Science: ATOMIC RADIATION: The Ts Are Coming

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MOST experts agree that all-out atomic war might end civilization. But what about the long-range effects of atomic-age peace? Last year the National Academy of Sciences, financed by the Rockefeller Foundation, undertook to find out. Last week its committees of eminent scientists made their report on what increasing radioactivity can do to humanity. General conclusions: 1) something new, strange and dangerous has come into the world; 2) not enough is known about it; 3) careful precautions should be taken to ward off future disaster.

The committees were not much worried about nuclear-weapons tests. "High-yield" thermonuclear explosions toss radioactive material into the stratosphere, where it hangs for years drifting around the earth. The tests also raise the radio active level of large areas of ocean. But these effects are slight, and will do no appreciable harm unless the tempo of bomb testing is increased many times over. There is nothing, say the scientists, to the popular idea that bomb testing has upset the world's weather.

That is about all the cheerful news in the report. All the committees were worried about the swift growth of the atomic age. Each year more radioisotopes are shipped to laboratories and hospitals; more nuclear reactors go into operation; more "hot" residues are processed and disposed of somehow. Within a few years, the scientists point out, large nuclear power plants will be built in many parts of the world. Many ships will be atomic, many industries will use radioactive equipment. Therefore, many more people will come into contact with radiation.

Ocean & Air. The Committee on Oceanography warned that radioactive wastes foreseeable in the near future will be too potent to discharge into the ocean's surface water, from which they might be carried ashore or enter human bodies in seafood. If the wastes are dumped at sea, they must be carefully sunk in deep spots where bottom water has little circulation. A research program should be started at once, say the scientists, to find the best such places.

The Committee on Meteorology also had worries. Nuclear power plants give off radioactive gases, some of which are difficult to control or get rid of. In the year 2000, the committee figured, the world's atomic power plants will be producing enough krypton 85 to raise appreciably the radioactivity of the middle latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere. Other gases given off at fuel-processing plants, e.g., iodine 131, can do even worse on a local scale. The committee points out that unfavorable weather conditions around a processing plant can concentrate the gases intensely.

Large atomic power plants will contain so much radioactive material that a blow-up would be a major disaster, causing serious damage over thousands of square miles. By 2000, figured the committee, the earth's reactors will contain so much strontium 90 (a cancer-causing radioisotope which deposits in the bones) that the dispersal of 1% of it would seriously contaminate the entire earth.