulations were turned aside and sabotaged, so that nuclear reactors were able to release the highest amounts of radioactivity ever recorded in the history of nuclear energy in 1974 and 1975 at the Millstone plant.[43] Two million nine hundred and seventy thousand curies of radioactive gases were discharged. One curie represents as many disintegrations per second as a whole gram of radium. The entire world's supply of radium in hospitals before the bomb was a few dozen grams. And they were releasing millions of curies of radioactive gases into the air of Rhode Island and Connecticut, not giving a damn. Except how much "on time"[44] the reactor would have, how efficient it would look, and how many more reactors they would sell, based on their excellent operating record.
When I turned against nuclear reactors--as contrasted to just attacking bomb testing--the Health Department of the state of New York, the Health Department of Pennsylvania, Governor Shapp's Commission, the Atomic Energy Commission, and the Environmental Protection Agency all issued statements saying that there was no truth, no credibility in anything I had found. And I lost almost all my friends who had stuck by me when I was only attacking bomb fallout--because in effect I was saying that they were not only unwitting baby killers during the time of the bomb testing, but they were baby killers whenever they ran a nuclear reactor, whether it was at Waltz Mills, Shippingport, Millstone--or anywhere.
But I could not remain quiet about nuclear reactors. If I had, it would have been criminal on my part. Secrecy is the one way an open society can be controlled--namely by keeping things from the public.
The military supports secrecy, and the military is behind the entire nuclear reactor program, and behind the entire Plowshare Program. It's behind everything connected with nuclear energy--even artificial hearts powered with plutonium pacemakers.
credit his evidence by making Dr. Sternglass out to be a "kook." It took courage to continue to speak out. . . .
DR. ERNEST J. STERNGLASS, PHYSICIST
. . . I could not remain quiet about nuclear reactors. If I had, it would have been criminal on my part. Secrecy is the one way an open society can be controlled--namely by keeping things from the public.
The military supports secrecy, and the military is behind the entire nuclear reactor program, and behind the entire Plowshare Program. It's behind everything connected with nuclear energy--even artificial hearts powered with plutonium pacemakers.
"Back in 1947 they knew. The data had been gathered at Argonne National Laboratory.[1] They knew that the newborn puppies, whose mothers had been fed small amounts of radioactive strontium-90, were dying of underdevelopment and serious birth defects. The government knew, and decided to keep it secret. The government set up the study. The government knew the results. And the government kept those results from the American people. Why?"
We are at the University of Pittsburgh Medical School in the office of the director of the Department of Radiological Physics, Dr. Ernest Sternglass. . . . He came to the United States from Nazi Germany when he was fourteen, in 1938. He leans forward, gesturing with his hands. "I know how a government can be totally destructive of its own people, how people in the highest level of government can use lies to achieve their political purposes."
Dr. Sternglass has been working for almost twenty years to publicize the dangers of low-level radiation. His article on the increased incidence of leukemia from fallout was published in Science in the spring of 1963. The Atomic Energy Commission "pooh-poohed the whole thing." They said his statistics "weren't good enough." His findings threatened the nuclear establishment. The government and the nuclear industry tried to discredit him. The year 1947 was a turning point for Sternglass. . . . [he] had the opportunity to meet Einstein in person.
. . . we talked for five hours. All afternoon. . .
He returned in a few minutes. "Tell me," he said, "Are you planning to go back to school?"
"Yes, I'm thinking about it."
"Don't go back to school. They will try to crush every bit of originality out of you. Don't go back to graduate school."
"Well, I--"
"Be careful. There will be enormous pressures to conform."
And then he told me about his own life and the mistakes he had made. "Don't do what I've done," he said. "Always have a cobbler's job. Always have a job where you can get up in the morning, face yourself, that you're doing something useful for humanity. Because nobody can be a genius every day. Don't make that kind of mistake. You know, when I accepted a job at the University of Berlin, I had no duties really. Nothing to do except wake up and solve all the problems of the universe every morning. Nobody can do that. Don't make that mistake.". . .
While I was opposed to bomb testing and concerned about the misuse of medical X-rays, I still believed that you could keep radioactivity inside a nuclear reactor. All you had to do was make it airtight. I believed we could have thousands of nuclear reactors without danger of radiation. . . . But in 1970 my view changed.
