NH #525: Reference Man Standard for Radiation Exposure Inadequate for Women, Girls, Boys – Mary Olson, Dave Lochbaum

Libbe HaLevy

00:00:01

Whenever there’s even a hint of a radioactive leak at a nuclear site. Be it a reactor, uranium, mine, weapons, manufacturer waste, storage, dumper. Anything else? The first thing the public is told is that there’s no danger and whatever happens is not significant. So there’s absolutely nothing to worry about, especially as regards to your health, but the standard for interpreting the relative dangers of radioactive exposure on the human body is something called reference, man. And the problem with reference man is that as one genuine expert explains

Mary Olson

00:00:41

Our regulators, our scientific bodies, our governments never stopped to look, listen, or reconsider when the same basis of radiation measurement and regulation was applied to the general population, including pregnant women, including infants, including elders, including girls. There should not have been the 60 year wait for enough data to be able to now say yes, female bodies are harmed more than male bodies, no matter what age.

Libbe HaLevy

00:01:17

Well, when you learn how the entire system for evaluating the dangers of radioactive exposure is a Western Caucasian adult male with very specific physical characteristics. And that he in no way represents the dangers. The exact same amount of radiation can pose to a person of a different gender, weight, race, ethnicity, and so much more. You begin to realize that all those official reassurances from experts might just be diversions so that you don’t realize how you’re trapped in that terrible radioactive seat that we all share

Announcer

00:01:58

Clear hot seat. What are those people thinking? Clear, hot seat. What have those boys been drinking? our time to act is shrinking, but it’s the bomb.

Libbe HaLevy

00:02:31

Welcome to nuclear hot seat, the weekly international news magazine, keeping you up to date on all things nuclear from a different perspective. My name is Leiby Halevi. I am the producer and host as well as a survivor of the nuclear accident at three mile island from just one mile away. So I know what can happen when those nuclear so-called experts get it wrong. This week is what I considered to be one of the most important interviews I’ve ever conducted. It’s on the concept and usage of reference, man, the model for understanding the relative dangers of any radioactive exposure, but who is reference, man? What is he, where did he come from? And how accurate is any assurance of safety? Based upon this theoretical being, we explore the concept and assumptions that underlie all of our beliefs about radiation dangers with two top experts, Mary Olson, founder, and acting director of the gender and radiation impact project and Dave lock bomb, former director of nuclear safety project of the union of concerned scientists.

Libbe HaLevy

00:03:48

We’ll also have nuclear news from around the world and more honest nuclear information than all of the programs that got nominated for an Emmy this week. All of it coming up in just a few moments today is Tuesday, July 13th, 2021. And here is this week’s nuclear news from a different perspective, starting in Japan where Fukushima prefecture will bar spectators from the Olympic events that had hosts this summer. They’re claiming it’s because of rising COVID-19 infections and not giving a single mention to the radiation that is still exists from the 2011 triple meltdown of nuclear reactors. In that prefecture, Japan has been hoping to use the Olympics to showcase its so-called recovery from their triple meltdown, earthquake and tsunami, but it’s not to be Fukushima is hosting softball, which is an all woman’s sport and baseball games at Azuma stadium in Tokyo for officials from Tokyo electric power company TEPCO and operators of Fukushima’s nuclear plants were summoned to Tokyo district court as part of an ongoing trial, despite a government ordered to bring all nuclear power plants in Japan, up to safety standards, especially to avoid tsunamis tap call.

Libbe HaLevy

00:05:09

And the Fukushima plant officials did not consider it necessary to improve anti-D tsunami measures with deadly results during the trial TEPCO vice chairman Sekai, Muto denied knowing about the reports that recommended to raise the anti-D tsunami wall. He said he was not competent in this area. Yeah, thank the judge. Reprimanded him reminding the accused of his responsibilities when he was vice-president in France EDF, the multi-national electric utility company has allocated hundreds of millions of euros to launch a construction program for new reactors called the EPR to despite the latest safety failures in Tyson, China of an EPR and endless delays and cost overruns in France, Finland and the UK, as well as plans for six EPRs in India. One site at Flamanville in France has been under construction since 2008 and president Macron, despite being fiercely pro nuclear has declared on several occasions that the EPR in would need to be operational before any decision to build.

Libbe HaLevy

00:06:18

Other reactors could be made. We’ll have a link up to Harvey Wasserman’s op ed on the collapsed Florida condo sending a giant nuclear warning because south Florida authorities have now ordered inspections of large buildings over 40 years old. And however, he points out the majority of nuclear reactors in the United States are also around 40 years old and deserve to have the same kind of examinations. We’ll be posting links to this article on nuclear hot seat.com under this episode, number 5 25 and two other articles as well from Robert Jacobs of the Hiroshima peace Institute, a counterpunch editorial brilliantly smacking down another editorial opinion piece that appeared on counterpunch extolling the virtues of nuclear power and castigating its opponents as paranoid and ill-formed ball made short work out of that one. And the other link we will have is to Dennis Rich’s translation of a French report on the experimental nuclear fusion reactor, and the problems with it.

