ML19312C954
| ML19312C954 | |
| Person / Time | |
|---|---|
| Site: | Crane  |
| Issue date: | 05/28/1979 |
| From: | Brodsky A NRC OFFICE OF STANDARDS DEVELOPMENT |
| To: | PRESIDENT'S COMMISSION ON THE ACCIDENT AT THREE MILE |
| Shared Package | |
| ML19312C953 | List: |
| References | |
| TASK-TF, TASK-TMR NUDOCS 8001170331 | |
| Download: ML19312C954 (4) | |
Text
.J HANDBOOK of RADIATION MEASUREMENT a<ut PROTECTION EDITOR Please reoly to:
Allen Brodsky, Sc.D.
Dr. Allen Brodsky P.O. Box 34471 West Bethesda,5fD. 20034 May 28, 1979 T0:
The President's Commission on the Accident at Three Mile Island af4w /L~4Ap FROM:
Allen Brodsky,6c.D., C.H.P.
SUBJECT:
REPORT ON ACTIVITIES AND OBSERVATIONS DURING PERIOD OF ASSISTANCE AT HERSHEY MEDICAL CENTER, MARCH 31-APRIL 2, 1979 At the request of Mr. Kenneth Miller, Director, Division of Health Physics, Hershey Medical Center, I went to the Hershey area on Saturday afternoon, March 31. Mr. Miller had indicated to me by telephone that he may be in need of considerable expert assistance in the avent that contaminated or exposed workers or members of the public should arrive for treatment or decontamination at the Hershey Medical Center.
Since I had considerable experience in the handling and evaluation of contaminated patients as fonner Technical Director of the Radiation Medicine Department, Presbyterian-University Hospital, and Associate Professor of Health Physics, University of Pi' tsburgh, as well as experience in emergency planning and operations in former positions with the Federal Civil Defense Administration and the U.S.. Atomic Energy Commission, I felt it my professional and civic duty to provide my assistance and advice to Mr. Miller.
Before going.to Hershey, I telephoned Mr. Ronald Kathren of Richland, Washington, a friend and well-known health physicist with emergency experience, to alert him regarding the possible need for additional health physics assistance at Hershey and to request that he infonn Mr, Carl Unruh, also of Richland, and the current President of the Health Physics Society, of this need so he could provide contacts to appropriate health physici.sts in the Eastern United States.
Mr.
Kathren returned my call to my Pittsburgh residence and told me there would be various DOE and.NRC teams in the Middletown area that could provide assistance, '
anc' ut Mr. Unruh was flying to D.C. on Sunday and could be contacted there if fn er specific assistance was needed from the Health Physics Society.
At 4 p.m., Saturday, March 31, I left Pittsburgh to drive to Hershey. On the way, I heard various radio reports that indicated there may be an imminent danger of a serious release of radioactivity from the TMI-2 plant. After several futile attempts to obtain radiation survey equipment from friends on the way out
- of Pittsburgh, I finally stopped at a State Police barracks near the Pennsylvania Turnpike and obtained a 0 - 200 R pocket chamb'er from.an officer at the desk, so that I would be alerted if I should be driving in the open through any seriously radioactive plume or fallout pattern.
The reports from the media, i
including statements by Dr. Ernest Sternglass and Dr. George Wald, had given me cause for serious concern.
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When I arrived at 10 p.m. at Mr. Miller's home, approximately 6 miles East of Three Mile Island, I turned on a G-M survey meter in his living room ano noted that external radiation levels were in the nomal background range.
I also checked my pocket chamber and found that it had registered no gama radiation exposure.
News reports were still posing the possibility of a hydrogen explosion in the reactor vessel and the possibility of meltdown of fuel.
On Sunday, April 1, I inspected the hospital preparations for receiving radio-actively contaminated patients with Mr. Kenneth Miller and Mr. Louis Rubin, another health physicist who had joined Mr. Miller some days earlier.
They had prepared hoses near the emergency entrance to decontaminate large numbers of people who might evacuate to the Hershey area, and had prepared a room in the emergency area to carry out more thorough decontamination and possible surgery or medical treatment for any injured, contaminated persons.
The normal capacity at Hershey Medical Center for handling accident cases from the Thret Mile Island plant would be no more than 2-3 contaminated workers at one time.
I spent most of Sunday and Monday listening to news reports, and making calcula-tions of potential doses to members of the public from the various postulated fission product releases.
I also provided Mr. Miller with some levels of food and water contamination that could be used for limited periods of intake in the event of a major release that would require utilization of all available resources, while ensuring that no one would be likely (with more than about 1%
probability) to receive serious internal doses that would cause harm. The infomation used to provide this guidance was taken from several of my chapters in the Handbook of Radioactive Nuclides, edited by Yen Wang, CRC Press,1969, since Mr. Miller had received no official guidance on emergency contamination limits at that point.
(I later checked the fission product inventories in my chapter versus those generated for NRC by.the ORIGEN code at ORNL, and found good agreement for the fission products of radiobiological importance.)
On'honday morning, I was requested to attend a medical staff briefing on the Thrae Mile Island accident to explain the nature of radiation risks and proce-dures Tor alleviating injury.
Some of the medical staff had already evacuated the area with their families, and it was important that the remaining staff be properly briefed and ready to take care of the remaining patients and those that might arrive as a result of any injuries during a mass evacuation.
After very competent briefings in regard to the hospital procedures by the director of the emergency room, Mr. Miller, and other hospital supervisors, I was invited to present a briefing on the nature of the incident, the nature of the radiation risks, and ways in which radiation injury could be minimized.