Early in May 1970 I gave a talk at a meeting of physicists in Wisconsin. At that meeting I secured a report put out by the Bureau of Radiological Health about radioactive releases from nuclear power reactors. On the plane home, I opened this thing, and there I saw that instead of .001 or .0001 curies[24] coming out of nuclear reactors, as I had been told about Shippingport,[25] some reactors were discharging hundreds of thousands of curies--millions, hundreds of millions times more than what I had been led to believe.[26] It was all in the official tables.[27]
I was shaken up, and I said to a group of my medical students at Pittsburgh, "What do we do now? If I'm right about fallout, and these figures are right about radioactive releases, then there must be increases in infant mortality around every nuclear reactor in the United States."
So the students went to the library. I told them to take a look at the Dresden reactor near Chicago.[28] And what we found was exactly what we expected--the closer you got to the reactor, the more babies were dying. When radioactive releases went up, so did infant mortality; when they went back down, so did infant mortality. Babies were dying of respiratory failure, of all sorts of ordinary conditions normally associated with prematurity.
Some would say, "Well, the baby was premature. That's why it died."
But when we looked at the statistics we found that prematurity grew 140 percent in the county when the radioactive releases went up and declined again when the leaky fuel rods were replaced. I got a friend of mine, Dr. Morris DeGroot, head of the Statistics Department at Carnegie-Mellon University, to look at some of these things. He did his own study, using a different technique, and he found definite, positive relations between releases of radioactivity and infant mortality.[29] . . .
Until 1970 or so I had really believed that one could trust our scientists and engineers to be honest. I really believed that our bureaucrats in Washington were honest people. And some of them were. They had written a report telling about the large leaks of radioactivity coming out of nuclear reactors.[42]
Little did I know that soon those honest people would be fired, stripped of their power to do any further detailed investigations of nuclear reactors. Their authority would be transferred from the Environmental Protection Agency to the newly created Nuclear Regulatory Commission--really just a bunch of AEC boys that would be moved over.
Nixon did this. I think he got a big payoff from the utilities, the oil companies, the banks, and all the other big corporations that had a heavy investment in uranium. The facts were devastating. The big corporations that were violating environmental laws and worker safety laws made payoffs so that the Nixon administration would go easy on enforcement. And Nixon promised the big energy companies, "No more regulation. We're going to hold the regulators down."
All attempts to enforce tighter regulations were turned aside and sabotaged, so that nuclear reactors were able to release the highest amounts of radioactivity ever recorded in the history of nuclear energy in 1974 and 1975 at the Millstone plant.[43] Two million nine hundred and seventy thousand curies of radioactive gases were discharged. One curie represents as many disintegrations per second as a whole gram of radium. The entire world's supply of radium in hospitals before the bomb was a few dozen grams. And they were releasing millions of curies of radioactive gases into the air of Rhode Island and Connecticut, not giving a damn. Except how much "on time"[44] the reactor would have, how efficient it would look, and how many more reactors they would sell, based on their excellent operating record.
When I turned against nuclear reactors--as contrasted to just attacking bomb testing--the Health Department of the state of New York, the Health Department of Pennsylvania, Governor Shapp's Commission, the Atomic Energy Commission, and the Environmental Protection Agency all issued statements saying that there was no truth, no credibility in anything I had found. And I lost almost all my friends who had stuck by me when I was only attacking bomb fallout--because in effect I was saying that they were not only unwitting baby killers during the time of the bomb testing, but they were baby killers whenever they ran a nuclear reactor, whether it was at Waltz Mills, Shippingport, Millstone--or anywhere.
But I could not remain quiet about nuclear reactors. If I had, it would have been criminal on my part. Secrecy is the one way an open society can be controlled--namely by keeping things from the public.
The military supports secrecy, and the military is behind the entire nuclear reactor program, and behind the entire Plowshare Program. It's behind everything connected with nuclear energy--even artificial hearts powered with plutonium pacemakers.
credit his evidence by making Dr. Sternglass out to be a "kook." It took courage to continue to speak out. . . .