Libbe HaLevy

00:07:21

The first of three articles. Now here’s this week’s very special interview. Sometimes I am privileged to interview people who reveal core information that pertains to every aspect of our nuclear awareness. That’s the case this week with two very special interviewees, Mary Olson is founder and acting director of the gender and radiation impact project. She served from 1991 to 2019 as staff biologist and senior radioactive waste policy analyst at nuclear information and resource service. Her work on radiation education led her to question whether biological sex is a factor in radiation harm and she’s presented her findings at the Vienna conference on the humanitarian impacts of nuclear weapons, the UN nuclear non-proliferation treaty review of 2015, the international committee of the red cross Asia regional meeting in St. Petersburg, Russia, and twice at the EU gender summit in Brussels in 2016 and London in 2018, she founded the gender and radiation impact project in 2017. My second interviewee is Dave locked bomb, who was for more than 20 years director of the nuclear safety project of the union of concerned scientists. He is a certified nuclear engineer who has taught reactor technology for the us nuclear regulatory commission. He’s the author with Edwin Lyman and Susan Stranahan of the book Fukushima the story of a nuclear disaster. And he is also a board member of the gender and radiation impact project. We spoke on Thursday, July 8th, 2021, Mary Olson, and Dave lock. Bob, thank you so much for being my guest this morning on nuclear hot,

Mary Olson

00:09:16

Thank you for inviting us. Likewise, living glad to be here.

Libbe HaLevy

00:09:19

We’re going to be talking about the concept of reference man as a standard for measuring radiation exposure. But before we get to specifics about the model, I think it’s important that people have an understanding of the context from which this concept emerged. So let’s start at the very beginning one. Was it first known that there was such a thing as radiation and that it was dangerous

Mary Olson

00:09:41

In Western science? We go back before the curious, but not by much just a decade or two into the discovery of particle emissions. And pretty quickly people started noticing that this had an impact on living tissue and actually plastered radioactive materials onto tumors and saw tumors shrinking with it. So one of the first understandings was that radiation did in fact make a difference to living cells in this case, particularly cancer cells, which is still today. One of the places where radiation is applied, but I want to just add that. I am aware of through having been to Australia and made friends with Aboriginal peoples that their traditions and understanding of the natural world have an understanding of radioactivity that goes back eons. And likewise, the Western Shoshone people that I know talk about uranium as part of the living system of the planet as ancient knowledge for their people. So, you know, we can always say that Western science is the be all and end all. And our transit through knowledge is what we pay attention to. And certainly it’s the bulk of the story we’re going to tell today, but I just want to acknowledge that we’re late comers to understanding radio activity.

Libbe HaLevy

01:11:03

I would just add that in doing interviews and getting to know people from Saskatchewan who are first nations, Dennis Uline, they have said that in their tradition, they talk about the black rock, which is dangerous and needs to be left in the ground. And it’s only dangerous when it’s brought above ground and for them, the black rock is uranium and they were absolutely correct about that. That’s ancient knowledge going to a more recent, if you can call it that set of knowledge, what was it that we learned about radiation radioactivity from Madame Curie and her experiments in isolating radium,

Mary Olson

01:11:44

Others had discovered radioactivity, but Marie Curie spent the time to concentrate enough radium to have one gram of it. And then to figure out how to measure precisely the number of radioactive events coming off that one gram of radium per second, and the number is quite astounding. It is 37 billion disintegrations per second. Today the more common unit is a Becquerel rail, which is defined as one disintegration per second. So the curious and an enormous li large unit of measure it is 37 billion becquerels.

Libbe HaLevy

01:12:30

Was there any awareness during her lifetime of the danger posed by exposure to this level of Becquerel’s

Mary Olson

01:12:40

It was all new to these people. There were people who got radiation sickness in the course of their experimentation. There were people who died young because of their exposure, including potentially a couple of her children and Marie herself did not live to be a terribly old lady. But at the same time, medicine was one of the first applications because there’s records of people applying radium and other radioactive materials directly to tumors that were visible on the external part of a person and seeing the tumor shrink. So there was some recognition that the radioactivity was dangerous to the tumor. Unfortunately at that point, our understanding of medicine and cancer and tumors didn’t include therefore danger to the person as well. So some of these early activities did not go well, including the famous case of using radium to paint dials on the first airplane equipment for the world war one airplanes, the women who carefully painted the numbers on the altimeters and other dials for the airplanes suffered horrific consequences of radiation sickness.

