If you spend any length of time in St. Lucie County, Florida, you’re carrying something special from this place inside of you. A bonus. From Florida Power and Light, now The FPL Group, one of the United State’s largest power companies.
Like their website says, they are not just located in the community, they are part of the community.
The part of the community that causes cancer.
Located on a barrier island off of Florida’s central east coast in Jensen Beach, the twin St. Lucie reactors are about eight miles upwind of the town of Port St. Lucie, where an astronomically high percentage of children have brain cancer.
The death rate for breast cancer in St. Lucie County has also skyrocketed.
“Gould’s numbers, based upon US Vital Statistics, showed that in St. Lucie County, the age-adjusted white female breast cancer mortality rate from 1950-54 was 6.5 deaths per 100,000 women. But the rate jumped to 20.7 for the years 1980-84, and 23.5 for 1985-89. Thus the rate of increase in these deaths, comparing 1950-54 to 1980-84, was 221%! And comparing 1950-54 to 1985-89, the increase was 263%. ” Michael Steinberg
There is no mystery here, even though the license for the power plant was renewed for another 20 years in 2002. Something in the water, that’s the culprit.
A study of baby teeth from children in St. Lucie County found high levels of strontium-90, a product of uranium fission. The six counties surrounding the nuclear plants in Florida had a 44% higher concentration of strontium-90 than the rest of Florida. Children who had cancer had 80% more strontium-90 in their teeth.
“What is St. Lucie’s safety record? St. Lucie is one of the best performing nuclear power plants in the country, as well as in the world. The World Association of Nuclear Operators has rated St. Lucie Plant as one of the top performing U.S. nuclear power plants.” FPL website
“I checked the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission records for radioactive releases from the St. Lucie reactors, as reported by their owner and operator, Florida Power and Light Company. The NRC records showed that the St. Lucie 1 reactor, operating commercially since 1976, had released nearly 283,000 curies of airborne radiation into the environment through 1991. The St. Lucie 2 reactor, operating since 1983, reported airborne emissions through 1991 of almost 50,000 curies. Thus the reactors, through 1991, had released over 333,000 curies of radiation into the air, much of it probably drifting towards Port St. Lucie.”
“The NRC records also indicated that over these years the St. Lucie reactors had released over 6800 Curies of liquid tritium—radioactive hydrogen—into local waters. Community groups in western Massachusetts have implicated liquid tritium releases from the now defunct Yankee Rowe nuclear reactor as the cause of abnormally high rates of five kinds of cancer and Down’s Syndrome. And in Suffolk County on New York’s eastern Long Island, residents have filed a $2 billion lawsuit against the operators of a research reactor at Brookhaven National Laboratory, contending that its leaks of tritium and other radioactive substances into the groundwater have contaminated their community water supply.”
Not just located in the community, part of the community. The part you don’t want.
Coming to your community. The nuclear waste from this facility must be shipped out and buried somewhere forever, and the nuclear fuel shipped in.
FPL plans to build a coal-fired power plant in the west of St. Lucie County in 2008.
The idea for your site is a very intelligent one. This post was not only informative, but well written. The use of the map pictures highlights everything enormously. Well done.
Fascinating…and scary. The cow post in particular is interesting.
Very interesting. I will be sending you something on the condition of the St Lucie River thanks to the discharges from Lake Okeechobee
Port St. Lucie had the nation’s fastest growth rate among large cities (100,000 or more population) between July 1, 2003, and July 1, 2004, according to new U.S. Census Bureau population estimates. Here’s a link
Having been an assistant Health Physics supervisor at St. Lucie unit 1 during the 1970′s
I can say with certainty that your site is incredibly misleading and ignores the most commonly accepted scientific facts.
You state the number of curies released by the plant, but fail to mention that a vast majority of this radioactivity is in the form of noble gases that are extremely short lived and non-reactive in the environment.
Two, you assume that all radioactivity comes from St. Lucie. SR-90 occures in nature and is often found in seafood! I wonder what people eat more of when they live near the ocean?
