Video transcription of questions and comments
on the Franke-Greenhouse IFEU Report of Radiological Monitoring at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
(LBNL)
Community
Meeting at the North Berkeley Senior Center April 2, 2001
1. Jim Cunningham: “Attended a
meeting in 1998 at the office of (Councilmember) Betty Olds, and many
members of the Lab were there and members of Betty Olds’ district
were there asking questions. Many questions were asked including technical
questions regarding CAP88. Lab people answered: “ I don’t
know.” Two months ago and again tonight I hear about the CAP88
that it is no good, why was I not told in 1998 that it was no good?”
“Also how important is historical contamination? I am referring
to the stack, the underground portion of the stack, and to the finding
of tritium in the grove, in the trees?
2. Robert Clear: Re: Fire
risk. “Have you reviewed the Fire Hazard Analysis for the NTLF?
(FD 95-195) To release the tritium, you have to heat the device that
holds it to 600 C (1100 F). Is there something wrong with the physics
listed here that you object to or specific condition that you are thinking
about?” “I also got curious about EPA’s Hazard Rating
System and looked into it. Because the score is maxed out …LBNL
is already as bad as it gets. Why do you continue to emphasize soil
sampling,…can’t do anything about time past?
3. Susan Rodriques:
Cited history of cancer deaths in her family who lived near Rancho Seco
Nuclear Power Plant. Also cited the Nurnberg Principles/ Article 6 and
expressed concern over putting children and elders at risk.
4. Martha R: “Is there any regular relationship
between the contents of (tritiated) water vapor and rainwater? Can you
extrapolate from one to the other?” “You listed a number
of plants (facilities) that create and/or use tritium around the country.
What kind of epidemiological studies have been done about the onset
of cancers and other diseases geographically connected with them?
5. Jami Caseber: “ With regard to human exposures
to ionizing radiation, DOE facilities such as LBNL, LLNL rely on federal
dose levels as a means of assuring the public. I am troubled by this
because Dr. John Gofman stated that there is no safe level. In light
of the BEIR V Report, would you agree that there is always some risk
to human health from airborne ionizing radiation such as tritium, HTO
and that there is no dose level below which exposure can be considered
absolutely safe.
“A lot of these standards were set by insiders (NRC, AEC) without
public input. We had no say in any of these standards and I am troubled
with the position that there is no risk or that the risk is insignificant
if it’s below 10 mRem.
6. Dale Smith: “ Assuming a release from the
top of the stack is causing these problems, is there not a mechanism
that could be used to further capture the elements (tritium) that escape
such as condensation chamber(s), gels, or some kind of filtering? Is
this a development or are we stuck with the idea that this is an ongoing
problem and we have that… it is low enough dosage that we don’t
have to worry about it?” “If those trees contain tritiated
water vapor, do they have to be treated as hazardous waste when they
are disposed of? How very contaminated are they? What is very?”
7. Amanda Carter: “I
have two questions. First about the public dosage. I saw the number
of 10 mRem/yr and then I saw the 100 mRem. What the federal requirements
are or what the public dose… what is the difference between the
10 mRem and the 100 mRem?” “Could you elaborate on the significance
of tritium coming out in bursts?”
8. Steve Nadel: “First a comment and question
about the relative scarcity of data we seem to have to really analyze
the risk level…out of what I understand is maybe twenty-five years’
operation, basically we are saying (that) only the last three years
of monitoring data could be considered reliable. And the other, let’s
say anecdotal measurement data that occurred before, that may indicate
higher releases, may have no corresponding monitoring data that can
be considered reliable…so we are in a position basically of being
asked to make risk analysis based on two to three years worth of operating
data.
So, the question becomes, is the level of operation during the relatively
brief period of time at the facility (NTLF) indicative of both its past
and present and future levels in terms of the number of tritiations,
the amount of the material being handled, which would be somewhat proportional
to the risk level, since we are basically being asked to make an analysis
based on a very narrow snap shot of data at this time?”
“The current exposure is based on a level of operation at that
period, at the facility were you say we have reliable data. We can compare
the level of operations at that period to both earlier and projected
future and say, was it typical, was it higher, was it lower? Can you
comment on that?” “If we concentrate on monitoring, once
it (tritium) has come out of the stack, we are basically not asking
the question whether the Lab is following the best possible practices
in handling and preventing high accidental and other releases and what
is the mechanism for evaluating that?”
“In terms of dealing with hydrogen there is a lot of expertise
in this region regarding dealing with gases and handling them and whether
the Lab is following best procedures, has the best up to date equipment,
etc… I don’t know what the mechanism for community involvement
is for assessing that…?”
9. Seth Katzman: Re: Lawrence Hall of Science (LHS):
“Your report finds that no one in the study, in the period of
two years, has received a dose of radiation from the tritium facility
that has been unsafe. So, would you advise parents, school boards and
educators to keep their kids away from LHS?”
