Nuclear Disaster

00:00 Alright, this is WMRWLP1, and I think I have Maggie on the line. Maggie, can you hear me? Yes, I can. I’m right here. Okay, great. That doesn’t sound too bad. We’re talking to Maggie Gunderson today. This is Politics and Science on the 16th of March, 2011. And today, we’re discussing our nuclear catastrophe in our world today, happening in Japan. And after Maggie’s off, we’ll be talking to Raymond Pete. Dr. Raymond Pete is a physiologist from Eugene, Oregon, talking about how to mitigate the effects of radiation. Maggie Gunderson is a founder and president of Fairwinds Associates and a freelance paralegal specializing in environmental nuclear safety and energy litigation in federal and state administrative law hearings. And you worked in the nuclear industry for a while, right? Maggie, as did your husband, Arnie. Yes, we both did. 01:02 That’s where we met. Well, thankful that you’re with us here today. And I was hoping you could bring us up to date with what exactly is happening over in Japan and what the ramifications are for that part of the world and for us. Okay, well, the news that just came during the last hour is that all the fuel has boiled dry. Say that again. We lost you there. All the fuel has boiled dry in unit four. And that was in the spent fuel pool. It’s not in the reactor itself. Now that was a full or offload. So that’s a tremendous amount of radioactive fuel that is getting very, very hot. And there’s the fear that it could catch on fire. If it catches fire, those particles become airborne. 02:04 It’s a worse scenario than having a melt. It is? Yes, it is. Because that radiation will travel anywhere. If there’s a meltdown, it does get into the water table that you’re able to monitor. They might even be able to corral some of the contamination and do things to mitigate. But this is airborne and this will go wherever the air blows. It’s like if you see someone smoking a cigarette and somebody just walks past and the plume changes. The plume can move in whatever direction the wind is blowing toward Tokyo, towards the U.S., toward mainland China and across the rest of Japan. It can go whichever way the wind is blowing. 03:06 I know Chernobyl was terrible because it was an explosion and that forced the radiation. And that was a core meltdown, wasn’t it? No, there was a graphite fire. The Chernobyl plant is a graphite plant and was not a liquid reactor like we’re talking about. And there was a fire in the graphite. At Chernobyl, only 3%!o(MISSING)f the radiation escapes. The other 97%!i(MISSING)s still inside the containment, inside the sarcophagus that they built around it. This accident, since the containment has failed, this radiation is getting out to the environment. Matter of fact, the U.S. search in general was on a tour in California. And so, of the fact that anyone in the U.S. should consider getting potassium iodide to protect their thyroid, 04:17 it would be a prudent thing to do. And the NRC announced today, and the State Department announced today, that they told all personnel in Japan, the U.S. personnel in Japan, to go at least 80 miles away from what’s happening. And that’s more than double what the Japanese are saying. And the NRC is usually, I never thought of them as being actually that worried about low-level radiation. Well, it’s not low-level radiation. It’s not an explosion like a bomb, but it’s not low-level radiation. There are no more personnel on site operating the plants. 05:19 They’ve had to remove them because the radiation levels are too hot. So basically, they’re just running their course? They’re running their course. They do have people who are risking their lives to keep putting water on the plant and taking care of the plant. That way to try and keep their pumping speed water up there. But there’s no operational things that they can do. And so that’s the fuel rods. Are they the ones? And it was number four, one of the reactors that was out of commission. And so all the fuel rods were waiting to be moved. All the fuel rods had been off-loaded into the fuel pool. So what’s really scary about that is that there are no rods to put in, control rods to put in to slow down the reaction. 06:27 The fuel rods are in the fuel pool and there’s no way as the water burns off. There’s nothing to keep that fuel pool cool. If the fuel gets really hard and starts to chain reaction, it cannot be stopped. Because there’s not anything to moderate that chain reaction. That was the difference with Chernobyl. Chernobyl is a plant that works as the chain reaction is going on inside. The operators have to work really hard to pull it back. It’s like a gas pedal pushing downwards all the time. The Japanese plants picture the same as the Vermont Yankee plant. They’re boiling water reactors, the same vintage, same design. They’re general electric boiling water reactors. And they also, both general electric and westing house now, are owned by the Japanese. 