The story might have ended there and been the sad tale of a young lady who lost an arm to cancer.   However, due to her poor choices, the story is much much sadder.   Ms. Ainscough decided to decline further treatment.  She instead opted for an organic diet, coffee enemas and various detoxification rituals.   She believes she is “healing” her cancer and that this is an example of her taking responsibility and doing the right thing.

Ms. Ainscough looks pretty good and, according to her, she feels pretty good.   That’s actually not too surprising.  The cancer has invaded her soft tissues and is growing and spreading, but, at least from the sound of it, it has not become debilitating just yet.   The sad thing is Ms. Ainscough seems to be very confident she is getting better because she lacks the most basic understanding of what the condition is and how it needs to be treated.   It’s certainly true that surgery, chemotherapy and radiation are damaging, but that’s because they have to be.  Cancer cannot be “healed.”  It must be killed.  Cancerous cells are damaged cells of ones own body, which grow out of control, due to a breakdown in the function of the mechanisms that control cellular growth.   Cancer is a problem inherent to animal cell biology, it can happen in anyone, for any number of reasons, but usually with no single attributable cause, and when it does, the only way it can be cured is by destroying the cancerous cells.

Ms. Ainscough’s complete lack of even the most basic understanding of how cancer is treated is apparent in some of her statements, such as this one:

Drugs do not cure cancer. They just don’t. Every now and then, chemotherapy and radiation treatments may put a patient into “remission”, but this is not truly healing. This is certainly not a cure. Why? Because cancer is so much more than the tumour it shows up as. The tumours are merely the symptoms. And when you just target the symptom without dealing with the root cause, the disease is going to keep showing up. You can chase the disease around your body with surgery and radiation, and you can douse it with toxic chemicals, but this is not an effective long-term solution. This is why you here so often of people whose “cancer came back”. They didn’t do the work to truly reverse their disease. Cancer is nothing more than your body telling you that something has got to give. It is the result of a breakdown in your body’s defenses after it has endured years of abuse in the form of a toxic diet, toxic mind and toxic environment.

No. That’s not it at all. The tumors are the problem. The tumors are composed of the cancerous cells that are the root of the problem and the reason it often comes back is that it’s so damn hard to get every one of those cells, especially when they start spreading to different areas of the body.   While cancer can be the result of carcinogenic chemicals, it can also be caused by heredity or by the random degradation of genetic material that happens as a result of cellular respiration.

Let me be blunt about the sad truth here.  Jess Ainscough is going to die.   I don’t mean in fifty years either.   The cancer she has now is going to kill her.   It’s too late for her to have a good prognosis, and if she continues without treatment, then the already poor odds are going to get worse.   She may feel okay for the time being, but she will die.  Her only hope is spontaneous remission, which in this kind of cancer is all but unheard of.

I should note that I am not a doctor and I do not have access to Ms. Ainscough’s complete medical information.  However, what I do know is that she claims to have been diagnosed with epithelioid sarcoma.   If this is indeed true (and if it’s a lie then she’s downright evil), and if she is not receiving treatment by surgery, radiation and chemotherapy, then the cancer can be expected to be fatal.   This has been confirmed by experts I have consulted before writing this.  As one put it “Not treating epithelioid sarcoma is suicidal.”

The thing that really bothers me, however, is that she is working very hard to put out the message that her non-treatment is working and is the best course of action.  She’s been embraced by the media and this idiocy could easily kill others who buy into it.

Via Dolly:

“I’m healing myself from cancer naturally”

In 2008, when I was 22 years old, I was diagnosed with a rare type of cancer called epithelioid sarcoma in my left hand and arm.

I was living in Sydney at the time and working as the online editor for DOLLY magazine. I was living an ideal life for someone in their early twenties – burning the candle at both ends, paying no attention to how my actions could affect my health, but having a whole lot of fun while I was at it.

Everything was going exactly according to my life plan. Or so I thought.

On the 24th of April, 2008 I went to see my hand surgeon to have a cast removed, following an operation I had to biopsy some lumps that had been popping up all over my left hand and arm.

After taking the cast off, my doctor told me the news that would change my life in too many ways to predict. He said that I had cancer, and that the type of cancer I have is so rare that not many doctors know how to treat it.

Epithelioid sarcoma doesn’t respond to chemotherapy or radiation, and my only chance of prolonging my survival would be to have my arm amputated at the shoulder. But essentially, my condition was incurable.

None of this made any sense to me. I felt so healthy, and I looked healthy. I could not understand how my life had come down to a decision about whether to have my whole, fully functioning arm chopped off.

After so much anguish and being given no other options, I signed the papers and arranged to have the amputation. However, Baby Jesus, Buddha, Elvis – or whoever is up there – must have been looking out for me, because two days before I was due to have the operation, my medical team came to me with an alternative option.

They wanted to tie a tourniquet around my armpit so that an extremely high dose of chemotherapy drugs could be pumped through my arm. I spent eight days in hospital having the treatment, then a week at home recovering.

Following scans showed I was clear of cancer, but in 2009 – not even a year after going into remission – the cancer was back.

This time I was told that my only real chance of prolonging my survival would be to have my arm amputated at the shoulder, but that this would just be biding me time. My case was regarded as terminal.

Deciding this was not good enough, I took matters into my own hands. I refused their offers and began searching for natural, alternative cancer treatments.

The way I saw it I had two choices. I could let them chase the disease around my body until there was nothing left of me to cut, zap or poison; or I could take responsibility for my illness and bring my body to optimum health so that it can heal itself. For me it was an easy decision.

I began looking at the different ways I may have contributed to the manifestation of my disease and then stopped doing them.

I swapped a lifestyle of late nights, cocktails and Lean Cuisines for carrot juice, coffee enemas and meditation and became an active participant in my treatment.

This research led me to Gerson Therapy which ensures you have a perfectly balanced diet for optimum health, assisting your body to flush out nasties whilst feeding it with all the goodness it needs to flourish.

Epithelioid sarcoma is a relatively rare type of cancer of the soft tissues. It usually occurs in the extremities and is most common in young adults. The tumors are slow growing, but have an extremely high rate of recurrence. Whenever possible they are best treated by surgical removal. As with most cancers, the earlier the tumor is removed, the better and the lesser the chances of recurrence, but even when the entire tumor can be removed, it frequently recurs. Up to 77% of patients will have the cancer reoccur after it has been removed.

Amputation would seem to be an extreme step to take, but in the case of Epitheloid Sarcoma, it is often the recommended treatment that offers the greatest probability of long term survival. The cancer is prone to metastasis early in its development, which is what makes it so difficult to treat and necessitates radical surgery as the best means of avoiding recurrence.   The cancer is most prone to “local metastasis” which is why operations to remove only the tumor are frequently unsuccessful.   Operations to remove larger areas of tissue or amputate the entire limb have a much higher success rate.   It’s hard to gauge the exact success rate because it depends very heavily on how early the cancer is caught and to what degree it has spread.  If the entire region of the cancer is removed, metastasis is only 30%.  Therefore, while amputation of a cancerous limb does not guarantee that the cancer is cured, but it offers the best chance for doing so.   Even despite the disfigurement and lack of function, it is generally advised that such radical surgery be the primary means of treatment.

The condition becomes extremely difficult to successfully treat once it has begun to spread to more distant areas of the body.  It does not respond well to chemotherapy some chemotherapy drugs do appear to have effect on large tumors, but the data is inconclusive due to lack of peer reviewed studies evaluating long term survival.  Radiation, though helpful for local occurrences, is of limited value once the cancer begins to spread to multiple areas of the body.   In some cases, aggressive radiation therapy does stack up favorably to amputation and therefore may allow for retention of a limb while still providing a similar success rates.   Surgical removal of the tumor combined with radiation therapy in the area of the tumor is another option which offers relatively good success with the ability to retain the limb.

The fact that this type of cancer is not common makes it difficult to get good statistical data on the success rates of different treatment regimes.   With aggressive treatment by surgery, radiation and chemotherapy, the overall success rate is, sadly, only lackluster.   About 42-55% of patients treated will survive ten years or more, which is generally considered the benchmark for being “cured.” Ms. Ainscough, however, would have had better than average odds of survival, given her demographic.  Women tend to have better survival rates than men, and younger patients tend to have better survival rates than older ones.  In more favorable cases, the rate of successful treatment can be as high 80%.

