12
How Much Radiation?
Jane Lee is a tough-talking widow in her forties. From the kitchen of her family's stone farmhouse in Etters, a tiny town in central Pennsylvania, Lee has watched the quiet countryside around her undergo some dramatic changes.Few rural areas in the United States have remained as well kept as the hill country around Harrisburg, a town of fifty thousand some 125 miles west of Philadelphia. With a large population of conservative, slow-moving "plain folk" from the Amish and Mennonite tradition the farm regions of the Susquehanna Valley still boast some of the most beautiful and bountiful acreage in the world. Lush, deeply cultivated fields and sturdy, well-kept barns are hallmarks of an area where traditional Dutch folk symbols still mean much more than mere souvenirs.
The deepest changes in this countryside of Jane Lee's have been the invisible kind--stemming from radiation. In the mid-1960s Metropolitan Edison, a subsidiary of the General Public Utilities (GPU) holding company, decided to build a massive atomic power complex. The plant would be at Three Mile Island, a narrow piece of land in the middle of the Susquehanna River, ten miles southeast of Harrisburg. The first 819-megawatt unit was ordered from Babcock & Wilcox reactor producers in 1966. By 1974 it was on line.
There was little opposition to TMI-1. But Jane Lee had spoken out about it. The state had already tried to put a toxic-waste dump on a nearby hilltop, where runoff would pollute the water table. "If the authorities were dumb enough to want to do something like that," Lee told us, "then I didn't think they could be trusted with a nuclear power plant either."
Living Next to Reactors Lee's opposition to the project had made her visible. Two years after TMI-1 opened, she began to get complaints from her neighbors that strange things were happening to their animals. "We're all accustomed to having an animal die here and there, or some birthing problems, or an off-year with crops and the like," she told us. "But this seemed very new. All of a sudden we were being plagued with a whole lot of bizarre things. And when you have farmers telling you their animals are falling down and can't get up, or there are miscarriages, eggs not hatching, calves being born deformed, hair falling out and cows dying, and that people who have been farming here for decades can't find any explanation for it, well, you start to wonder."
The "wondering" led just one place--Three Mile Island. In a room behind her kitchen, three miles from the plant, Lee began accumulating files, collecting signed statements from those of her neighbors who were willing to put their animals' problems down on paper. "This isn't an area where people are used to speaking out," she told us. "It hasn't been easy to get people to come forward."
As we talked in the chilly dampness of early spring, Lee showed us photographs of a badly deformed litter of kittens, born in 1978. One appeared normal, a second was born with its hair in splotches, the final two were hairless runts, born dead. "The cats get a triple dose of radiation," Lee said. "They get it when they breathe and drink like the rest of us. They get it again when they eat wild animals like field mice. And they get it a third time when they lick themselves down after running in the fields."[1]
Nor were the cats the only animals to suffer. Duck eggs failed to hatch, and those ducklings that made it were often deformed. Rabbits and goats were stillborn. Cats dropped dead for no apparent reason. Trees lost their bark and gardens wilted overnight.
Emma Whitehall, who lived at the same farm within four miles of TMI for all of her seventy years, told Lee that in 1978 her ducks laid 290 eggs, not one of which hatched. She also lost a milk cow and her calf.
On the same road James Fitzgerald reported two calves born blind, with unnaturally soft bones. Across the river in Middletown, less than five miles from the reactor, Mary Ann Fisher saw a three-week-old litter of kittens drop dead overnight. One hundred eggs laid by twelve geese produced just one hatchling, which died.
In January of 1979, just after the opening of a second, larger nuclear unit at Three Mile Island, Fisher lost four litters of kittens to spontaneous abortions, had one full-term litter stillborn, and complained of four heifers being unable to conceive. Her geese laid eggs again with no hatchlings, then stopped setting.[2]
Charles Conley, who lives within eyesight of the TMI towers, also had complaints. Ever since the plant opened, he said, rainfall would wash a milky-white substance off his roof and into the cisterns from which his cows would drink. If the cows drank it, "they would get down and not be able to get up." If he dumped the white substance out of the cisterns, "the grass would die."
Other neighbors also complained of the mysterious white substance, and pointed to runoff lines below their roofs where something had created a trough of dead grass.