07:37 The boiling water reactor works, you have to push the gas, you have to push the reaction to happen. And you have a lot of control on it. But they don’t have control on this because this is the spent fuel all just sitting there together. There’s no control rods in there. And as the K-heat causes many chain reactions, you could have fire or meltdown in the fuel pool itself. That’s about as technical as I can get. You listed on your website that I’m a nuclear expert. And I am an industry expert, but I’m not. I’m a paralegal and I’m a mediator, and that’s the angle. I’m not as technical as Arnie. Okay. Well, you’re probably more technical than I am in most of the people listening, so I think that suffices. 08:41 So that’s just going into free fall, basically. And what’s the state of the other reactors? There’s six of them there. Is that right at that Fukushima power station? Yes. There are, well, two of them already are in partial meltdown. What happens when the raster’s operating and when they stopped it? And when the storm came up, when the earthquake started, they stopped the reaction. The emergency system marked and the reaction was stopped. But when they couldn’t keep the reactor cool, there are things that, there’s 5%!o(MISSING)f the heat is decay heat, and that is what has kept burning. The other 95%!w(MISSING)as stopped, but the decay heat is enough to keep boiling off all the water. The diesels had gotten bombed by the tsunami, so they didn’t have any backup power, and they couldn’t cool the reactor for a really long time, any of them. 09:46 So my understanding, and this has been changing hour by hour, so I can’t be totally clear on what’s happening. I saw three different reports before I came on with you. Two reactors have had a partial meltdown. You know, they have parts that are melting down, and how bad that’ll be will depend on how much seawater these employees who are risking their lives being in such a high radiation area. I mean, it’s just incredible. They are pumping in tons of seawater to try and make like a lake under the reactors. These reactors are raised. And in a boiling water reactor, the control rods come up from the bottom into the reactor itself. So where’s the pressurized water reactor? And I work on pressurized water reactors. 10:47 I’ve never worked with boiling water reactors. I worked on nuclear fuel reload core design. So that’s doing the calculations for the fuel, each fuel reload every on PWRs. However, you know, if the year, 18 months, whatever, the utility has decided to run and forth. And the PWR, the control rods come up from the bottom. So those daughter products can come through. The bottom of the reactor is not as tight as on a pressurized water reactor. It’s very tight. The control rods come down from the top. So those daughter products that are generating all the sex at heat are slumping into the bottom and making a molten mass. And that is coming out of the bottom of the reactor. That’s why they’re trying to cool it. They’re making a lake underneath that between the base of the metal reactor and, you know, the vessel itself and the concrete base of the containment. 11:54 Someone asked me, is this special concrete? You know, special nuclear grade concrete? It’s concrete. It’s just regular concrete. I mean, like you would find on a bridge or something. It’s not a special nuclear grade to it. And how long can that hold up to temperatures that I’ve heard are like 2,200 degrees? Well, as there’s no one else. I mean, we’re in uncharted territory here. The fuel pool can get up to 4,000 degrees. Oh. And we’re in uncharted territory. And when there’s some studies I looked at them today and NEI, Nuclear Energy Institute, which is the lobbying arm of the industry is saying this, you know, there can’t be a fire in the fuel pool where there’s already been one. There’s, you know, a containment can’t leak. Well, two of them have blown their lids off. 12:56 Right. We need to go back and look at the general design criteria on every nuclear plant. And a lot of them are just, they’re true all of it. Vermont Yankee, Oyster Creek program, these are very, very old, old plants that don’t have any current safety standards around them. And they have been all of the parameters under which they were built have been grandfathered in. So they don’t need the current regulations. Yeah, that’s scary. And Vermont Yankee got an up-rate 10 years ago, I think. So it’s actually a… The up-rate is really a frightening thing because if there’s an accident at Vermont Yankee, then there is 40%!m(MISSING)ore radiation than a normal accident because of the up-rate. Even though the up-rate was 25%!,(MISSING) the way the daughter products act, the way the material acts, 13:58 you get 40%!m(MISSING)ore radiation in the up-rate. And the emergency evacuation plan was designed around the way the plant was built before the up-rate. It is not possible to get everyone out before there would be a lethal dose if there was a severe accident at Yankee like there has been here because there’s just the evacuation plan, emergency plan does not work. Now, we only have a few more minutes, Maggie Gunderson. I was wondering, people would say, well, the Vermont Yankee is not at risk because it’s not an earthquake zone and there’s no danger of tsunami. But it is next to a river. Is there a flooding danger there? Yes, there is a flooding danger there. Hurricanes that could knock out power or do something to unstable as the grid. Vermont Yankee’s backup power is diesel, just like the plants in Japan. 