Libbe HaLevy

01:13:54

Sure. The radium girls who also through the 19 teens and twenties, we’re painting luminescent dials on watches, and they were told to lick the brush between their lips to get a really good point so they could get a really fine painting the dial. And as a result of that, they were directly poisoning themselves with the radium paint. Now that was a well-known story at the time before world war II, though, how well known was the fact that there was such a thing as radiation and that it was dangerous. If one was exposed to it,

Mary Olson

01:14:35

Say that at this point in history of Western society, radiation was almost completely unknown. It was a very, very small group of people who had any knowledge of it at all. And certainly during the run-up to the second world war, it became secret. If you were working with radioactivity, nobody was supposed to know that that’s what you were doing.

Libbe HaLevy

01:14:57

That brings us up to the Manhattan project to build the first atomic bomb. Officially. It began in 1942 and general Leslie groves ahead of it knew that radiation was a danger because he knew about the radium girls. He admits this in his autobiography. He also sought ways to get insurance coverage in case of radiation exposure to his workers, to the scientists, to the engineers. But there were security reasons why the coverage ultimately could not be done by a private firm and had to be covered by the government. And we all know the problems that have come from that ever since now, groves put radiation protections in place to protect his scientists at Los Alamos. Yet there is no comparable caretake and to protect the local population from the dangers when they were downwind of radiation exposure because of the Trinity test in 1945. And the existence of radiation was not even mentioned in press materials prepared before that test blast. Do you think that this blanking out of information about radiation in the wake of the first blast was a blind spot caused by ignorance, willful neglect, intentional manipulation, wartime expediency, or was there perhaps some other,

Mary Olson

01:16:12

And maybe it’s all of the above where there’s motive. You can’t extend it in a blanket way. I’ve worked with people in the nuclear industry, in the nuclear regulatory commission in Congress and all kinds of places. And certainly there are individuals who’ve had motive have had liability who should be engaged with as having not adequately fulfilled, whatever oath they had taken or, or whatever Hippocratic oath they should have taken. But we have now people who were told by others that this was the truth. This was the fact, this was the information that those other people were given. And there wasn’t a way for them to check it because of the secrecies that were imposed. So in a very broad way, you have to ask who what, where, when and why you can’t just plaster everybody with any one of those assertions that you made. They’re all true.

Libbe HaLevy

01:17:15

The suppression of information about radiation was especially true after the bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, because there was almost instantaneous blackout of all information, total censorship put in place by general MacArthur that the damage caused by radiation exposure was completely censored. Journalists were restricted and could not enter Hiroshima or Nagasaki without military approval, escort and manipulation as to where they could and couldn’t go. They were told they could only report the damage and the power of the bomb, not on the human side of it. And the Japanese people were not allowed to speak about what had happened and was continuing to happen to them. The censorship was only broken by one Australian journalist, a man named Wilfred Burchette who published in a London newspaper. He had managed to get into Hiroshima a day before MacArthur and the occupation army. So before the censorship clampdown happened and he subsequently published an article with an enormous headline largest lettering, I’ve ever seen her in a headline saying atomic plague. I write this as a warning to the world about the people of Japan dropping dead, even though they were not harmed by the initial blast. This was a month later. And they were still dying. Given the fact that all of this was happening before people’s very eyes in Japan, but yet none of the information was able to get through how did this blackout impact our perception of the bomb and what it was meant to do and what we certainly, as United States wanted it to do?

Dave Lochbaum

01:18:52

I think part of that was explained by lack of knowledge, where the human consequences of exposure to radiation, weren’t known well enough to establish what, what the limits were. People knew if you got too much exposure, you might die, but there wasn’t much awareness of what exposure less than that could cause cancer incidents and things like that. So there’s a reluctance to be concerned about something until you know, what the answer is until you have a solution, you kind of downplay the problem because you don’t want to inflame the populace until you can come up with, it’s not real good politics to explain you have a problem with, and don’t have a solution for, you’re not going to get elected, or you’re not going to get promoter. You’re not going to get whatever it is you want. You won’t do it if you don’t have a solution to today’s problem. So you don’t have a problem today, two, you have the solution. And I think that kind of explains some of the testing we did in the Pacific of Arconic weapons, the Marshall Islands, and so on. We, I don’t think we intentionally tried to wipe out those populations or that we’re more concerned with the development of the bomb than their health. It was ignorance is bliss situation, or we were late and coming up with a blitz reduction program.

Mary Olson

02:20:04

Well, I’d also say it’s military operation. And the minute you say military, you’re implying it’s either before, during or after war and war is never been about human rights, human health, human protection. It’s, it’s put all of those things aside and justified its activities through military imperatives. And I use the data from Hiroshima and Nagasaki in my work, and it is a blemish worse than a blemish. It is a tarnish in a deep cut into my immortal soul. As my mother would say that I use data that really results from what is a war crime. These were actions during a war, and yet they were unconscionable to use the first weapons on studies full of people. So before we start talking about the blackout of information, let’s talk about the event itself, which was the decision to use the very first nuclear weapons on cities, full of people after testing them in New Mexico, in areas that were populated without evacuation notices, without provision for the people and to this day, no compensation for the people who were impacted as downwinders.

