Rolling Stone’s Radium story is Ignorant, Impossible, Malarkey
In the Rolling Stone story, a man named Peter’s skin lesions are blamed on radium. Peter’s skin lesions are definitely not from radium. Peter’s symptoms are due to toxic hydrocarbons in the brine. According to this blog, 92 million pounds, (41730 metric tons) were injected in Texas. So, that phenol is going to come up in the brine. Phenol is one of the most common causes of chemical burns in laboratories because it’s a widely used solvent, and it is anesthetic on skin, so it damages without causing sensations.
For oil field workers with cancers and skin lesions, it’s the hydrocarbon cyclic and polycyclic molecules that include groups that make them water soluble that are the cause. Paint coal tar on a mouse’s skin and it’s going to develop a cancer virtually every time. Nasty stuff.
Fracking brine will act as a system for dissolving precisely those water soluble hydrocarbons that are some of the worst. That’s the assay they need to do. Blaming radium is ludicrous nonsense.
These two graphs show people studied by Argonne Laboratory, taken form a report of all radium case data from the 1920’s forward until the project was ended in 1993. This report by Rowland is the definitive report on radium effects — it’s all the data. My graph shows people who had 4 mSv lifetime dose or more. I chose that threshold because there was no indication lower doses made any difference. (If you need the excluded cases, I can get that for you separately.) These two graphs show 1,457 cases out of the 2,403 recorded by Rowland. What this graph shows is how long people lived after exposure. Keep in mind that the minimum age was 20. So, the 30 year period is quite long. Most of those lived normal life spans, and the vast majority lived quite long lives. Rowland did investigate people who died after absorbing high doses of radium. This group includes the “Radium girls” and the Radithor cases.
What got the attention of the press was not cancer. It was not even the girls who ingested enough radium/ zinc sulfide paint into their bodies to make their hair glow in the dark, although afterward, that became a meme that people still quote without any idea where it came from. These girls did things like paint their nails and teeth with radium paint because it was pretty, not just touch the brush to their lips to point it. (Some of them thought it was cool.)
What got the attention of the press is that the toxic effect of too much radium is necrosis of bone, and more specifically, that a victim, Eben Byers, was prominent and wealthy. He had the money to be able to decide to mostly drink Radithor, which did indeed have the claimed amount of radium (1 microcurie) in each bottle. Radium at high dose causes the most rapidly remodeled bone to die. This is jaws and bone supporting attachments to the side of the skull in most people. So the jaws and skull disintegrated. That liberates the radium to go elsewhere. It is an awful way to die, straight out of a horror movie. And it takes years. Today, we could locate such concentrations, make prostheses out of titanium, remove the affected bone and these people would be ok.
The point here is that it takes some serious work to get a significant dose.
If you look at the second graph you see cumulative doses in Gray, which in this case are identical to Sievert because beta emission has relative biological effect (RBE) also written as radiation weighting (Wr) of 1 to 1. A cumulative dose around 50 gray is what a cancer patient getting radiation gets over the course of treatment.
Most of these people were in their twenties when they absorbed radium, some of them in their thirties and forties. So people in the group started to die of normal causes in their fifties after 30 years had passed. If we go forward 30 years from 1925, we would be in 1955. The average life span in 1955 was 66 for men, and 72.8 years for women. Since most were exposed in their early 20’s, you can see that most lived past 50, and a surprising number lived into their 90’s. It is apparent that some people tolerate doses rather well that are fatal to others. It is also clear from these graphs that lower doses have no effect.
Many people came to Argonne believing they were contaminated because of accidents. Very few of them were, leading Rowland to say:
“… the great majority of exposed individuals went through life with no recognizable consequences of their exposures. They lived as long as, and apparently in as good health as, their unexposed neighbors. This fact seems to have been little appreciated and seldom mentioned, but it may be the most important finding of the entire study.
In the same vein, we should note that acquiring sufficient radium internally to put one at risk is not easy. Many individuals were referred to the Center for Human Radiobiology at Argonne for body content measurements after exposure to radium in the workplace or at a contaminated site, only to find no detectable radium in their bodies.”–Rowland, 1994
Radioactivity of brine vs. seawater
Now let us look at what we should expect in the seawater, which is a kind of brine. Modern estimates place uranium at an average 3.2 micrograms per liter and ocean volume in the range of 1.3 billion cubic kilometers yielding a modern value of approximately 4.2 billion metric tons of uranium in the oceans. Four billion tons of uranium is a widely accepted figure used today. Of that dissolved uranium, 0.711% is U-235, the radioactive element that is enriched to create nuclear fuel and bombs. Also present is U-234, at 0.005%, providing almost half of uranium ore’s radioactivity. Thus, in the world’s oceans there are approximately 30 million metric tons of U-235 and 210,000 metric tons of U-234. That is enough U-235 and U-234 in the world’s oceans to make at least 472 million atom bombs with a yield equal to the Hiroshima device, 1 bomb for each 15 people in the world. Unrefined uranium is 0.68 microcuries per gram of uranium or 680 Ci per metric ton. So all that oceanic uranium represents 2.9 billion (2.9 E9) Ci of radioactivity. Roughly half of that radioactivity, 1.52 billion (1.52 E9) Ci of it, is from U-235/U-234.