15:02 If they were involved in a flood or a hurricane and couldn’t operate, then there’s no backup power there. And if a huge storm and flooding knocked out the service water that cools the plant and that comes out of the Connecticut River, for terrorists, I mean, one of the things Union of Concerned Scientists has really worked hard pushing the NRC on the threat matrix since 9-11, since 2001, on there’s not enough protection at these intake structures. And if somebody took a Miami Vice-Style boat and filled it with dynamite and ran it in there and knocked out the service water, at the same time the diesels were knocked out, somehow you couldn’t cool that plant. And the NRC does not consider that a realistic part of its threat matrix, but they don’t even consider these as possibilities. 16:05 Well, that’s not very reassuring to say the least. Maggie, I know you’re not a meteorologist, but do you know how the fallout from what’s happening in Japan might behave if you talk to anybody who has an opinion about that? I don’t know that. And again, no one knows. I mean, will a lot of that come across the Pacific and come to the U.S.? There was extensive data from bomb testing that was done in the Pacific originally, and a lot of that strontium and cesium were carried to the U.S. during those tests and then absorbed into kids’ muscles and bones and things. So I don’t know. No one knows. We’re in uncharted territory. This accident is the worst. 17:06 It’s three mile island worse than Chernobyl, and it’s the worst accident that this world has ever seen of any kind of industrial accident or any kind of, you know, in terms of an illness. There’s no other thing that was as bad as this was the bubonic plague, but that ended. Here, there’s a half-life of hundreds of years on some of these radioactive isotopes and plutonium, and these plants are running a mix with some plutonium in them. There’s going to be 250,000-year waste left. Geez. It sounds like you were once, I assume, in favor of nuclear power. It sounds like you may have changed your position. That’s correct. I was in favor of nuclear power. I believe, you know, I’m a woman, and I was part of Jobs for Energy Independence, 18:08 which was a U.S. organization, and I was working in the nuclear industry in part to show there’s plenty of energy available, women and minorities have jobs, and when energy gets really costly or there’s economic issues, women and minority lose those jobs. So that’s why I began in the nuclear industry, and the scientists had assured me it was the safest thing, and I don’t believe it anymore. Well, I can see why. Maggie, I’m going to have to… I hope… Oh, go ahead, please. I hope I answered all your questions, and I want to tell everyone, please, to, you know, be praying or thinking for the people of Japan. This is a terrible, terrible tragedy. All right, thank you very much, Maggie Gunderson, and I hope to check in with you again soon. Okay, you’re very welcome, John. Take care. 19:09 Yeah, you too. Bye. Bye. All right, that was Maggie Gunderson, who was founder and president of Fairwind Associates. She’s a freelance paralegal specializing in environmental nuclear safety and energy litigation in federal and state administrative law hearings. So I’m going to put on some music, and let’s see. Something by Tom Waits, and I’ll be back with Dr. Raymond Pete, physiologist, and we’ll be talking about radiation, its effect on life, and how to mitigate the negative effects, which I think is all they have. All right, here’s Tom Waits. 20:11 Thank you. Thank you. All right, I’m back live here on the 16th of March. 21:38 All right, I’m back live here on the 16th of March with Dr. Raymond Pete, who’s a physiologist and a biologist and a science historian from Eugene, Oregon. Ray, can you hear me? Yeah, it’s very well. Oh, good, you sound great. Well, thanks for coming on today. I thought considering the catastrophe and tragedy that’s happening in Japan right now, we could talk about radiation, which is probably going to be circulating around the globe, and some of it will be heading toward the United States and Canada, I’m sure. And I thought maybe we could talk about radiation’s effects on the body in ways that it can be mitigated. So maybe you could start out just by talking about radiation. The first issue of my newsletter in 1981 was about the issue of radiation damage. 22:43 Radiation damage? Yeah, and I read lots of mostly Soviet research. They were the ones mostly interested in how to repair damage. The main factors are the amount of magnesium in the cell and the metabolic rate, and it happened that a pyrroforma is what’s needed for the cells to retain magnesium at a high level. And this old dirt that I reviewed 30 years ago was the central idea was the high metabolic rate, activating repair processes so that once the damage was done, it was almost immediately repaired. 