Conley had no proof the white substance was coming from the power plant. But he told us that "whenever it would shut down, why, the powder would disappear. And when it would fire up, the powder would come back."[3]
Born in 1914, within a half-mile of his farm, Conley readily conceded that country life is full of ups and downs, and that plants and animals get sick and die, sometimes for inexplicable reasons. "Any farmer with livestock knows you'll have a history of trouble," added Gary Huntsberger, owner of four hundred acres near the plant. "Just as you get one thing licked, you'll have another crop up."[4]
Indeed it is virtually impossible to nail down firm statistics on a "normal" rate of birth defects and reproductive problems among farm animals. Dr. Horst Leipold of Kansas State University, one of the nation's leading experts on animal husbandry, told us that a 1 percent stillbirth rate among beef and dairy cows was considered normal, and that the rate might be twice that for goats and pigs. "If I hear about two stillbirths, or malformations, at the same farm, I consider that serious enough to go out there," Leipold told us.[5]
For farmers and many observers there seemed obvious reasons why radiation around TMI, at Lloyd Mixon's ranch near Rocky Flats, and at other nuclear facilities would cause an abnormal number of symptoms to appear in animals before they would in humans. Some of them--particularly cats and rabbits--are much smaller and reproduce far more quickly, at a much earlier age, than humans. Most farm and wild animals also keep their mouths and noses constantly to the ground, for grazing and hunting. That means they absorb more heavy fallout particles from the air they breathe, the water they drink, and the plants and animals they eat. They may also receive more gamma doses from emitters on the ground.
Some animals also may be more radiation-sensitive than adult humans. In fact animals have been used as radiation monitors during abnormal emissions at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. And it is well known that pine trees are more sensitive to radiation than grown humans.[6]
Humans, on the other hand, usually wash their vegetables. They stand farther off the ground than most other animals, and thus breathe in fewer heavy particulates. Their meat and fish are often not freshly slaughtered, giving some of the radiation time to decompose.
But ultimately, we are also susceptible. "Watch the animals," Helen Caldicott, a Boston pediatrician and radiation expert, told us in 1980. "What happens to them first will be happening to people soon enough."[7]
And what was happening to animals during normal operations at Three Mile Island also seemed to be happening near other reactor sites. At Hinsdale, New Hampshire, just across the Connecticut River from the Vermont Yankee reactor, sixty-seven-year-old Annie Fostyck was seeing things in her cows she'd never seen before. After the plant opened, she said, there was a rash of "cows miscarrying, aborting. Cows with boils, tumors, lameness. Cows eating clay even in winter." She also complained of a "white, milky film" that floated in the air and would "fly off when the corn was cut."Neighbor John Solacz found that cows "have been harder to breed" since the plant opened. "Right after freshening," he said, "some have run a high fever, stopped eating and died within a week. They're aborting too."
Steve Stoll, a public-relations man for Vermont Yankee, had heard similar charges before. There was "nothing to substantiate" claims the reactor was harming animals. "We have people calling us up all the time with these complaints. But most of the time, it's just generalities," he told Vermonter reporter Susan Green. "These people do not know anything about radiation, so when anything is out of the ordinary, it's easy to blame Vermont [Yankee]."
Mildred Zywna's complaints were not so easily dismissed. As a Hinsdale town selectwoman, she had reported a general disappearance of squirrels, rabbits, and birds after Vermont Yankee opened. A number of trees had died mysteriously, and the bark was peeling off some on the sides facing the plant. A grandmother in her late fifties, Zywna had noticed a rise in thyroid cancers in town. She also knew that Dr. Rosalie Bertell of the Roswell Park Memorial Cancer Research Institute in Buffalo had noted a high rate of heart problems requiring hospitalization in Vernon, where Vermont Yankee was located. Disturbed by such findings, Zywna and her fellow town officers had asked the state for statistics on cancer rates in Hinsdale. The state never responded.[8]
Farmers in upstate New York near the Nine Mile Point and Fitzpatrick power reactors got similar treatment. "We've been trying to get a study done here for years," we were told by Nancy Weber, a dairy farmer in the town of Mexico. "But we haven't been able to get anybody to listen to us."
Weber's dairy farm has been in her husband's family for thirty-five years, and is situated near both plants. The area also has toxic-waste dumps. However, according to Weber NRC documents indicated that emissions from the nearby reactors were peaking at the same time a score of local farmers had experienced "more than normal abortions among our animals" plus "extreme difficulty in getting cows bred."
