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Date: Sat, 8 Jun 1996 21:13:12 -0700 (PDT)
From: Joe Chew <jtchew@netcom.com>
Subject: Fun with Radioactivity (FAQ fodder)

I have found a most excellent and voracious book with some possible entries for "The Misappliance of Science" or perhaps a new entry, "A Little Nukie Never Hurt Anybody."

The book is Barton C. Hacker, _The Dragon's Tail: Radiation Safety in the Manhattan Project, 1942-1946_, Berkeley: University of California Press (1987). Here are some Frequently or at least Occasionally Posted Legends that it contains good explanations of. The one-liners are not actual current verbatim FAQ entries, just my placeholders.

Hacker includes an extensive discussion of the radiationsafety aspects of the Trinity test, including "atomic cows." The book also makes mention of radiation exposure in the Operation Crossroads tests (tests "Able" and "Baker"). Though discussion of recent allegations about extensive and perhaps irresponsible personnel contaminations are largely beyond its scope, they are mentioned briefly.

The toxicity of plutonium in its various forms, and the historical perception of this, is an area with some urban-legend relevance that is treated only very sketchily, one of the book's few major omissions from our standpoint.

I would describe the book as challenging but accessible to the lay reader and easily read by anyone with a hard-science background that includes a nontrivial amount of physics. Many references therein are of course to the technical literature.

T. Painters of luminous watch dials got radiation poisoning.

The problem is discussed in Hacker, pp. 20-23. To summarize, radium-treated luminous watches appeared in the early teens and demand was spurred by WWI, with production reaching two million annually in 1919. Preparation of hands and dials was organized in cottage-industry fashion and performed almost entirely by young women. The risk was exacerbated by the introduction of water-based paints that allowed the use of brushes, which workers got into the habit of "tipping" by mouth.

Little was known about the risks, proper diagnosis of prompt effects and sequelae was happenstance, and no treatment was known. The problem was noted in the 1923-1924 time frame, and industry practices, as well as laws, were changed. It figures large in the history of radiation safety in the workplace and ultimately (along with prior knowledge that miners in Saxony and Bohemia had elevated rates of lung cancer) in the discovery of radon as a hazard.

T. Radium was once used in medications and quack cures.

Hacker discusses this practice on pp. 24-25. The 1932 death of a Pittsburgh industrialist and man-about-town who had been a faithful user of approximately 8 microcuries of radium tonic (and reputed aphrodisiac) a day prompted a public outcry that led to the banning of these items. Previously they had been used in everything from polio treatments to vaginal creams. Hacker describes his death only as "gruesome." (The squeamish reader is hereby warned that this part of industrial and medical history is not at all pretty.)

T. Los Alamos scientist incurs lethal radiation dose saving coworkers.

On p. 73, Hacker discusses the death of physicist Louis Slotin at Los Alamos in the type of experiment that suggested the title of the book, an exercise called "pulling the dragon's tail" meant to explore criticality. This and another fatal accident, which killed a scientist working alone, occurred after the war, though other workers had received substantial neutron doses during the war while performing such experiments.