23:44 The thyroid function was very high allowing the cells to retain magnesium. And just in the last couple of years, a group studying the radio-cystin bacteria that had been found at several, they were discovered at a Oregon State University where sterilized food with super intense radiation in can, and the irradiated food after a few weeks brought it, and they found there were bacteria that survived millions of rad. This type of bacteria just recently was found not to have any special resistance of a DNA, but the protein system that pairs the DNA is what is uniquely resistant for radiation damage. 24:52 So the DNA can be torn into tiny fragments, but if you have the enzyme left for repairing, the bacteria re-is called their DNA from tiny little scraps, if the proteins are good. And this group recently discovered that manganese is an essential factor for the survival of these bacteria. What the manganese is doing is petalizing very fast of glucose. Ray, I’m going to interrupt because we’re having the same phone problem again where it’s clipping your voice. Yes, it’s a terrible echo. Oh, you’re getting an echo. I didn’t know that. Yeah. How’s that? When you’re talking about, how is that? It, um, that may have decreased. 25:55 There’s a slight echo, but it sounded like there were three of us for a while. I just don’t understand why it’s doing that. Well, try it again and we’ll see if it goes. I may call you back and see if we can get rid of that. Okay. Anyway, the very fast glucose metabolism is almost all turned into carbon dioxide. And carbon dioxide happens to protect, please stick to amino groups of proteins. And that’s been my approach to defense against aging and grass to keep the carbon dioxide up high in mammals. But apparently these bacteria carry it to an extreme so that they can survive millions of rad of ionizing radiation. I see. So you’re saying that their metabolism is high enough. 26:58 Does this have to do with the thyroid function as well? Well, it resembles, it’s parallel to the thyroid function. They do it just by this manganese containing enzyme system that very powerfully turns glucose into carbon dioxide. But in mammals, it’s the thyroid hormone that’s primarily responsible for turning glucose and fat into carbon dioxide. So one of the problems with radiation is that it does damage the thyroid. And I know that I guess my last guess just said that the American Surgeon General who’s traveling abroad just recommended that people get a supply of potassium iodine to take, which I hadn’t heard this. The CDC a few days ago recommended a single dose of 160 milligrams of potassium iodide for an adult to be repeated if the iodine cloud stays around for more than one day. 28:08 A kelp or adult, or other iodine-brit seaweed, a few grams per day will do that if you don’t have the pure potassium iodide. And even the antiseptic picture of iodine, if you paint them on your skin, people have used that to disinfect water. So if you’re not allergic to that, that’s an alternative way of getting your iodine up. But I think the basic thing is to keep your thyroid hormone active if necessary by using a supplement of thyroid hormone to keep your thyroid-imulating hormone, the TSA, down as close to zero as you can get it. Because that’s good for many reasons, including that your thyroid isn’t going to be metabolizing and so won’t take up the toxic concentration of radioactive iodine if your KSH is kept at zero. 29:16 And meanwhile, the high thyroid activity is going to accelerate the repair processes where if you rely on potassium iodide, that’s going to dilute the radioactive contaminant so that it doesn’t destroy your thyroid gland. But the potassium iodide tends to suppress your thyroid function, lowering the whole body’s metabolic rate, and that makes it increasingly susceptible to radiation damage. If you think of the inverse relationship between thyroid and estrogen, a low thyroid person usually has very high estrogen. A very high thyroid person has low estrogen, and estrogen synergizes with radiation damage. 30:22 So a low thyroid person is doing many things to make all of their tissues more susceptible to injury by all of the radiation sources, which include carbon isotopes, STHEsium, strontium isotopes, are important ones in nuclear fallout. And the iodide suppressing your thyroid gland, as the CDC recommends, isn’t going to do anything at all to protect you against strontium, cesium, carbon, and other radiation sources, and in fact will tend to make you more susceptible to injury by them by suppressing your thyroid function. Because if your thyroid’s functioning, you’ll be able to remove those quicker? Yeah, the cells are producing carbon dioxide, which forms a defensive barrier on the proteins, keeping them from suffering destructive oxidation. 