Some calves that made it were coming out deformed, including several born at 150 pounds, twice normal. "It was like a science fiction movie," she said. "One calf came out staring at me with giant red eyes." Among other things, the oversized calves were causing pelvic separations among the mothers. For about a year, Weber told us, there were instances of calves being born with two tails and three front legs, with brain and liver tumors, and with severe deformations in their internal organs. A goat farmer reported "mummified kids born left and right." Reproductive problems among cats became rampant.
The NUS Corporation, which did the controversial environmental monitoring at Shippingport in the early 1970s, also surveyed the Fitzpatrick/Nine Mile Point area in 1980. They found abnormal cesium levels at one nearby farm, but blamed it on bomb fallout. "Nobody quite believed that," said Weber.[9]
Columnist Jack Anderson also reported some similar problems at Shippingport. In his nationally syndicated column he said that the new Beaver Valley plant had contaminated the drinking water supply at the site, and had dumped nine thousand gallons of radioactive liquids into the Ohio River without warning towns downstream that drew drinking water from it.Shippingport residents told journalist Howard Rosenberg, an investigator for Jack Anderson, of "white dust that sometimes covered their roofs and filled their cisterns. They charged that their water wells and backyard gardens had occasionally been contaminated. They showed him chunks of calcium sulfate that had fallen on their property. He brought one plate-sized chunk of pollution back as a souvenir."
Rosenberg also reported strange goings-on among area wildlife, including "tales of birds that walked backwards." Hunters and woodsmen said that "the lush foliage along the riverbank has turned brown and sickly. The deer long ago abandoned their former haunts." In an interview Rosenberg also told us that small animals like rabbits, squirrels, and sparrows had disappeared from the woods.[10]
One of Anderson's columns on the situation at Shippingport was banned by a number of western Pennsylvania newspapers.
But reports of similar symptoms in Arkansas surfaced on the national wire of the Associated Press. In that case a farmer named Herschel Bennett said the 850-megawatt Arkansas Nuclear One was destroying his farm, which was just a quarter mile away.Owned by Arkansas Power and Light Company (AP&L), Nuclear One is seventy miles from Little Rock, in the town of Russellville. It was granted its operating license in 1974. In the late winter of 1977 Bennett reported a calf born on his farm with no eyeballs. "One lid was growed shut," he told the Arkansas Gazette. "The lid didn't open, but you could feel there was nothing back there. The other eyelid would open and close and there was no eyeball at all."[11]
The eyeless calf died on March 1, 1977. Another calf was born around the same time with no tail. "Nothing like that calf being born deformed ever happened here before," Bennett told us in a 1980 interview. Bennett and his wife had been on the same farm since the 1940s. The place had been owned by Bennett's grandfather before him.
Along with his thirty head of cattle Bennett managed a twenty-acre peach orchard. Soon after the eyeless calf succumbed, a quarter of Bennett's peach orchard also died. Bennett called the operators of Nuclear One, who soon visited his farm with a representative of the local agricultural extension service. They told him his problems were from winterkill. According to Bennett, a Louisiana State University horticulturist named Dr. Earl Puls added "poor management" and "an extremely high population of nematodes" to the list of causes. Puls, who visited the farm "for about one hour," said his findings were "conclusive in ruling out any type of nuclear radiation."[12]
Puls's report was reminiscent of official studies done of animal problems at Lloyd Mixon's ranch near Rocky Flats and of official disclaimers at Vermont Yankee and Nine Mile Point. "I've been raising peaches for more than thirty years now," Bennett told us in an interview, "and there was just one year, back in the 1950s, when we had no crop. Now this fellow comes from some university, spends an hour here and tells me I'm mismanaging my orchards and don't know what I'm talking about. Well, I'll tell you this. We haven't lost anything in this heat and drought. And that plant's been shut down for a long time now [for repairs] and ever since it's been shut down, why, we've had as good a year as any."
After the death of his eyeless calf, Bennett reported a rash of reproductive problems in his cow herd, and a drop in the hatching rate of chicken eggs laid at his farm. A laboratory confirmed the problem with the eggs, but declined to name a cause.