Let us will assume a large tanker truck holds 40,000 liters of brine. If it was seawater, that would be 3.2 micrograms/liter x 40,000 liters = 128,000 micrograms, which is 128 milligrams of uranium. There are 1000 milligrams in a gram, so 0.128 * 0.68 = 0.08704 microcuries. That is 87.04 nanocuries, or 87,040 picocuries from uranium.
The next element giving radioactive content to seawater is potassium (element letter K). The amount of radioactivity in the ocean from potassium is about 15% of that from uranium. Potassium is present at 399 metric tons per cubic kilometer of ocean and 0.0117% is potassium-40, which has an activity of 7 microcuries per gram. This works out to a total of 62 million tons of potassium-40 in the oceans and 437 million Ci. Potassium-40 gives us most of the radiation we normally receive, about 4400 Bq in our bodies. (1 Bequerel is one atomic disintegration event per second. Since most people don’t remember Avogadro’s number which is 6.02214086 E23, and that 10 raised to the 23 number is huge, Bq numbers are favored by anti-nuclear activists because they are huge and therefore scary.)
In our tanker truck, we should expect 13,056 picocuries from potassium.
Next is radium. Radium occurs in a gradient that increases with depth, averaging roughly 11 milligrams per cubic kilometer, which is approximately 15 tons in the entire ocean. Because a curie (Ci) is defined as the amount of radiation emitted by 1 gram of radium, there are 15 million Ci from it. There are 1 trillion liters in a cubic kilometer. So 11 milligrams x 40,000/1 trillion = 0.00000044 milligrams in our tanker truck. That is 44 picograms of radium which is 44 picocuries.
There’s also plutonium. The whole ocean has round 3,400 metric tons of plutonium. The total curies are approximately 7.7 million. So in our tanker truck there would be approximately 22.58 picocuries.
All of that is also in your sea salt. The major difference between sea salt and mined table salt is that modern sea salt has more radioactivity and pollutants. The concentration of uranium in the ocean has risen over the hundreds of millions of years since sea salt was laid down in geological strata.
By the way, if you do the math, there is enough U-235 in San Francisco Bay to make 4 or 5 Hiroshima sized atom bombs if it could be extracted. And the Japanese have proven ocean water mining of uranium yellowcake.
Picocuries per truck comparison
Add all the seawater values up, and we should expect that our tanker truck full of seawater contains 100,162 picocuries (and change) of radioactivity.
The article says that, “Four of Peter’s samples registered combined radium levels above 3,500, and one was more than 8,500.” I assume that this is picocuries from context. But since the article doesn’t qualify that with a volume, it’s almost meaningless. My best guess is that the “combined” word means that it would be 3500–8500 picocuries per truckload, or 3.5–8.5 microcuries per truck. That would be 0.0875 picocuries per liter.
If this is true, then the total in any truck would be 3.4% to 8.4% of the radioactivity of the radioactivity in a tanker truck full of seawater.
But, let’s explore that amount.
Compare that with the amount of radium in a bottle of Radithor, which was at least 1 microcurie. So we are talking about 3 to 9 bottles of Radithor drink per truckload for Peter’s probable samples. The people that had problems with Radithor bought hundreds or thousands of bottles and drank it for years. (Radium is around 13% +/- 4% absorbed by the gut.) It is impossible that anyone could consume a truckload of brine per week for years. The salt would kill them first.
Next, 9,300 picocuries per liter is stated in context with Yuri Gorby. If that was our truckload, it would be 372,000,000 picocuries, or 372 millicuries of radium in one truck. While that would kill a man if he drank all 40,000 liters, he’d die from the salt (and probably phenol) long before he could finish drinking it.
Nobody is absorbing 9.3 microcuries worth of radium from a liter of that brine either. Nobody is drinking liters of the stuff. Even if they did, we see to the left, in this graph of malignancies (cancer) versus dose and year, that no cancers occurred below 100 microcuries. You would have to absorb more than what is in 10 liters to have a chance of cancer from it.
