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Chapter 1: Threshold Illusions
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10 Threshold Illusions As oceanographer richard fleming went home to the University of Washington in the fall of 1952, he was hoping to have lifted a heavy burden from his shoulders. He had just put together a draft statement about the disposal of radioactive waste at sea, and he admitted, “I am returning to Seattle feeling years younger and six inches taller with this load off my neck.”1 There was a new faculty position waiting for him there, and he was eager to devote his energy to it. But over the years, he had been part of a committee sponsored by the National Bureau of Standards to assess ways to get rid of contaminated material. It was particularly burdensome for Fleming because, as everyone began looking to the sea as the final solution to the problem, he was the only oceanographer on the committee. It should not have been a difficult task; after all, the bureau was not expecting any restrictive recommendations, and in fact the culture of the bureau discouraged them. But the more he looked into the problem, the bigger it became, revealing to Fleming the profound state of ignorance about ocean chemistry and dynamics, the biological dangers of particular isotopes, and the intricate details of waste disposal engineering. His initial report did not go over well with colleagues at the bureau and at the Atomic Energy Commission. So the project continued to sap Fleming’s time and energy as he reworked the draft over the next year. His colleagues at major oceanographic institutions waited for him to make what would be the authoritative statements about the risks of ocean contamination, and his colleagues in government waited for him to draft something that would not condemn present practices. But he struggled with how to set permissible levels of waste disposal when there was so little known about the effects, and he was uncomfortable with the idea that radioactive waste could safely disappear into the oceans without significant consequences. But as time passed and his competing Chapter 1 Threshold Illusions 11 responsibilities drew him away from the project, he settled for a document that reinforced the assumption of both the AEC and the bureau: there were thresholds of safety, below which one could expect no harm at all. Fleming wrote to his colleague Allyn Vine in 1953 that ultimately his job became one of identifying maximum tolerable quantities based on the accumulation of isotopes in the flesh of food fish.2 Perhaps this was reasonable; after all, he reasoned, surely some radioactive waste could be put into the sea. Despite the role he played in authoring the first major national guideline about radioactive waste at sea, the experience did not sit well with Fleming. Perhaps he came to realize that one man could not change institutional culture , and he was happy to flee to the comforts of academe, with its culture of individuality and intellectual freedom. His suggestions that the AEC should support more research on ocean disposal had been ignored, and the bureau had cast aside his cautious reservations about allowing indiscriminate dumping . When in 1955 he was asked by the bureau to participate in a reassessment of the problem along with other oceanographers, he declined. “I have ‘had my say,’” he wrote. “I feel rather frustrated in my dealings with the AEC,” he added, “and unless there is a change of heart I do not intend to press the matter any further.”3 Despite Fleming’s frustrations, neither he nor any other prominent oceanographers played a combative role in the virulent public controversies over radiation effects between academic scientists (often geneticists) and the AEC throughout the 1950s. Instead, the way Fleming framed his recommendations —with the goal of assigning maximum tolerable quantities—actually conformed to a manner of thinking about radiation that geneticists already had been critiquing and trying to revise. Maximum quantities implied threshold values below which no harm could be expected. According to geneticists, such thresholds were illusory for radiation effects. Eventually oceanographers would come to the similar conclusion about the seas, but it would be a long process. This was partly because thresholds conformed to marine science culture ; for example, this was precisely the way scientists approached problems of overfishing, by assigning maximum sustainable yields.4 It was no stretch to assume that, like fish stocks, the ocean could rejuvenate itself through dilution, and that it had a definable annual capacity to do so for radioactive waste. At the...