Word: strontium
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...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...
...Libby is not alarmed by strontium 90. In his widely publicized letter to Missionary-Physician Albert Schweitzer (TIME, May 6), he said that its threat to growing children is at present about the same as from "the additional dosage that a resident at sea level would receive from cosmic rays if he moved from a beach to the top of a hill a few hundred feet high...
Geneticist E. B. Lewis, also of Caltech, proves in Science that leukemia (a cancer-like blood disease) is indeed 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...
Concerning the article on "The Peril of Strontium 90" [May 6], I feel very strongly that we should heed Dr. Schweitzer's warning...
Willard Libby was primarily addressing himself to Dr. Albert Schweitzer, the illustrious missionary-physician and Nobel Peace Prizewinner, who had called for an end to H-bomb testing because of the strontium 90 peril. Is it not preferable. Dr. Libby gently asked Dr. Schweitzer, to accept this small risk rather than "the far greater risk, to freedom-loving people everywhere," of slackening "our defenses against the totalitarian forces"-until some method of safeguarded disarmament has been achieved...