Mary Olson

02:21:15

So there’s just a huge break in our claim on civilization and being compassionate. People it’s as if we just either ignore it or we somehow get into justifying it, or we jump over it and get into the nerdy details of it. And in any case, I personally know that the data that I use comes from the tremendous suffering and the deaths of hundreds, of thousands of people, and that those actions should never have happened and they must never happen again. And yet the testing in the Marshall island islands was effectively the same and the people weren’t blown up the way they were in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but they’ve never been able to return home. They’ve had huge health consequences. Their islands are pretty much disappearing. So the Marshall E’s are now basically in Arkansas. So to me, there is no way to mend this. There is no way to make it okay.

Mary Olson

02:22:15

There is no way to say that if we had handled the information differently, it would make it okay. My parents were young adults and it was common in California, which was closer to Japan and other parts of the United States to assume that this action was going to lead to a reaction. People were terrified whether they had the information about radiation sickness or not. The destructive capacity of the weapon was sufficient for people in the United States to be reacting in horror and fear in terror. And then somehow that all got named over into the 1950s, and everybody has a Turkey in their refrigerator. I mean the denial of our popular culture of these events, and then turning them into almost like cartoon pre features, which is, I think a segue into talking about reference, man, he’s basically a cartoon let’s get to

Libbe HaLevy

02:23:13

Reference span because after Hiroshima and Nagasaki was radiation exposure measured at all. And if it was, how long did it take before,

Mary Olson

02:23:23

Or it was, they did dose reconstructions. Do I think a dose reconstruction is a valid idea. I don’t do. I think that the kind of epidemiological work that I have relied upon for being able to draw the conclusions I’ve drawn about gender and radiation are solid. I actually don’t, but everybody does them day in and day out and ignoring a huge, huge, huge piece of what they’re looking at would just, there is a female body. In addition to a male body, there is a child, in addition to an adult, they are absolutely got blinders on and only looking at the male adult male data. So, you know, in terms of exactly the history of this data, I hate to frustrate you, but I can’t tell you anything more than there were dose reconstructions done. There were, whereas their actual measurement of radioactivity in the postpartum time, it was a U S occupy military occupation. I think there probably are published accounts. I haven’t looked at them

Libbe HaLevy

02:24:23

Referenced, man, who was first named standard man was created in 1949. What was the thinking behind the creation of this point of reference and how might it work in application?

Dave Lochbaum

02:24:38

Well, the motivation for developing standard man was to allow various radiation studies and the effects of radiation on the human body to have a standard reference plane, to be able to look at a study on radiation, to the spleen, to another study about radiation effects on the, on the lung, unless you have a common denominator, then you have all these numerators. It’s more of an apples to oranges comparison. The reference man concept or standard man concept was attempt to come up with an equalizer that are allowed results from one study to be compared on a more apples to apples comparison to the re radiation results from another study. It didn’t turn out that way, but that was the motivation behind. It was to facilitate the development of radiation standards and limits that would be meeting.

Mary Olson

02:25:29

In addition, you can measure radiation as an energy field. You can measure actual down to individually emissions. Now, if you have the best equipment available, but that doesn’t tell you about the impact on living tissue. So if you’re going to calculate dose, you have to ask those to home. And in the early years of an institutional commitment to working with radioactive materials, the whom were military males and paramilitary males. There were certainly females in the Manhattan project. I don’t mean to, to overlook that part of history, but the primary engagement with radioactivity was pretty much universally male and pretty much universally young male, and pretty much the definition of standard and then reference man. So it was somewhat appropriate at the time to define the reference individual as the ones who were being asked to work and serve in radioactive environments of the Manhattan project as referenced man, that was appropriate in reading,

Libbe HaLevy

02:26:38

Hang on your website, gender and radiation.org about reference, who was originally named standard. Man, I was taken aback by how specific it was in terms of how much blood was in the body, how much air was breathed. I mean, there are some very precise, I would say, nitpicky from the outside, but very precise demarcations as to who this individual was, who created this model and what were the groups behind it?

Dave Lochbaum

02:27:12

Well, initially in 1949, it was 23 scientists from the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada who met to develop the standard man that was later morphed into the reference man in 1963, by the international commission on radiological protection, a larger body of individuals, but still largely males, fairly young, 20 to 30 years old of pretty much the same ethnic and geological background. It was a fairly small slice of the overall human population.

