ExposureBlog

In this world there are consultants who tell their clients (often lawyers) what the cultural territory is like.  Politically, is the jury pool red or blue?  Wealthy, mid-level or poor?  Do they owe a lot of money?  Do they shop at Target, K-Mart, or. . .well, whatever place the really wealthy shop for Target-quality stuff?  I’ve had the opportunity to read some of the reports these guys churn out and some of it is impressive.  But I’ve also noticed that there is a wide variation in the number of references and end-notes.  I recall one of them obviously read New York Times columnist David Brooks, and probably even read his book, Bobos in Paradise, in which he compared local versions of red vs blue America. 

Apparently a lot of people think he’s a very smart guy and that his book approaches academic quality for the insights it offers.  His books and columns are fun to read and one comes away thinking that they’ve learned a deep truth about American culture.  Except. . .

Some of that stuff was, well, made up.

It seems Philadelphia reporter Sasha Issenberg did a little cookie-jar level fact checking on some of the claims Brooks made and found that the stuff was wrong.  Certainly nothing anyone would want to rely on for, say, jury selection.  When she confronted Brooks about it over the phone, he hemmed, hawed and parsed—even calling Issenberg’s skills as a reporter into question and darkly suggesting (it seemed to me anyway) that confronting David Brooks was not the way to get ahead in the news business. To judge for yourself, read the article here.

While Brooks is a good writer and probably a fun person to hang around with, his work may not be the thing you’d want to rely on either as a consultant studying cultural patterns nor as a lawyer interested in jury selection. 

Since many cases are won or lost on the testimony of eyewitnesses, a recent study cited here should raise some eyebrows.  It concerns the psychological phenomenon known as inattentional blindness, or the inability of some normal individuals  to recognize something when their attention is directed elsewhere.  The phenomenon is well-known in psychology. Visual expert Marc Green has a good article on inattentional blindness and human error,  and there is a book on the subject by Australian researchers Arien Mack and Irvin Rock.

I have read depositions in which the deponent is asked over and over whether he or she saw something take place.  If the response is in the negative the assumption is that the event did not, in fact, occur—or that those who say that it did are not telling the truth.  Well, not so fast.

In the study, conducted by Dr. Seema L. Clifasefi of the University of Washington at Seattle, 47 participants were asked to watch a basketball game and count the number of times a basketball was passed back and forth between teams.  Some were given an alcoholic beverage and others were given an alcohol-free beverage.  During the game, a woman in a gorilla suit appeared on the screen, stood amidst the players, beat her chest and walked away.  When questioned later whether they had seen the gorilla, fully a third of the participants had NOT noticed the gorilla.  Of those not consuming alcohol, only 46% recalled seeing the gorilla.  Of those consuming alcohol, only 18% recalled the gorilla.

It would seem, then that if an eyewitness was engaged in behavior that required his full attention, the odds of noticing details of a specific incident may be less than 50 percent. 

Not long ago, the Department of Defense announced that they would detonate a 700-ton cache of ammonium nitrate and fuel oil at Area 16 of the Nevada Test Site.  Dubbed Divine Strake, the test was to “determine the potential for future non-nuclear concepts.”  The shot, expected to produce a dust cloud 10,000 feet tall, was scheduled for June of this year. 

In May, after questions regarding their environmental impact statement came up, the feds decided to postpone the Divine Strake test indefinitely.  Now, it seems “indefinitely” means “until September or thereabouts.”  Apparently the Department of Defense believes it can come up with a proper EIS (Environmental Impact Statement) that addresses all the concerns (including mine, discussed earlier in this web log).  

Now, while the mainstream press has remained characteristically quiet regarding the revival of the test, the activists are angry.  In a Tom Dispatch letter, author Chip Ward pointed out that visitors to the nuclear test site are restricted from taking home chunks of NTS rock and that the same material that will likely be entrained into the air when Strake is detonated.