It’s hard to tell what Ms. Ainscough’s prognosis would be, but it appears it would have been pretty good, based on her age, gender and general health.  With aggressive treatment, she had a very good shot at beating the cancer, even if it may have cost her an arm.   Regardless of her ultimate outcome, treatment could certainly offer Ms. Ainscough a longer life, even if it were not ultimately successful.   In all likelihood, the aggressive chemotherapy she had early on has given her at least a year or more extra to live.

Unfortunately, it’s now probably too late.   I asked a doctor about what would be recommended now, and he said it might be amputation, if the cancer is completely or at least mostly in one arm, but if it’s spread further, amputating the arm would not provide much benefit.  If the cancer has moved beyond her arm, which it probably has, then there’s very little hope of a successful outcome.  Once the cancer has reached widespread distribution, the likelihood of long term survival is small, although it is not impossible. Even if treatment could still result in a favorable outcome, it appears that Ms. Ainscough is not open to the possibility of reconsidering mainstream medicine.

The progress of this type of cancer is usually slow.  Since it primarily affects soft tissues, it may be grow and spread for quite some time before presenting serious symptoms or life threatening complications.  Soft tumors develop around the body, mainly in the deep subcutaneous tissues.  They are slow growing and may or may not result in noticeable tenderness or discomfort.  It can, in some cases, result in surface ulcers.  The slow but aggressive cancer will eventually begin to impair normal functions as it invades lymph nodes and structures like the abdominal wall.

It can take some time for this form of cancer to become debilitating and even longer for it to kill.  The most common way that this cancer kills is by infesting the lungs.  It may take some time, but eventually the cancer will begin to impair lung function.   Palative care may include supplimental oxygen, which can allow patients to live a bit longer, even as their lung function declines.  Ultimately, this is the manner in which epithelioid sarcoma kills.

I really do not take any delight in saying this, but based on all the research I have done and the opinion of doctors in the field, if Jess Ainscough really does have epithelioid sarcoma and is not having it treated then she will almost certainly die in the near future.   She may continue in relative comfort and appear healthy for the time being, but the cancer is only going to get worse.  She will begin to suffer progressively worse symptoms and will die, although it may take anywhere from a few months to a few years for it to happen.   She has missed the opportunity to have a reasonably good prognosis.   If she were to start treatment now, her likelihood of living a full life would be low, but if she continues to forgo treatment, it will be even worse.

I really find it extremely sad.   Ms. Ainscough is a twenty six year old lady who may be naive and has been very quick to embrace alternative medicine as a cure for a disease she seems to have no understanding of, but being naive hardly is grounds for a death sentence.   Sadly it does not look like she is going to make it to thirty.

Now this is really going to sound terribly cold, but considering she is going to die and there’s not much to be done about that, part of me hopes it happens soon, because has long as she is alive (which isn’t going to be a whole lot longer, no matter how you look at it), she’s spreading this deadly misinformation.   Maybe once she dies, her tragic case will make others wake up and realize they need to get their condition treated.

The ones who really should have to answer for this disgrace is not so much Ms. Ainscough, who is as much a victim as anything else.   This poor woman is dying and does not even know it, because charlatans exploited her ignorance and lack of blind trust.  Media outlets have given her a platform to spread it even further.   In the end, she’ll be the dead one and they’ll be laughing all the way to the bank.

Unless she’s lying about having this condition, in which case she’s just plain evil.

Finally, in a highly unusual step, I wrote to Ms. Ainscough:

Dear Miss Aincough,

I am writing you because I have read your posts and articles about your battle with cancer and the actions you have taken to try to treat your condition. I am sure that you firmly believe that you are getting better and that you are doing the right thing to improve your health. You may even feel better and perfectly healthy at the moment. However, you have been had. You are taking advice from people who have no idea what they are talking about. If you continue to do so, it will likely kill you.

I am not a doctor, but I know when a doctor should be consulted and being diagnosed with cancer is most certainly a time when you need a doctor. Having read your accounts, I can understand why you feel they are not giving you the answers or advice you are looking for. The modern healthcare system often bounces patients between white coat-clad professionals who do extremely cold and clinical assessments and seem to take little interest in personal wellness. This is a symptom of doctors needing to treat many people and being forced to work within constraints. It’s a heavily regulated and impersonal system. That does not, however, mean they don’t know what they are talking about.

The doctors who treat cancer understand it very well. They have spent years studying it on a biochemical level, a microscopic level and on a whole-body level. They know how it works, how it progresses and how different chemicals interact with the cancer cells. Becoming a doctor is not easy and you’ll generally find doctors to be very smart people.

Despite what you might have heard, doctors are not in it just for money. Sure, a career in medicine pays pretty well, but it’s not as simple as that. Medical school is long, hard and expensive. Doctors have to spend years in low paying residency before they ever get the chance to make good money, and even then the salaries doctors get are good, but they’re not usually enough to become extremely rich – usually just upper middle class. They have to worry about things like malpractice and may be forced to be on call at odd hours. If a person only wants money, they’ll go into finance or become a lawyer. Doctors, on the other hand, may make good pay, but they are also motivated by the desire to help and the challenge of things.

I don’t think anyone is going to deny that cancer is a tough thing to treat. It’s not as simple as nutrition, and if it was, we would not be spending billions a year working on improving treatment. Cancer is a problem inherent to animal cells. Sometimes they break down and start to divide out of control. When this happens, there’s usually no attributable cause. It’s not your body reacting to something, but just a random error that causes the body to attack itself. This is why it’s so hard to treat and why the treatment can be so difficult.

I realize that losing an arm is something that anyone would want to avoid. Being young and healthy and suddenly hearing you’ve got to have your arm amputated to avoid dying from cancer must be a huge shock. However, I assure you that no competition medical professional would ever recommend such a thing unless they thought it was absolutely necessary and even then, they don’t take it lightly.

The reason you have heard things that you do not want to hear from doctors is that they are required by the ethics of their profession to be truthful. When they said you had to have an arm removed and that it would not guarantee that it would successfully stop the cancer, they were telling you the cold hard truth. When they say the disease could kill you and they can’t be sure they’ll be able to stop you, they are telling you the truth. It’s not the reality you want or they want, but it’s just the way things are. Those who tell you to drink juice and have coffee enemas can tell you much more positive and desirable things. They can tell you that you are being cured and will live a long healthy life with both arms and no cancer. They can tell you this because they lie.

One thing that is universal with cancer treatment is that it always is always more effective when started early. You have already waited some time and therefore, your odds of success are now lower than they had been. They are not zero and if you start treatment now, you have a fighting chance of beating the disease. If you want until tomorrow, they will be worse. The longer you wait, the worse the odds get.

I really do not expect you to listen to this, because I’m sure you have heard this all before, but I still felt ethically obligated to at least try.

Please consider seeking real medical treatment or you will almost certainly die.   If you get treatment now, you might have a chance.

Regards,
Steve Packard

Um…

Well… it is a weak acid so it could possibly react with chemicals that are either alkaline in nature or are just prone to breaking down in acid.  But those “chemicals” are rather high up in altitude, and aside from that obvious problem, one might think that if the chemicals were potent enough to be dangerous even after drifting down and surviving the harsh conditions of the upper atmosphere than vinegar probably would not do much.

Really, do I need to explain the flaws in the logic here?

Apparently so.

There are actually a lot more videos about this on Youtube. I did not have time to look at them all, so some may be even more lame.

Helsinki/Finland, January 11, 2012-Epidemiological studies are given the most weight in evaluation of human health effects. Therefore, when researchers started their effort to find out whether cell phone radiation causes brain cancer, epidemiology was given the most of attention – and the most funding.

Well… yes, since Epidemology is the study of health events, disease patterns, health statistics and disease rates and their relation to factors like environment, lifestyle and other causes, it would seem to be the field of study that would apply to such a question.

It’s as straight forward as determining that geology is the appropriate field of science to look to when trying to determine the characteristics of a rock.

However, and please let me play “devils advocate”,

Only if I can play with science advocate.

is the epidemiology overrated?

No.

There, are we done?

Will epidemiology ever give us reliable answers concerning cell phone radiation and brain cancer?

Yes, and they have. Or is it simply that you don’t like the answer and want it to be something else, therefore you consider it flawed?