Mary Olson

02:27:47

That’s really where my concern is, is the evidence that our regulators, our scientific bodies, our governments never stopped to look, listen or reconsider when the same basis of radiation measurement and regulation was applied to the general population, including pregnant women, including infants, including elders, including women and female bodies, girls and women across the board, because there should not have been the 60 year wait for enough data to be able to now say yes, female bodies are harmed more than male bodies, no matter what age we have that information. Now in the gold standard of the Abe bomb lifespan study of survivors, it shouldn’t have taken 60 years of data from the H-bomb bomb survivors and the national academy report in 2006 called the biological effects of ionizing radiation. There was a paper based on biological sex published that year by Dr. Arjun, Mecca, Johnny, and two coauthors. I didn’t see that paper. And so I did my own work independently and in 2011, it should not have taken that long for someone to see this. And it is society’s responsibility, not mine and gender and radiation impact project to take care of everyone when it’s federal licensing of activities that will impact the communities that they’re located in. And the communities are not composed solely of reference men. And at some point, we need to read that definition for

Libbe HaLevy

02:29:33

You. Why don’t you read that definition for us now,

Mary Olson

02:29:37

I want to emphasize that there are eight parameters and I’ll read the parameters, there’s age, their sex there’s height, there’s weight temperature, which corresponds to respiration and metabolic rates, race, lifestyle, and environment. So the official definition of reference man is defined as being between 20 to 30 years of age, weighing 154 pounds, which is also 70 kilograms. He is five foot seven inches tall, which is 170 centimeters. He lives in a climate with an average temperature between 10 and 20 degrees C, which is somewhere around 60 degrees Fahrenheit. He is a Caucasian, white and a Western European or north American in habitat and customer.

Libbe HaLevy

03:30:32

And also on your site is the reference to the fact that with radiation being attracted, especially radioactive iodine, going to the thyroid, that the thyroid gland can be a different size based on the level of nutrition a person has had growing up with this particular male Western model, being most likely to have the largest and most robust thyroid gland, as opposed to someone from say the Marshall Islands, and that’s even referenced in the piece that Dave wrote for the gender and radiation impact project that said that there could not be a comparable study done for other peoples of other backgrounds, because it was not feasible to undertake a similar study for the many ethnic or regional populations of the world. So there’s an institutional racism component to reference man as well.

Mary Olson

03:31:30

Obviously he specified as a single race, obviously.

Dave Lochbaum

03:31:35

Yeah, I was more than a little bit disappointed when I did the research to find out that, that the reference man protocols and limits were established not based on science, but on convenience,

Libbe HaLevy

03:31:46

Explain what you mean by convenience.

Dave Lochbaum

03:31:48

They took the data that was available to the researchers from those various countries, knowing that it wasn’t applicable to people with different diets and different backgrounds and different ethnicities, but because it was available. So they took it and applied it to everybody. You knew it wasn’t applicable to everybody, but because that was the easy way out and you could meet a schedule, you went with it and applied it to everybody, knowing that it wasn’t applicable to everybody. I’m glad that my name’s not in of that paperwork. Cause I would’ve had to refund my college degree because I didn’t earn it. That’s what I do with it.

Libbe HaLevy

03:32:23

Given what has been learned it, has there been any attempt made to retroactively apply the reference man exposure guidelines to the people of Japan or an adjustment to compensate for women, little boys and little girls so that there is some understanding of what the radioactive exposure actually was

Dave Lochbaum

03:32:46

Kind of just the opposite after the few Shima accident in 2011, because the radio she got out and was affecting the general population, the Japanese government increased the limit and basically made every worker, every citizen in Japan, a nuclear worker, and they applied to nuclear worker limit, which was basically the reference man limit to every man, woman and child in Japan, which was not the right answer to that problem.

Mary Olson

03:33:13

It had increased levels at 20 times higher and applied them to children specifically because there was never an actual Japanese nationwide government action to do this. But there was a guideline that came actually recommended by someone who was working for the United States government during that time that the worker limit be established as the in-school exposure in Fukushima prefecture. So walking to school and all the exposure at home or playing was not even included in this guideline of what we would say to Rams a year or 20 millisieverts per year, which isn’t it phenomenally high level for a developing child. This was as very, very regressive, not what you’re looking for in terms of the human value maybe, and, and your questions are right on, but I don’t know of anybody that has the authority or the inclination to do any of the steps that you are pointing towards.

Mary Olson

03:34:15

But I want to be clear reference. Nan is not a radiation limit. Referenced. Nan is the individual used to evaluate whether a radiation limit is being met or whether it will be met reference, man is the basis for us protection standards for every licensing decision, whether to grant a license to a new nuclear power reactor or to a research lab at a university or any of those things. And it says right in our code of federal regulations in the section chapter 10, a, which is the nuclear regulatory commission, it says repeatedly that reference Nan is the basis use today. And my dear friend, Dave lockdown sent me a archive of documents from the nuclear regulatory commission library over 900 documents. Each of which uses reference man as the basis for whatever it’s doing. And this includes things like computer codes for risk analysis. They’re all based on this individual who is standardized. My new project is to offer a new reference individual. I just think referees man, isn’t the right one

Libbe HaLevy

03:35:32

In order to correct this model to more closely reflect the realities of radiation exposure or give us something to compare against that will be more protective for the more vulnerable. Tell us about what this next project of yours is.