31:36 And the magnesium retained by the thyroid is used in the repair end times for DNA repair, and at the same time you’re lowering the estrogen throughout your body, which you want to avoid that synergistic effect of radiation and estrogen. Now, you said that potassium iodide is not good for you in the long run. In the short run, that would be something to do if you didn’t have any other choice, I suppose. Yeah, if you don’t have thyroid build or kelp or dulse or seaweed, then potassium iodide is fine if you’re not allergic to it. Some people have a very intense inflammatory reaction when they take iodide or iodine. And in terms of raising your thyroid function, most people probably won’t be able to get their hands on any thyroid supplements. How can they do that? 32:47 Well, the quickest way is to make sure that you’re getting enough food and fuel. A sugar moment by moment is used by your liver to activate the thyroid hormone. So if you go hungry for several hours, your thyroid is going to decrease its function. On even a shorter scale than just keeping your body well nourished, coconut oil with its short-chain saturated fatty acids competes with the inhibiting unsaturated fats that are always tending to circulate in the body. And those are acting as a break on the thyroid, so the coconut oil short-chain fats are able to compete against the inhibitors of the thyroid momentarily liberating a higher thyroid function. 33:50 So that only lasts a couple hours for a tablespoon of coconut oil, so if you add nothing else, you could eat a tablespoon of coconut oil every couple of hours. And that’s better than butter and other saturated fat? Only in the sense that it activates your thyroid function more powerfully. And what about vitamin E and vitamin C and things like that? Are they at all important? Not very. In some situations, they’re protective against radiation, but when I was reviewing the literature 30 years ago, they were somewhat ambiguous and nothing very interesting has turned up since then. Progesterone as an anti-estrogen is probably one of the other short-range protective things. 34:53 I see. If people could take progesterone, that would lower the synergistic effect of radiation. You’ve said before that radiation is very similar in its effects to estrogen, and people actually take estrogen as a supplement in hormone replacement. Could you comment on the similarity in the effects of radiation and estrogen? Yeah, a lot of this research was done in the late 1930s, and the estrogen functions were identified as similar to suffocation and stress and radiation. About 15 years later, when the concept of estrogen receptor was introduced, there was a great push to distract people from the biochemical effects of estrogen 36:03 and blame all of estrogen’s effects on the actions of a receptor protein, which was supposed to activate the genes which create the female traits. It turned out that the research was supported by the Atomic Energy Commission, and it claimed that estrogen is not metabolized in the cells where it’s acting. Twenty years later, that was proven to be absolutely false, and the fact that it was supported by the Atomic Energy Commission and done by a man who had been working in chemical warfare I think makes up the whole foundation of the receptor theory suspect, because the 1930s research was very clear that any stress activates, including the protein that is now called the estrogen receptor, 37:13 any injury to the organism increases the appearance of the estrogen receptor, as well as the estrogen functions, which include inflammation, water uptake, suppression of the respiratory function, and eventually atrophy and fibrosis and calcification. And radiation has those similar effects, I understand. Biochemically, my dissertation was trying to find anything different between radiation stress and estrogen’s effect, and I couldn’t find any basic physiological or biochemical difference between them. They both interfere with oxidative metabolism and activate the stress metabolism, so I think that means that we have evolved estrogen simply as a way to activate certain biological processes of cell division in preparation for implantation of the embryo 38:37 and uterus, cell division to develop the breasts to give milk, and cell division in the pituitary to activate prolactin secretion, and takes only about 12 hours of exposure to estrogen to get those processes going. And so I think the biological meaning of estrogen is just like a quick jump start function for certain process, and the chronic use of it is completely contrary to the real biological research, and really has no foundation other than the marketing departments of the drug companies. And whatever the military has in mind. How does the military fit into this? 39:39 Well, they are the ones that promoted the concept of the estrogen receptor. Elwood Benson went from working on chemical warfare to working on the estrogen receptor, and his group and the people in it have formed a tradition supported by the Pentagon. Some of them have been working more recently at Lawrence, at Livermore Radiation Lab on the estrogen receptor, so for 60 years now it has been of great importance first to the Military and Atomic Energy Commission, and now to various government agencies. That seems a little bizarre to me, but I guess they’re always looking for things to use as weapons basically. 