“Each day I went to class carrying my trusty Geiger counter.”
By Thomas Belton
Physics was my most difficult subject at Penn. To some, the mechanics of the physical world are as simple to read as the nightly baseball scores. For me it was more like trying to reassemble the family clock after I’d pulled it apart as a child to see how it worked. Every piece came away with superb logic on disassembly, but the reconstruction eluded me. Without a diagram, I couldn’t discern the obvious mechanical connections to recreate time’s swift passage in a box. I might as well have gone outside and looked at the sun.
Yet in spite of this shortcoming, when my wife and I were broke in graduate school and needed money to keep the wolf from the door, it was a job as a radiation safety technician at Penn that kept us from penury. The Radiation Safety Office was tasked by the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) to inspect labs and affirm the safe use of radionuclides in every academic and medical department. In the basement of the University hospital, I stumbled upon a hermetic molecular biologist who injected isotopic iodine-137 into nanny goats, then studied kidney failure when she subsequently deprived them of essential amino acids. At the physics department I measured isobars of invisible radiation leaking from lead-encased sources of thorium and radium.
This job proved to be the best all-around education that a budding scientist—studying marine biology, in my case—could ever hope for. In my daily inspections I observed every possible permutation of inquiry devised by the scientific community and their unique modes of application to physics, chemistry, and medicine. Each day I went to class carrying my trusty Geiger counter and a pack of toluene-soaked papers to take wipe samples on lab benches. It was a great icebreaker for making new friends, or meeting maniacs, as I chatted with hundreds of curious people who wanted to debate the ethics of dropping the bomb on Hiroshima or the perils of nuclear energy. I relished these willy-nilly amateur discussions but found the more interesting anecdotes coming from the researchers I visited. Some described how radiopharmaceuticals would become the diagnostic tool of the century (which they did) while others prophesied the development of cheap and safe nuclear fusion reactors (which has yet to pan out).
My first experience in radiation protection outside of academia, however, came in 1979 when we heard over the Radiation Safety Office radio that a nuclear meltdown was under way at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant, just 90 miles upwind of Philadelphia. A partial core meltdown of the pressurized water reactor in Unit No. 2 resulted in the most significant accident in the history of the American commercial nuclear power generating industry. We later learned that the accident was due to a stuck valve in the reactor but compounded by operator error. The event released an estimated 43,000 curies of radioactive krypton and 15 curies of gaseous iodine-131 into the atmosphere. Iodine-131 can cause thyroid cancer at dosages much lower than this.
The NRC seemed paralyzed during the ensuing five days, trying to simultaneously understand the problem, communicate about the relative risks, and decide whether the accident required a widespread emergency evacuation of those downwind. The health physicists in my office at Penn immediately began debating the repercussions if the protective containment around the reactor core were to crack. My concerns, on the other hand, flowed from my studies in marine biology. The reactor was built on an island in the middle of the Susquehanna River, which was the primary drinking water source for many communities downstream and supplied half the freshwater flow to Chesapeake Bay. The Chesapeake Bay is the largest estuary in the United States and an incredibly complex ecosystem. What would happen to it, I thought, if the meltdown sent tons of fissionable materials downstream to this waterway, a source of seafood for millions of Americans? It would kill millions of animals outright but also bioaccumulate isotopes in the tissue of those that survived. The half-life for many of these fissionable nuclides was in the hundreds if not thousands of years. We could lose the Chesapeake Bay as a natural resource for generations.
That’s when John Thomas, the director of our office, received a call from the NRC in Washington asking for help. The Commission was mobilizing all assets in Pennsylvania to perform downwind monitoring and to seek advice on plume meteorological calculations. We found out that day that the shortcomings shown in the blockbuster movie The China Syndrome, released only 12 days before the accident occurred, were not far off the mark. The 1979 thriller tells the story of a reporter who discovers safety cover-ups at a nuclear power plant. The title refers to an idea put forth by nuclear engineers that if a nuclear plant melted down and breached its containment, it would melt straight through the earth until it reached China. The parallels with the events going on in central Pennsylvania were disheartening and colored our perceptions of the regulator’s deliberations over the next few days as we listened to emergency response personnel on our shortwave radio and helped plan the potential evacuation of the fifth-largest city in the United States.
Uncertainty reigned in those chaotic days as the Three Mile Island disaster paralyzed the nation with fears of nuclear fallout and communities across the US mobilized for safety reviews at every nuclear plant. Even President Jimmy Carter, a former nuclear engineer in the US Navy, visited the reactor facility to try to calm the nation. Eventually the TMI accident was contained and no further amount of radioactive material was released into the environment. But virtually overnight, nuclear electrical power generation became a target for anti-nuke environmentalists and apple-pie politicians alike.
As it happens, my job as a radiation safety technician at Penn proved to be my first environmental job but not my last. Upon graduation as a marine biologist, I became a research scientist with the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection’s Office of Science and Research, carrying out environmental field studies and assessing the public health impacts from air and waterborne toxins as well as radionuclides. One of these came along quite unexpectedly when, in December 1984, Stanley Watras, an engineer assigned to the Limerick nuclear power plant then under construction in Pennsylvania, set the radiation alarms ringing when he walked through a detector.
Though this might have been understandable if Watras had been leaving the plant after a full day’s work, the nuclear rods had not been delivered yet and the alarm went off as he entered the plant. He asked Limerick’s owner, the Philadelphia Electric Company (PECO), to check the radiation levels at his house a few miles away, where technicians discovered the highest concentration of the colorless, odorless, and tasteless radon gas ever found in the US. The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Resources estimated that living in the radon-tainted house for one year, Watras and his wife Diane had been exposed to the equivalent of 455,000 chest X-rays, which increased their risk of lung cancer by 13 to 14 percent. They immediately vacated the house until PECO completed a $32,000 cleanup. Geologists later determined that the Watras residence sat upon the Reading Prong, a granite formation that extends like a river of stone from near Reading, Pennsylvania, on through a wide section of northern New Jersey and into a narrow band of New York State and Connecticut. This whole formation was known by mining operators to have high uranium content.
Both Pennsylvania and New Jersey moved quickly to deal with this finding by mapping thousands of houses that lay atop the Reading Prong and sampling their interiors for radon. NJDEP’s health physicists estimated that roughly 30 percent of the houses over the Reading Prong in New Jersey had radon levels exceeding a USEPA-calculated action guideline of 4 picocuries per liter of air. My office helped distill this information and focus it into regulatory responses, communicating carefully with homeowners to allay their panic while simultaneously mobilizing them to test and mitigate their homes through simple air venting pumps.
To be honest, back in 1979 when I joined Penn’s Radiation Safety Office, I never envisioned using any of the esoteric physics I learned in study hall to help people deal with real public health issues in an emergency.
I look back upon my fear of failing physics in college now and find that in spite of its arcane formulae of sub-atomic particles and nuclear fission, it offered some simple philosophical tools to support an environmental detective. For it was Isaac Newton who proposed a new dynamic and mechanical description of the world in which energy and motion are characterized by acceleration, inertia, and the concept of conservation of momentum. And perhaps it’s in his concept of inexorable momentum, with events ever moving forward, that I find a simple explanation for my life and my career. I took what I’d learned and carried it with me until the opportune moment arose, and found meaning and purpose in it.
Thomas Belton is a marine biologist and environmental scientist who attended Penn between 1975 and 1979. He is the author of Protecting New Jersey’s Environment: From Cancer Alley to the New Garden State (2010), from which this essay is adapted. Used by permission of Rutgers University Press.