Mary Olson

03:35:48

Yes, gender and radiation impact project is the organization that I founded. And Dave black bound is one of our board members. And I am now leading in conjunction with a second organization beyond nuclear and it’s staffer, Cindy Folkers, a project to define reference girl. Now the very first thing I say, when I bring up reference girl is she’s not good enough, but the reason she’s not good enough is because we have a life cycle. And the huge portion of our life cycle is the reproductive portion, which has to do with protecting our primary germline, which nobody knows what that means, but it means the genetic material that transmits from my parents to me and for me to my children, that is the part of our life cycle. That everybody just kind of pretends it doesn’t exist when it comes to radiation and reference girl will help protect it a little better, but it’ll take a whole new regulatory model to actually protect that genetic material.

Mary Olson

03:36:50

So reference girl is an improvement. She’s a first step, but I don’t want to ever make it sound like she’s the solution to the overall situation and with, with radiation as part of our society. Now, the thing is that reference girl will be based in the area of our post birth life cycle, where the greatest harm happens from ionizing radiation, which is a girl under the age of 10. And if we do this, we can keep the same regulatory model that we have today, which is all based on doing calculations on a reference individual. If we choose to define a girl that has the eight parameters of reference, Nan, we can slot her right in. We don’t have to change the regulatory model at all. And my guess this is just a guess is that adult males will be protected times 10 and girls will be protected at all because the data shows that harm to girls is about 10 times greater than harm to males. So if we’re going to keep the level of protection we have today and base it on the girl, everybody else will be protected better and she will be protected at all.

Libbe HaLevy

03:38:04

What will it take to have this new model, this reference girl replace reference, man.

Mary Olson

03:38:12

Oh, let’s talk about getting referenced girl. Before we talk about the replacement step, because ultimately we want to give reference man a gold watch and thank him for his service and, and just retire him. That’s what we would like to see happen with reference man. But the process of defining her, we think should be an open consultated process that reaches to the frontline communities that have been impacted the most. We already understand that the Western European north American industrial society idea isn’t right, because the people who are living with the most radioactivity are around mining areas and nuclear bomb factories and nuclear reactors. And so we need to look at girls in those areas and talk to people in those communities. And when we get enough information to do a draft, then we need to have expert review of it, including people who may not agree with us. And then once we have the review draft, then it’ll be time to start talking about adoption and adoption is never straightforward. However, and it’s, as we’ve already said in this conversation, highly political. So do I intend to start by going into a rulemaking process? No, but we want to get our reference girl drafted, reviewed, and ready for adoption. Before we start talking about where that should happen.

Dave Lochbaum

03:39:36

Unfortunately, there’s, there’s a lot of inertia associated with the status quo. It’s hard to break through and lead to meaningful change, fairly recent examples that the nuclear regulatory commission a few years ago was going to study the statistics around operating Copart plants to see if the federal limits on routine releases or radiation to the air and water sufficiently protect those exposed populations. They canceled this study because it costs too much. It costs less than a million dollars a year and would’ve taken about eight years and that was too much for them. They just didn’t want to fund that project. Their annual conference costs about a million dollars a year, where they meet with the industry to figure out what to do and how to do it. So they could either schmooze in a conference or figure out if they’re protecting the American population. They chose the former.

Mary Olson

04:40:28

We had a problem with that, that study, in addition to wondering about how much it costs simply that we didn’t think that the NRC was the appropriate body to conduct a study of its own effectiveness and it’s doing its own report card. So we would have rather just see the money go to a federal agency that would put out a request for proposal and RFP and independent researchers could respond and they could be peer reviewed and you know, actually have some science. But interestingly enough, we also believe that in addition to costing too much money, that it was going to cost them too much public approval because the initial surveys were showing that those communities are not well. And we can’t actually say that there was an outcome from that initial survey, but the communities where they were looking are not well, people are sick. So I think they may have also decided they couldn’t afford the hit on their public image and possibly their operations

Libbe HaLevy

04:41:33

Saving face as opposed to saving lives. Have there been any early proposals as to age or weight or any other specifics about reference girl?

Mary Olson

04:41:46

No. There are what are called Phantoms and the people I know at the international committee on radiological protection, it is a nonprofit and they make recommendations that then national committees pick up and then the federal regulators in each nation based their stuff on what the NCRP national committee for radiological protection. And they give advice to various regulators. So they have what they call Phantoms, which are used for things like cancer treatment to evaluate standardized doses of radiation, treatment of cancer for other nuclear medicine procedures. And so there are standardized email bodies, including young girls, but they’re not regulatory. And they don’t include all the parameters of reference, man. They don’t include things like lifestyle, environment, climate, the factors that could genuinely change the order of magnitude of a exposure. So yes, there are some girl models. No, they are not regulatory models and no, they are not the same as the reference individual is.

Dave Lochbaum

04:42:58

I think there’s reason for hope that the appropriate changes can be made. And an example of that would be not too long ago, it was decided that pregnant female workers or nuclear workers who wanted to become pregnant could declare that and then be exposed to a different occupational radiation exposure limit. Then otherwise recognizing that the fetus was particularly vulnerable to radiation exposure. So that change was made. And it wasn’t the reference man, obviously. So I think changes can be made, but that change probably took longer than it needed to be, but it did happen. So it gives me some hope that comparable changes can happen in the future and not just beating the head against the wall.

