An article appeared September 29th in the Hawaii Reporter with the lengthy title "Navy's Narrowly Focused Scoping Meetings Ignore Assessing Future and Past Environmental Risks" by Beverly Ann Deepe Keever, a professor of journalism at the University of Hawaii.

She is clearly opposed to the Navy establishing a Research Center with the University of Hawaii, and spells out her reasons. She is also familiar with the many legal and regulatory weapons at her disposal to be deployed in her opposition to such research programs. It’s an obstructive, costly, lengthy process well-known for more than 30 years.

Her arguments include:

• 1. The relationship between the Environmental Impact Statement of the geothermal facility on the Big Island and Naval Research, which is not clear.

• 2. The alleged repressive impact the program would have on the campus of U.H., and

• 3. The alleged restrictions on students being able to publish secret technology in the open literature.

Many campuses have such research facilities and many of their students get top rated degrees and are often hired by government, academia, and industry. She also uses the tired 30 year old scare stories about plutonium and the atom bomb tests at Eniwetok Island in the Kwajalein Atoll in the South Pacific.

Sure Eniwetok (where atom bomb tests were conducted 50 years ago) was blown away by a large test, and sure some residual radioactivity remains. Much of the radioactivity keeps decaying away and is a minimal health threat. Remember that Hiroshima and Nagasaki are thriving cities today.

Thus she suggests that the “Navy Should Address Continuing Negative Impacts of 500,000 Years of Radioactivity Created by U.S. Pacific Nuclear Weapons Testing.”

To make her case against radioactivity she continues, “It is ironic that the scoping meetings were held 60 years and two months after the first and second U.S. nuclear weapons tests were conducted in the Pacific region. The environmental, cultural and human degradation resulting from those and subsequent tests continues to this day. And some of this degradation will continue for half a million years, considering that the radioactivity emitted from the plutonium in those weapons has been and will continue to be circulated globally for that long.”

She offers nothing in support of these assertions about radioactivity.

She doesn’t provide a single word to corroborate her assertions, nor what the scientific bases are, nor what precisely are those impacts of plutonium, the nature of those impacts, and why would they last 500,000 years. What precisely are the forms of degradation, how are they related to radioactivity, what are their relative magnitudes compared with say, the usual day to day risks of living?

On what basis are these statements made? Worst of all she doesn’t provide the unwary reader with badly needed context for such manmade radioactivity.

For example, all sea water is radioactive and has been so ever since the rivers began to run to the oceans billions of years ago. The reason for this is simply that natural radioactivity has been in and around the Earth since the beginning. There are more than 50 known naturally occurring radioactive isotopes.

Natural radioactivity was discovered 110 years ago in 1896 by Bequerel. It’s been 110 years and its well past the time that educators should teach about it. Its part of the natural environment, well know to scientists, about which much has been written.

About a year ago, I asked a University of Hawaii class of 20 graduate students if they had heard about natural radioactivity. None of them had. How many of the faculty could answer the question and give a 5 minute discussion of the many type?

There are billions of tons of radioactive uranium in the Pacific Ocean - see http://www.physics.isu.edu/radinf/natural.htm

There are billions of tons of radioactive thorium in the Pacific Ocean

There are billions of tons of radioactive potassium-40 in the ocean as well.

There are similar quantities of other radioactivity in sea water too, tritium, carbon 14, and a whole host of others in lesser amounts.

Ms. Keever seems concerned about the plutonium around the Kwajalein Atoll The amount of plutonium in sea water there (where Eniwetok is one island) is about 0.5 pCi/cubic meter, a factor of about 600,000 less than the potassium-40 in the same sea water.

See http://tinyurl.com/kghll

Thus, a major point is that just because something is radioactive doesn’t make it harmful. They are quite measurable, and being measurable doesn’t equate to being harmful.

In this case it’s very useful to compare the manmade radioactivity to that already naturally in the sea water. The radioactivity in the sea water is harmless (because of its low quantities), while the manmade radioactivity is a tiny fraction (1/600,000) of that. This is an important observation because it provides context.

Yet by leaving out the context which natural radioactivity provides, Professor Keever was in fact dealing with an extremely small amount of radioactivity in the form of plutonium, about 600,000 times less than the potassium already there. It’s a matter of freshman physics to know that we as humans have lived in an invisible sea of natural radiation for millions of years. Can you say radon, uranium, thorium, radium, actinium, polonium, etc.?

The bodies of all humans, including the body of the Professor Keever, contain very measurable amounts of these natural sources of radioactivity. These sources are far below any possible level which could create adverse health effects.

The amount of plutonium in that Kwajalein sea water happens to be a factor of about 600,000 lower. To claim that such small amounts of radioactivity in sea water are having a 500,000 year impact is without any scientific basis.

If Ms. Keever feels that this has a negative impact on humans, she also needs to explain why radioactivity at levels 600,000 times greater, is not. She can’t.

How in the world will the Navy respond to unscientific comments like this? May I suggest what the British have done? Put all such commenters under oath when giving testimony; have full cross examinations by subject matter experts, with full penalties of perjury hanging in the air.

As for Ms. Keever writing so copiously about a science she knows little about, perhaps she could take the advice of another journalism professor, Jon Franklin. Franklin writes in his Song of Science

See http://www.bylinefranklin.com/songofscience/songofscience/index.html

“As the media bottom-feeders gain influence, good reporters and editors are dropping out of the business at an alarming rate. They are replaced with “journalists” who act more like snake oil salesmen, political operatives, or corporate apparatchiks.”

Michael R. Fox, Ph.D., is the Director Center for Science, Climate and Environment. He can be reached via email at mfox@grassrootinstitute.org