Word: aec
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...this flow of information is based the official AEC position, recently expressed by Scientist-Commissioner Willard F. Libby. In general. Chemist Libby's view is calm. As a scientist, he knows that fission products from megaton* explosions rise into the stratosphere and circulate round the earth for years. Most threatening of them is strontium 90, whose long half-life (28 years) keeps it potent during its stratospheric circling, and whose habit of lodging for keeps in human bone makes it a probable cause of leukemia and bone cancer...
...AEC scientists agree with Dr. Libby. Most vocal is Physicist Ernest O. Lawrence of the University of California, Nobel Prizewinner (1939) and inventor of the cyclotron, who finds it "beyond my comprehension" that any reputable scientist should worry about fallout from weapons tests. He thinks the tests could continue forever without damage...
...caused by radiation. He uses statistics covering Japanese atom-bomb victims and three types of Americans exposed to large amounts of X rays. Strontium 90, he believes, will have the same effect. He figures that if its concentration in U.S. bones ever rises to one-tenth of what the AEC considers the "maximum permissible concentration," leukemia in the U.S. will increase...
Both physicists and biologists emphasize that too little is known to support hard-and-fast judgments. Dr. Harold A. Thomas Jr., Harvard professor of civil and sanitary engineering, who has worked for eight years with the AEC on safe disposal of radioactive wastes, says the field is full of mysteries and surprises. "We are concerned about strontium 90," he says, "but there are many other [fallout] materials whose effects are almost totally unknown." He suggests being more careful...
...Libby is well aware of the adverse opinion swirling around him. He thinks the AEC does not get proper credit for the effort it is making to find out more about the effects of fallout on humans. The AEC has also markedly reduced the radioactive poisons released by its megaton bomb tests, and it promises to make future tests even "cleaner...