Mary Olson

04:43:40

So Dave share with us the suggestion you made to me about civilian women and pregnancy.

Dave Lochbaum

04:43:48

If you’re a nuclear worker and you’re pregnant or want to become pregnant, you can inform your supervisor and therefore not be exposed to the same radiation limit as a male coworker or female who doesn’t want that protection. So I just suggested why not have the people who live within 10 miles or 50 miles of and operate equal power plant also say I’m pregnant or I want to become pregnant. And therefore also be subjected to a lower radiation hazard than otherwise. If it’s good for a female nuclear worker, it should be good for a female person who lives in the nuclear community. That’s the same concept. Why not apply it across the board.

Mary Olson

04:44:26

And this takes us though to another point that I really want people to hear. When we about a reference girl, we’re not talking about a new standard or rule or regulation that applies to girls. And in this example about a woman in the community, having a higher level of protection or a lower level of exposure, how do you do that? You can’t do it in either case, which is why I am proposing a new reference individual that will require that reference man be retired. And that reference grow be used in the exact same way that reference man has been used to represent everyone. And likewise, if a pregnant woman needs less exposure than the entire community should have less exposure because any woman has the capacity to become pregnant without even knowing it for some amount of time. So, you know, this is about how we envision health, not about limiting illness, right?

Mary Olson

04:45:34

We need healthy people. And if we’re talking about reference, mans exposures do result in cancer, current regulation of, you know, federal licenses for nuclear activities allow radiation at levels that we know have the capacity to cause cancer have the capacity to cause in fertility, birth defects potentially even contribute to things like heart disease. That’s when it’s a little bit harder to prove in the civilian population, but radiation is harmful. We are having activities that emit it. We’re having federal regulators that are creating rules to allow those emissions. So if we’re talking about all of that in the context of needing to have a healthy community, then we need to look at where the greatest harm occurs. And that is in female bodies. And most particularly in female bodies who are young, we don’t yet know why, but there’s a new hypothesis that it has to do with a difference in the amount of stem cells in little boys compared to little girls circulating freely in our bodies and that the exposure of the stem cells leads to Layton cancer.

Mary Olson

04:46:43

That is then across the lifetime. We’re not talking about little girl cancer. We’re talking about female cancer originating from exposures in childhood and male cancers, originating in exposure in childhood. And even if we just took a reference, boy, if there’s so much misogyny in our culture that we have to go for low reference, boy, we’ll be halfway there because he is five times more likely to be harmed than the adult. Male just happens. That little girls in the dataset that we have of people who live 60 years after all sharing a big, huge flash on a day in August in 1945, the little girls who lived over the next 60 years got twice as much cancer as did those who were little boys, 1945. So that twice as much as how you ended up with 10 times more than reference, man. So if you’re going to be actually having integrity and say, it’s science-based, it’s not a little boy, it’s a little girl, but she now needs to be where we aim all of our effort to reduce exposures, reduce emissions, and deliver even the crappy, excuse me. Did I say that? Yes. Crappy level of protection that we have today for her at that point

Libbe HaLevy

04:47:59

From everything you’ve said, it sounds like this is first of all, a necessary step. And secondly, one that will have a protracted period of time before we have any hope of implementation of it. As you move forward, what can we, the listeners of nuclear hot seat do to be of support and assistance to you?

Mary Olson

04:48:24

Well, we’re completely volunteer. We don’t have a budget that supports paying me anything. So money would help, but I’m not going to stop just because I’m a volunteer. And so people need to protect their girls, protect their boys. I don’t want a little girl to have to face down her physician. So it’s not about educating the girls. It’s about taking care of them. And then start talking to everybody that, you know, who’s connected to this picture because in order for reference girl to be adopted, we’re going to need a massive team of support.

Dave Lochbaum

04:48:59

I’d echo what Mary said. And also, I appreciate you having a son to nuclear hot seat, because I honestly was not aware that females were more suffering, more harm for the same exposure until I heard Mary talk about it at a conference in 2015. So I think increased awareness that there is a problem that needs a solution we’ll shorten the timeline it takes for that solution to be implemented.

Mary Olson

04:49:23

A possibility levy is that somebody who’s an enlightenment surgeon general could require warnings on everything and that everything would be including airplane tickets. And x-rays at the dental office and CT scans and nuclear reactors and buying a house near a nuclear reactor. I mean the warnings would be quite substantial if they existed like the cigarette warnings, would they change the world? I don’t know, but it’s a different route than trying to go up against the nuclear addicted community. That is pretty much on both sides of the regulated and regulated tour at this juncture that could change. But at this juncture, there’s kind of one community. And like Dave says, they get together once a year and schmooze, but they’re in every licensing procedure I’ve been in and I’ve gone into four of them, myself as an intervener. And you know, people are trying to do what they’re doing well, it’s just that what they’re doing.

