ExposureBlog

There’s not much toxic or nuke exposure portrayed on television.  The one’s that got it absolutely right–The Day After and Special Bulletin come to mind–are are usually so right that it scares everyone out of watching them.  Which, sociologically speaking, is probably worth talking about—but some other time.  This post is just going to set the stage a little bit, as it were. 

Back in 1989 when I was in the then-USSR, officials there told me that The Day After was instrumental in forming Gorbachev’s position vis a vis the U.S.  As for Special Bulletin, if you want to know what terrorists can really do with even a small nuke, this is your film.  The writer and director should have been given emmys for this one.

Maybe they did get emmys, I forgot.  Anyhow, Special Bulletin was written by Marshall Herskovitz, who seemed to have a knack for getting the emotions right in his screenplays.  Among his other projects, 1976’s Family and 1987’s Thirtysomething.  Special Bulletin was directed by Herskovitz’ pal Edward Zwick who had a hand in the aforementioned Herskovitz projects as well as the great 1990’s series “My So-Called Life.”  It lasted one season.  Like Special Bulletin, maybe a little too realistic.

Which is perhaps why the current scriptwriters add that little dose of unreality to the program so that viewers will know that it’s all well, make believe.  Take that new CBS show scheduled for the fall lineup–Jericho.  From the press release it’s about the citizens of a small Kansas town who witness an explosion that resembles a nuclear test and because of it’s remote location (the town, not the explosion) the citizens have difficulty figuring out what to do next.  Sort of like Lost on the Great Plains. Or maybe not.

The fact is, I like CBS, mostly because Dan Rather and Fern Orenstein work there.  But, as a guy who knows a mushroom cloud when I see one, the cloud in the promo needs serious work.  It actually looks worse than the one in the really sensitive and too-cleverly-titled Desert Bloom, that old Jon Voight movie about coming-of-age and nuclear testing. 

But back to Jericho: there’s the problem with the terrain—there are mountains visible on the horizon.  I grew up in the Midwest and having spent a lot of time in Kansas I can assure you that Kansas is awesomely flat.  In fact, it has actually been mathematically proven to be flatter than a pancake.  I’ve been all across that state and I know of no place in KS where there are mountains as tall as are depicted in that promo.   Colorado, yes.  Southern California, suspiciously, yes.  Kansas?  No.

So, Fern–remember me?  I was the guy sitting next to you on the plane to San Fran—you were wearing that black MGM tee shirt. 

Place a call to CBS Television Marketing. Ask if the ”tweak” designer on that team has ever spent any time in the Midwest.

Jericho sounds like a great script, one of those shows that could turn out to be another Lost—but those mountains in that promo have got to go. 

My good friend and former DOE safety guy/motorcycle maven Gary Noss sends along two great articles on how to lift a motorcycle that has fallen over, here and here.  I used to ride one and will likely do it again, so for me anyway, this is timely.   

Apparently so.  The survivor in the most recent mine disaster in Kentucky says the escape air packs didn’t last long enough.  Developing. . .

It’s not every day that you find new info about friction–you know–that ill-defined resistive force that occurs when you rub two surfaces against each other. 

Lawyers who deal in slip and fall cases can probably recall the safety guy dragging the exemplar shoe across the vinyl tile at K-mart.  The shoe was likely attached to a spring with a kind of device that looked like a horizontal fish scale.  It was supposed to measure drag and thus, well, coefficient of friction.  Anything less than 0.5 was bad. 

Well, if you’re one of those lawyers, this one’s for you.  It seems that the definition of friction has been enhanced.  We now know the minimum distance for friction to occur—about a nanometer.  And now we also know that friction is dependent upon the chemistry of the materials involved.

Okay. That much we all knew anyway.  Tennis shoes seem to have a higher coefficient of friction than flats.  Can’t dance in tennis shoes.  No slide.

Back to the serious stuff.  Now it seems that two objects don’t even have to be in that close contact to create friction.   The official term is friction at a distance, but the distance is still too small for the average jury to see—even with bifocals.  The distance is just a little greater than a nanometer.  Not like twenty feet or something.  Read all about it here.

From the air, the Divine Strake GZ doesn’t look like much–just barren desert.  A closer look (with a few marks on the photo) shows the location of the test tunnel.  Again, nothing spectacular.  Zooming out, however, we find that the site is only five miles from a shot crater that is still somewhat radioactive (about 150-250 microroentgens/hr)–even when measured using instruments placed 3 meters above the surface.  In my opinion, that’s probably close enough to the new GZ to warrant a real analysis of the Strake soil for radioisotopes.  Soil can easily migrate five miles, even where the winds don’t exceed 50 mph.

