San Onofre's ongoing tritium issues: Are they a significant health risk?

The nuclear industry refuses to understand the risks from radiation. This is, of course, intentional. The reality is that there is no such thing as a "trivial" release, all radiation damage is cumulative. Extremely low doses are almost certainly MORE dangerous relative to higher doses on a per-dose basis. This is known as a "supralinear" effect (see page 6 of my Code Killers book (free pdfs online, this is not a sales pitch!)). Supralinearity hasn't been proven beyond a reasonable doubt yet because the effects of extremely low doses are hidden by all the other "assaults" on life from chemicals, diet, variations in people's health to begin with, and nobody has been able to design a proper test for it yet. However, the thing that convinces me it's correct is that the "minimum" radiation dose from any radioactive release (alpha, beta, gamma, neutron) is massive compared to the strength of any chemical bond in the body.

One emission from Tritium, which the industry (in the attached article, for example) ALWAYS describes as an "extremely low-dose beta emitter" (or words to that effect) will destroy thousands of chemical bonds when it occurs. When that tritium atom was originally part of a water molecule, it leaves behind an OH free radical, which does even more damage to the body and actually probably causes more damage than the beta emission itself. (But I'll talk more about the beta emission here anyway.)

First of all: The whole idea of calling ANY beta emission "low energy" just because its energy level might be a thousand times lower than a "high energy" beta emission is PURE PROPAGANDA. Why is this so? Let me explain:

A beta particle is a CHARGED PARTICLE. It's basically just an electron, with a negative charge of -1 like all electrons. That's enough charge when it passes by other electrons at high speed ("high speed" being a relative term, as I'll explain) to knock those other electrons out of their orbits. Thousands of electrons can be knocked away by a single beta emission. ANY beta emission, whether it's a low-energy emission or a high-energy emission. How does that work?

Here's how:

When ANY beta particle is emitted, whether a so-called low energy emission or a high one, that particle is traveling at about 99.7% the speed of light -- far faster than an alpha particle emission, for example, which "only" is about 98% the speed of light.

The beta particle (or "ray" if you prefer) is a charged particle, extremely small, and traveling very fast when first emitted. So it PASSES BY other atoms so fast that it's not near other atoms for very long, and DOESN'T have much or ANY effect on things it passes UNTIL it slows down. That's when virtually ALL the damage occurs. It would still be going very fast by "terrestrial" standards, but nothing like the 99.7% the speed of light.

Imagine passing a magnet over a bunch of nails. If you do it very, very quickly, the magnet won't pick up ANY of the nails or even move them around at all. But if you pass the magnet slowly over the nail, it will affect them all. It's basically the same thing for charged particles passing other charged particles. At nearly the speed of light, the beta particle (or "ray" as some prefer to call it) passes other atoms so quickly that nothing significant happens.

So both high and low-energy beta particles do more or less the same amount of damage because virtually ALL the damage is done at the end of the track, when the particle has slowed down significantly.

The nuclear industry NEVER mentions tritium without calling it a Low Energy Beta Emitter. And that's BS. Nuclear propaganda. The vast majority of workers in the nuclear industry have no idea what I'm talking about, but of course, this comes from experts I've talked to many times, including three Manhattan Project scientists. (At least two of them, specifically about Tritium, and the third founded the Health Physics Society.)

The small creatures of the world -- that our lives depend on (plankton, bees, everything in the food chain) are far more at risk from tritium than larger animals, and diluting the releases does nothing to prevent tritium from harming something or someone, it just spreads the danger out, as with all radiation releases that they "dilute" to "safe" levels. There are no safe levels of any radioactive substance. That said, I've had half a dozen CTs and PETs, mostly in the last five years. The doses were tens of thousands of times higher than anything I'll absorb from SanO. If there were no other safer, cheaper, better ways to generate electricity, society might choose to use nuclear power IF the operating releases were the only problem. But there ARE safer, cheaper, better ways to generate electricity, and the "spent" fuel that is left over is millions of times more hazardous that the "fresh" fuel that went into the reactor. In other words, SanO operated as a manufacturer of the most deadly poisons on earth for many decades, but fortunately, SO FAR, has only released what they call "trivial" amounts over the years. It's all the other stuff, in those canisters by the beach, that scares me the most.

One small fraction of one canister contains more radiation -- that can be released into the environment at any moment -- than all the continuous releases from SanO add up to, starting from Day One, Unit 1, the first day Unit 1 operated for the first time.

Lastly, let me address the question: Is your individual risk from SanO's tritium releases worth worrying about? Basically no.

If you smoke tobacco, that's far more likely to kill you than all the tritium releases from SanO, diluted as they are before they get to anyone. If you drive regularly any great distance, that risk of death or injury is far higher. If you are significantly overweight or don't exercise, your risk is far higher than whatever you've recieved or will recieve from all the tritium that SanO has ever released. Dilution as a solution to pollution does have its benefits (for locals, anyway)!

Is the radiation from a single cross-country airplane flight more dangerous than the cumulative effects of SanO's releases to local residents? Probably -- although exploding packages put on planes by terrorists is probably an even greater risk these days. Suicidal pilots have crashed several planes as well in the past few decades (not just on 9-11).

I worry about the spent fuel, and the possibility of an airplane crashing into it, a terrorist attack on it, or tsunamis and earthquakes far more than about the tritium releases -- but there is no EXCUSE for the lies the nuclear industry propagates about tritium or about "low level" radiation dangers generally.

I hope these comments help and I apologize for the length of this response. It's not a simple topic -- nothing about radiation damage is simple, that's why they've gotten away with releasing so much from bomb tests, and from the nuclear industry. Dilution has always been their solution to pollution, and it just doesn't work. We need the plankton and the bees to survive, too. Only a tiny amount of tritium is produced naturally.

Ace Hoffman, Carlsbad, California USA
November 25, 2024

Review of Arjun Makhijani's 2023 book Exploring Tritium Dangers:
https://acehoffman.blogspot.com/2024/11/book-review-exploring-tritium-dangers.html

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Tritium exit sign (from NRC web site)

My 2007 essay on tritium:
http://www.animatedsoftware.com/environment/tritium/2007/ItsAllAboutTheDNA.htm
My 2006 essay (includes a glossary and some background):
http://animatedsoftware.com/environment/tritium/2006/EPATritiumStandard.htm
My first tritium essay (2004):
http://www.animatedsoftware.com/environm/onofre/2004/TritiumComments%2020041223.htm