Chattanooga: Japan radiation found in local water

[TNLib]

I find this kind of scary since I live in Chattanooga TN

While a cloud of radiation from Japan’s maimed and melting nuclear plant snaked across the Pacific and curled along America’s jet stream, Chattanooga collected the second-highest radioactive iodine-131 level measured in drinking water anywhere in the U.S.

But I also find kind of scary is

RadNet also is sampling air, rainwater and milk. No Chattanooga-area samples have been posted in rainwater databases. Earlier this month, officials detected air samples near Sequoyah with radioactive isotopes

Sequoyah is are local Nuke Plant

News Source

I honestly don't know what to make of it.

[inademv]

1. How do they know

that the radioactive isotopes are from Japan?

[JuniperLea]

3. I can't explain how... but they knew with Chernobyl...

There was a thread explaining it some time ago... might be time for a disaster forum... man, what a horrid thought.

[greenman3610]

5. the processes at fukushima create their own fingerprint

in the isotopes released etc

[Uncle Joe]

2. Kicked and recommended.

Thanks for the thread, TNLib.

[uppityperson]

4. Here on W coast it's been showing up for a while. Here is what a MD in Vancouver, BC says

Emphasis his.

Let's look at I-131.

If your doctor sends you to a nuclear medicine department to have your thyroid function tested, we use I-131 to test that. The dose we give you is approximately 111,000 Bq of I-131 to see how much your thyroid takes up,10,000 times the amount detected in rainwater at SFU. In 50 years of performing this test, there is zero difference in cancer rates between tested and untested populations.

If you come to us with a hyperactive thyroid, we also treat that with I-131, in the amount 370,000,000 Bq. This is 35,000,000 times the amount in the rainwater. Again, you guessed it, zero difference in cancer rates, even in the 10% of people who need a 2nd treatment.

If you come with thyroid cancer, we treat you with about 5,000,000,000 Bq of I-131. Yes, 5 billion. With a "B."

Even at this amount, there is no convincing evidence of increased cancers of other kinds, only the slightest non-significant trends toward possibly increased risk. Actually, some individuals get a recurrence of their thyroid cancer, and we may treat them with total doses of 22 billion Bq of I-131. At this point, still, the long term evidence is not clear. There may be a very tiny risk of a subsequent cancer 5 to 20 years later, and even this risk is so small that it triggers arguments between those who think there is increased risk and those who think not.

[girl gone mad]

12. Please stop posting this disinformation.

[Yo_Mama]

14. It's not disinformation

It's science. The real kind.

I posted this link once before - it is to a medical study.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11418074
1 Gy = 1 Gray = 1 Sievert. Gray is absorbed dose. You calculate grays for I-131 to the thyroid differently from background exposure, that much is quite true. The amounts given above show you a ballpark.

1. Radiat Res. 2001 Jul;156(1):61-70.

Thyroid cancer after diagnostic administration of iodine-131 in childhood.

Hahn K, Schnell-Inderst P, Grosche B, Holm LE.

Department of Nuclear Medicine, University of Munich, Ziemssenstr. 1, 80538
Munich, Germany. [e-mail]

Hahn, K., Schnell-Inderst, P., Grosche, B. and Holm, L-E. Thyroid Cancer after
Diagnostic Administration of Iodine-131 in Childhood. Radiat. Res. 156, 61-70
(2001). To determine the carcinogenic effects of diagnostic amounts of (131)I on
the juvenile thyroid gland, a multicenter retrospective cohort study was
conducted on 4,973 subjects who either had been referred for diagnostic tests
using uptake of (131)I (n = 2,262) or had had a diagnostic procedure on the
thyroid without (131)I (n = 2,711) before the age of 18 years. Follow-up
examinations were conducted after a mean period of 20 years after the first
examination in 35% of the exposed subjects (n = 789) and in 41% of the nonexposed
subjects (n = 1,118). Iodine-131 dosimetry of the thyroid was carried out
according to ICRP Report No 53, and the median thyroid dose was 1.0 Gy. In the
exposed group, two thyroid cancers were found during 16,500 person-years,
compared to three cancers in the nonexposed group during 21,000 person-years. The
relative risk for the exposed group was 0.86 (95% CI: 0.14-5.13). The study did
not demonstrate an increased risk for thyroid cancer after administration of
(131)I in childhood.

