Nuclear power stations: environmental surveillance of radioactivity

Because of the radiations they emit, radioactive substances can be detected, identified and measured at extremely low concentrations ? the corresponding masses are lower by a factor ranging from 1000 to 10 000 than those that can be measured by any other chemical or physical method, however precise, applied to non-radioactive substances. Radioisotopes can therefore be detected in the environment at levels much lower than those at which genuine public health problems begin to arise. Unfortunately, we cannot say the same of numerous non-radio active pollutants, which can be measured only at concentrations very close to, or even exceeding, the toxicity threshold. In the mind of the uninformed public confusion seems quite frequently to reign as between the detection threshold and the toxicity threshold. This undoubtedly explains the following situation which is, to say the least, paradoxical: people are afraid of the hypothetical effects of radioactivity at ridiculously low levels, whereas nobody is alarmed at the fact that the toxicity limits for a very large number of non-radioactive, but very real pollutants are being exceeded almost continuously. The sum of all artificial irradiations does not exceed the normal fluctuations of natural irradiation, and if the genetic effects of very low radiation doses were truly cumulative, the natural radiation to which we are all exposed and which is by far the highest would by itself have eliminated every trace of life on earth long ago. Lastly, let us not forget that merely the use of X-rays in medicine, particularly in radiodiagnosis, represents an additional average artificial irradiation of the population amounting to double the natural radiation (100 millirem per year). This is about 100 times the irradiation which would accrue from nuclear industry even according to the most pessimistic estimate. We have seen that the measures described above will make it genuinely possible to maintain environmental radioactivity in all circumstances at a level which is perfectly compatible with public health regulations. Far from constituting a hazard to the public, nuclear facilities can, by virtue of the strictness of the controls to which they are subjected, serve as a model for combating numerous unacceptable conventional pollutants of the environment, the most alarming of which, indeed, nuclear power will undoubtedly cause to disappear in the long run.