In 2010 and in 2011, two of the largest epidemiological studies on brain cancer were published. It appears that the time and money were used generously,

There’s a lot of interest in the topic, so a lot went into it. I’m not certain which studies you mean, but there have been some enormous ones recently.

but the studies failed to provide reliable answers concerning cell phones radiation and brain cancer. Flaws in the design of both studies prevented delivering conclusive answers.

Really? Well, if you say so. But thankfully, we don’t have to rely on any two studies. Two studies don’t mean much in the world of epidemiology anyway. To actually get a conclusive answer, you need to have confirming data coming from many studies. In this case we’re lucky enough to have literally thousands. So, you could actually discard two of them if you so choose and it won’t change the balance of the evidence much, because there’s such a huge amount from other sources.

It was 1999 when the largest case-control epidemiological study, INTERPHONE, was planned. At that time, optimists hoped that by the end of this project in 2004 we would know whether cell phone radiation causes brain cancer.

Actually, I think we had a pretty good idea even back in 1999, so it doesn’t seem very optimistic to think we would by 2004. That would be like me predicting that in the year 2017 we’ll know that the earth revolves around the sun. Unless there’s some kind of complete collapse of civilization that leaves behind only a handful of completely uneducated people, I am pretty sure we will know that in 2017, since we do already know it now.

I think I see where this is going though. The Interphone study was supposed to be one of the largest studies of this type and would dispel the doubt forever. It pretty much did.

After several delays, INTERPHONE published the results of the glioma brain cancer study in 2010.

The results were confusing, to say the least. Use of the cell phone for less than 10 years seemed to have a “protective” effect, whereas the use of the cell phone for more than 10 years showed a small increase in glioma occurrence.

Well I agree on one thing: The study abstract didn’t do a very good job of putting this all in context. It might simply be that research scientists are very apprehensive about using absolutes and tend to talk in degree of confidence. The tiny increase in giloma, but only in certain subsets was almost certainly statistical noise. It was miniscule. The “protective” effect can be attributed to a combination of statistical noise and possibly some slight confounding factors.

The balance of the data provides pretty good confirmation of no overall risk increase. Again, this should have been made more clear. The problem largely stems from having non scientifically literate persons get involved in the reporting. Reports and public officials have a tendency to focus on very narrow portions of a study like this and take them out of context. They will generally then demand to know whether the researchers can be 100% confident that this is not in fact a risk effect. The answer to that question is always no, statistical analysis never regards anything as being 100% certain. Then the study gets reported as if it raised doubts, when it actually does not.

Several problems with the design of INTERPHONE were debated. By design, the INTERPHONE study was unable to detect brain cancer induced by cell phone radiation because of its long (over 10 years) latency period.

Okay, that might be the case, but plenty of other studies did look at longer latency periods. A few went so far as to track down some of the early adopters of cell phones who started using them frequently in the early 1980’s and they also found no increase in brain cancer.

That said, even if the AVERAGE latency period were something like twenty or thirty years, it’s hard for me to imagine that there could be a bell curve so narrow as to have zero detectable risk increase after a much shorter period of time.

At the time of execution of INTERPHONE (2000-2004), cell phones were in common use for only a few years. There would be not enough time for the development and diagnosis of brain cancer if it was caused by cell phone radiation.

It does not matter how common they were by the early 2000’s. The fact of the matter is that they have existed since the late 1970’s and they have been used by many people since then. Sure, the actual proportion of the population that began using cell phones a lot in the early 1980’s is small, but it’s still more than large enough to produce good study results.

It’s not even really a cell phone issue. Wireless phones are just UHF/Microwave transmitters and those have been around for ages. There are studies that have been done on others exposed much longer. Police officers started using radar guns in the late 1950’s to measure the speed of motorists and some cops spent thirty years working highway patrol with a radar gun in their car. Others spent their careers as microwave technicians for AT&T or television networks. Military personnel worked on the deck of ships with radar antennas energized nearby.

Studies have been done on these individuals. Many of them, in fact. The results are consistent and compelling: The only health effects ever detected are acute thermal injuries and no chronic effect of exposure to RF fields has ever been documented.

However, there was an even more important design flaw. The information about the extent of exposures to cell phone radiation was based on individual recollection of the subjects in the study. The study subjects were asked about their history of using cell phone, including how long and how many phone calls they made in the past.

Perhaps in this study, but not in all. While it may introduce a potential source of error, I’m hard pressed to see how this could possibly skew the studies that badly. Even if you rely on spotty recollection, the fact that people who reported being heavy phone users show no greater cancer risks than those who never owned a cell phone at all would seem to be pretty hard to mess up.

By the way: Studies on cigarette smoking and cancer have largely been based on the subject’s recollection of how many packs they usually smoked a day. Despite this, they had no problem picking up on the fact that tobacco causes lung cancer.

It is a very unreliable method. Who of us remembers how many and how long calls made a few days ago? The study subjects were asked to recall cell phone use up to ten years before the study.

Okay, lets see if I can do this…

Got my first cell phone in the summer of 2001. Before that I had used cell phones a bit, but only occasionally when on that belonged to someone else. I worked for a company that sold cell phones so I had a good plan with a discount. Consequently, I used it a good few minutes a day or more. I would say my use has generally been on the increase since then, although not always. I’ve generally made or received three or four calls per day, usually each one only being a few minutes. Occasionally I have longer calls. In 2004 and 2005 I had a job that had me on the road a lot and my usage went up to about a dozen calls a day, but mostly short. As it stands now I use about 180 minutes of talk time in a month, but occasionally one or two long calls can push that way up. That’s how it’s been for the past few years.

Good enough?

Therefore, by design, INTERPHONE compared reliable information concerning diagnosed cancers with entirely unreliable information about exposures. Such kind of comparison can not produce reliable result, as was seen in the confusing results of the study published by INTERPHONE in 2010.

Again, you’re presuming that this error is so great that it would make someone who has never owned a cell phone indistinguishable in risk from someone who says they’ve been a heavy cell phone user for the past ten years. That just does not make sense. Even if recollection skewed the data, it shouldn’t so enough to cause that kind of discrepancy.

In 2011, the Danish Cohort published another largest study, evaluated in this column in December 2011.

Similarly to INTERPHONE, the Danish Cohort compared reliable information on diagnosed brain cancers with the absolutely unreliable information about exposures based not on the use of cell phone but on the length of subscription with the network operator.

No. That’s actually perfectly reasonable. It stands to reason that a person who has a cell phone contract and owns a cell phone will be more prone to using a cell phone than one who does not. This is even more true in the early years. In 1983, a handheld cell phone cost about four thousand US dollars. Anyone who pays that much for something obviously has reason to do so. For example, real estate agents were some of the first to embrace the technology, because even given the high cost, they needed to make appointments while traveling between properties.

It might be imperfect in that some cell phone owners will use it more than others, but a cell phone owner will always use it more than one who does not own a cell phone.

The study also contaminated the control group with the cell phone users.

The study looked at the habits of long term user as compared to the general population and to groups of similar demographic profiles. Some of those included those who had used a cell phone as well, but didn’t you just assert that it would not matter since the latency period is very long? In any case, it’s all but impossible to find a large group these days which has never owned a cell phone. So the study compared long term cell phone users to those who either had recently acquired a cell phone, never owned a cell phone or had been very light user. The study actually looked at the groups using more than one method. It examined it based on the length of the phone ownership, the average usage of the phone, the reported habits etc.

In all cases, no coloration to increases in brain cancer was ever detected.

Again, as with the INTERPHONE, the Danish Cohort made comparison of reliable data on cancer with the unreliable information about exposures cannot produce reliable final result.

And what the hell would you consider to be reliable data?

Brain cancer is a rare disease, somewhat in the range of around 10 cases per 100,000 people. It means that in order to reliably detect the change, which seems to be less than 50% according to flawed INTERPHONE, tens of thousands of the study subjects should be analyzed. This is very expensive but not necessarily productive.

It’s actually not quite that rare. In fact, it’s about twice as common as cited.

But regardless, the fact is that if the probability of brain cancer were increased by using a cell phone, it would be easy to detect if that probability increase were large. In other words, if it increased the risk from, 22 per 100,000 people to 23 per 100,000 people, that would be very hard to find and a massive sample would be needed. On the other hand, if it increased it from 22 per 100,000 people to 100 per 100,000 people, that would be easy to detect and would stand out from the statistical noise in even a modest study.

