Makhijani's Exploring Tritium Dangers

Arjun Makhijani has recently published a book called Exploring Tritium Dangers. The book suggests tritium is far more dangerous than the nuclear establishment claims. In fact, tritium is far more innocuous than the nuclear establishment implies. Here's the Gordian Knot Group review.

Exploring Tritium Dangers is a 100 page book on the harm from tritium radiation, that does not offer a single example of such harm.¹ Even stranger, much of the book has nothing to do with tritium. There are long digressions into the difference between high-LET energy such as alpha particles and low-LET such as photons.² But tritium only emits low-LET electrons. The book puts a great deal of emphasis on mitochrondia damage; but once again the issue has nothing to do with tritium. There's even a discussion of zinc-65, even though Zn-65 is not even a fission product.

The preface inadvertently acknowledges this via a non-sequitur. The author explains ``It is called `Exploring Tritium Dangers' because it has literally been a voyage of exploration into a variety of areas of radiation risk, especially some that have been relatively neglected." This sentence would have made sense, if the title were `Exploring neglected areas of radiation risk'.

When the author does turn his attention to tritium, he does so in a carefully selective manner.

ROS damage from normal metabolism is ignored.

Makhijani claims endogenous Reactive Oxygen Species(ROS) processes don't do any damage. Only ``pollution, on top of normal oxidative processes creates the damage"[page xiii] ``It is excess reactive oxygen species that create damage,"[page 56] This is flat out false. ROS damage is the same whether it caused by metabolism or low-LET radiation. He never mentions the fact that tritium's increase in ROS damage is minuscule compared with endogenous ROS damage. For example, he calculates that a tritium electron will ionize 450 water molecules on average, implying this is a large number.[p 9] He fails to point out that one billion ROS ions leak into each of our cells every day from the cell's mitochrondia.³

Our bodies experience an astonishing amount of ROS-based DNA damage, about 10,000 Single Strand Breaks per cell per day, Table 1. This is the price we pay for having an oxygen based metabolism.

Table 1. ROS Damage from Normal Metabolism}

Number

per cell per day

Single Strand Breaks 10,000

Double Strand Breaks 10

1 mGy/d increases Single Strand Breaks by about 45/cell-day and Double Strand Breaks by 0.025 to 0.040/cell-day.⁴ Nearly negligible increases. Plus there is no way you can get anything close to 1 mGy/d from drinking tritium. But Makhijani never talks about tritium exposure in mGy or mSv numbers. Nowhere in this book exploring tritium danger do we find a statement something like ``the dose/dose rate from tritium was xxx mGy/mGy/day".

ROS damage repair is ignored.

All the ROS damage means Nature had to come up with an extraordinarily effective and accurate DNA repair system. Without such repair, we would not be here. The repair mechanisms are remarkably clever. At low doses, a damaged cell attempts no repair, but triggers its premature death At higher doses, it initiates the repair process. This scheme avoids an unnecessary and possibly erroneous repair when cell damage rate is so low the cell can be sacrificed. But if the damage rate is high enough that the loss of a cell would cause its own problems, then the repair process is triggered. These repair processes are still being elucidated. In 2015, three scientists were given Nobel Prizes for ground breaking work in this area.

Makhijani flat out ignores all this fundamental biology. I doubt he's unaware of the overwhelming importance of cell repair in evaluating radiation harm.

Tritium's puny dose rate is ignored.

It is hard to imagine a less dangerous radioactive isotope than tritium. Tritium emits an extremely low energy electron, so weak it is stopped by a half-inch of air. Tritium radiation is so weak it cannot be measured by a normal Geiger counter. The electron is too weak to make it through the wall of the thinnest gas tight detector tube. A tritium electron cannot penetrate the dead outer layer of your skin.

(Preposterously Makhijani tries to turn this into a negative. One of the reasons we should worry about tritium is that ``it is far more dangerous inside the body than outside".[page 4] Since the danger outside the body is zero, this is an obvious non-sequitur. But it does tell us something about Makhijani's respect for his readers.)

Each electron in a cathode-ray tube television has more energy. Tritium is used in luminous watches, rifle sights, and road and runway signs.