There were no monitoring devices at Bennett's farm. But NRC records did confirm that Nuclear One dumped an abnormal amount of radioactive liquid into nearby Lake Dardanelle in the summer and fall of 1976, when the eyeless calf might have been most vulnerable. "Their problems corresponded to mine as far as time was concerned," Bennett told us. "Leaks and spills and releases and filtering problems. . . . They did everything wrong about the time the calf was born without any eyeballs."[13]
NRC records confirmed the releases. But the commission's Jack Donohew said the levels were "a fraction" of what could cause "biological mutations." He told the Arkansas Gazette the fact that Bennett's animal problems surfaced at the same time as the radioactive releases was "probably just a coincidence."[14]
1. Jane Lee, interview, March 1980.2. Affidavits at Fisher Farm, Etters, Pennsylvania.
3. Charles Conley, interview, March 1980.
4. Laura T. Hammel, "Three Mile Island's Second Accident: How Government Failed," Baltimore News-American, July 20, 1980 (hereafter cited as "Second Accident").
5. Horst Leipold, interview, May 1981; See also, L. O. Gilmore and N. S. Feccheimer, "Congenital Abnormalities in Cattle and Their General Etiological Factors," Journal of Dairy Science 52, No. 11, pp. 1831-1836.
6. Karl Z. Morgan, interview, May 1981.
7. Helen Caldicott, interview, March 1980. We talked with Dr. Caldicott just before her appearance on a nationally televised panel in Harrisburg. The occasion was the accident's first anniversary. When asked about the general rash of animal problems in the area, one pronuclear panelist blamed "milk fever" and advised giving the cows in question "a swift kick."
8. Susan Green, "Yankee: The People and the Plant," Vermonter, December 7, 1980 (hereafter cited as "Vermont Yankee"); and David Riley, "Big Power in a Small Town," Country Journal, April 1980. We did follow-up interviews with most of the people mentioned in these articles and found the accounts to be quite similar to those around TMI.
9. Nancy Weber, interview, April 1981. See also, "Bovine Blues," The Waste Paper, the Sierra Club, spring 1980, and "Radioactive Milk?" winter 1981.
10. Jack Anderson and Les Whitten, "Washington Merry-Go-Round," November 1, 1977, November 16, 1977, and April 17, 1979 (hereafter cited as "Merry-Go-Round"). Also, Howard Rosenberg, interview, May 1981. Anderson and Whitten's November 1, 1977, column, entitled "White Clouds Over Pa.," was the one banned in some western Pennsylvania newspapers.
11. Carol Matlack, and Ginger Shiras, "Farmer Near Plant Reports Calf Deformed, Trees Died," Arkansas Gazette, June 2, 1979, p. 1-A (hereafter cited as "Farmer"). (We first found Bennett's story in an Associated Press story, "Farmer Thinks Nuclear Plant Is Cause of His Plight," Columbus Dispatch, September 23, 1979. Our thanks to Phyllis Wasserman for sending us that and many other clippings.)
12. Arkansas Gazette, October 17 and November 1, 1979.
13. Herschel Bennett interview, October 1980. Herschel Bennett died under mysterious circumstances as we were writing this book. He was investigating the outtake pipes at Nuclear One and somehow fell into twelve feet of water and drowned. There was just one witness to the drowning. No autopsy was performed. Bill Peters, letter to authors, November 13, 1980; and, Bill Peters, interview, November 1980.
14. Matlack and Shiras, "Farmer"; See also, On the Record: Operations and Reported Incidents of Arkansas Nuclear One (People's Action for Safe Energy, 401 Watson, Fayetteville, AR 72701).
The Reactors' Safety Record The spreading fear among farmers had its political costs. Such fears--plus economic concerns--prompted the town of Eugene, Oregon, to vote down, in 1966, a reactor project planned nearby.
Through the late sixties and early seventies a small but dedicated group of concerned citizens around the country devoted thousands of dollars and years of effort to dragging the industry through the licensing process and the courts, trying to stop the reactors or at least make them safer. In so doing they laid the foundation for a social movement.