Therefore, what we can say from these studies, without doubt, is that while it is impossible to rule out the possibility that there is an increased risk, it must be vanishingly small, if it does exist, because otherwise it would have been easily detected.

As shown by the experiences with INTERPHONE and Danish Cohort, large amounts of money (tens of millions of Euros) and ample amounts of time (over 10 years) were used and no reliable answers received.

No, we have reliable answers. They’re just not the ones you want.

In the current situation, with the above presented experience, should the epidemiology be the first kind of studies to use our scarce research resources? Epidemiology is very expensive and takes a very long time to get results. Any flaw in the study design sets us back by ten or more years.

Well I agree in so much as there’s no point in throwing more money at this. We have plenty of data. The jury is not out. The questions have been answered. It’s time to consider spending money on things we don’t know.

Would we be we better off using the available funding for the human studies examining acute effects of cell phone radiation on physiology? This would, of course, include studies of the known molecular events leading to initiation and development of cancer. We still do not know if cell phone radiation triggers any such events in living humans.

We’ve actually done that too.

And as far as molecular events that lead to initiation and development of cancer, those are not observed with microwaves. No mechanism by which that could happen has ever been discovered, despite more than a century of study of RF fields and electromagnetic radiation.

Performing physiological studies on volunteer will provide information whether any known carcinogenic events are triggered by cell phone radiation. Depending on the result, we could act immediately by imposing preventive measures based on scientific evidence.

Yes, we have done that. We’ve done it on humans. We’ve done it on animals. We’ve done it on live tissue cultures. We’ve done it on chemical systems that mimic what goes on in cells.

To provide such information, epidemiology will still need tens of years before it is able to perform effective studies, assuming that studies will be designed without any major flaws. Volunteer studies examining physiology and pro-carcinogenetic events would provide information much faster.

It’s been done. At some point it becomes time to give up on the existence of something which has been studied for so long and has not been determined to exist.

In this time of scarce resources, we need to make choices how to obtain, most reliably and expeditiously, information about the possible effect of cell phone radiation on brain cancer.

Based on the experience of the last 10-15 years, epidemiology does not seem to be the method of choice.

Well, compared to an assclown with an ax to grind and a desire to be in the newspaper, it actually does pretty well.

I love how she says she didn’t know the age of the anchor woman’s daughter and therefore couldn’t know if she had a boyfriend.   The whole damn point of being a psychic is you’re supposed to know stuff without being given all the information necessary to figure it out.   If you know a person’s daughter is seventeen, for example, it’s not a long shot to guess she either has a boyfriend or has some kind of romantic interests.   If she’s six, you can probably guess she does not.    It’s so ridiculous to think a real “psychic” would need to be primed with the information to know this.

The best part is the other news anchor who actually takes her to task, pointing out that she didn’t guess the name of the woman’s daughter but only guessed J or an M for someone relating to the woman.   It’s very common for a psychic to claim success for something they didn’t get outright but were lead to.  It’s also rare to get a news personality who will take them to task for this.  I wonder why she wants to do his reading off camera?

Via the Mail and Guardian:

Obama rescues the Grand Canyon

Barack Obama took a big step towards preserving one of the world’s natural wonders on Monday, banning uranium mining on 400 000 hectares of land around the Grand Canyon.

The move, announced by the interior secretary, Ken Salazar, at a film screening in Washington DC, bans new mining claims around the canyon for the next 20 years. The area is rich in uranium deposits.

“A withdrawal is the right approach for this priceless American landscape,” Salazar said. “People from all over the country and around the world come to visit the Grand Canyon. Numerous American Indian tribes regard this magnificent icon as a sacred place and millions of people in the Colorado river basin depend on the river.”

Environmental groups said the move, which was opposed by the mining industry and some Republicans, would secure the American president’s environmental legacy.

The measure does not affect about 3 200 existing mining claims around the canyon, however. The administration said there would be continued development of 11 uranium mines.

Conservation groups said Obama had shown political courage in going ahead with the ban in the face of opposition. “Despite significant pressure, the president did not settle for a halfway measure,” said Jane Danowitz of the Pew Environment Group. In the final years of the George Bush presidency, when uranium prices were rising worldwide, mining companies filed thousands of claims in northern Arizona on lands near the Grand Canyon.

They also proposed reopening old mines adjacent to the canyon.

Salazar ordered a temporary halt to claims in 2009 after Obama came to office. Government officials proposed the 20-year ban in October last year, after an environmental review calling for the preservation of an “iconic landscape”.

The reality is that the Grand Canyon was never actually in any danger of being torn up for mining. That’s because the iconic expanse of canyon of eroded sandstone and river bed is located within the Grand Canyon National Park. It might depend a little on how you define the beginning and end of the canyon, but in general, the expansive “grand” part is all within the national park. Because it is within a national park, there can be no mining claims. The area is permanently and unquestionably protected and the only development and construction allowed is limited infrastructure for the park itself. (things like visitors centers, hiking trails and such.)

The park is enormous. It’s 1,902 sq mi or 4,927 sq km. It includes the canyon itself and much of the surrounding area. It was established as a National Monument in 1906 and has enjoyed the protection from commercial development of a US national park since 1919. There is absolutely no way that any part of that massive area will be mined for uranium or anything else.

The park is in Arizona, in a relatively sparsely inhabited region. Much of the area around the national park is federally administered land. As such, claims can be staked for mineral recovery. It’s not actually in the park and it’s certainly not in the canyon. It’s many miles away, but in the general region of the Grand Canyon. More than two thousand potential mining sites have been staked, many for uranium, as uranium can be found in the sandstone of the area. This is normal. Mining companies can, depending on the circumstances, claim or lease federal land for mineral recovery.

In 2009, it was proposed that a massive area that is only remotely close to the Grand Canyon be closed to mining. Now that decision has been extended, at least for the next twenty years. Vague environmental concerns are cited as the reason. There are already some long standing hard rock mines in the area, which apparently will still be allowed to operate.

I have to admit that I don’t actually have any expertise on this area or the eco-systems or whether it’s so unique or amazing as to make it worthy of complete protection from mining and development.   However, it should be made clear that regardless of the validity of this decision, this is not the Grand Canyon and the Grand Canyon was never in danger of being destroyed by mines.

But uh oh… it seems nuclear plant operators may have surfed the net

Via CNN:

NRC: Nuclear technicians surfed web on the job

Nine technicians responsible for monitoring operations at a Louisiana nuclear power plant spent on-duty time surfing the Internet — visiting websites that included news, sports, fishing and retirement information — jeopardizing the safety of the plant, federal regulators say.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission disclosed the web-surfing activities Monday in a letter that proposes a $140,000 fine against the River Bend nuclear power station, 24 miles northwest of Baton Rouge.

No pornography sites were accessed, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission said. And importantly, the NRC said, the computer use did not present an avenue for hackers to gain access to reactor control systems, a modern-day fear at industrial plants.

But the NRC said the web-surfing control room operators were directly responsible for monitoring the reactor and other plant systems, and that their actions violated plant procedures requiring operators to remain attentive and focused on their work.

According to an NRC investigation, nine operators “deliberately violated” the safety procedures by surfing the web between January and April of 2010. Three of the nine did so with such frequency and duration that they are being issued “severity level three enforcement violations.” (Severity level one represents the greatest significant violation and severity level four is the lowest.) The remaining six operators will receive severity level four violations.

The operators were not named by the NRC.

An NRC spokesman said the proposed fine for web surfing is the only such action for web surfing in memory, and may be the only such action in the history of the agency.

In a notice to Entergy Operations Inc., operators of the River Bend Station, the NRC said that it appears that operators “remained attentive to reactor operations, indications, and alarms” while surfing the Internet.

“However, because most of the operators involved knew and understood” the prohibitions on Internet access, they exhibited “deliberate misconduct” and engaged in “hundreds of instances” of accessing the Internet from the “at-the-controls” area of the control room.

Score one for ridiculously reporting.