One volcano eruption releases more radioactivity and SR-90 into our “biosphere” than all the nuke plants combined ever have.
I could go on and on debunking the falsehoods you promote as fact, but I will ask you two questions – One, if radiation causes cancer then large numbers of Denver residents would show increased cancer rates since they receive at least twice as much natural radition as sealevel residents do. In fact, their rates are lower.
Two, If radiation was so likely to causes deadly cnacer in anyone it touches in the slightest amount, then why do they treat cancer patients with radiation on a routine basis for over fifty years???
I await your response.
Respectfully, Gregory Green
retired Health Physicist (25 years exp.)
(I am not employed by the industry in any way, nor have I been for over 15 years.)
Gregory, thanks for explaining the astronomical rate of brain cancer there… it’s the seafood! This must be why as you claim that cancer rates are lower in Denver, although it could be the prarie oysters and the clean living there.
Cancer treatment in the last fifty years has exploded almost as quickly as the incidence of cancer itself, and it’s a fascinating branch of medicine that has saved thousands of lives. The Federal Government has a lot to do with the success here. Through the NIH tax dollars have been distributed for this research. The license for a given treatment is then given to a large pharma company for them to exclusively profit.
Pharmaceuticals such as Tamoxiphin have made the shotgun-blast approach of radiation therapy more effective when used in combination with other treatments. The order matters.
We use radiation and toxic chemicals in cancer treatment because scientists have not figured out a more selective way to trigger apoptosis. These therapies cause living cells to die, and that is precisely why they are so effective in cancer treatment.
Scalpels and other sharps are also used in medicine but exposing your body to them indescriminantly can be quite dangerous, as we both know.
Dear Automat = After mulling over your somewhat disjointed response to my simple question – WHY DO THEY USE RADIATION TO TREAT CANCER WHEN YOU SAY ONLY A LITTLE RADIATION CAUSED BRAIN AND BREAST CANCER? = I have come to the conclusion that a hidden agenda must be behind your website.
The facts are well known, and if you wish to bend them to match your desired result, then no one could successfully enlighten you.
Your remarks about my comments are again, insulting and childish. SR-90 has been in human teeth since the dawn of mankind. They recently dated the Stonehenge builder’s skeleton with its’ SR-90 content. I guess St. Lucie has been running a long time!!
The fact that we all live in a sea of electromagnetic radiation – from EMI, to microwaves, to cosmic and ratural radiation, to lasers and radio waves. All of these can be of some health concern AT MASSIVE LEVELS!!
Oxygen, water, salt, practically anything you can name is deadly at large doses. The ability to separate any locally sigficant increase in health effects to the few extra millirem a nuke plant MAY give to the public could never be decearned from the normal 100-130 millirem they receive naturally. ( In fact, you dose your mate with 2-10 millirem a year from your own body! CANCER CAUSER!!) The BEST coal palnt doses its neighbors with twice the radiation that the worst nuke plant ever could. Ever heard of Radium? Oh, if you don’t like any radiation, then don’t drink any alcohol, smoke, eat seafood esp. shellfish, wear dark glasses or dentures, live in New England in the winter, have a MRI or CAT scan, or thyroid scan or liver scan or …..
HAVE A NICE DAY! P.S.- DON’T GO IN THE SUN AT ALL!
G.M.GREEN
In other words, you get a certain amount from the stuff lying on the ground. But the dose to the body can be ten to a hundred times greater to key organs, depending on what the chemistry is. You can have a ten to a hundred times internal dose when you eat the food grown on the contaminated soil. And that’s what the people still have to do.
DTR: Because it keeps building up?
EJS: No, because it concentrates in the organs, chemically. In other words, strontium, instead of being uniformly distributed throughout the tissue, all goes to the bone. So it irradiates bone marrow extremely efficiently and that has never happened before from natural sources. So the internal doses from strontium-90 and iodine-131 are really devastating us. And it’s just as true for releases from Rancho Seco and from all the reactors–all the doses they always mention that are so low–first of all they’re not so low, they are generally in the few millirem range–but the dose to the bone marrow of a baby could be a hundred times greater because of the chemical composition and the concentration and the fact that the newly developing infant uses up and takes up the strontium so fast.