40:43 Yeah, at different times they have been interested in its birth control effect, population control. And that’s one of the things they were studying, I think when they, I think you’ve written about this, they did releases of large amounts of radiation, and then studied the effect it had on population and sterility and such. Yeah, and estrogen is really a more controllable way to sterilize the population. Maybe you could talk a little bit about what the danger we face from what’s coming out of Japan now and this tragic meltdown of the nuclear reactors, and is this a particular radiation that we’re going to be exposed to that’s going to go up into the atmosphere and travel around the globe? 41:49 Yeah, as long as it stays very high in the atmosphere and doesn’t rain out, it isn’t going to do too much harm. But if it doesn’t rain out in the Pacific, and if it happens to get through a dry spell for a few days across the Pacific and then rains out wherever it comes down, it will do a lot of damage. A few of the bombs that they exploded in Nevada happened to stay in the air until one of the fallout clouds rained down in New York, in Pennsylvania, I guess, was the one that Ernest Stern class happened to be on site. And I saw that his radiation measurements were showing extreme contamination while the government was saying nothing had happened, and that started Stern class on his research on what was really happening. 43:00 And he showed how the U.S. Public Health Service was collaborating with the Atomic Energy Commission and even state government agencies to put out false information and destroy the actual data. So, whatever we’re going to hear from the governments of Japan and the United States, I don’t think there’s any precedent for thinking there’ll be any truth in it. Yeah, I was just reading the introduction to a book about Chernobyl that was published in this country just recently and edited by Janet Sherman. And that book starts off with saying that you think that the governments would want to study the actual data of these accidents to improve the safety of nuclear power plants and to understand what happens when things go wrong. But this Russian scientist was saying that all this information was suppressed after the Chernobyl nuclear accident. 44:07 And it sounds like you’re saying that you think the same thing will happen now most likely from the… Yeah, you can’t have a nuclear industry or a popular nuclear deterrent idea if people understand the dangers that are very likely to happen from things that are fairly uncontrollable. Mining the material and disposing of the material are sources of radiation exposure and they are now talking about avoiding the carbon increase in the atmosphere to prevent global warming. But they neglect the amount of carbon used in mining and manufacturing. There’s a great petroleum expense in producing the fuel and the factories for making the atomic energy. 45:28 So it’s very polluting in the carbon sense as well as the much worse pollution from the mining debris and the waste disposal problems besides the leaks from the installations themselves. Yeah, I think one of the reassurances we’re always told is that nuclear power doesn’t even… the emissions from nuclear power doesn’t go above the background radiation. One of the things that bothers me is that the background radiation is always going up and they’re allowed to adjust the standard by which they set their emissions to that background radiation. And it’s going up because of their own emissions. So there’s a little bit of an escalating loop that’s going on whereby everybody around nuclear plants and all of us are getting more radiation as time goes on. 46:29 The type of radiation is crucial in its biological effect. The industry has the tricks of comparing living in Denver or flying in an airplane with breathing fallout from the nuclear industry. And it’s completely ignoring the well-established fact that the gamma rays that they’re counting in Denver or in an airplane have a low energy transfer to the tissues. They go through so fast they don’t react. And at lower altitudes they talk about less radiation exposure, but actually at sea level you’re getting tertiary and secondary cosmic rays which have more energy delivery in a toxic way to your tissues. 47:36 So actually Denver has less biologically effective radiation than sea level. And another trick they use to make it seem like radiation isn’t necessarily harmful is to show an alpha emitter and a detector and then put a sheet of typing paper in the path and showing that it stops the alpha particles from passing through. But if you inhale an alpha emitter when that particle goes, it’s going to hit a cell, not a sheet of typing paper. And the fact that it will stop in a sheet of paper means that it has 100%!d(MISSING)elivery of its energy to the tissue. And it’s the delivery of energy that causes the tissue damage. 48:43 Not exclusively, when gamma rays pass through you, they give up a little of their energy in a scattering manner. So they have a very low linear transfer of energy that they still do damage by a partial giving up of their energy. The low velocity is what really harms you. And so if you inhale a particulate that’s radioactive, even though it might not be that much radiation, it’s the fact that you’re just getting all of it in one place that makes it so serious. Yeah, the beta radiation from iodine and strontium and cesium, basically all of it’s going to be absorbed when a particle decomposes in your tissues. 