No, there was never a safety risk. While I don’t know exactly what the operators were assigned to do or how the systems operated here, all indications are that they were simply passing some time by surfing the net when they didn’t have any need to directly interact with the controls. Nuclear reactors certainly do not require continuous second by second human input nor do they need to have a reactor operator spending hours blankly staring at the dials that usually don’t change. Granted, all indicators are checked frequently, as they should be, but that was never interrupted.

It seems that in this case the operators were doing something many of us have: using company computers with internet access for personal surfing. Companies don’t like this, of course, because it tends to encourage employees to spend their time non-productively. If not for the internet, the operators might be more prone to doing something more useful for the company during the time they spend babysitting the control room. It’s like anything else, where the operator is primarily there for contingencies or if problems arise.

Still, this really just isn’t a news story. The workers never left their posts and they were ready to respond to any incident. That’s the important thing. I guess in the future they’ll have to go back to old fashioned paper crossword puzzles and magazines.

The solution to this problem has been the radioisotope thermal generator.   An RTG is a simple device, consisting of a strong particle-emitting isotope that produces heat and a thermoelectric generator which converts that heat into electricity.   The heat can also be used to keep vital components of the probe warm.  Unlike nuclear reactors, radioisotope thermal generators are extremely simple, have no minimum critical mass, produce little gamma and almost no neutron emissions, which could blind scientific instruments, and therefore require little or no shielding.  Modern RTG’s can provide hundreds of watts of reliable electrical power for years on end in a small, durable package.

The choice of isotope for space missions has always been, and continues to be plutonium-238. Plutonium-238 is a powerful alpha emitter which produces enormous amounts of heat energy.  Plutonium-238 produces only a small amount of low energy gamma emissions, making it easy to shield.  It’s easily prepared into ceramic oxide pellets that are chemically stable and have good thermal transfer.   With an 88 year half-life, plutonium-238 is short lived enough to be a good energy producer yet long lived enough to allow for missions of many decades.

All radioisotope thermal generators used for deep space missions have used plutonium-238.   RTG’s were also used to power the Apollo Lunar Surface Experiments Packages left by astronauts on the moon.    The RTG used for the Mars Science Laboratory provides 110 watts of electricity and uses about 4.5 kilograms of plutonium-238.  Larger RTG’s have been built for deep space probes, which provide up to 300 watts of power and use 7.8 kilograms of plutonium-238.  Some spacecraft have used multiple RTG’s, for example, Cassini was equipped with three RTG’s which provided a total of 900 watts of power to the spacecraft.

There are other isotopes that can also be used to provide power for RTG’s, but none are as desirable as Pu-238.   Strontium-90, a high energy beta emitter, which can be extracted from spent fuel, also produced significant amounts of heat, but would require substantially more shielding and produces less power per gram of material.  Isotopes of Curium have been studied as well, but also provide much less power and require greater shielding.  Americium-241 has also been considered, but at least four times as much material would be needed to produce the same amount of power, and greater shielding would also be required. Still, Am-241 is regarded as being the second most well suited fuel for RTG use.

Worldwide production of Am-241 is only a few kilograms per year, with US production capacity standing at only 500 to 750 milligrams annually.   Most of this material is already used to fill demand for smoke detectors and moisture gauges.  In order for the US to have a viable chance of using Am-241 as an RTG fuel, production would have to be ramped up significantly.

At one time, plutonium-238 was relatively cheap and easily available.  The United States had large stocks of the material and used it for numerous space missions.  Yet since the early 1990’s, that has not been the case.  Since then, only Russia has had the capacity to produce plutonium-238 and the price has skyrocketed.   US missions have been entirely dependent on plutonium-238 purchased from Russia at the cost of hundreds of millions of dollars.  Yet now even this limited supply is threatened, as Russia has begun to signal that it will no longer be able to provide the quantities of Pu-238 that the US (or potentially other nations) would require for continued space exploration.

Production of Plutonium-238:

The plutonium that can be extracted from light water spent fuel contains significant amounts of plutonium-238, but it’s combined with other isotopes of plutonium, making it unusable.  Separating out the plutonium-238 would require a complex plutonium enrichment system, which is far less practical than simply preparing the plutonium-238 on its own.

To produce plutonium-238, the first thing that is required is neptunium-237.  Neptunium-237 is produced as a byproduct of the reprocessing of spent fuel.   When a nucleus of uranium-235 absorbs a neutron, it will usually fission.  However, in a thermal spectrum reactor, some of the uranium-235 (about 18%) will absorb a neutron and not fission.  Instead, the uranium-235 becomes uranium-236.  Uranium-236 has a low neutron cross-section, so most of the uranium-236 generated in a reactor will just remain uranium-236, but a small amount of it does absorb a neutron and become uranium-237.  Uranium-237 has a very short half-life of only six days, decaying to neptunium-237.  Another source of neptunium-237 in spent fuel is the alpha decay or americium-241.

Spent fuel contains about .7 grams of np-237 for every one hundred kilograms of fuel.  That might not seem like much, but fuel reprocessing operations routinely go through hundreds of tons of fuel.   Because Np-237 is the only isotope of neptunium present in spent fuel in any significant quantity, it does not require any enrichment.  Instead, simply chemically separating the neptunium out yields nearly 100% neptunium-237.

After removing the neptunium-237, it is fabricated into targets which are irradiated with neutrons in a high flux reactor.   The targets are then removed and processed to separate out the plutonium-238 that is produced.  The plutonium-238 is then fabricated into RTG fuel tablets.

The end of US production:

The United States ended the practice of spent fuel reprocessing in 1977 when it was banned by the Carter Administration because of “proliferation concerns.”  Since then, the ban has been lifted, but as all reprocessing operations were shut down in the 1970’s and little support can be found for restarting the practice, the US still has no capacity to reprocess spent fuel.  After 1977, some material from plutonium production reactors continued, which yielded some neptunium-237, but that also ended in 1992, with the end of the cold war.

Today, the United States reprocesses no fuel at all and therefore cannot produce any neptunium-237.  There may still be some of the material remaining, though it’s doubtful that very much is left.   It should still be possible to obtain Np-237, purchasing it from countries with major spent fuel reprocessing programs, such as Russia, France or Japan.   However, this depends entirely on the willingness of such nations to provide it and may be expensive, since additional steps beyond normal reprocessing are required to produce the highly concentrated neptunium necessary for plutonium-238 production.

Getting enough Np-237, however, is not the biggest problem that the United States faces in producing Pu-238, however.   The US has a shortage of suitable reactors where the neptunium could be irradiated to produce the final plutonium-238 product.  Irradiating the targets requires a reactor with a very high neutron flux and the ability to receive materials for irradiation.  During the Cold War, the United States operated reactors at the Hanford and Savannah River sites primarily for the production of plutonium for nuclear weapons.  These same reactors could be used to irradiate materials for the production of medical and industrial isotopes along with materials like plutonium-238.  Therefore, up until the late 1980’s, the US had ample capacity for plutonium-238 production.   In the early 1990’s, the United States shut down all such reactors over “proliferation concerns.”   Russia, on the other hand, converted theirs to the full time production of peaceful isotopes, which is why they have been the world source for plutonium-238.

There are other reactors in the United States that could potentially produce plutonium-238, but not many of them.   The US has seen an unfortunate reduction in the number of research and irradiation reactors available.  Many, such as the Fast Flux Test Facility were shut down due to “proliferation concerns.”  Others like the High Flux Beam Reactor were closed after celebrities lobbied heavily against them.  Many simply were closed due to age and have not been replaced, given the lack of construction of new research reactors in the US in recent years.

There are only two reactors in operation that might be usable for producing plutonium-238.  One is the High Flux Isotope Reactor at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.  However, the HFIR is already running at near full capacity for basic materials research and producing specialty isotopes.  It’s the only source of the vital isotope Cf-252 in the United States.  It also hosts a recently installed cold neutron source.   Because of this, the HFIR does not have enough available capacity to produce Pu-238.  That leaves one reactor: the Advanced Test Reactor.   The ATR is located at the Idaho National Laboratory.  It’s the only source in the US for production of cobalt-60, an isotope critical to medicine and industry.  It’s also one of only a few reactors that can be used to simulate extended fuel irradiation in a light water reactor, making it critical to fuel studies.  It’s not entirely clear to what extent producing Pu-238 at the Advanced Test Reactor might limit its capacity for other important functions.

