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Radioactive contamination of the environment occurs all day, every day as a result of the normal operation of commercial nuclear power reactors, military and civilian research reactors, shipboard propulsion reactors — the Russians are even building nuclear-powered ice breakers — as well as the transportation and use of radioactive isotopes in medicine, industry, science, war and war preparations. Nuclear power reactors cannot even operate without routine releases of radioactive water and gases that are vented continuously in order to control the pressure, temperature and humidity inside reactor cores and waste fuel pools, and to keep radiation levels from exceeding exposure limits for workers.
The military is the single largest generator of hazardous wastes in the United States adding some 500,000 tons of toxins annually, according to Sunaura and Astra Taylor in “Military Waste in Our Drinking Water,” the US military in 2006 generated more than one-third of the country’s toxic waste.
In 1992, the government had identified 3,200 sites at 100 nuclear weapons facilities that had radioactively contaminated soil, ground water or both. The total is possibly 45,000 radioactive hot spots, according to John Cashman’s article “Report Lists 45,000 Potential Radioactive Sites,” 20,000 of them government owned. Testifying to Congress in 1988, Dexter Peach, an assistant comptroller general at the General Accounting Office, said, “… to clean up thousands of sites owned by the federal government at which uncontained radioactive wastes are contaminating soil and ground water … may be the government’s biggest challenge.”

Nuclear weapons and reactor fuel production have radioactively contaminated so much of the United States that official cost estimates of merely a partial clean-up — the National Academy of Sciences concluded in 2000 that large areas cannot be cleaned to safe levels — are $365 billion and climbing. Part of the reason for the daunting dilemma is that, as the government discovered in 2000, ten times more plutonium waste from weapons production were dumped “into soil or buried in flimsy containers” than was earlier estimated. (“U.S. Estimate of Spewed Plutonium Is Raised: Tenfold,” New York Times, Oct. 21, 2000)
All the radioactive contamination in the world can be considered military pollution, because the whole of the nuclear power complex was born of the atom bomb. Waste fuel from civil nuclear power reactors was initially intended for use in bomb production. Only the disastrous failure of waste fuel reprocessing — for plutonium extraction — ended the civilian waste-to-weapons program. Still, tritium gas for the nuclear arsenal has been produced at commercial reactors in Tennessee, putting the lie to official distinctions between civilian and military programs. Nuclear power is the bomb.

In his 2009 book “A Primer in the Art of Deception,” Paul Zimmerman tells the story of Dr. Ernest Sternglass, of the University of Pittsburgh Medical School, who published “Infant Mortality and Nuclear Tests” in Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in 1969. The Sternglass found that the advent of above-ground  atomic bomb testing in 1951 slowed the decline in infant mortality so much (the rate of decline returned to normal after tests ended in 1963) that the testing could be considered the cause of 375,000 infant deaths before their first birthdays.

The US National Cancer Institute reported in 2002 that 80,000 cancer cases and over 15,000 cancer deaths in the United States were attributable to just the iodine-131 in 90 of its 235 above ground nuclear bomb tests.

The bio-accumulation of long-lived radioactive pollution from nuclear power and weapons presents a mostly unregulated and nearly unfathomable threat to human and environmental health, especially in conjunction with the cumulative effects of 80,000 other generally unmonitored chemicals that are routinely poured, vented, leaked, incinerated or dumped into the environment and the food chain. (“New Alarm Bells About Chemicals and Cancer,” New York Times, May 15, 2010) Interviewed by Eduardo Goncalves for “The secret nuclear war” in The Ecologist for April 2001, the late Dr. Rosalie Bertell estimated that as many 385 million cancers and 175 million cancer deaths could be attributed to industrial radiation from bomb production and testing, production reactor accidents and reactor leaks.
Other scientists like Chris Busby, John Gofman, Arthur Tamplin, Alice Stewart, Jay Gould, Yuri Bandashevsky, Benjamin Goldman, Arjun Makhijani, and Samuel Epstein among others have offered similarly alarming estimates. They can all be taken with a grain of salt, but none of us can escape the reality of having been trapped in an endless experiment without our consent.

John LaForge works for Nukewatch, a nonprofit nuclear watchdog group in Wisconsin, and edits its newsletter.