It’s the same as iodine in terms of how the body recognizes it, chemistry, so it goes to the thyroid. Now, iodine-131 is a radioactive form of iodine – very radioactive – that’s produced in nuclear reactors when uranium is split and we generate energy. And so the subsidiary questions as to who was hurt, whether somebody got thyroid cancer, and so on, were not really raised until this lawsuit was filed.ĬURWOOD: Just briefly explain the science of why iodine-131 would be of interest involving people’s health. So, essentially, people were led to believe that there were no serious releases of radioactivity, especially in terms of iodine, from this accident. And then the officials concluded that, “ah, well, although we don’t really understand the accident, we don’t think anything was released ” and that became the accepted theory for 45 years. And yet, despite that public health example, they did not follow a sound procedure. So they actually went and sampled the milk, collected it.Īnd I felt that at the time of the Rocketdyne accident, in 1959, that that example was available to the authorities. They collected milk from a 200-square-mile area – I believe half a million gallons, if I remember the number correctly – and they dumped it. And after attempting to sort of cover it up, or hide the consequences, in a day or two the British authorities decided to go largely public. The iodine-131 releases were between, I estimate, somewhere between 80 and 100 times bigger than the iodine-131 releases from Three Mile Island.Īnd there had been a reactor accident at Windscale in Britain two years prior which had an even larger release of iodine from there. And then, in the middle of July, they had a partial meltdown and there was a release of radiation. MAKHIJANI: Well, it was a sodium-cooled reactor that had had a problem that had been detected in terms of contamination in the core, and they ran the reactor anyway. Now why is it that nobody ever heard about this? Hello, sir.ĬURWOOD: So, tell me the story of what happened in California. He’s the president of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research and a former advisor to the EPA on nuclear matters. Arjun Makhijani provided scientific testimony for the plaintiffs. After an eight-year-long court battle, more than 100 local residents reached a settlement with Boeing-Rocketdyne.ĭr. The facility also released many other radioactive materials, as well as other toxic chemicals, over a period of years.
And while radioactive iodine only has an eight day half life, that’s more than enough time to get into the local dairy cows and contaminate the milk supply. Iodine-131 – that is, radioactive iodine – was released in doses estimated up to 100 times that of Three Mile Island, enough to cause various types of cancers and thyroid abnormalities, particularly in children under the age of 15.
The Former Sodium Reactor Experiment Containment Building where the 1959 meltdown occurred.
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