No one is saying that I-131 is good for you. But the evidence shows that the types of exposures we are talking about in current US testing aren't harmful.

In Chernobyl studies, most of the kids got dosages in excess of 5 Grays. That is huge. They did have a significantly elevated thyroid cancer rate.

[girl gone mad]

15. No, this is very definitely disinformtion.

I understand how people who lack a good scientific education can get sucked into believing that it sounds plausible, but it's totally bogus. I don't believe for a second that a doctor would make such an idiotic statement. I noticed a link is conveniently missing.

Moderate doses of iodine-131 are actually much more dangerous than high doses. If you want to claim to be knowledgeable, it's good to actually have the evidence on your side. In this case, the evidence is overwhelming. The high doses are safer, and that is why they are used instead of lower doses.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iodine-131:

"Due to its mode of beta decay, iodine-131 is notable for causing mutation and death in cells which it penetrates, and other cells up to several millimeters away. For this reason, high doses of the isotope are sometimes paradoxically less dangerous than low doses, since they tend to kill thyroid tissues which would otherwise become cancerous as a result of the radiation. For example, children treated with moderate dose of I-131 for thyroid adenomas had a detectable increase in thyroid cancer, but children treated with a much higher dose did not. Similarly most studies of very high dose I-131 for treatment of Graves disease have failed to find any increase in thyroid cancer, even though there is linear increase in thyroid cancer risk with I-131 absorption at moderate doses.<1> Thus, iodine-131 is increasingly less employed in small doses in medical use (especially in children), but increasingly is used only in large and maximal treatment doses, as a way of killing targeted tissues. This is known as "therapeutic use.""

[uppityperson]

17. There is no link because it came directly to me. It is not disinformation. WIki is not adequate

for any medical use. Wiki is not "actual evidence".

I provided no link because it came directly to me, not through a link. Some of us do have other acquaintances outside DU and do correspond with people outside DU.

I am sharing what he wrote. You show no evidence to prove this disinformation and your snark about " people who lack a good scientific education can get sucked into believing that it sounds plausible, but it's totally bogus" won't go over well with this doctor.

[girl gone mad]

19. Right, so your personal e-mail is superior to Wikipedia?

If your doctor is telling you that moderate doses of iodine are safer than the high doses used in radiation therapy, he is a fool.

[uppityperson]

21. High doses are more dangerous than low doses. High doses KILL the thyroid. Dead tissues

don't develop cancer.

He isn't the fool. He is the civil one though. And yes, I trust my doctor much more than wikipedia.

[girl gone mad]

24. Please re-read what you just typed.

Dead tissues don't develop cancer.

That is why the higher doses are considered safer to use in radiation therapy.

You can't extrapolate from this:

The dose we give you is approximately 111,000 Bq of I-131 to see how much your thyroid takes up,10,000 times the amount detected in rainwater at SFU. In 50 years of performing this test, there is zero difference in cancer rates between tested and untested populations.

If you come to us with a hyperactive thyroid, we also treat that with I-131, in the amount 370,000,000 Bq. This is 35,000,000 times the amount in the rainwater. Again, you guessed it, zero difference in cancer rates, even in the 10% of people who need a 2nd treatment.

If you come with thyroid cancer, we treat you with about 5,000,000,000 Bq of I-131. Yes, 5 billion. With a "B."

Even at this amount, there is no convincing evidence of increased cancers of other kinds, only the slightest non-significant trends toward possibly increased risk.

that therefore anything below that level is also safe.

