The polls say that Americans, by a margin of about two to one, think George II is doing a really good job as president. The media elite -- having told us that he isn't -- don’t understand why so many of us think that he is.
Well, for one thing, we don’t see him much on television, rushing off every day in Air Force One to the scene of every seven-car pileup or creek flooding its banks to feel our pain. No, the president and his bomb-squad have been busy in the nation’s capitol, searching for -- and sometimes defusing -- various booby-traps left there by the Gore-Greenies.
After only a few days in office, President Bush announced that he had no intention of complying with Al Gore’s Kyoto Global Warming Protocols. He had to do that to defuse one of the Kyoto booby-traps left by the Gore-Greenies at the EPA -- the Gore-Greenies had got Christy Whitman to propose regulating carbon dioxide as a "pollutant."
Power-generation facilities burning fossil fuels (coal, oil and natural gas) do produce carbon dioxide and water vapor -- both of which are Gore-Greenie "greenhouse gases" -- but neither of them are "pollutants" as defined by the Clean Air Act. The Gore-Greenie plan was to use the Clean Air Act as a regulatory hammer to force compliance with the Kyoto Protocols, which would require us -- by 2012 -- to cut back our carbon dioxide emissions to the levels of 20 years before. If the Gore-Greenies had prevailed, not only would we not be able to build any more coal- or natural gas-fired plants, but we would have had to shut down all the plants built during the 1990s.
But the president’s bomb squad can’t relax just yet. Having lost that Kyoto battle, the Gore-Greenies at EPA are at it again. They want to drastically reduce the arsenic levels allowed in drinking water, from 50 parts per billion to 5 ppb. Actually, they have had to settle for reducing it to 10 ppb, but they wanted to reduce it to 5 ppb.
What do arsenic levels in our water have to do with Kyoto?
Well, a 1,000 megawatt coal-fired plant, producing enough electricity for a city of about 300,000 people, burns about three million tons of coal a year, and releases -- among other heavy metals (such as mercury and uranium) -- 450 pounds of arsenic!
So when you find a lump of coal in your Christmas stocking, don’t suck on it.
Now, coal-fired plant emissions are already suspected by the EPA of being responsible for the heavy metal "contamination" of lakes and rivers in northern states. According to the EPA, in Wisconsin alone, more than 200 lakes and rivers are contaminated with mercury. The amount of mercury in coal is much, much less than the amount of arsenic. If the EPA already suspects coal-fired plants of contaminating rivers and lakes with mercury, how much longer will it be before coal-fired plant operators are hauled off to jail for contaminating America’s lakes and rivers with arsenic?
So, perhaps the Gore-Greenie objective in setting the 10 ppb arsenic level in drinking water is not to drive cities and municipalities into bankruptcy, after all. It’s to force the shut-down of all remaining coal-fired plants, ala Kyoto.
But if we do that, the only remaining option is nuclear power!
Incidentally, according to the National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurements, because of the release of uranium and thorium -- and their radioactive decay products such as radium, radon and polonium -- when burning coal, the effective radiation dose-equivalent to the population from the operation of a 1000MWe coal-fired power plant is more than 100 times that from a 1000 MWe nuclear power plant. It’s not so much that the radioactivity released by the coal-fired plant is all that much -- it’s really that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission requires nuclear-power plants to keep its releases unrealistically low.
Which brings us to "hormesis" -- a biological term for the stimulation of any organism by low doses of any agent. Hormology is the study of excitation produced by the stimulation. Low doses of many hormetic agents result in a positive effect; large doses of the same agent produce a negative effect. Many such chemical hormetic agents are known, and one of them is arsenic -- which plays a minor but significant hormetic role in our metabolism at relatively low concentrations. That is, not only is a little arsenic good for you, you couldn’t get along without a little of it. It’s something like the zinc, iron and selenium in your One-A-Day vitamin capsules.
But you can read all about arsenic and that particular Gore-Greenie booby-trap somewhere else. This column is about ionizing radiation -- the "health threat" the EPA and the Gore-Greenies have used to make nuclear-power plants an endangered species in this country. The EPA and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission have based their radiation safety criteria on the so-called "zero-threshold" model, which says that all radiation exposure is bad for you and that the operation of any nuclear-power plant -- or any x-ray machine -- will inevitably cause unacceptable additional cases of cancer in the general population
However, it now appears the EPA and NRC "zero-threshold" linear-extrapolation model has been wrong all along. As we learn more and more about how our bodies function at the cellular level, it appears that all the cells in your body -- not just your skin -- benefit from a little irradiation. That is, ionizing radiation is a hormetic agent. You need a little of it every day, like sunshine, but don’t get too much.
Every living creature on the planet’s surface is exposed to ionizing radiation, which varies from place to place by factors of two or three. The background radiation from cosmic rays is greater in high-altitude places like Albuquerque, N.M., and greater over a Pennsylvania coal seam because of radioactive radon gas venting from the uranium and thorium in the coal seam. Evidently, two or three times average background levels is not too much. In fact, statistically, people who live at high altitudes and over coal seams are less likely to develop cancer. That is, it appears that higher background levels are better for you than lower ones.
Each cell in your body is struck -- on average -- a couple of times each year by background radiation. Each "hit" on a cell could cause DNA damage to that cell that could result in cancer later in life. And that is basically what the "zero-threshold" dogma assumes will happen. But there are other possible responses for both the cell and the organism to ionizing background radiation.
For example, the individual cell that’s been hit may at some later time try to function and may realize that there is something wrong and commit "suicide" -- a process called apoptosis -- which also removes the cancer risk to the organism. Or the immune system of the organism may be stimulated by the radiation damage of some cells to search out and destroy not only the cells damaged by radiation, but all the defective cells it can find. In other words, a little background radiation can cause the body to kill cancer cells caused by some other carcinogen -- cells it would not have otherwise sought out and destroyed. Far from causing cancer, a little ionizing radiation may even result in the organism defeating some other cancer causing agent.
At an American Nuclear Society meeting in San Francisco a few years ago, Japanese researchers reported on their study of the incidence of carcinoma among two large groups of Japanese in or near Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 when the atomic bombs were dropped -- one group having been exposed to significant amounts of ionizing radiation, and another control group that was not. The Japanese researchers reported that there were more -- statistically significantly more -- carcinomas in the unexposed group than in the group that had been exposed to ionizing radiation many orders of magnitude greater than background. And they got that exposure all at once, not distributed uniformly over a year’s time, as is the case with background radiation -- an incomprehensible result from the standpoint of the "zero-threshold" dogma of EPA and NRC.
Which is not to say that you would be better off taking a teaspoon of arsenic every day. But because both arsenic and ionizing radiation are evidently hormetic -- like vitamins -- the EPA and NRC should not be driving the allowable exposures of arsenic and ionizing radiation down to zero. You might wind up getting scurvy or something like that.
But if getting some Gore-Greenie transmitted disease doesn’t bother you, how about this? These "zero-threshold" Gore-Greenies are deliberately driving up the cost to infinity of electricity generated by coal-fired and nuclear plants. If they’re successful, then all you soccer moms out there in la-la land are not only going to be pale and anemic in the daytime, but you’re also going to be freezing in the dark at night.