[NukeNet] Radioactive Long Island

[Bill Smirnow]

   >Cancer rates on Long Island have soared
without explanation. For many of these cancers,
including >breast cancer, the only proven cause,
aside from genetic predisposition, is exposure to
radiation.



http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/12/opinion/nyregionopinions/12LI-McMasters.html
    Op-Ed Contributor
The Nuclear Neighborhood
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By KELLY MCMASTERS
Published: November 12, 2006
AT the geographic center of Long Island, just
before the fish tail splits, three plumes of
radioactive tritium snake through the earth. These
plumes extend from soil beneath Brookhaven
National Laboratory, where they originated during
experiments involving one of the lab's nuclear
reactors in the late 1990s, and travel by
groundwater east and south.

The United States Department of Energy, which owns
the Brookhaven lab, recently posted a legal notice
in local newspapers requesting public comment on
some options for cleanup. The department offered
five plans for the public to consider, from simply
monitoring the plumes to digging up the
contaminated soil and shipping it to an
undisclosed location. The department recommends
monitoring to be sure the plumes shrink over the
next decade as predicted. And if they don't?
"Additional actions will be evaluated."

The department's notice directed readers to a Web
site. Two maps there are particularly educational.
The first is called Operable Units and Areas of
Concern. It highlights 30 sites on the lab's
campus, including Graphite Research Reactor spill
sites, a Building 830 pipe leak and a Particle
Beam Dump. There is also the 123-acre stand of
pines and oaks known as the Gamma Forest, which
was irradiated with cesium-137 between 1961 and
1979 in order to research the effects of radiation
on plants.

In other words, the map charts decades of
accidental leaks and spills and intentional
releases of radiation, most of which issued from
the site's two decommissioned reactors. (Two other
reactors remain operational.)

The second map outlines groundwater flow from the
lab; two bright blue arrows point east toward the
Hamptons, and six point south directly at Shirley,
a mostly blue-collar community to the south that
shares the Hamptons' beautiful coastline but none
of their social cachet.

I grew up in Shirley. As a child there in the
1980s, I was fascinated by the lab, partly because
the neighborhood fathers who worked there - most
of them in support and service positions - traded
jokes about glowing in the dark. Today, the jokes
have turned sour.

A class action lawsuit has been filed against the
Brookhaven lab, and most of the plaintiffs are
from the Shirley area. The complaints range from
depressed real estate values as a result of living
in a contaminated area to the claim that cancers
and other illnesses have resulted from the
laboratory's pollution. A children's cancer
cluster - by 2000 there were 19 children in the
area afflicted by a rare soft-tissue cancer -
rings the lab like a necklace.

The plaintiffs' lawyer is Richard J. Lippes, who
fought and won the Love Canal case near Buffalo in
the 1970s. The Shirley case has been going on for
more than a decade already. During that time, the
lab has managed to clean up almost all of the
nuclear and chemical pollution flowing east toward
the Hamptons while largely ignoring Shirley.

When Brookhaven was constructed in 1947, Shirley
didn't exist; most of the East End of Long Island
was covered in potato farms and brush. It was this
isolation - the thick cover of pines and distance
from large populations - that made the site
attractive to scientists engaged in such
inherently dangerous research.

Sixty years later, the laboratory is still hidden
away in the middle of the Pine Barrens, but
beneath it lies an aquifer that is one of the
nation's largest single sources of drinking water,
serving nearly three million people.

I understand that the lab is worthy of
celebration - six Nobel Prizes have been won by
scientists associated with Brookhaven. I also unde
rstand that much of the work the lab conducts,
including medical research into addiction and
cancer, is vitally important. But over the six
decades the lab has been on Long Island, a dense
population has crowded around it.

Meanwhile, the lab released radioactive tritium,
cesium, europium, radium, strontium, plutonium and
several known carcinogens into the environment.
Cancer rates on Long Island have soared without
explanation. For many of these cancers, including
breast cancer, the only proven cause, aside from
genetic predisposition, is exposure to radiation.

With all that in mind, I would like to suggest my
own plan for Brookhaven's cleanup. Let's call it
Option 6: Close the remaining two nuclear reactors
on the Brookhaven National Laboratory property. It
is time.

Nuclear reactors made sense in the 1940s when most
of Long Island was brush and pines. But it makes
no sense to house them in a dense residential area
where so many lives are at risk and mistakes -
radioactive, potentially cancer-causing mistakes -
continue to be made. Shut them down.

Kelly McMasters, who teaches creative writing at
Columbia, is writing a book about the hamlet of
Shirley.