[uppityperson]

23. My doctor IS superior to WIkipedia, yes.

[EvolveOrConvolve]

26. Actually, Wikipedia is one of the worst sources out there

Quoting Wikipedia as an "authority" on anything is a risky proposition. Information is often left out, misleading, or completely incorrect. Inappropriate persons often are left to monitor fields of study that they are not qualified to oversee. The moderation scheme works to a point, but there are so many holes in it that it's just not that trustworthy.

Trust me when I say this: you have little chance of winning a scientific debate with uppityperson. But carry on, if you must.

[FBaggins]

30. You really need to stop posting on this subject.

Your foot-in-mouth disease could actually be contagious.

In SOME cases, a higher dose CAN be safer than a moderate dose... but that's entirely irrelevant here because they're talking about 1.6 picocuries per liter. That's not a "moderate" dose... it's not a small part of a moderate dose. You could drink a gallon of the stuff every day for the rest of your life and still not get up to a moderate dose.

The "low" dose cited in your Wikipedia link was 1/20th of a curie per gram (for a child's dose). This is 1.6 trillionths of a curie per liter.

[girl gone mad]

33. Yeah, it's the physicist who doesn't know what fission is..

here to give me another useless lecture.

[FBaggins]

39. Only useless because you've got your fingers in your ears.

But the post is to help others avoid confusion from your errors... not to help you dig out of a pit of your own creation.

You don't know what you're talking about GGM... it's time to stop trying.

[Yo_Mama]

31. You are the one misinforming, but I think on the basis of misunderstanding

Moderate doses have to be understood in relationship to the exposure one could get from the I-131 levels reported.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19194214
full excerpt below.
A megabecquerel MBq = 10X6 becquerels (1,000,000 becquerels)
So FLD = 481,000,000 becquerels.

And here is a 2002 publication for long term followup of such cases concluding that it is safe:
http://hormones.gr/preview.php?c_id=13
25 mCi = 925 MBq
That's good because it gives some references to other studies. Note that there was a much higher recurrence in lower doses, and that the main risk factor involved with lower dose I-131 treatment is lack of complete tissue destruction and the survival of cancer cells.

And here is a Medscape article on pediatric thyroid cancer. Adenomas are very rare in children, but have a high chance of being cancerous. (This article cites 26-36%).
Thus, cancer after lower-dose I-131 treatment in children appears to be more related to not killing off the pre-existing cancer, rather than causing cancer in and of itself.
http://emedicine.medscape.com/article/853737-overview

The population studies in Chernobyl victims, unfortunately a large-scale population test of the low-dose causes more cancer theory, showed that cancer rates rose in a linear relationship to dosages.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15900042

Here is the UNSCEAR 2008 report:
http://www.unscear.org/docs/reports/2008/11-80076_Report_2008_Annex_D.pdf

It's just not true that exposure to small amounts of I-131 will cause more damage than exposure to larger amounts. It's very clear in the Chernobyl studies that there is a linear dose response modified by iodine deficiency (iodine deficiency increases cancer risk, but it may do so even in the absence of I-131 exposure)
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15900042

The Hanford Study didn't show that low rates of I-131 exposure caused thyroid cancer:
http://www.cdc.gov/nceh/radiation/hanford/htdsweb/pdf/htds_aag.pdf
Full
http://www.cdc.gov/nceh/radiation/hanford/htdsweb/pdf/htdsreport.pdf

1. Nucl Med Commun. 2009 Feb;30(2):169-75.

Comparison of four different protocols of I-131 therapy for treating single toxic
thyroid nodule.

Zakavi SR, Mousavi Z, Davachi B.