49:47 It’s not as locally intense as alpha particles, but it’s much more effective at tissue delivery than x-rays or gamma rays just passing through your body. I see. And just for those of us who don’t know, could you just quickly summarize what alpha, beta, and gamma mean in terms of radiation? Alpha particles are actually an atomic nucleus. And so it’s a big particle that stops easily when it runs into cell material. Beta particle is an electron which is much more able to pass through cells without being absorbed, but it still is a particle of matter or of electricity. 50:48 X-rays and gamma rays are photons, so they’re analogous to light. And the certain frequencies will resonate more with the living substance. So the x-rays have a fairly intense interaction with living material compared to gamma rays, but still they can be equated. The amount of energy delivered to the tissue or the linear energy transfer, LAT, is how you compare the different types of radiation. And so I suppose it’s impossible to make this comparison, but I’m going to ask you anyway because maybe there is a way. If we have fallout from some accident like we’re having from Japan, how does that compare to going in for medical x-rays or dental x-rays? 51:56 Is there a comparison to be made? The thyroid is damaged by all of them, but if the cloud is very close to the factory, iodine has a half-life of eight days, so it takes three months to disappear. So if it’s your thyroid you’re worried about, and if the cloud takes a long time to get to you, then it could be that the x-ray to your head and neck would be the worst. But usually the fact that you breathe in or eat the particles is going to mean that the fallout is considerably worse than just having a dental x-ray. Now I know there’s a scientist named Dr. Christopher Busbee, and he’s criticized the safety standards by which the international agencies grade how much radiation a person can take. 53:11 And I think he’s basically talking about what you’re talking about here, which is that the standards that they use now take all doses of radiation as if it’s a whole body dose, and it doesn’t spread evenly through all your tissues. And he’s saying that they don’t take into account the fact that it’s often quite localized and therefore causes much greater damage because the energy is all focused on one part of the tissue. Yeah, the dental x-rays tend to cause cancer of the eyeball, the brain, and the thyroid, but the estrogenic effect will cause a series of dental x-rays to make a pregnant woman deliver a premature underdeveloped underweight baby just by the systemic estrogen effect. But it does cancerize the things that are closest to the exposure, and the government’s tendency has been to use whatever measure sounds the least threatening, such as failing to make the distinction between the local dose and the total body dose. 54:39 They’ve done the same thing with interpreting the danger of the fallout from the atomic bombs in Japan, where the bomb smoke went in a sort of a triangular pathway downwind from the explosion. They drew a circle around the center of the explosion and averaged out the people at a certain distance in any direction and tended to make the people who were actually exposed to the fallout disappear by averaging them 360 degrees around the circle. I see, thereby lowering the incidence of problems. Yeah. Well Ray, I’m sad to say that we’re out of time. Maybe you could just, if you could, maybe it’s not possible to summarize quickly the things that people could do to mitigate radiation problems. 55:43 Yeah, eating seaweed, kelp, and if you have a bottle of iodine you can paint them on your fingers and toes and soak up some of it through your skin, and all of this shouldn’t be done until the cloud is actually here because excess iodine is toxic to your thyroid in itself. But if there’s an intense cloud passing over then these external sources of iodine will protect your thyroid, but they won’t protect the other tissues, so keeping your thyroid function up is the ideal way to do it. I see, and that’s done with coconut oil and… Yeah, sugar, coconut oil, and when possible a thyroid supplement. Okay. Dr. Raymond Pete, thanks so much for being on tonight. 56:44 Okay, thank you. We appreciate it, and we’ll talk to you soon, I hope. Okay. Yep. Bye for now. And thanks for listening tonight. This has been Politics and Science. I’m John Barkhausen, and that was Dr. Raymond Pete, and you can find out more about his work at his website, raypeat.com. That’s r-a-y-p-e-a-t dot com. A lot of very interesting articles. And let me just remind you that the fundraiser, although it should be over, is still going forward on slow mode. We’re at about 80, what is it, $8,320, and we got to get to 9,000, so we really appreciate all of you who have donated and all of you who are about to donate. We just have a little bit more to go, and we’ll have our operating expenses for the entire year. All donations are tax deductible. 57:45 And how do you do it? 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