The Advanced Test Reactor has been the focus of recent efforts to restart US Pu-238 production.   Several bills and proposals to begin production at the site have been floated, but funding has not been provided.  Most recently, a funding request for the relatively small amount of fifteen million dollars by the DOE was shot down by Congress.  No explanation was given, but it seems no US legislators are interested in restarting plutonoum-238 production, quite possibly because nobody’s spent any money lobbying for it and some have spent money lobbying against it.

Restarting production in the US may prove more difficult than simply finding a suitable reactor.   Producing the final Plutonium-238 tablets used for providing heat to RTG’s requires that the irradiated targets be dissolved, the plutionium-238 processed out and fabricated into the final RTG fuel.   The material is very hot, both in terms of radioactivity and literally.  Handling and processing it requires special facilities such as hot cells and plutonium chemical separation facilities.  The United States has limited capabilities in this area, with most of the facilities capable of fabricating special nuclear materials shut down over “proliferation concerns.”

That said, the US should have enough capacity for processing such materials to make at least a modest Pu-238 production program possible, if only funding is provided and the effort to do so is undertaken.   Ideally, enough would be made to allow for its use on spacecraft without extreme conservation measures taken, but that seems to be politically unlikely due to “proliferation concerns.”

In the end, we are left with a few options for the US space program, not all of them very appealing:

1. Restart domestic production of plutonium-238
2. Continue to rely on the limited Russian capacity to produce the material and hope they do not cut production or sales, as they seem to be indicating will happen.  Perhaps this could be avoided by paying an even more exorbitant amount to Russia for the material.  Continue with only limited deep space flights due to this limited source.
3. Hope that some other country steps up to the plate and starts making plutonium-238.  There’s a good chance that a country like China might start domestic production in the coming years, as they become more ambitious in their space program.  Whether they’ll share with the US is another issue.
4. Rely on another isotope that will result in less energy per kilogram, require greater shielding and therefore dramatically reduce spacecraft capabilities and increase launch expense.
5. Rely exclusively on solar power for space exploration.  Space exploration will therefore be limited to the inner solar system, out to about the orbit of mars and a little bit further, even out to Jupiter, although this will require very large solar arrays and will be restricted in capability due to very limited power capacities.   Beyond Jupiter, exploration by space probes will be impossible and will have to cease entirely.  And while exploration of the inner solar system will still be possible, landers that require significant amounts of continuous power will not be possible, thus making the Mars Science Laboratory the last of its kind.

Personally, I vote for choice 1.

Whether or not this is cause for concern really depends on the exact composition of the copper concentrate. Most forms of copper concentrate have low soluability in water, so much of it may just sit in a big pile where it landed in the river. Copper oxide is not hazardous at all, and is found very commonly in nature. On the other hand, if it contains large quantities of copper sulfate, there may well be reason for concern. Copper sulfate is mildly toxic and certainly would be reason for concern if it were present in such a large spill.

Although copper concentrate produced by mines is generally not considered hazardous material, it may contain other minerals that present a problem.   If the material contains significant amounts of cadmium, lead or mercury, then this could be a problem, since such a huge quantity has been spilled.   Of course, it would depend on the concentration of those materials and what type of chemical compounds they were part of.

Reports from Sky News do indicate that this copper concentrate was regarded as toxic, so there does appear to be some valid reason for concern over contamination of the river.   Officials have stated that any material that dissolves should be diluted to levels that are not hazardous.

But that’s not what everyone is so damn concerned about.

Via NEWS.com.au

Fears of uranium on derailed freight train

And the NT News has learned that OZ Minerals has also been allowed by NT and SA governments to transport the copper concentrate without complying with Australian Dangerous Goods laws.

The copper concentrate from OZ Minerals’ Prominent Hill mine contains less than 0.008 per cent uranium, as revealed in the company’s Material Safety Data Sheet.

This means there could have been up to 96kg of the chemically toxic heavy metal in the estimated 1200 tonnes of concentrate that spilled from a derailed freight train into the Edith River.

OZ Minerals says radiation levels are below regulatory limits and are monitored to ensure no risk to the workers or public during production or transport.

But it would not provide its monitoring results.

NT WorkSafe and SafeWork SA exempted the company from recent regulations requiring copper concentrate be transported in rigid containers with lids.

OZ Minerals has been allowed to transport the substance – classified federally as environmentally hazardous – in containers known as kibbles, covered only by tarpaulins.

And the 12-month exemption runs out today.

SafeWork SA said the exemption was to allow the company time to design and build new containers.

The Territory Government didn’t respond to questions as to why it allowed an exemption, or whether it had demanded to see the uranium monitoring results.

OZ Minerals’ spokeswoman Rachel Eaves said the new containers were arriving next week.

“They could be considered beyond compliance as they are developed to load a bulk commodity without the use of a ship loader,” she said.

The news comes after days of denial from NT Government heads and the train company that any uranium was on the train.

Country Liberals transport spokesman Adam Giles said nearly 100kg of uranium mixed up in the 1200 tonnes would be a “fair amount” floating down the river.

“What I find surprising in the three days since the spill is that the Chief Minister (Paul Henderson) hasn’t said anything about it,” he said.

The NT Environment Department says it is testing for uranium in water samples, even though the amount involved was reportedly lower than regulations.

Mr Henderson said he did not know the copper concentrate contained uranium.

“I understand the copper concentrate contains less than 0.008 per cent uranium and poses negligible risk,” he said last night.

Mr Giles said it was crucial the investigations into the derailment look at what provisions were needed to make sure trains don’t go through flood waters again.

It never fails to amaze me the level of absurd fear that uranium seems to inspire. People may not realize it, but uranium is a very common substance in earth’s crust and just about any soil sample you can get is going to test positive for uranium if a sensitive enough test is used. The copper concentrate is actually not especially high in uranium, as far as mineral concentrates go. Phosphate minerals commonly contain much higher traces of uranium. The uranium is not there because anyone put it there, it is simply part of the mineralogy of the area where the copper was extracted.

0.008% concentration of uranium is by no means high. I live in Connecticut, a state composed largely of granite with some sandstone in the local mineralogy. I would have a very hard time finding a rock on the ground that had significantly less uranium than that in it. Therefore, let me emphasize that if a train load of gravel fell into the river, it would also result in a “uranium scare” if the same standards were applied.

Assuming that all the concentrate did land in the river and assuming that it all did dissolve into the water (which it didn’t), that would result in a maximum amount of uranium of 96 kilograms. That’s not a lot, especially when it’s been diluted into 1200 tonnes of aggregate. Considering how heavy uranium is, what this amounts to is the equivalent of seventeen centimeter cube of uranium.

I should also point out, that there’s already uranium in that river. The river bed undoubtedly contains rocks and soil with more than 96 kilograms of uranium present. The river contains dissolved uranium and always has. Adding another 96 kilograms is just spitting in the ocean. Most probably don’t know this, but they’re walking around every day on concrete, stone and mortar that has just as much or more uranium in it. Uranium is part of the environment and it’s ridiculous to be concerned about something containing 0.008% uranium, especially when it may well have other components that are legitimately hazardous!

I was disappointed by how apologetic the article was, but it still made an important point about where our food actually comes from.   Indeed, the “ideals” that the Times refers to never really were embodied by the organic farming movement in any meaningful way.   The entire idea really comes down to a philosophy that certain things are bad simply because they are man-made, while others are acceptable.   There’s no science to it at all and there never was.

Via the New York Times:

Organic Agriculture May Be Outgrowing Its Ideals

TODOS SANTOS, Mexico — Clamshell containers on supermarket shelves in the United States may depict verdant fields, tangles of vines and ruby red tomatoes. But at this time of year, the tomatoes, peppers and basil certified as organic by the Agriculture Department often hail from the Mexican desert, and are nurtured with intensive irrigation.

Growers here on the Baja Peninsula, the epicenter of Mexico’s thriving new organic export sector, describe their toil amid the cactuses as “planting the beach.”

Del Cabo Cooperative, a supplier here for Trader Joe’s and Fairway, is sending more than seven and a half tons of tomatoes and basil every day to the United States by truck and plane to sate the American demand for organic produce year-round.

But even as more Americans buy foods with the organic label, the products are increasingly removed from the traditional organic ideal: produce that is not only free of chemicals and pesticides but also grown locally on small farms in a way that protects the environment.

