Countering Radiation Fears With Just the Facts
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/29/science/earth/29brenner.html
By DENISE GRADY
Published: March 26, 2011
As soon as David J. Brenner heard about the undersea earthquake and subsequent tsunami that devastated northern Japan on March 11, he checked a map of the region’s nuclear power plants. One, because of its coastal location and reactor design, looked particularly vulnerable: Fukushima Daiichi. He hoped he was wrong.
Less than a day later, ominous reports of failed cooling systems and radiation leaks at that plant began to emerge. Dr. Brenner, director of the Center for Radiological Research at Columbia University — the oldest and largest such center in the world — found himself called on repeatedly to explain what was happening with the failed reactors and to assess the radiation risk to public health, both in Japan and around the world.
Dr. Brenner, 57, a native of Liverpool, England, is a physicist who has spent his career studying the effects of radiation on human health. He has published research showing that CT scans increase the cancer risk in children, and he recently testified before Congress, saying that the widespread use of whole-body X-ray scanners at airports would produce 100 extra cases of cancer each year in the United States.
He thinks CT scanners and the people who use them need more regulation to make sure the scans are medically needed and the doses of radiation as low as possible. He believes that even low doses increase the risk of cancer, and that there is no “safe” level or threshold below which the risk does not rise — even if that risk cannot be measured statistically.
But for all his concern about potential harm from radiation, he does not foresee a public health disaster resulting from the crisis at Fukushima Daiichi.
From the start, he has spoken with a scientist’s caution, respect for facts and numbers, and keen appreciation of how much is simply not known or, at this point, even knowable. The situation changes constantly, and the path to the truth can be dicey, twisting through parties with passionate agendas for or against nuclear power, information meted out by government and industry, and public fears of radiation that many scientists consider wildly exaggerated.
How to explain the facts without scaring people needlessly? How to reassure without seeming to sugar-coat or patronize? The last thing people want, Dr. Brenner said, is a guy like him in a white coat on TV smugly telling them everything is fine.
“People are very worried, which is not surprising,” he said. “We want people to be able to make some kind of realistic assessment.”
In the week or so after the earthquake, he did about 30 interviews with reporters, he said, “some good, some dreadful.”
Some interviewers tried to push him to say the danger was much greater than he believed it to be. He resisted, and canceled one appearance when he realized that the host group had a strong anti-nuclear agenda.
“I try to keep my political views separate from my academic life,” he said.
Asked whether he was for or against nuclear power, he paused, then said, “I think there is a role for safe nuclear power.”
From the beginning of the troubles at Fukushima Daiichi, he has said that the Japanese plant is not, and will not become, Chernobyl. The Soviet reactor, which had no real containment structure, blew up in 1986 and spewed its contents far and wide. The Japanese reactors, though damaged, do have containment vessels, and the government acted quickly to evacuate people from the areas around the plant.
But he thinks the events in Japan should be a call to action for the United States. “This country and Japan have a fleet of aging nuclear reactors,” he said.
Early on, Dr. Brenner said that Fukushima Daiichi would probably turn out to be similar to the 1979 Three Mile Island accident in the United States, which has never been found to have effects on public health. As conditions deteriorated at the Japanese plant, he said he thought the outcome would be somewhat worse than that at Three Mile Island, but not much worse.
But he expects cases of radiation sickness among the workers at the contaminated plant, and, he added, “I fear there will be fatalities.”
He said it was possible that there would be some cases of thyroid cancer — probably too few to prove a connection statistically — years from now among people exposed as children to milk, water or produce contaminated with radioactive iodine.
So far, it seems unlikely that the accident will create a vast uninhabitable zone in Japan like the one that Chernobyl left in what is now Ukraine, Dr. Brenner said. Extensive fallout of radioactive cesium occurred at Chernobyl, and it takes many years to decay to safe levels. That kind of fallout has not occurred in Japan.
Over all, he said he thought the Japanese government was doing a good job of providing reliable information to the public — but that it has not always done so. At first, there was a delay in releasing radiation readings around the plant. And when officials announced that radioactive iodine had been found in milk and vegetables, and yet initially declared them safe, Dr. Brenner said, he “screamed loud” and spoke out to reporters about it. There was simply no reason to risk consuming them, he said.
Radioactive iodine is taken up by the thyroid gland, particularly in children, and a vast majority of the 6,000 cases of thyroid cancer caused by the Chernobyl accident occurred because people were not told to stop giving their children local milk. The milk was contaminated because it was produced by cows grazing on grass coated with fallout.
Potassium iodide pills are widely recommended to protect the thyroid gland from radioactive iodine, but Dr. Brenner said it was better just to stop drinking milk until the threat had passed.
His message changed, however, when radioactive iodine turned up in tap water in Tokyo. Though the public was advised that babies, children and pregnant women should not drink the water, Dr. Brenner conceded that some exposure might still be hard to avoid, and that using potassium iodide was a reasonable precaution.
“I’ve been maybe a little overstrong in saying that potassium iodide doesn’t have a role to play,” he said. “But usually the problem is milk. To me, the levels in water came as a surprise.”
In recent years Dr. Brenner’s research has focused on responses to terrorism. He finds himself in the odd position of having directed the development of a machine that he hopes will never be used, the Rapid Automated Biodosimetry Tool, or Rabit. Its purpose is to test blood samples — up to 30,000 a day — for signs that people have been exposed to a significant dose of radiation.
The Rabit was meant to be used in the event of a terrorist attack — a dirty bomb, for instance — in which large numbers of people fearing they had been exposed to radiation might overwhelm clinics and emergency rooms. Small blood samples could be drawn at many locations and sent to the Rabit; people with signs of exposure could be monitored and treated if necessary.
The radiation releases in Japan so far have been much lower than what the Rabit was designed for.
He may have inherited his knack for industrial design from his maternal grandfather, a mechanical engineer who was one of the inventors of the Kit Kat candy bar and the machinery to mass-produce it.
His office holds two prized possessions: a 1961 photograph of John Lennon and George Harrison with Stuart Sutcliffe, the Beatles’ original bass player; and the desk used by the first director of the Columbia radiological center, in 1915. It came with a drawerful of tobacco pipes.
On a recent afternoon, the venerable desk was strewn with maps and graphs of radiation levels around the Fukushima plant. Unable to find the one he wanted, Dr. Brenner accused a colleague of having made off with it, and was cheerfully rebuffed. Television interviews were scheduled and a photographer was on the way; he winced and said that lately he had had no time for a haircut.
