Radiation Dangers With Nuclear-Powered Ships

Press, Volume XCVII, Issue 28531, 10 March 1958, Page 9

Radiation Dangers With Nuclear-Powered Ships

(Rec. 7 p.m.) WASHINGTON, March 8.

A committee of scientists warned today that whole harbours could be made dangerously radioactive by collisions involving nuclear-powered merchant ships of the future. The warning was in a report to the United States National Academy of Sciences by its committee on effects of atomic radiation on oceanography and fisheries.

The committee said it was almost certain that nuclear engines would be extensively used in merchant vessels as well as naval craft. “Serious hazards may arise in confined waters from collisions in which the reactor is damaged and the fuel elements with their contained fission products are lost in the water,” the report said. Under certain circumstances, it said, one reactor in the water could poison a harbour eight miles long by three miles wide by 50ft deep. It would produce “an almost constant radiation dose of about five-tenths of a roentgen a day on the surface.” Dosage Unit

The roentgen is a unit of radiation dosage. The daily dose given in the report’s hypothetical har-bour-contamination case is larger by two-tenths of a roentgen than the total weekly dose permitted to workers in the atomic energy industry.

Marine organisms which grow on dock pilings, ship bottoms, and various harbour structures would concentrate the radioactivity to “extremely high” levels, the report said. The report is part of a continuing study the committee is making on the hazards that could develop not only from atompowered ship collisions but from disnosal of nuclear wastes at sea. “The record of the control and monitoring of the disposal of atomic pollutants has. so far, been excellent,” the report said. “We are, however, at the threshold of a tremendous growth of the atomic energy industry, and it behoves mankind to make sure that as much caution is exercised in the future as in the past.”

Food Fish Disposal of radioactive wastes at sea raised the question of industry to marine creatures and contamination of food fish, it said. It. also posed the possibility of genetic damage to sea life which could “seriously upset” the balance of all oceanic nature.

The report noted that unlike land animals, which always had been exposed to natural radiations. deep sea animals lived in an environment of “very low” background radiation. It estimated that disposal of 1000 tons of fission products a year in the deep sea would “almost triple” its average radiation level.