By the early seventies concern had spread, particularly in areas where the plants were being built. An amalgam of traditionally conservative farmers, fishing people, and small-town residents joined with nationally organized nuclear opponents. In 1976 the first coordinated civil disobedience actions took place at the Seabrook reactor site on the New Hampshire seacoast. Operating with nonviolent tactics, a coalition called the Clamshell Alliance helped organize a series of occupations that captured the imagination of environmental activists around the U.S. By the summer of 1978, when the Clamshell attracted some twenty thousand nuclear opponents to the Seabrook site, scores of occupations had taken place around the country, and a national antinuclear network was in place. A movement had grown to stop the reactor industry that echoed the one aimed at atmospheric testing two decades earlier.[15]
By the spring of 1979 the peaceful atom was in serious financial straits. The Arab oil embargo of 1973 had sent fuel prices soaring, which by all expectations should have made atomic energy more competitive. Instead it sent the cost of the reactors themselves soaring, at a rate far higher than the cost increases in coal burners. Electricity prices also rose sharply, prompting American consumers to use far less. That, in turn, helped undercut the demand for new reactors, which fell further because of public pressure and a loss of faith in the technology.[16] Orders fell drastically, from forty-one in 1973 and twenty-six in 1974, to four in 1975, three in 1976, four in 1977, and two in 1978. Cancellations quickly outnumbered orders. In 1978 the number of domestic reactors on line, on order or under construction dropped to 197, lowest since 1972.[17]
And there were other problems. In 1966 the Fermi fast breeder, which the UAW had fought to the Supreme Court, very nearly caused a devastating radioactive release. Starting on October 5, 1966, the reactor hovered on the brink of a catastrophic meltdown for an entire month. Its operators secretly alerted local police and officials in Detroit, forty miles north, that a mass evacuation might be necessary. The disaster was barely averted.[18]
Eleven years later two workmen at the Tennessee Valley Authority's Browns Ferry plant near Decatur, Alabama, set the plant's wiring system on fire. The workers had been using a candle to check for air leaks and had set some insulation into flames. By the time the fire was out, $100 million in damage had been done.[19]
By 1979 sloppy reactor construction, poor design, and inept operation had become a national scandal. That year's NRC records revealed more than twenty-three hundred operating errors, including a failure of control rods at Browns Ferry; a temporary blackout in the control room of a power plant in Florida; the surprise development of a steam bubble in another Florida reactor; and the blowout of a coolant pump at Arkansas Nuclear One, near Herschel Bennett's farm. New York's Fitzpatrick II--where Nancy Weber's cows were dying--listed eighty-eight incidents of its own.[20] There were other incidents as well: one reactor cooling system had been hooked up to the plant's drinking supply. At another plant a basketball wrapped in tape had been used to plug a defective pipe.[21]
Through the end of 1979, the allowable average dose to residents near the plants remained at 170 millirems per year, a rate Drs. Gofman and Tamplin calculated would guarantee an extra thirty-two thousand deaths per year. And methods of measuring radioactive releases had not been systematically improved despite the recommendations of the Shapp Commission. If anything, standards were regressing.
In 1975, for example, excessive strontium 90 radiation was found in milk at a farm near the Shippingport plant. The following year, monitoring at that farm was discontinued.[22]
In October of 1977 Ernest Sternglass charged that strontium emissions from the Millstone Nuclear Power Station at Waterford, Connecticut, were extraordinarily high, and had led to an increased rate of cancer.[23] Soon thereafter the NRC eliminated the requirement that utilities collect strontium 90 data. Budgetary reasons were cited.[24]
Also that fall the General Accounting Office released a report charging that the EPA's national radiation monitoring program did not measure exposure for 40 percent of the American people, "and provides only educated guesses for the remaining 60%." The GAO warned that "levels of radiation are increasing which affect not only the health of the current population, but of future generations because of genetic damage." Federal agencies lacked resources, staff, and know-how to deal with the problem, said the GAO. Environmental Protection Agency policy "may not be the result of public need, but rather reflects a crisis-oriented approach to the problem."[25] Despite the warning, the Reagan administration in 1981 drastically cut the EPA's radiation monitoring program well below the levels cited as inadequate by the GAO.
But crisis was something the industry was saying could not happen. Despite the near-catastrophes at Fermi and Browns Ferry, reactor manufacturers, utilities, and their supporters in government continued to assure the public that an accident was next to impossible. In 1976 an MIT professor named Norman Rasmussen issued a major study indicating that the odds against a major meltdown by 1980 were on the order of one in twenty thousand. Sponsored by the NRC, his report was hailed by the industry as the ultimate confirmation of nuclear reactor safety.[26]
But in January >
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