Mary Olson

05:50:25

Isn’t good enough. Is there anything you haven’t covered that you’d like to get to now? I think there’s a lot of resource available on the gender and radiation impact project website, which is www.genderandradiation.org. And under the tab that says, learn, we now have a whole page for reference girl, which is going to be growing and we’re going to be adding some other tabs there for more general radiation background information. But there’s also videos of talks that I’ve given and not the one that Dave heard, but similar talks. And I really commend people to check out how much has already been done and consider supporting the work.

Dave Lochbaum

05:51:08

A few years ago, I looked at what the occupational radiation exposure limits were over the left past a hundred years. And I noticed that they’ve been changed about four or five times over the century period. Every time the radiation limits were lowered, the more we knew, the less we could be exposed to the radiation hazard, which implies that perfect knowledge would be zero exposure. It’s not a matter that we started out conservatively protecting people or protecting workers. And with time we were able to relax that standard based on science, it’s just the opposite. Science informs us that we need better protection. And I think Mary and grip have shown that the population that really needs protection is the female and the young females, which are being under protected by current standards

Mary Olson

05:51:55

And tag that population is the basis for another federal agency, the environmental protection agency. And you know, it’s okay to talk about a population. That’s basically what we have in epidemiology is, you know, groups of a hundred thousand people is how things are modeled, but we are a lifecycle. I’m a biologist. You don’t have a reference man or a population without every single piece of the life cycle. So I was giving a comment to the EPA and I asked them when they were going to start writing regulations based on the most impacted part of the human lifecycle, being little girls. And the immediate response I got was that little girls are a subpopulation and they were going to get to subpopulations later and I was on a phone bridge. So I just came back with, well, wait a second little girls in Chicago and little girls in Moscow are subpopulations, but little girls are an inextricable link in the human life cycle and colleagues who were present in person in the meeting.

Mary Olson

05:53:02

I was actually there with the guy who was, I was talking to on the phone bridge. He was silent and later they told me he literally sweat through his clothes because I counted. I didn’t bail him out. Usually I’m nice. And I, I say something else, but I waited. And it was four minutes of silence in this federal meeting. Unheard of. And he finally said, you are correct. And also thank you. And then they went on to the next person, but they haven’t done a darn thing about it. They still view little girls as a subpopulation, which is basically a formula for extinction.

Libbe HaLevy

05:53:41

This is clearly some of the most important work we can do in terms of coming up with a system that does more to safeguard us and our future from the dangers of radiation, we will have links up to your site and to some of the specific pages that you mentioned, Mary, and for now, I want to give you my gratitude for the work that you’re doing and Dave, for your support of the work that Mary is doing and your contribution to it. And thank you both for being my guest this week on nuclear hot seat.

Mary Olson

05:54:14

Thank you, Libby. Thank you for the work you do. And for your book,

Libbe HaLevy

05:54:18

That was Mary Olson acting director of gender and radiation impact project. And Dave locked bomb, formerly director of the nuclear safety project of the union of concerned scientists. Mary Olson is currently raising funds to support a 2021 project to define a new female inclusive basis for radiation protection standards to help prevent unnecessary radiation exposure and reduce radiation harm. You can learn more by going to her website, gender and radiation.org. And of course we will link to it on our website, nuclear hot seat.com. Under this episode, number 5 25, this has been nuclear hot seat for Tuesday, July 13th, 2021 material for this week’s show has been researched and compiled from nuclear-news.net to own renard.wordpress.com beyond nuclear international.com. The international campaign to abolish nuclear weapons, op ed news.com. Gender under radiation.org. The guardian.com counterpunch.org, Arab news.jp Dennis riches.wordpress.com and the captured and compromised by the industry. They’re supposed to be regulating nuclear regulatory commission.

Libbe HaLevy

05:55:38

If you’d like a foolproof way of getting nuclear hot seat, you can have it delivered via email every week. It’s easy. Go to nuclear hot seat.com, scroll for the yellow box and sign up for weekly email links to the latest show. You’ll get it. As soon as it’s posted, if you have a story lead, a hot tip or a suggestion of someone to interview, send an email to [email protected] and we promise we take all of them seriously. And if you appreciate weekly verifiable news updates about nuclear issues around the world, take a moment to go to nuclear, hot seat.com and look for the big red button. Anything you do once you click on it will help. And we really appreciate your support. Nuclear hot seat is copyright 2021 Leiby Halevi and hardest street communications, all rights reserved, but fair use allowed. As long as proper attribution is provided. This is Leiby Halevi of hardest street communications. The heart of the art of communicating, reminding you that the last thing that anyone who opposes nuclear wants to be able to say is I told you, so there you’ve got it, bats. It you’ve all had your nuclear wake-up call. So don’t go back to sleep because we are all in the nuclear Hotsy