Mashhad University of Medical Sciences, Mashhad, Iran. [e-mail]

OBJECTIVE: To compare low and high doses as well as fixed and calculated doses of
I-131 in treating toxic thyroid adenoma.
METHODS AND PATIENTS: In a prospective study, patients with hyperthyroidism and a
single hot thyroid nodule and 24-h radioactive iodine uptake of more than 25%
were randomly treated with one of four protocols: fixed low dose (FLD, 481 MBq),
fixed high dose (FHD, 832 MBq), calculated low dose (CLD, 3.33-3.70 MBq/g), and
calculated high dose (CHD, 6.66-7.4 MBq/g). The patients were asked to visit the
endocrinologist 2 and 6 months after treatment and every 6 months thereafter.
Clinical exam and laboratory tests were done in all patients during each
follow-up. A curative effect was considered as absence of thyroid stimulating
hormone suppression (thyroid stimulating hormone>0.3). An analysis of variance
test was used for comparison of groups.
RESULTS: 97 patients completed the follow-up, eight male, 89 female, with a mean
age of 43.3 years (SD=13.4) and mean 24-h radioactive iodine uptake values of
48.07% (SD=14.07). No significant difference was noted in the four groups
regarding age, sex ratio, thyroid uptake, and thyroid weight. About 10 months
after therapy, cure of hyperthyroidism was higher in CHD group compared with
other groups. Hypothyroidism was significantly higher in CHD and FHD groups
compared with CLD and FLD groups in all follow-ups. No significant difference was
noted in the cure of hyperthyroidism between CLD and FLD groups. Mean radioiodine
dose administered in calculated groups was significantly less than fixed dose
groups.
CONCLUSION: CHD protocol is preferable in old patients with toxic adenoma whereas
CLD is more appropriate in young patients.

[girl gone mad]

34. Nope. I'm not the one misinforming.

Posting that low to moderate levels of radiation are safe because high levels of radiation are used to treat thyroid patients is misinformation. Period.

You can take the side of someone who makes this statement, but it doesn't make you look intelligent, no matter how many links you post.

[Yo_Mama]

37. That's not what I said

You're the one that claimed that low levels of I-131 are more apt to cause cancer than higher rates. That is not true.

And sorry, those links are lot more scientifically valid than one link to Wikipedia, not that I don't love and use Wikipedia too. But that quote is not correct as I take its meaning and as you do.

There is some very useful info in those links for those concerned about risk:

1) Iodine deficiency increases your risks for any given dose of I-131, because it increases your effective dosage, (so just eating a diet high in iodine will help), and
2) There is an environmental limit of I-131 that hasn't been shown to increase cancer risk, or rather at which any increased cancer incidence is indistinguishable from other exposures.

The levels of I-131 out there now in the US haven't been shown to be risky.

For what it's worth from my scientifically uneducated self, here's some more info scaling I-131 intake:

A) For an adult, the normal body level of radiation is around 60 becquerels per pound. Most of that comes from Potassium 40, of which about 11% is gamma and the rest is beta. Carbon 14 is just beta decay.
http://www.rerowland.com/BodyActivity.htm

That adds up to a whole body count of about 8,000 becquerels. Becquerels = disintegrations per second. C-14 is going to be present in your body at approximately the atmospheric concentration and potassium is conserved by the body, so this is a pretty constant ratio.

An adult thyroid should range about 10-30 grams, or about .022 - .066 pounds. Thus, your thyroid's natural background becquerels are about 1.5-2.4 (thyroid scales close to weight of body, this is lower half estimate). The normal adult uptake for I-131 (makes it into thyroid) is about 25-28%. We'll round up and call it 30%.

The level of radiation found in the water in the OP link was 1.6 picoCuries (pCi)/liter. That is about .06 becquerels per liter of water. Four liters is about a gallon. Assume you drink a gallon of water a day. 4 X .06 becquerels = .24 becquerels (about 1/4 becquerel). Assume 30% makes it to your thyroid. That is about .072 extra becquerels in your thyroid. Using the lower range of 1.5, that is about an extra 5% of exposure.

BUT, this exposure is going to occur only very briefly compared to your lifetime exposure. So it's not surprising that low levels of exposure to I-131 haven't been found to cause cancer. That's because you aren't changing your tissue exposure levels noticeably. If these levels of radiation caused cancer very frequently, almost all of us would have cancer, wouldn't we? In practice, that does not seem to happen until a person gets very old.