DTR: So the cesium is about thirty years for its half-life, but the iodine is only a couple of months right?
EJS: No, no–iodine is actually only a week. But there are short-lived iodines that happened in many reactor accidents that have a two-hour, ten-hour, six-hour, three-hour half-life. And since most people live within a half-hour of where the wind blows they inhale it, and if you inhale it you can get it. They don’t even count those doses! They only count the doses for iodine-131 and longer half-lives (which is a week). So the short-lived isotopes aren’t even properly counted.
This was all designed in order to allow nuclear bomb testing. Nobody cared about human health at the time–they lied, they deceived, they were so desperate in trying to use this weapon as a threat, they could not admit the serious biological character of it. That’s the whole thing that we have to end. The real message is that it’s not just a big accident that we have to worry about. It is the daily releases that are slowly killing us because of the logarithmic shape of the dose-response curve–the first five, ten, twenty millirems do most of the damage after which it reaches a plateau.
http://www.ratical.org/radiation/inetSeries/ejs1192.html
Here is a link to an excellent out-of-print book in pdf format co-authored by a doctor of radiology and a nobel laurate on this very subject.
http://www.ratical.org/radiation/SecretFallout/
[...] Some new developments concerning the St. Lucie nuclear reactor in Florida, which we covered in Sprol 6-23-2005. [...]
I just want everyone who is DEFENDING FPL to know that it is disgusting that they are willing to lose so many human lives for the sake of property value. It is a commonly known FACT among St. Lucie County Residence that Cancer is caused by the power plant. My family lived on a block of Indian River Estates for almost 17 years. During those years, 3 people died of cancer and 12 homes of the 16 on the block had someone in their family diagnosed and treated for some form of cancer. Some homes had multiple families over the years with multiple cases. My mother being one of those cases. It is also interesting to note that the acreage just south of Indian River Estates is owned by FPL and they hhave massive power lines that run through it. So for all of you so hell bent on FPL being innocent because of your personal financial gain or blind stupidity (whichever may be the case) take a walk through one of the MANY MANY cancer clinics in St. Lucie County. Look at the faces of the mothers, fathers, grandparents, and children whose lives have been forever altered because a multi-billion dollar company doesn’t want to lose a little bit of money. If you look into the eyes of an infant that will never make it to elementary school, maybe you will change your greedy minds. How many more studies is it going to take before South Florida opens their eyes to the gross abuse of power by the FPL plant? oh and if you are a resident of this county and you have been striken by cancer, good luck finding a lawyer that isn’t either too scared or already paid off to keep their mouths shut.
Furthermore, Gregory Green’s comment ” I am not employed by the industry, nor have I been for fifteen years” implies that at some time, he has , indeed, been imployed by “the industry” which leads me to the question …what industry (by industry I mean company) was our dear, blinded by financial gain, friend Mr. Green employed by? Wouldn’t that be interesting to find out.
how can you argue against state and federal evidence that tested for 561 chemicals and found no evidence. you are making assumptions and correlations where there are none. people will always get cancer, there are carcinogens in the air. for you to blame fpl is to put them as the scapegoat. they are a company that is required to keep the air clean by federal law.
Chewbacca, you must remember that the majority of the people on this site are bleeding heart liberals, who think it’s America’s problem any time something goes wrong in the entire world. Also, the fact that the company is required to retain the cleanliness of the air is meaningless to them simply because they pick and choose what they want to hear/see/read/use/and otherwise believe. Their only motive is the downfall of everything that represents the U.S. Government, capitalism, the nation, and its people as a whole. These people have no common sense, and there are far too many of them running rampant in today’s society. Perhaps the increase in these invalids has caused the rising cancer rates. Yes, people will always get cancer, regardless of what lies around, and no one can be absolutely sure of how they became ill with it. One thing is for sure, however, this is definitely not one of the causes. Automatt is employing ignorance, storytelling, and fabrication to make himself seem an empathetic figure. Grow up.
