Word: radon
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...years the Environmental Protection Agency has urged Americans to check their homes for radon contamination. Seeping into basements from underlying rocks and soil, the colorless, odorless radioactive gas raises the risk of lung cancer. The EPA maintains that a household level of four picocuries of radiation per liter of air is enough to produce cancer in 13 to 50 of every 1,000 people who breathe it regularly. The agency estimates that at least 8 million homes exceed this level, warranting such measures as sealing foundation cracks...
Although the Atomic Energy Commission knew by 1951 that venting radon gas from uranium mines could greatly reduce workers' exposure to radiation, it waited 20 years to require the practice at mines in Southwestern states. As a result, thousands of miners, many of them Navajos from local reservations, contracted lung cancer, and many of them died. In 1979, 200 workers with cancer sued the Federal Government for damages, but courts dismissed the case on the ground of sovereign immunity, which exempts the Government from legal liability unless it gives its consent...
...belts, go hang gliding and expose themselves to the cancer-causing rays of the sun. On the other side, they suffer a bad case of the jitters about the smallest threat to personal well-being. They flee from apples that might bear a trace of Alar and fret about radon, nuclear power...
...about where the Utah experiments had gone wrong. Pons and Fleischmann claimed that they had caused the nuclei of deuterium atoms, a heavy form of hydrogen, to fuse together to form helium, thus releasing radiation and heat energy. But, the physicists suggested, the radiation detected might have come from radon that was already present in the laboratory's air. The helium reported could also have seeped into the apparatus from...
Most pollutants are probably not present in large enough concentrations to pose significant health hazards. But there are a few worrisome exceptions. Radon, a radioactive gas that gets into the air from soil and rocks, is also present in some water supplies. Rick Cothern, a member of the EPA's Science Advisory Board, points out that when the contaminated water pours out of a tap or shower head, the radon can pass into the air inside a home. He believes that radon from water may cause a few hundred cases of cancer each year. Those cases might be prevented...