I presented my estimation that, even in the event of a major fission product release from the reactor vessel, it was unlikely that very.much of the fission products would be released from the containment building.
If the filters should fail, mainly the volatile iodines and rare gases would contribute to the population dose.
Thus, I indicated that', in my own opinion, the worst pocsible case they might be confronted with would be that in which a major portion of the iodines were released to the environment.
I explained that
. )
even in'the event that the iodines were released from the reactor vessel, I did not believe that most of the iodines would actually escape the containment building, since they would be mostly contained in the coolant water.
Further-more, much of the iodine entering the vapor in the building would be likely to react with the building walls or with other components in the building, and only a fraction of the iodine would escape to the environment.
Nevertheless, I explained, if one postulates that a major portion of the iodines were released to the environment, they could produce thyroid doses of up to hundreds of thousands of rads to persons outside the plant area under unfavorable weather conditions. My calculations on rare gas inventories indicated that even if all of the rare gases were released this would not pose serious problems for the surrounding population and for the Hershey Medical Center.
Much of the short-lived rare gas activity had already been dissipated.
I explained further that although thyroid doses of hundreds of thousands of rads to members of the public would also imply that hundreds of rads would be received by the whole body, once these persons were decontaminated according to Mr. Miller's procedures, there would be no appreciable risk to the medical staff in working with these patients.
I reminded them that hospitals -are accustomed to treating persons for thyroid carcinomas to doses from I-131 of approximately this magnitude, and that the limited amounts of I-131 contamination emitted from the body are easily controlled routinely in most hospitals of the United States today.
I also pointed out to the staff that if they feared an unexpected release might occur without sufficient warning, they would be better off to stay within the massive structure of the hospital where several underground floors are available, including areas of the Radiation Therapy Department where the cobalt and linear accelerator rooms are shielded by 3 or more feet of concrete.
With a temporary shutdown of the ventilation system of the hospital, the hospital could provide excellent protection against a passing radioactive cloud.
I illustrated the protection possible by giving experiences of my own after the Castle hydrogen bomb tests at Eniwetok, and experiences in the managing of patients with large amounts of contamination by highly radiotoxic nuclides at Presbyterian-University Hospital, University of Pittsburgh.
I again emphasized, however, that no massive release of radioactivity from Three Mile Island had occurred, and that amounts of radioactivity released at that time should not be of serious concern.
The only additional suggestion I had to Mr. Miller's preparations were that he should have on hand a multi-channel analyzer and gamma ray spectrometer for evaluating contaminated articles, food samples, and patients.
However, he had i
already ordered this kind of equipment and he and Mr. Rubin were preparing to 3
set it up on Monday evening. Thus, on Monday afternoon when I felt that I had provided all the advice necessary and reports indicated to me that the reactor situation was heading toward stabilization, I decided to return home to Bethesda so that I could report back to my job at the NRC the next day.
e I
I would particularly 1;ke to call attention at the end of this report to the attached article by Dr. Ernest Sternglass, which is written to make it appear that I supported his view that the NRC covered up the radiation releases.
As indicated above and as indicated in my attached rebuttal to Dr. Sternglass' article and his statements at meetings, I have not even talked with Dr.
Sternglass since the Three Mile Island accident and I do not support his views.
The infonnation he presents in his writeup is taken from a 1965 article of mine in licalth Physics, where I calculated synergistic and cumulative effects to populations based on releases of major proportions of radioactive inventories of operating reactors.
The 1965 article presenting these calculations is the same one that I used in preparing some of the materials in the chapter of the Irandbook of Radioactive Nuclides, from which I estimated maximum consequences T)f the Three Mile Island accident.
Dr. Sternglass' assertions are based on calculations that assume full fi.ssion product release.
I have stated emphatically, not only at the Hershey briefings but in other talks since the TMI accident, that only a small fraction (actually far less than 1 millionth) of the radioactivity in the reactor was released, and that I can verify this fact based on my own observations.
In fact, if one considers possible radia-tion doses and risks to the population rather than fractional radioactivity, H is my estimation that the containment building was an outstanding success provided protection factors of well over a billion, as it was designed to m
do.
In fact, I believe that the measurable consequences of the Three Mile Island accident now prove that the containment building would have protected the public from the types of consequences predicted by Dr. Sternglass and Dr.
George Wald on television and in many r.ewspapers (see attachments), even if there had been a complete release of all fission products from the reactor vessel itself (and I do not believe that this would have occurred to 100%
completion under any circumstances.) Further, I support the risk estimates
- made by the ad hoc committee of NRC and other agencies' staff members.
I also believe the risk estimators used by the NRC are consistent with the recent recommendations of the Comnittee on the Biological Effects of Ionizing Radiations, National Academy of Sciences (BEIR), in regard to the upper limits of risks for use in calculating radiation health effects.
Thus, the new BEIR committee recommendations also effectively reject recent claims by T. F. Mancuso and others that they have found risks much greater than previous expert committees have estimated.
This rejection is consistent with my own testimony and evidence presented at Congressional hearings in 1978, and further supports the risk estimates of NRC and other agencies.
(Thisis my own independent professional judgment.
I had no role in preparing the NRC-EPA-HEW report
- on Three Mile Island.)
Attachments: As stated L. Battist, J. Buchanan, F. Congel, C. Nels'on, M. Nelson, H. Peterson, M. Rosenstein, " Population Dose and Health Impact of the Accident at the Three Mile Island Nuclear Station," U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Department of ifealth, Education, and Welfare, and Environmental Protection Agency, May 10,1979 (for sale by tne Superintendent of. Documents, U.S.
Government Printing Office, Washington, D.C.
20402).
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