As part of their earlier sampling protocol the Defense Department took what are essentially radiation measurements somewhere near the Strake blast site.  In an affadavit filed with the court, I and several other environmental professionals argued that it would be necessary to sample area to identify the specific radioisotopes in the soil that produced the radiation. Here is why:

1. The soil at Area 16 has been contaminated by debris from prior nuclear tests, such as shots Gailieo, Kepler , Coulomb B, Shasta, Smoky, and Turk.  Some of these tests, such as Kepler, Galileo and Turk produced the long-lived alpha-emitter americium-241; while shot Galileo produced high quantities of the long-lived radioisotopes cobalt-60 and cesium-137.
2. The same radiation (i.e. gamma, beta, alpha particles, x-rays, etc) can be produced by chemically-different radioisotopes.
3. The way a radioisotope behaves in the body is determined by the chemistry of the radioisotope rather than the radiation it produces.

So, in order to do a proper environmental impact assessment, the Department of Defense must identify the specfic radioisotopes in the soil–both quantitatively and quantitatively. In other words, they should determine not only what radioisotopes are in the soil at Area 16, but how much of each radioisotopes are there.

But that is only half of the assessment.  Since these materials will be entrained in a 10,000-ft tall dust cloud—and since what goes up must come down, the feds must acknowledge that this material will potentially affect any site downwind–all the way to the Eastern seaboard.  Nuclear debris clouds certainly made it to the East Coast in the 1950s, and the Strake cloud will make it that far as well.

Recently I heard rumors that the DOD scientists were planning to counter that the Strake fallout would not be detectable above background (ambient levels of radiation.)  Of course, that brings up the second half of the EIS:  the impact of the fallout on the target site (mostly, the rest of the United States.)  Again, just assessing radiation levels won’t fulfill the requirments of a proper Environmental Impact Statement: they must identify the radiation-producing radioisotopes at the downwind sites as well.  While there are some wonderful books on the subject (ahem), for accuracy and precision nothing beats actually taking samples in the potentially-affected areas.  This would mean core samples taken at such sites where radioisotopes from earlier testing may have accumulated–namely soil at the bottom of lakes and ponds.  Soil sampling for radioisotopes is an accepted protocol that has been used for years by government scientists.

Only until soil sampling in the downwind areas is completed and the samples analyzed, will we be able to properly assess the potential impact of the Strake shot on the rest of the United States. 

But potential impact is only part of the story.  Once the device is detonated, once the cloud is airborne and heading north and east, the DOD still has one additional requirement: monitoring of the path of the Strake dust cloud.  Given the current state of the EPA radiation monitoring system, this may be a problem.  The EPA monitoring apparatus consists of only 59 air radiation monitoring sites —a little more than half of what was available in the U.S. in the 1950s–located primarily in the northeastern U.S.  Unfortunately, there are no monitoring stations in Wyoming, Montana or Nebraska—states that could be affected by higher amounts of radioactive debris.   Two years ago, I had the opportunity to speak with some EPA technicians familiar with the system.  They told me that the sites were staffed by volunteers who recorded the raw radiation data and then mailed the samples to the main EPA Laboratory in Montgomery, Alabama.  Hopefully, that situation has changed since then.

Glasstone and Dolan, in their book The Effects of Nuclear Weapons, that a radioactive debris cloud can be completely scavanged (washed clean) by a rainstorm in about an hour .  An encounter between the Strake debris cloud and even a small thunderstorm could result in a area of concentrated radioactivity on the ground below. 

Any Environmental Impact Assessment should also include information and protocols regarding what should be done if such radioactive rainouts occur.  For example, if a thunderstorm deposited significant amounts of NTS americium-241 on a farmer’s corn field, should he be allowed to bring the corn to market—or be compensated for the economic loss?  If the rainout drops radioactive NTS material squarely onto a small town, should the residents be offered free medical tests and followups?

Tough questions, but ones the Strake EIS should address.