The explosive growth in the commercial cultivation of organic tomatoes here, for example, is putting stress on the water table. In some areas, wells have run dry this year, meaning that small subsistence farmers cannot grow crops. And the organic tomatoes end up in an energy-intensive global distribution chain that takes them as far as New York and Dubai, United Arab Emirates, producing significant emissions that contribute to global warming.

From now until spring, farms from Mexico to Chile to Argentina that grow organic food for the United States market are enjoying their busiest season.

“People are now buying from a global commodity market, and they have to be skeptical even when the label says ‘organic’ — that doesn’t tell people all they need to know,” said Frederick L. Kirschenmann, a distinguished fellow at the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture at Iowa State University. He said some large farms that have qualified as organic employed environmentally damaging practices, like planting only one crop, which is bad for soil health, or overtaxing local freshwater supplies.

Many growers and even environmental groups in Mexico defend the export-driven organic farming, even as they acknowledge that more than a third of the aquifers in southern Baja are categorized as overexploited by the Mexican water authority. With sophisticated irrigation systems and shade houses, they say, farmers are becoming more skilled at conserving water. They are focusing new farms in “microclimates” near underexploited aquifers, such as in the shadow of a mountain, said Fernando Frías, a water specialist with the environmental group Pronatura Noroeste.

They also point out that the organic business has transformed what was once a poor area of subsistence farms and where even the low-paying jobs in the tourist hotels and restaurants in nearby Cabo San Lucas have become scarcer during the recession.

To carry the Agriculture Department’s organic label on their produce, farms in the United States and abroad must comply with a long list of standards that prohibit the use of synthetic fertilizers, hormones and pesticides, for example. But the checklist makes few specific demands for what would broadly be called environmental sustainability, even though the 1990 law that created the standards was intended to promote ecological balance and biodiversity as well as soil and water health.

Lets stop and consider the greater context here: there are eight billion people in the world. That’s a lot of people to feed. Thankfully, we can feed them all. The fact that not everyone gets enough food is not due to a lack of capacity to produce it but more because of localized socioeconomic and political issues in getting it to those who need it. We grow enough food in the modern world to feed everyone. Not only that, we do it at a very reasonable cost, which results in people generally not having to spend the majority of their income just to get their daily nutritional needs filled.

For example, if you’re in the United States, the federal minimum wage is $7.25 per hour. If you work one hour a day at the minimum, you can make enough money to keep yourself reasonably well fed. And not only that, but in first world countries, the average citizen can afford to buy things that are imported out of season. Better yet, our food rarely carries serious pathogens and when it does, it gets recalled rapidly. We don’t suffer from periodic famines. The worst thing most of us will ever suffer through is a regional drought or frost driving the cost of a particular type of produce up for a few weeks.

Sure, we take all this for granted, but considering what it has been like for most of human history, the fact that you can reliably go buy a meal for a few dollars, that it will be free of pathogens and that it’s always available and not subject to periodic shortages is pretty damn impressive.

We did not get to this point by forcing all foods to be grown in small mom and pop farms.   Such local food is great when you want something that’s as fresh as you can get and happens to be in season, but make no mistake, it’s a luxury.   We could never feed all of society by such small operations and doing so would not have any real ecological advantages.   All human activity will have some impact on the local ecology, and agriculture is no different.   That does not mean the impact has to be unacceptably large.   However, the best way to keep that impact to a minimum is by efficiently farming the land, using the most modern practices and technology available.

“Organic food” is not about small, local mom and pop farms.   Most people seem to think that if food is “organic” it means that a friendly old man in overalls grew it while chewing on a blade of grass and whistling a tune about how he loves the land.   It’s not.   Farming is a business like any other business and farmers will use the tools they have at their disposal to produce as much as they can with as few resources as possible.  The farms are located in the most favorable areas.  That means that fruit and vegetable farms are often located in tropical areas where they can provide fresh product to market all year long.

On large farms, efficiency is very important and great efforts are taken to get as much product from the given area as possible.  They’re run and managed like the industrial-scale operations they are.   Many, but not all, of these large farms are owned by families.  Thanks to modern management and farming methods, these farms are productive enough to make their owners very comfortable financially.

It is much harder for anyone to support themselves on a small farm.  Many of the smallest local farms are not full time operations.  The owners may have other jobs and keep the farm as a “hobby farm.“  Those which do work small farms full time may have to concentrate on a specialized sector in order to remain commercially viable.  Some manage to make small farms economically viable by operating them as a specialty product provider, such as a winery a nursery for ornamental plants.  Others make money by having a store that provides other products.  A few may capitalize on Halloween hayrides or pick-your-own events.

There’s nothing wrong with these small farms that cater directly to consumers looking for the novelty or nostalgia of such products, and many do provide excellent fresh products and make great pies.  Yet they may give some the wrong impression of what farming really is.  They are not the food producers that provide the staples which keep the world fed.

Those who do work small, low-production, low-income farms as their primary means of getting by are subsistence farmers.   Thankfully this practice has largely vanished from industrialized nations, yet it remains common in many parts of the world.

When a farm decides to go “organic,” they are simply giving up some of the tools at their disposal to grow foods.   Many types of fertilizer suddenly become forbidden.  Tractors, tilling and irrigation are generally not affected, but the types of crops, fertilizer and insect control uses are.  In some cases, the organic farmer will be required to buy materials that are chemically identical to forbidden compounds simply because they come from a certified source that is regarded as “natural.”

Since some of the tools are now taken away it becomes harder to grow food reliably and at high capacities.  Some other commodities become more important.   If fertilizer is less concentrated, more water may be needed to get the nutrients to the roots.   If more of a crop is lost to pests, larger areas must be planted for the same yield.  If crops yield fewer fruit per plant, more plants are needed.  Not using one tool means all the others will tend to be more taxed.  It may require more labor, more energy, more land and more water.   It costs more too.   Farmers don’t do this because they’re stupid, of course.  They do it because they know that consumers are stupid and will pay a premium for this stuff.

Before buying some of that overpriced organic food, stop and think about the bigger picture.  Do you really think Old McDonald is the one who feeds the world?   Farming is an industry and if you want everyone to be fed, you wouldn’t want it any other way.   Modern society requires that most people work in fields other than agriculture.  We need farmers, but we also need doctors and dentists and mechanics and engineers.   Trying to force society back to the days when a farm fed only a few local families is not going to help the environment or our food supply.

They’re really great little items and the perfect gift for just about any occasion.   For one thing, they’re an interesting conversation piece and a very good example of a practical application of radioactivity.   They demonstrate that you can indeed keep something radioactive in our pocket and be quite safe and they’re very eye-catching.

They also have quite a bit of practical value.  Finding your keys in the dark is very easy with one of these key chains.  In fact, it’s so easy that if you happen to misplace your keys, the easiest way to find them is to turn off the lights.  When entering your home or starting your car in complete darkness, the glowing key chain provides just enough light to easily select the correct key and use it without fumbling.   If you happen to drop the keys on the dark floor of your car, you can find them very quickly and without effort.   You can even see the glow of the keys if they are under a seat or somehow otherwise obscured from direct view.  You can get different colors and use them to mark different key chains, making it very easy to grab the correct one, even in complete darkness.

I’ve had these key chains before (and broken a couple by mistake).  I can attest to just how useful they are.   There’s also no other way of getting this same value without using radioactive material.  An electrically illuminated key chain could not provide such continuous periods of glow without the batteries quickly running out.   Standard phosphorescent glowing items are limited to a few hours of illumination and must be exposed to light first in order to glow, making them useless for something like a key chain, which is often kept in one’s pocket.

There’s only one problem with these amazing little glowing key chains:  nobody in the US sells them, at least not directly.   Technically, these are not approved for sale or ownership in the United States, although I’ve never heard of anyone getting in trouble for owning one.  Many people do own them and talk about them openly online and elsewhere.  It might just be one of those things that hasn’t shown up on the radar of a bureaucrat who was asinine enough to bother to do something about it.

Still, there are stories about their thugs stopping sales of these key chains on sites like eBay.  It seems that these days most of those sold on eBay are coming from sellers who are not located within the United States.  Exactly how much trouble you could potentially get in for these remains unclear, but it appears to be a case of selective enforcement.  (So if you have one, don’t ever leave the federal government looking for an excuse to call you a terrorist.)