Peter’s claims about skin lesions
I have sympathy for Peter’s skin lesions, and hydrocarbons (for instance phenol) are probably causing them. But it is flatly impossible that Peter could get a lesion on his skin from radioactivity due to radium in the brine we discussed.
First, in cancer therapy, people receive doses between 1.5 and 2 Sv each day to a local area for 4–6 weeks, 5 days a week. That’s a total dose of 30 Sv to 60 Sv. Radiation therapy patients do develop mostly minor burns that look like sunburn, but it requires a great deal of radiation.
Remember that Radithor had 1 microcurie per bottle, which is 1000 picocuries. The lifetime dose from 1 bottle was too low to make it onto the graphs at the top of this article, and had no cancer events in Rowland’s review. If someone consumed a liter of this brine somehow, that would be equal to 9.3 bottles of Radithor. That would do nothing at all. You could bathe in that concentration and not get to a 1 microcurie dose.
Second, beta particles have a unique signature burn called “nuclear tan” which means that for beta radiation from outside, the fat below the epidermis is browned like a thanksgiving turkey if you get a bad exposure. It’s very survivable, because it doesn’t penetrate far and generally doesn’t kill skin epithelial cells. Here is a chart of beta radiation on skin. Alpha particles cause epthelial burns. Beta particles generally don’t, and when they do, it’s a huge dose.
Ian Fairlies claims about radon, lung cancer, etc..
Ian Fairlie claims that radon is a leading cause of lung cancer, but this has not been accepted as clearly as he states. There are studies that show inverse rates, protective effects, and that radon probably prevents lung cancer. There is also no basis for Mr. Fairlie to suggest that having radium in a tanker truck is going to expose workers to radon much. They aren’t locked in a house with the brine sitting in the basement. They are out on the road, in the open air. Radon won’t stick around.
Further, we have a great deal of high dose data now that shows that in humans, the 1955 NRC limit value of 0.05 Seivert per year, which was supposed to represent the dose at which we see doubling of germ line mutations, does not happen below 2 Sievert acute dose, and probably not until 4–6 Sv. In other words, it requires mortal dose range.
Fracking.
I am not a fan of fracking at all. I think it is wrong-headed, and severely against our environmental needs. I do not, and never have been involved with either the nuclear industry nor the oil industry. I have no conflict of interest here. What I have is an allergy to baloney.
Radium cancer claims
The claim that radium caused all those cancers in oil field workers cited at the top of the article is one I find very difficult to believe. Any radium doses would be tiny, and we know from the Argonne data published in 1994 on all cases, and the malignancies versus dose chart Rowland made show that cancers were common only with the highest doses. So the claimed CDC study that supported the workers claims of radiation damage flies in the face of all the previous evidence. (I cannot read that CDC study to verify if it really says that because it’s not listed.)
Using jury awards and court settlements as evidence.
Remember “vaccine injury” damage awards when you talk about juries and court settlements. Science means nothing to a jury. Juries were awarding huge judgments for “vaccine injuries” such as autism, prior to the vaccine court compromise. Those vaccine injuries were nonsense, fed by fabrications that Andrew Wakefield, Joseph Mercola, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and other purveyors of hogwash continue to pimp for. The modern anti-vax movement was started with 1960’s era hippies republishing the book, “Back to Eden,” by Jethro Kloss, first published in 1935. This book includes a cure for asthma by inducing vomiting until the attack passes. It includes a cure for drowning by blowing cigar smoke up the rectum of the drowned person. Jethro lost his son and wife to disease. He was a fanatic Seventh Day Adventist, and it didn’t change his ideas about vaccination.
Vaccine makers told Congress in the 1980's that they would shut down operations because of what juries were doing. So Congress passed legislation protecting them. No lawsuits can be brought against vaccine makers anymore.
Linear no threshold (LNT) model
Let’s start with this: the LNT model is wrong. It doesn’t fit the data. Articles such as Tubiana’s are supported by field data from Chernobyl and other events, and it’s definitely not the only such article. What LNT proposes is that you can predict with a simple line equation what the effect of radiation will be at low doses from the effects found at very high doses. It’s just not true.
The LNT predicted 4000 to 8000 leukemia and lymphoma cases from Chernobyl did not happen. Nobody can find them, despite looking very hard, and it is not a coverup. The only increase in cancer is thyroid (9–15 excess deaths in 25 years), in people (mostly children) that consumed milk in the first few weeks. The most at-risk group, by the way, is not found in our official charts for prevention. It’s adolescent girls, because mammary tissue has an iodine pump. Here’s a chart from my book on that. It is quite dramatic, and the iodine guidelines should be changed, but that is very difficult to accomplish.
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