But according to Makhijani, tritium is ``extremely radioactive".[page 4] He reaches this conclusion by focusing on specific activity, which is the number of decays per second per gram of material. Tritium has a half-life of 12.3 years, and is very light. Plutonium-239 has a half-life of 24,000 years and is very heavy. So according to his chosen measure, tritium is ``about 150,000 times as radioactive as Pu-239”.[page 5]

But radiotoxicity depends on the dose-rate, which is the product of the decays per second and the energy per dose, the kind of particle, the uptake, and the biological half-life. Pu-239's energy per decay is about 1000 times higher than tritium's. Pu-239 emits an alpha particle, which produces biological damage 20 times more effectively than tritium's electron. (Elsewhere Makhijani's argues the figure of 20 is way too low.) Tritium has a high uptake, but a biological half-life of only 10 days. Pu-239 has a very low uptake; but, if it is absorbed into the body, it stays there for 200 years, 7,300 times longer than tritium. Makhijani is smart enough to know that his cherry picked definition of ``extremely radioactive" is horribly misleading.

Mahkijani acknowledges tritium’s half-life in humans as about 10 days; but fails to point out that the difference between this biological half-life and the radioactive decay half-life of 12.32 years means that only 0.022% of consumed tritium’s decay take place in the body.

This failure to acknowledge tritium's low toxicity is consistent. Makhijani makes a big deal about the tritium concentration in seawater near the fuel reprocessing plant at LaHague being 11 Bq/L. He neglects to mention that the background level of Potassium-40 in seawater is about 12 Bq/L (up to 22 Bq/L in high evaporation places like the Persian Gulf). Potassium emits a penetrating photon which is 150 times more harmful than tritium's anemic electron, and stays in the body 3 times as long. Most of us are correctly unconcerned about seawater's radiotoxicity; but Mahkijani would have us worry about 1/450th of that toxicity.

Makhijani assumes that exceeding EPA tritium limits is a cause for alarm.[p 21] The EPA drinking water limit is 740 Bq/L. To produce detectable harm in mice, they had to be fed 37 million Bq/L water, 50,000 times as much. Makhijani never talks about actual observed harm in humans from tritium. Perhaps this is because we've never seen any.

Fetal exposure

The book talks at length about the differences between adults and fetuses; but makes almost no attempt to link these differences to tritium. Makhijani poses a list of possible things that could go wrong to the fetus, but offers no evidence that tritium has produced any of these effects.[p 70-71] He fails to mention the Neel study of 70,000 bomb survivor pregnancies.⁵ This study found no evidence of any genetic impact on kids conceived after the bomb was dropped. There was some reduction of brain size, and mental retardation in kids exposed in utero. Makhijani references a secondary ICRP report to support this, avoiding referring to the inconvenient Neel study that is the primary source for this data. Makhijani fails to point out that the bomb survivor fetal dose rates were exceedingly high. We start to see significant loss of IQ only at dose rates above 100 mGy/day, Figure 1.

Figure 1. Mental retardation in bomb survivor kids exposed in utero.

An atom bomb can create those dose rates; but there is no way that a fetus could get such dose rates from tritium. A liter of the ``horribly" tritated water at Fukushima has an activity of about one million decays per second. Suppose the mother drank 2 liters of this water per day. According to the EPA model, she would get a dose rate of 0.03 mGy/day. According to Makhijani, the fetal to maternal ratio for tritium is 1.6.[Table VI-1] Her baby would get a dose rate of about 0.05 mGy/day. But Makhijani does not do dose rate calculations.

Takeaway

Exploring Tritium Dangers is an odd collection of carefully cherry-picked facts and largely unsupported speculation, much of which has little or nothing to do with tritium. But if there is a consistent, underlying theme to the book, it is the failure to acknowledge the single most important fact about tritium: due to its exceptionally weak electron, the dose rates associated with tritium exposure are so low, a tiny fraction of background radiation, that the body's repair processes have no problem repairing any tritium damage. A child when forced to eat a food that it does not like will often attempt the impossible task of eating without swallowing. Makhijani tries to do something similar. We might call it ``exploring without looking".

1. Makhijani, A., Exploring Tritium Dangers, Opus Self-publishing, 2023

2. LET stands for Linear Energy Transfer. The damage from high-LET is concentrated along a straight line. Low-LET damage is far more spread out.

3. Feinendegen, L. et al, Hormesis by Low Dose Radiation Effects, radiation Oncology, 2012, Section 3.

4. Neumaier, T. et al, Evidence for formation of DNA repair centers and dose-response non-linearity in human cells, PNAS Early Edition, 2011.

5. Neel, J.and Schull, W. The Children of Ato,mic Bomb Survivors, National Academies Press, 1991.