Yet while the government may tolerate people owning them, you can’t buy them from any major retailer.   They can be purchased on the “grey market,” imported in relatively small batches or sold over the internet.  They can be bought from foreign retailers, like those in the UK, who will generally ship to the US without problem.   The best place to buy them, however, tends to be eBay, where numerous sellers will sell to US customers.

That, however, was not good enough for me.  I know a great product when I see one and these things are inexpensive, extremely useful and very easy to sell.  I had bought one and people were constantly asking me about it and where to get one.   I wanted to sell these, and not just by keeping it on the down-low, selling them on auction websites or to friends.  I wanted to really sell them, importing them wholesale and selling them openly and in quantity.

I also didn’t want even the slight potential to have the NRC knocking at my door, which does occasionally happen when someone tries to sell them in the US.   One would think that the government has better things to do, but of course, they don’t.

I thought it would be easy to do.  After all, these things are very readily available in other countries, and by “other countries,” I don’t mean just Russia, Zimbabwe and Cuba.  They can be bought in the UK.  They are brought into the US all the time.  They’re also perfectly safe.   Of course, I assumed wrong, but this was a few years ago, long before I had gained a full understanding of the bureaucracy that is the NRC.

I e-mailed, called and faxed the NRC several times about this matter.  I cannot even begin to explain how difficult they were.   First, nobody at the agency seemed to understand what I wanted to do or what the devices were for.  They told me that if I wanted to start the process of getting a consumer product containing radioactive material approved, I could get some paperwork to start the ball rolling, but it would be several thousand dollars just to begin and would take more than a year.  I told them I believed the items qualified as being license-exempt, since other items of comparable function and contents, such as illuminated watches are.   They didn’t seem to understand what I was getting at.

After bouncing around many times between different individuals and sub-departments, before I eventually got the answer:  No, I could not import the key chains and no I could not sell them and nobody was really supposed to have them at all.   They never would tell me why the answer was no.  I was not told what exact regulation or requirement they violated.  They never would give me a straight answer about whether I could appeal that decision, who had made it or on what grounds and whether there was any way of having it reevaluated.  The best they could give me was that I could try the expensive process of getting a new product approved, but they also warned me that to do that I first had to have some prototypes of the product to have inspected and it would be illegal for me to have those prototypes unless I first got yet another license, permitting me to possess otherwise illegal amounts of tritium.

So the next place I went was the Health Physics Society.   They managed to put me in touch with some radiation safety experts who had worked with the NRC and knew the right people to ask.   After several false starts, they did manage to track down an NRC official who would go on record and explain the policy.   This is the e-mail I eventually got:

In response to your electronic mail dated October 23, 2007, concerning
keyrings containing tritium, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) has
determined that a license is required to distribute products similar to
the Traser “glowring” key chains.  Although the devices are allowed in
the United Kingdom, they are not licensed here.  NRC regulations [10 CFR
30.19(c) and 10 CFR 32.22(b)] and policy (Federal Register Notice of
March 16, 1965, 30 FR 3462) do not allow licensing toys, novelties,
adornments or any consumer product containing radioactive material
considered a frivolous use of radioactive material and where the end use
of the product cannot be reasonably foreseen.   Other consumer products
that are not frivolous use, but contain self-luminous radioactive
material, must go through a two step safety review process consisting
of:  (1) an engineering evaluation and registration for the device as
well as (2) a licensing review of the program involved in possession and
distribution of radioactive material.

In order for NRC to be sure consumer products containing radioactive
material are safe for distribution to the general public the product
must be below a certain activity and/or found to incorporate engineering
features making release of the radioactive material unlikely.  In
addition environmental studies must show that during the products life
from manufacture to disposal, no adverse impact will be caused on the
environment or on those who may come in contact with the radioactive
material.  Traser Glowrings contain about 400 millicuries of tritium as
indicated by the UK manufacturer.  In comparison, a tritium wristwatch
typically contains 5 millicuries of tritium.  Tritium produces beta
radiation that cannot penetrate the skin, however, tritium can be
absorbed through the skin.  Tritium can also be an internal hazard
through inhalation and ingestion, as well as being absorbed through the
skin.

Again, Traser glowrings, and similar products, are not legal to own or
possess in the U. S. without a Federal and/or State license.

So that’s the big problem?   It’s an adornment or a novelty and therefore frivolous?

My Response:

• The fact that an item may be used as a novelty, adornment or toy does not mean it is “frivolous.”  The definition of “frivolous” is “irresponsible, lacking due consideration, without due consideration, improper.”  I think I can see what they’re getting at.  They want any item that is considered radioactive to have a legitimate use and consider entertainment or novelty to not be legitimate.  I have to disagree on that.   It’s fine to use something for such purposes if there’s negligible risk involved.
• The end use of the product can be reasonably forseen: people will put it on their key chain and use it to help locate their keys.
• At least part of the appeal of glowing key chains may indeed be their novelty and fashion aspect, but the same can be said of a tritium-containing wristwatch.   Watches are absolutely and undeniably fashion accessories, in addition to being functional timepieces.  In the cases of watches, the fact that they have a tritium-illuminated dial is often a selling point because of the fact that it’s fashionable in and of itself.   It’s not the only way to illuminate a watch dial.  It can be done with an electroluminescent face or with long lasting phosphorescent material.
• Radiolumonescent key chains are not only fashionable or novel, but also are practical.  They are at least as functional as radiolumonescent watches.  It makes it very easy to find misplaced keys simply by turning off the lights in a room.  The glow of the keychain is obvious in the dark even at a distance.   The glow can even be seen if the keys are partially obscured, such as being under a desk or bed.  The glow of the keychain also provides just enough light to aid a person handling the keys in the complete darkness, making it easier to select the right key for insertion into a lock or automobile ignition.
• While the amount of tritium in a key chain may be greater than that found in most watches, it is still trivial and is less than that found in numerous other commonly available items that can be purchased by the general public.  These include radiolumonescent compasses, small self-powered flashlight-style illuminators, self-illuminating map readers and other luminous items.   These devices are perfectly safe and do not pose any hazard to public health or the environment.  The amount of tritium present is far too low to pose a significant radiation hazard to anyone, even in the wost case scenario, where it might all be released in a confined area.
• Key chains of this style are already available in numerous countries around the world.  They have been sold for years without incident.   They are so common that it’s impossible to keep them out of the United States and there’s no legitimate reason to try anyway.  They’re safe and proven safe and their existence in no way enables terrorists, compromises public safety or constitutes a hazard.

I am willing to acknowledge that there may be legitimate reason for the NRC to require that the product undergo some kind of review, as they state, an engineering evaluation of the product.   Hopefully that would not include an environmental study, because that would be pretty ridiculous to do a study from scratch when there are already products of a similar nature being sold and which would release an equal amount of tritium upon disposal.  I’m not sure why they can’t just use a general purpose tritium device disposal study.  Although knowing the agency, it’s entirely plausible that they will require a completely new study. They could simply apply the same standard for release into the environment as any number of products with the same amount of tritium.  The danger presented is zero, at least if they are evaluated fairly and reasonably.

There are many exit  signs sold in the US which have much more tritium in them than one of these and the tritium is stored in tubes of almost exactly the same type.  Tritium-containing self-luminous exit signs may contain upwards of 40 curies of tritium, one hundred times the amount of tritium in one of these key chains.   It should be noted that these exit signs are subject to some special restrictions.  Those who purchase them are technically also purchasing an individual license for the sign, which requires that they do not tamper with the sign or open it and that they dispose of it properly, usually by returning it to the manufacturer.   Yet this certainly does not always happen.  Despite the requirement, thousands of tritium-containing exit signs of various ages (and therefore with various amounts of tritium present) end up in landfills and incinerators every year.  Despite this, the sky has not yet begun to fall.

I would be more than willing to consider undertaking the necessary engineering review, although I’m sure it would be long and expensive.   The products would almost certainly pass it.  They’re very straight forward and the manufacturer can provide any data necessary.  If an environmental study were also necessary, it still might be worth perusing.

The problem is that even if the manufacturer and distributors were willing to go through that process, the NRC has already decided the key chains are “frivolous” and therefore won’t even entertain the notion of approving them.   So it is simply impossible and they seem to not have the slightest willingness to revisit the decision.  DAMN!