And now there is this–a map of the geology of Area 16 includes the famous Syncline Ridge.  It’s in blue—and it’s composed of what is called the Tippipah limestone formation.  According to an earlier chart, some of this area may include springs. 

I have been told that springs were mentioned in the doucments discussing earlier tests, particularly the Jan 18, 1968 Hupmobile Shot, but I’ve seen nothing in the Strake EA’s about them.  

The presence of springs may indicate the presence of an aquifer, and thus the possibility of contamination.  And of course, there may have been one there in 1968 and it has dried up since. 

Stay tuned.

Daniel W. Miles, a former physics professor at Dixie College in Utah offers another perspective on breathing radioactive dust.  Short version: the (presumably) typical Utah garden contains naturally-occurring radioactive materials, so breathing radioactive dust isn’t so bad. 

I have some problems with this view.  First of all, Miles compares his garden’s radioactivity to something that is still unknown—the radioactivity of the soon-to-be-generated dust cloud.  He’s comparing apples and oranges. . .er, actually—his radioactive tomatoes, cucumbers and squash with some unknown stuff from Area 16 of the Nevada Test Site.  And while I’m sure we could find thorium, uranium and radon in most places, I believe we’d be hard-pressed to find such isotopes as cesium-137, strontium-90, curium-242 and plutonium in our back yards.  Yet those radioisotopes are probably buried a few inches below the surface at Area sixteen’s ground zero. 

Dr. Miles may save money on the candles for his Halloween pumpkin, and good for him. But we still should identify those radioisotopes at Area 16 before we spread them around the country.

Well, that’s what the National Nuclear Security Administration rep said about the upcoming Divine Strake test.  Glad he cleared that up.  He also admitted that the explosion of 700 tons of ammonium nitrate and fuel oil would be equivalent to 593 tons of TNT.  And that the dust cloud probably would not take the form of a mushroom cloud.  But it could reach 10,000 altitude.

Back in 1979, while with OSHA, I received a phone call from a medical student.  His neighbor, who worked at a nearby petrochemical facility in Texas City, TX, had been diagnosed with a brain tumor.  Against all odds, this neighbor worked in the very same facility where another tumor case had appeared almost twenty years earlier.  I investigated, and soon turned up four cases—all at the same facility.  We called in the epidemiology team from the national office and before long, we had identified 10 cases.  Worse, we found the possibility of 18 more cases at another facility about 40 miles south of the original cases.  Unfortunately, the 18 suspect cases was at Dow—and Dow didn’t consider 18 cases much of a problem.  When Industrial Hygienist Dave Elskamp and I visited Dow to open an inspection there, we were shown the door. 

Then our troubles promptly continued.  Pro-OSHA Jimmy Carter was out, Ronald Reagan was in, and the new OSHA boss, a Florida contractor named Thorne Auchter, didn’t seem to like OSHA.  Not long after our Dow visit, we received word that no further epidemiological work was to be done on this case.  Seeing some pretty obvious writing on the wall, the principal investigators got together, wrote up a paper and sent it off to a new medical journal for consideration.  The paper was published by the American Journal of Industrial Medicine, —just as the new OSHA Director terminated the study—and two years later, terminated the OSHA office where the study had originated.

Eventually, a researcher at the University of Texas School of Public Health continued work on the case via a string of National Cancer Institute grants that eventually totalled about $700,000 over nine years.  Despite the massive amount of money poured into that study, no final report has ever surfaced.

I’ve heard of other possible brain tumor clusters-the 1985 cluster in western Missouri, the 1996 Amaco case in Napierville, IL, the Pratt&Whitney case in North Haven Connecticut,and recently a possible cluster in Ocean City, NJ.

Interestingly, the researcher who took over the OSHA brain tumor study in 1980 was also the principal investigator of a paper discussing what is probably the Amoco case in Napierville.  The findings?

“Although conclusions are limited by the small study population and lack of specific exposure data, these findings were not consistent with an occupational explanation for the observed brain tumor cluster.”

Compare that finding with the statement from Monash University epidemiologist Michael Abramson regarding the Melbourne RMIT cluster:

“To be quite frank, I think it’s an unfortunate coincidence.”

Perhaps.  But when these unfortunate coincidences–stretch from Texas in 1979 through western Missouri, through Napierville, IL, through New Jersey and now, in Melbourne, Australia—well, it would seem that something other than chance might be involved.

Louie Slesin over at Microwave News reports a cluster of 7 people with brain tumors all working in a single building. Very strange.  More later.

Maybe.  Stay tuned.