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This is from Dr. Rudi Nussbaum, one of the pioneers of radiation safety. Now retired, he helps us out on occasion with answers to our many questions on the risk/dose equations of low dose radiation.

In general, countertops in kitchens, in particular, that contain radioactive minerals definitely present a health risk since they are a continuous radiation source. Moreover, in addition to external exposure from penetrating radiation (gamma or high energy beta rays), released radioactive gas (radon) or radioactive minerals leaching from the stone due to spilled liquids like vinegar or other acids might enter your lungs or into food and thus produce internal exposure.

While the skin is thick enough to protect body tissue from damage by external alpha radiation, this is not true if alpha emitters get lodged in organs or the blood inside the body. Internal exposure represents a very much larger health risk compared to external exposures. However, it is extremely difficult to make any reliable statements about the magnitude of this risk compared to other environmental risks from chemicals in our food, water, air pollution, etc.

There are a few reliable studies of health risks from low level radiation for specific exposure situations: E.g. variations in terrestrial gamma background radiation across the British Isles is definitely correlated with variation in childhood cancer mortality. Or, low-dose exposures (most likely internal exposures) from radioactive fallout from nuclear weapons tests in the US or from the Chernobyl explosions in Europe have been found to be correlated with increases in neo-natal infant mortality.

The scarcity of research data is only in small part due to the limits of available scientific research tools. This kind of research requires levels of investment that only large research grants could provide. For over fifty years the political and military/industrial powers have deliberately manipulated the scientific establishment (by holding the research purse strings and carefully selecting scientist-members of official radiation protection bodies, including the UN World Health Organization) to proclaim in hundreds of official reports and mainstream journals and popular magazines that low level radiation is harmless (or may even be beneficial), thus protecting the interests of nuclear weapons and ammunition production, the industrial applications of radiation, but also the medical radiation establishment (radiology and nuclear medicine).

This is consistent with what you report about the granite industry.

There has always been a relatively small number of courageous whistle blowers who believe that they have a responsibility to search for the truth and resist corrupting pressures on their sense of scientific integrity. Any independent and critical scientist who challenges the accepted dogma with conflicting evidence (like the above examples about fallout) finds it very difficult to get his research reports published in the mainstream scientific/medical literature, and often has seen his career under assault and sometimes destroyed.

These are ugly facts of corruption and they result in workers’ and citizens’ lives being sacrificed, who remain unable to litigate for compensation because of the intentional absence of scientific evidence and the inherent impossibility to prove cause and effect for any individual victim of radiogenic disease. Open discussion of these matters in the general media would violate a strict taboo.

About the author:

Rudi H. Nussbaum, Ph.D.

Dr. Nussbaum is professor emeritus of physics and environmental sciences at Portland State University Physics and Environmental Sciences emeritus faculty, co-edited The Effects of Low-Dose Radiation Exposure: In Children, in Young Adults, in Medicine, the Environment and in the Workplace, which was from the proceedings of an international conference held March 19-21, 1998, in Muenster, Germany. The volume is published by the German Society for Radiation Protection, Berlin, 2001. Nussbaum also co-authored Epidemic Juvenile Hypothyroidism among a Population of Hanford ‘Downwinders’, which appears in the volume. Dr. Nussbaum received his B.S. in 1951, and Ph.D. in 1954 from the University of Amsterdam (The Netherlands)