10. Gene Bernardi: Bernd Franke thinks that most people
are only concerned about what’s going on right now. As he has
also said, the lab (NTLF) has considerably reduced its operations. There
is no way of telling, as he also said, that they are not going to ratcheted-up
their operations to what they had been in the past, when we had some
very high releases. There seems to be so much focus on the now…we
are talking about something, when tritium is released into the environment
it is there for 123 years before it almost disappears. I am very concerned
and I think many others are about the legacy contamination and I want
to ask that these questions Dr. Roger Byrne has raised, I hope Mr. Franke,
that you will seriously consider looking at them before you finalize
this Report No. 2.
“What does it mean when you have 775,000 pCi/L (of tritium) in
rainwater? You said that you want to rely on the measurements and yet
you told us that the data are not reliable for that period. What does
it mean? Isn’t there something that we can find from that? How
about the organically bound tritium in the vegetation? And tritium in
groundwater: 85,000 pCi/L, that is four times the EPA limit? What is
going on here?
“Dr Hoffman indicated that he does not know about any cover-ups
at the Lab. Well here we have a memo about an accidental release on
March 9, 2001. It’s almost a month later and nobody has heard
about it. Why have we not heard about it? Why was there not a press
release about this (release of tritium)?”
11.Janice Thomas: “I am concerned about the politics
of science, the politics of science of economics, the science of risk
assessment and that’s what we are basing our decision upon. (I
would like to have an) answer to a question that was not asked of Bernd
Franke. And that is whether this is the right location for this laboratory?
“I was living in Strawberry Canyon and I am still living in Strawberry
Canyon and I was trying to get pregnant during the year of these big
releases. My husband had dead sperm…He has since had children,
it took him ten years later, he has children, no more dead sperm. One
of the side effects of tritium is damage to the reproductive organs.
We can’t prove that this is what caused the dead sperm, but meanwhile
this laboratory does not practice good scientific management principles.
I can attest to that. When I first started working on this issue, the
wind monitoring stations were at the Oakland Airport….is this
the right location for the laboratory”
12. Elliot Cohen: “First of all, I want to give
you a couple of incidences: Feb 27, 1984 accident, monitor measured
100,000 pCi/L in the air. Monitor was located on the ground level but
discontinued due to construction and replaced by another several hundred
feet further away from the facility. In 1995 a Pineapple Creek monitor
(i.e., sampling site) which showed high concentrations (of tritium)
in 1993, was removed.(as sampling site) along with five other monitoring
sites, only four stormwater sampling locations now remain.Over half
of the air samples exceeded EPA ‘s Cancer Risk Screening Concentrations
(in LBNL’s ) 8- monitor network in 1995. By 1996, four of these
monitors were no longer in the network.
My question to you is this a smart practice, in terms of trying to get
accurate results from monitoring or does this seem more like an effort
to hide the truth?” Every time the Lab found a high concentration
detected by monitors, all of a sudden they removed the monitors. Is
this a fair way to get an accurate reading or is this a cover-up? When
you have a director of EH&S Division who is also the director of
the Community Relations Office, which seeks to get this community to
continue accepting the existence of the facility and tries to make this
facility presented in the best light…Isn’t that an inherent
conflict of interest? And that’s Mr. McGraw here”.
13. Leona Wilson: “I live fairly close to the
stack, in my family my husband died of cancer, of Leukemia, at the age
of fifty-six, my daughter can not have any children and I got breast
cancer. Now that is…radiation (audience). I am not sure but it
certainly sounds to me like it might be due to that. It’s a fairly
high number of cancers in one family. I like to give my time to Dr,.Byrne”.
14. Roger Byrne: “I am upset about how the CAP88
has been castigated. It is difficult to use in complex topography if
you are trying to model all sixteen sectors. If you are interested in
one sector and the target is only 110 meters away, CAP88 should be used.
There is absolutely no reason why CAP88 can not give you good numbers
and therefore should be still used as it is used at all DOE facilities
by law. These low numbers that are reported by the ambient air samplers
up on the hill are low because both are inappropriately located: one
is below the stack and the other’s air intake is at a height of
3.5 meters…almost certainly the plume is less than two meters
high. The tragedy here is that (tritiated) water vapor is an invisible
pollutant and I urge the Lab to run smoke experiments to test my interpretation,
we need to see it indirectly by putting smoke and watching what happens.
In the Bay Area we have generally a stable atmosphere. Inversion conditions
are typical near the surface…plume not disturbed vertically, will
keep the same diameter as it comes out of the stack…diameter of
the stack is less than 1 meter, not reason…that plume is going
to be dispersed vertically, the chances are that the plume, when it
is blown towards the LHS will be concentrated in the lowest two meters
of the atmosphere.”
15. Patricia Sun: “All things about radiation
are under a lot of suspicion because the government has lied about it
a lot of times.”