No one can disprove the LNT hypothesis, because the structure of our universe and our biology is such that we all are exposed to radiation throughout our lives. But so far, epidemiological studies do not show that the LNT hypothesis is correct.

However, it matters not in this instance, because in point of fact the lifetime additional exposure we are discussing here is so small that even if the LNT hypothesis were strictly correct, we could not observe the resulting increase in cancer.

Now maybe you like numbers and maybe you don't. There are about 86,400 seconds in one day. This means that you can confidently expect to go through your adult life with your thyroid taking well over 100,000 disintegrations a day. We'll use that number because it is so easy although it is too low. A lifetime of 365.5 days in a year and 70 years nets us kind of a big number - 2,558,500,000. Assuming you were exposed to the extra .072 extra becquerels for two months it would hammer your poor thyroid about 379,469 extra times in your life.

That represents an additional lifetime risk of about 0.00015%. I can assure that you there is no experimental design that will pick that up.

In practice, it is obvious that the LNT hypothesis must be wrong, because if something doesn't usually happen in 2,558,500,00 throws of the die, it is not going to happen in another mere 379,469 throws. There is no question that cancer is associated with cell damage, and there is no question that radiation can damage cells, but there must be some repair mechanism that can take care of low-level damage pretty well.

I hope this makes you feel better about the situation. And if not you, then others who may be concerned. EPA sets a limit of 3 pCi per liter of drinking water. It seems to me that their limit is very safe indeed.

[TNLib]

6. I may be getting a little paranoid but could this possibly be from our own plant?

It just seems odd that we have the second highest level in the US and we're quite aways away from the west coast. Sequoyah is run by TVA a quasi federal agency. I'm just kind of nervous this may have been going on for awhile and now because of Japan our water company started testing.

nt

[AndyTiedye]

10. Yeah, It's Hard to Imagine All the Radiation Skipped Over the Land Between Japan and Tenn.

…particularly since lots of places in between have gotten rain.

I think our nukes release more than they tell us.

[akwapez]

29. Fellow Chattanoogan here....that was my first thought

when I heard the story this morning.

[Art_from_Ark]

38. Information about iodine isotopes from the Argonne National Laboratory

http://www.evs.anl.gov/pub/doc/Iodine.pdf

This was written several years before the current crisis. What is particularly interesting here is the mention of iodine isotopes that had been emitted by the Hanford facility in Washington State.

[yawnmaster]

7. Relax. Stress is the real killer...

"Meg Lockhart, a spokeswoman for the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation, said the level detected in Chattanooga water is so low that even an infant would have to drink 600 liters of water to receive a dose equivalent to one day’s background radiation in nature."

from the same article.

[TNLib]

8. That's fine and all but what if it's been going on for awhile undetected?

If it's just a spike from Japan that's one thing but what if from our own plant?

[Zoeisright]

9. Wrong.

Ingesting radiation is far worse than the "background radiation" your skin is exposed to.

Perhaps you should do a little research before posting.

[RC]

11. And maybe you should read post #4

Before you continue with your scare mongering.

[girl gone mad]

13. And maybe you should learn some actual science before scolding others.

Much smaller incidental doses of iodine-131 than are used in medical therapeutic uses, are thought to be the major cause of increased thyroid cancers after accidental nuclear contamination. These cancers happen from residual tissue radiation damage caused by the I-131, and usually appear years after exposure, long after the I-131 has decayed.

Get it? They use very high doses of iodine-131 in radiation therapy specifically because it is less dangerous.

[Robb]

16. Good lord but you've horribly misinterpreted that.

Carefully targeted higher doses in a very, very small area will kill tissue. Dead tissue will not become cancerous.

It is hardly less dangerous in larger amounts as a general rule.

[girl gone mad]

18. Robb, please.

I am not the one misinterpreting things in this thread.

3 people are arguing that because high doses are used with associated safe outcomes in radiation therapy, that means the lower doses found in contaminated milk and water must be much safer.

