Berkeley Voice, January 9, 1997
L A Wood

The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory is a treasure. Today, much of the research work conducted in the hills above the UC campus is done nowhere else. With its nine Nobel Prize winners and extensive research in nuclear physics, the lab has had a most prestigious history. Unfortunately, its reputation is being tarnished by its seeming lack of concern for public health and safety. In a recent Voice story (Nov. 21, "Tritium Releases Alarm Lab Neighbors") it was revealed that the lab's National Tritium Labeling Facility has been emitting radioactive tritium into the community since 1969.

The lab's response to Berkeley's concerns over tritium emissions at the NTLF is to restate its PR line of misinformation about this deadly pollution. The first claim is that low-level emitters are low risk and therefore exposure isn't significant. It is now known that low-level radiation is five times more dangerous than bomb radiation with respect to human chromosome damage.

There is no threshold for ionizing radiation exposure. If you don't get cancer or another disease from unrepaired chromosome injury, you can hand it down to your children via genetic disorders. The lab continues to state that there are no studies linking low-level radiation exposure to human health effects. There have been a number of studies directly involving human effects since 1945. Medical researchers now believe 50 percent of all cancers in the 20th century are caused by low-level radiation exposure of one sort or another, and it is recognized that children are at the greatest risk.

Much of the current understanding of the health impacts from radiation can be attributed to the research work of John Gofman, M.D., Ph.D., who is professor emeritus of medical physics at UC Berkeley. Dr. Gofman's studies of human health effects from ionizing radiation, and particularly low energy level types such as tritium, have spanned nearly 30 years. For the last decade, he has stated that there is no safe dose of ionizing radiation because a single electron track through one cell can cause cancer. In 1993, the United Nations Scientific Committee reaffirmed this conclusion, as did the National Radiological Protection Board of Great Britain in 1995: There is no safe dose. There will be harm down to the lowest doses.

So why, in the face of these scientific facts, has LBNL maintained its right to release radioactive tritium from the NTLF into the community? Moreover, why has it not embraced its own science in recognizing the real dangers facing those who are exposed to those same releases? The answers to these questions can be understood by looking more closely at the NTLF.

The NTLF is a unique operation. There are no other federal tritium labeling facilities. Like many parts of LBNL, the tritium lab is supported by various sources, including a number of private commercial user groups. For most of these private companies, often local, a contract to use the NTLE has meant opportunity for large-scale radioactive research that could never be done on their own site, especially if this meant discharging radioactive waste into the adjacent urban community. At the NTLF, this has been an acceptable practice, and a regulatory right, for nearly 30 years.

In this decade, LBNL had begun to move toward privatization to become a major participant in the emerging biotech industry. The NTLF operations represent a cornerstone for future LBNL research opportunities in this area as well as many others. Because of this, the labeling facility's growth is assured as is the generation of larger volumes of deadly mixed waste (radioactive and hazardous wastes combined), and the release of more radioactive tritium into Berkeley's environment. A testimony to this is LBNL' s recent request for a permit modification to store larger volumes of mixed waste on site.

In September, Berkeley's City Council voted unanimously to close the NTLF. Since that time, the lab's management has tried to head off community suspicions of the high levels of tritium in the environment around the NTLF and the Lawrence Hall of Science, its next-door neighbor. These suspicions have been fed by several independent reports of high levels of tritium in soils surrounding the NTLF. Perhaps the NTLF's tritium emissions is the best kept secret on the hill since the Manhattan Project days of World War II. Certainly, it does not reflect good science or good management. It's time for full disclosure and remedial action.