Adam we both agree that we should get the facts right, if you have any questions or facts to talk about I will look forward to reading them.
The one point you make is incorrect. The vast, overwhelming majority of Sprol visitors have a political opinion that cannot be determined. They come via search engines looking for researched information and images about various topics.
BTW speaking of information, see
http://www.orature.com/
if you want to learn how to argue better.
I see my orignal comments were removed. As with all things in the universe, too little is bad, too much is bad too. This is the real case with radiation, especially ionizing radiation. We all live in a sea of electromagnetic radiation in the form of microwaves, cosmic and natural radiation, The limits imposed by the government and Health Physics community limit the amount of radiation the public can be exposed to to less than 1/100 of what you receive from Nature every year. The sun gives the planet all of it’s life, but is a massive hydrogen bomb. If you believe in evolution, life would probably not exist witout natural radiation. Some studies have documneted a higher cancer rate wher the natural radiation levels are the lowest, and vicsa versa.
And the question I asked, “If radiation is so damned dangerous and caused cancer so easily, then why do practically all of the best doctors and hospitals use it to treat camcer patients?’
The answer is simple, it is much more likely to kill and cancerous cell than it is to create one; why, simple physics. To kill a cell with radiation you must zap it while it is dividing and upset the chemistry inside. To creat a cancerous cell you must strike the DNA molecule directly, cause a change that won’t kill the cell, and avoid the cell’s own DNA defect scanning mechanisum and then produce a change that will cause uncontrolable growth.
If this fact was not true, then doctors would not use it to kill cnacer, unless you believe all doctors are part of the evil conservative plan to kill all human life on the planet!
Grow up, face reality and start to contritbute to the good instead of promoting fear and distorting the truth for your own gain.
How many contributions have you received and where did all that money go? Your pocket I guess.
P.S. If the SR90 you cite came from St. Lucie plant, then it had to also include all the other isotopes produced at the station. All the isostopes could be dectected as well as SR90 and would be in the the exact same proportions as at the plant. This would prove if it came form St. Lucie or not. More likely it came form a pure SR90 source the kids were given by some idiiot parent as has happend before.
For anyone interested in a peer-reviewed scientific study of the link between elevated cancer rates and Sr-90 from the St. Lucie nuclear power plant, please check out the article on page 229 of the September 2005 (volume 25, issue 3) edition of the Journal of Radiological Protection. In short, the authors found no link.
Just a little P.S. – I was watching a History channel show on ancient Egypt and a mummy they found. Do you know how they dated tne mummy and determined where the child had been raised? By using Sr_90 dating! It seems that their teeth absorbed the natural SR from the bedroock in the regions they grew up in!
I guess St. Lucie Plant has been around a REALLY LONG Time!!
Port St. Lucie’s nuclear plant has fundamentally and fatally flawed emergency and evacuation plans that ignore a Marist College Poll finding that sixty percent of the people living in the 50-mile radius would evacuate during a nuclear event — the fifty-mile radius is designated by the NRC as the ‘Peak Injury Zone; and the seventeen and a half mile radius is designated as the “Peak Fatality Zone’.
FPL is only required to paln for evacuation for the ten mile radius. According toe the James Witt Associates report commissioned by NY State in 2003 planning should br updated to include evacuation planning for spontaneous evacuations from the fifty-mile radius, and elevated risk of terrorist attack.
Additionally, the Witt Study recommended household distribution of Potassium Iodide tablets throughout the fifty-mile radius.
As a candidate for the Florida’s state Senate in District-28 I am trying to create awareness of the elevated risk at thenuclear power plants at Port St. Lucie and Miami’s Turkey Point . For more info go to my website at: http://www.stansmilan.com
When in 1830 the 1st railroad was built on the European continent, the farmers protested because the cows would stop giving milk.
Very unscientific to blaim a nuclear power station for an increasing number of cancers. Such an increase can be the consequence of a manifold of factors: food and drinking habits can play a predominant role. Even the way homes are built is important: chinese dry-walls can be hazardous!