Use your brain for a minute.

[Robb]

22. No, regardless.

You wrote

They use very high doses of iodine-131 in radiation therapy specifically because it is less dangerous.

That is not accurate. That is like saying a sharp scalpel is not dangerous, because it is used in surgery.

[girl gone mad]

25. No, actually, it is perfectly accurate.

The higher doses have been scientifically proven to be associated with no increased risk in cancers, whereas the lower doses are associated with increases in cancer rates. The wikipedia page I linked to above cites these studies.

[Robb]

28. Higher, targeted doses. Not just higher doses.

And the Wikipedia page explains exactly this, thankfully.

[girl gone mad]

42. Radioactive iodine is self-targeting.

http://www.cumc.columbia.edu/dept/thyroid/raiprep.html:

Since radioactive iodine (RAI) targets thyroid cells only, it is a safe and effective way to treat Graves disease and thyroid cancer and to test thyroid function and monitor recurrence of thyroid cancer. However, it requires strict compliance with instructions in order to insure its accuracy and efficacy.

http://www.cumc.columbia.edu/dept/thyroid/raiprep.html:

How Radioactive Iodine Treatment Works

RAI treatment is based on the fact that the thyroid actively accumulates iodine, which it uses to produce thyroid hormones required for normal body function. This RAI is like the iodine found in foods such as fish, seaweed, and iodized salt, except that it releases an electron, or beta particle, which creates its therapeutic action.

For use in treatment, the RAI is given dissolved in water or as a capsule. It is absorbed quickly by the stomach and intestines, then carried in the bloodstream to the thyroid, where it is taken up by the gland. While in the thyroid gland, the RAIdisrupts the function of some of the thyroid cells - the more radioactive iodine given, the more cells cease to function. As the cells stop functioning, excessive amounts of thyroid hormones are no longer produced, and symptoms of hyperthyroidism begin to disappear.

(wikipedia free sources)

[uppityperson]

20. No, they use large doses to KILL thyroids, NOT because it is less dangerous.

There is less chance of cancer after a large dose because the thyroid is dead tissue. Which doesn't develop cancer. Killing the thyroid ALL the way means there is nothing left alive to develop cancer.

We aren't arguing that any I-131 is good, but to say higher doses are less dangerous is just totally wrong.

[girl gone mad]

27. Except that what you have been arguing is that..

because very radioactive amounts of iodine-131 are safely used in medical therapy (with no increase in cancers), therefore lower rates in water, food and milk must also be safe. Which is not the case.

[yawnmaster]

45. the solution is clear! To keep from getting cancer from the low doses of I131, eat a high dose!

Where can I get high dose I131, so that I can protect myself from these low doses showing up??!

[yawnmaster]

44. Oh no, I am very right. cortisols will kill you much faster than the insignificant...

amounts of radioactivity that you might eat and "statistically" increase your chance of cancer.
Of course that increased chance is lost in the noise of dying of other things...especially from the damage due to stress hormones.

be happy.

[deaniac21]

32. We found radiation from the sun in Arkansas. We are all screwed.

[Harmony Blue]

35. Even a minute amount

of radiation could possibly alter the genetic code sequence of DNA, which is why when your cells go to replicate DNA for new cells, they can become cancerous. No one knows definitively either way what amount truly is safe. We are operating currently on the limits of our technology as to what boundary is "safe".

[deaniac21]

36. My iPhone4 is inundating me as well. I'm screwed.

[RegieRocker]

41. The best way to use your Iphone is to hold very close to your head.

[yawnmaster]

43. oh noes. we are screwed. so much radiation around us from everywhere...

and so much dna and the statistics...oh the statistics!
the possibility for genetic damage might possibly increase maybe.
I need my lead suit.
but wait...molecules of lead in me might cause some damage.

okay. adding these things to my list of things to worry about.
My list is so long I have to write it on toilet paper.
And it invariably gets used.

[RegieRocker]

40. Raisins and bananas.