16. Pamela Sihvola: “ The NTLF is also a waste
generator, main generator of a waste type for which there is not disposal
path (NDP). In May of 2000, Berkeley Lab signed an agreement with DOE
that they (LBNL) will not generate NDP waste, and at the same time they
are telling us at the tritium Task Force meetings that operations of
the NTLF will continue during this very critical time, when Superfund
(air, soil, water) sampling is going to take place. In 1998 EPA deemed
LBNL eligible for Superfund listing based on ambient air monitoring
data (1995). Since the lab has promised not to generate NDP waste and
if they really want to honor this agreement, they would come out in
public and state that the NTLF is not operating until the mixed waste
issue has been resolved…..In addition, there were only three user
tritiations performed at the NTLF during the first quarter of CY 2001.
(Given that the NTLF’s major activity during the two years that
you reviewed LBNL’s air emissions data, was tritiated mixed waste
treatment under a treatability study, which DTSC has shut down on October
13, 2000, what are we expecting to measure in the in the air during
the Superfund sampling period of 2001-02 ?)
Furthermore LBNL has announced that the 28 foot high tritium stack and
its highly contaminated high-capacity exhaust system will be removed
and it seems unlikely that any user tritiations be performed during
this time of decommissioning…What are we expecting to monitor
in the air during the removal and proposed relocation of the tritium
stack, given that this stack project will take place concurrent with
the LBNL Superfund air sampling?”
17. Leo Steidlitz: “I worked in nuclear physics…as
a medical physicist. Every one of the standards related to radioactivity
has been made more rigorous, not less rigorous (with one exception).
So, that’s part of what the outrage does with respect to politics.
So called science is not pure science. Science is effected by the political
environment. If the lab were serious about decreasing the outrage they
would increase the stack height by 200 meters. Why don’t they
do that? Then it would be power struggle and outrage would have had
some effect. Outrage comes from lack of response and the defensiveness
of those who jobs are at stake. Not in the monetary way but the psyche
of these people to keep this facility running and to keep the nuclear
plants running. It is obvious that outrage is necessary…based
on real considerations of the problems at the facility and the management
of that facility which has resisted oversight. If there was no outrage,
uranium miners would not be recognized with compensation, the down-winders
would not be recognized with compensation, not that their broken lives
could be restored.”
18. Mark McDonald: “ The issue of Monheit/Menchaca
data…we are not interested in the lab’s data…what
we asked was to reverse engineer…what does it take in terms of
emissions to create those kinds of (tritium) concentrations in rainwater
and vegetation? You are doing the community a disservice by dancing
around it…that way we can assess whether the lab’s data
(is accurate). The number of (user) tritiations is critical, i.e., you
turn the car off, you don’t get any exhaust…you can’t
smog the car with the engine off. If this facility is not operating,
you can’t get an idea what kinds of emissions are normal…there
should be a comparison to what was considered normal activity a few
years ago, and what is normal activity now that they have shut it off.
Is it possible that the reduced level of user tritiations is going to
skew the results of the air sampling regiment. (Superfund sampling).
Regarding tritium recycling…Due do to the information that you
reviewed showed that the (October 1998) recycling shipment had a lot
less tritium than they claimed… Is it possible that LBNL has not
been recycling as much as they claim?”
19. Arlene Crooks: “I have lived on lower Summit
Road for many years and there were thirteen children who were raised
there. And of these thirteen children, I only know of two that were
able to have easy and normal pregnancies. There are reproductive issues
with all the rest. Some of them have not tried to get pregnant but the
ones that have tried… there have been issues. There have been
no studies done. You are talking about human lives, what are the great
scientific achievements from the use this tritium to justify the infertility
of these children?”
20. Arlene Margarian: “Tritium contamination
levels at the (NTLF) corporation yard bus stop were found to be 100,000pCi/m
. Why did you not recommend that a monitor be placed there as well?
(Especially in light of the fact that the closest monitor to that location
is on top of the roof of building 69 and not at ground employee level.)
21. Barbara George: “Karl Morgan, a physicist
for nearly two decades chaired the U. S. and international committees
that set radiation standards, said his colleagues have had as a major
objective the preservation of the floundering nuclear power business.
The international committee prostituted itself regarding the danger
of tritium, legalizing higher doses in 1973 after he argued they should
be five times lower.”
"Tritium in Berkeley",
a City of Berkeley and the Community Environmental Advisory Commission
workshop and presentation on the independent findings of Tritium releases
and radiation hazards associated with the National Tritium Labeling
Facility at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory with Mr. Bernt
Franke Institute Fur Energie-Und Umweltforsccwung (IFEU of Heidelberg)...including
Owen Hoffman, LBNL Consultant SENES, David McGraw, LBNL, Professor
Roger Byrne, U. C. Berkeley Department of Geology.