Warning On Pacific Radiation Levels

Press, Volume CX, Issue 32382, 22 August 1970, Page 19

Warning On Pacific Radiation Levels

As long as there is any doubt about the safety of “permissible” levels of radiation, every practicable step must be taken to ensure that nuclear tests planned for the future do not take place, says a paper on radioactive pollution in the South Pacific issued by the atom committee at the University of the South Pacific, Fiji. In the interests of humanity it must be concluded that any

further increase in the level of artificial radioactivity in the environment is intolerable, the paper says. There is increasing concern about the long-term genetic effects of low levels of radioactivity, about which nothing was known when “permissible” levels were first proposed. “Now there is rapidlyincreasing evidence that levels of radioactivity below those described as ‘permissible’ are actually dangerous to mankind because they affect those characteristics of men and women which determine the nature of their children.

“It is the children who will suffer, and their children. The effect is passed from generation to generation.” Leading scientists with the United States Atomic Energy Commission had warned that ‘permissible’ radiation could, if unabated, cause more than 64,000 deaths a year in the United States, mainly among infants, the paper says. Scientists had calculated

that if the entire population of the United States was exposed to the existing "permissible" limit of radioactivity there would be another 16,000 cases of cancer every year. “Even the conservative International Commission for Radiological Protection has recently concluded that the cancer risk from radiation is three times greater than an earlier estimate.” The official opinion of the New Zealand National Radiation Laboratory was that the levels of radioactivity in the South Pacific did not constitute a health hazard, the paper says. The laboratory based its decision on the assumption that humans could tolerate the ‘permissible” level of radiation without harm. The level in most areas of the South

Pacific was indeed below the “permissible” level established by the International Commission for Radiological Protection, but current thinking on the “permissible” levels should be considered. The paper says that the atom committee believes that the French authorities are taking precautions to prevent incidents similar to the case of the Japanese fishing boat Lucky Dragon, which was overcome by a deadly radioactive cloud from an American nuclear test some years ago. But inhabitants of the South Pacific could still suffer indirectly, it says. Localised radioactivity could find its way through the food chain—plankton and small fish—to migratory fish like tuna. Tuna, if they frequented the test area, could become heavily contaminated with radioactivity, and swim thousands of miles to be caught and sold to a community which believed it had nothing to fear from nuclear tests, the paper says.