The Ecoiogist Digest be preparing to raise its permitted radiation doses still further. It is now considering the implications of the MRC meeting.

Nuclear Power

Radiation data exposed, by Anthony Tucker, The Guardian, Novemer 28th 1983. There is no scientific basis to the Home Office estimates of nuclear war casualties and of the levels of radiation to which members of the emergency services could safely be exposed after a nuclear attack or accident, according to independent experts. Senior doctors and radiation physicists, who met Home Office advisers privately at the Medical Research Council said the calculations on which civil defence planning has been based were done "i n half an hour on the back of an envelope in 1955." The Home Office has claimed that its radiation criteria was approved by the Medical Research Council. But, after the meeting, Professor Laszlo Rajtha, former director of the Holt Radium Institute in Manchester and chairman of the 1977 MRC committee on radiation hazards, said that the Home Office criteria were "meaningless and useless." The meeting discussed two important aspects of radiation; how much exposure is expected to kill half of those exposed to it (the LD-50), and how much continued exposure in the highly radioactive post-attack phase can people withstand? In its present calculations, which produce casualty estimates much lower than those estimated by the US or the USSR, the Home Office assumes an LD-50 of 400 rads to the bone marrow. But at the meeting it was shown that, in the enormous range of circumstances which could occur after an attack, it is impossible to arrive at a figure which has any meaning. In addition, the Home Office figure applies to healthy young men, and not to infants nor to the elderly. Yet, on the basis of the 1955 calculation, the Home Office has constructed a formula for the permitted exposure of emergency service personnel which assumes that after an initial exposure of 150 rads over two days, humans can "repair" bone marrow damage at a rate equivalent to 10 rads exposure per day. In an emergency people would be allowed to receive 10 rads a day for 100 days, a combined total of 1,150 rads. In his assessment, Professor Lajtha said that the Home Office formula is "no more than an academic exercise and has no practical value. The Home Office, is known to

Fallout on Bikini atoll for century, by Harold Jackson, The Guardian, November 29th 1983. Bikini Atoll, where the United States carried out many of its biggest postwar nuclear tests, will remain contaminated with high-level radiation for 100 years unless most of its soil is replaced. A team of American scientists has estimated the cost of such a cleanup at $10 million for each of the 1,100 exiled islanders. The Bikini Atoll Rehabilitation Committee, in an interim report to the US Department of the Interior, commented that the islanders could return to their homes immediately—provided they ate no home-grown food until the late 21st century. The alternative to an entirely imported diet is that the American Government should pay to replace all the contaminated topsoil on the 1,200 acre island to a depth of about 18 inches. The team said that the fish in the lagoon and in the surrounding ocean are now safe to eat, but that the coconuts, which are a staple diet of the Bikinian diet, are still badly contaminated with Caesium-137 and likely to remain so. It said that the wells on the atoll contain drinkable water, but the Bikinians are likely to receive this assurance with some scepticism.

Badly planned reactor plant is said to set back Soviet Nuclear Programme, by Dusko Doder, International Herald Tribune, November 30th 1983 The nuclear power industry in the Soviet Union has suffered a major setback as a result of faulty planning and erroneous geological surveys that have led to severe problems in the construction of the country's largest reactor manufacturing plant, according to well-informed sources. The $4-billion project is located at the edge of a huge man-made lake in southern Russia. The sources said that unexpected land erosion damaged the foundations of the plant, which is partly operational. The completion of the plant known as Atommash is now in doubt, the sources said. Upon completion, Atommash was to become the main Soviet producer of nuclear reactors with a capacity of eight 1,000-megawatt units annually. According to the sources, the authorities have been considering alternatives for the continued construction of the giant plant to get the nuclear power programme back on track. There are no indications that a solution has been found. One idea to salvage the project, the sources said, is to permanently freeze the ground under the plant to prevent further erosion. The original miscalculation made by planners and not