WORLD INFORMATION TRANSFER’S · 2018-11-30 · World Ecology Report World Information Transfer Summer - Fall 2018 2 direction, according to Vox. But globally deaths from starvation

WORLD INFORMATION TRANSFER’S 27th International Conference on Health and Environment

Global Partners for Global Solutions United Nations Headquarters, April 27, 2018

Sustainable Energy: Legacy of ChornobylSustainable Development Goal 7

World Information Transfer, sponsored by the Government of Ukraine, held the 27th an-nual conference on Health and Environment with a focus on Sustainable Energy and the Legacy of Chornobyl. Honorable Carolyn Comitta used past legislation to highlight the balance between economic and social responsibility. Dr. Bernard Goldstein stated that healthy humans are vital to setting and achieving the sustainability goals. He emphasized that we sometimes think of sustainability as being an end goal, instead of a process, be-cause the world is always changing. Ms. Margaryta Rayets discussed how there is a lot of transformative legislation to pass to get the Chornobyl exclusion zone to its potentially positive future. Mrs. Kateryna Pavlova added to the discussion on the Chornobyl exclusion zone with examples of how the zone can benefit from solar energy development projects. Dr. Martha Linet presented the latest findings on the health effects of radiation exposure to children, drawing from the key studies, and emphasized the state-of-the-art lifetime per-spective on radiation risks and suggested ways to saolve them such as meditation. Honor-able Andrew Weber, the Keynote Speaker, talked about his experiences with programs se-curing uranium use worldwide. He said that we have made progress in countering weapons of mass destruction, but we live in a dangerous world where the line between conventional and nuclear weapons is blurred. Dr. Peter Salk overviewed the biological history of humans to provide context to the dimensions of our current issues, and suggested ways to solve them such as mediation, support of the SDGs, and capitalization of existing technologies. Mr. Gilad Regev presented a revolutionary idea about rewarding companies and people for using renewable and clean energy with a new currency. He says this will only work if trust is built in the currency and everyone is included in the process. Mr. Apurv Gupta concluded that the world needs to focus on the future leaders where there is energy andpassion to make the world better.

Left to Right: Honorable Carolyn Comitta, Ms. Margaryta Rayets, Mrs. Kateryna Pavlova, H.E. Volodymyr Yelchenko, Dr. Christine K. Durbak, Honorable Andrew Weber, Dr. Martha Linet, Dr. Peter Salk, Dr. Bernard Goldstein

The World Ecology Report is printed on recycled paper.

“Education brings Choices. Choices bring Power.”

Summer-Fall 2018, vol. XXX No. 2-3

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OPENING REMARKS:Dr. Christine K. Durbak

H.E. Ambassador Volodymyr Yelchenko

Honorable Carolyn Comitta

KEYNOTE ADDRESS:Honorable Andrew Weber

PRESENTATIONS:Dr. Bernard D. Goldstein

Ms. Margaryta Rayets

Mrs. Kateryna Pavlova

Dr. Martha Linet

Dr. Peter Salk

Mr. Gilad Regev

Mr. Apurv Gupta

ISSUE available at www.worldinfo.orgSee WIT’s 27th Conference atwww.youtube/user/WITConferences

World Ecology ReportWorld Information Transfer

Summer - Fall 20182

direction, according to Vox. But globally deaths from starvation

have been reduced to one six hundredth of the risk 60 years ago.

This success is a result of establishing a global early famine warn-

ing system and humanitarian efforts around the globe. 2017 also

saw fewer fatalities from natural disasters, according to the In-

ternational Database, infectious diseases continuously decline

globally, largely due to vaccination efforts. Solar power contin-

ues to expand as a source of energy with the Swindon geother-

mal energy andfinally, progress in human rights have grown in

all regions of the world, though certainly not in every country.

Focusing only on progress would produce an overly optimistic view

just as a focus on problems alone produces an overly pessimistic

perception of the state of our world today. Inspiration to improve

the lives of others comes in part from the belief that progress is

possible. Wars, one could argue, have to be expected and accept-

ed as part of the human condition because anger derives from the

core element in the human psyche and the lack of attention to the

emotional and physical needs of every child born is still prevalent.

“One billion people are added to our planet approximately every twelve years since 1950”

An evolutionary change would have to occur for war and child

neglect to disappear, yet limiting conflict and mitigating its re-

sults have been achieved thanks in large measure to the efforts of

the United Nations. The UN itself represents human progress,

symbolized by the ceiling in the ECOSOC chamber. The cham-

ber’s architect, Mark Ilyas, intentionally left part of the scene

unfinished as a reminder that the work of repairing the eco-

nomic and social ills of the world will be ongoing. Achieving

positive change and perceiving it as progress in any sector oc-

curs over time and requires both patience, balance, assessment,

and the willingness to change our perceptions and beliefs.

I would like to end with a quote from Charles Darwin, “Ig-

norance more frequently begets confidence than does knowl-

edge: it is those who know little, and not those who know

much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will

never be solved by science.” Thank you for your attention.

Excellency, distinguished delegates, colleagues, ladies and gentle-

men and students, we are most pleased to welcome you to our

27th annual conference at the United Nations on the topic of Health

and Environment, Global Partners for Global Solutions, which is

co-sponsored by the government of Ukraine, our co-sponsor since

1992 and, supported by the International Council of Women, the

NGO Committee on Sustainable Development New York and

World Association of NGOs. Today I would like to begin with a

quote, “progress isn’t in the eyes of the beholder” which began in

1987 following the catastrophe in Chornobyl on April 26 1986.

With its mission of bringing scientifically relevant information

to promote a healthy environment for all, we are grateful to the

government of Ukraine and His Excellency’s board for support-

ing our mission, and to the faculty to enlighten you this morning.

Our global population in sheer numbers is larger than at any point in

human history. One billion people are added to our planet approxi-

mately every twelve years since 1950, which is challenging the Earth’s

carrying capacity to sustain civilization. However, the average global

family size has decreased and fertility rates have fallen in most de-

veloped countries. People on the average are living longer, healthier,

and safer lives. There are fewer deaths from illness and starvation,

and fewer extremely poor or illiterate people, and certainly more

people connected by telephone, the internet, and transportation.

The tendency to focus only on persistent problems can blind those

who seek to repair the world, observing and supporting progres-

sive change such as United Nations Sustainable Development

Goals, SDGs. SDG 7, Energy, is on our agenda today. We’ll hear

about the transformation happening in Chornobyl, the origin of

why the World Information Transfer began, and how energy, or

lack of it, is transforming our world. Even where progress occurs

many ignore it. Across the globe 60 percent of people surveyed, in-

cluding the US, thought that their nation was moving in the wrong

Dr. Christine K. Durbak

Conference Chair and Founder, World Information Transfer Inc.

3World Ecology ReportWorld Information Transfer

Summer - Fall 2018

H.E. Mr. Volodymyr Yelchenko

Permanent Representative

of Ukraine to the

United Nations

Excellencies, dear Colleagues, distinguished guests, At the outset, let me thank Doctor Christine Durbak of the World International Transfer, Conference Chair and Founder, for being our supporter and partner for so many fruitful years.And I would also like to welcome our distinguished speakers of today. I am pleased that Ukraine has a long lasting tradition of co-hosting this essential open dialogue at the United Nations, that give us an opportunity to discuss a number of the most relevant items of the international, national and regional importance.As Doctor Durbak already mentioned, this year our fo-cus is in conjunction with the UN 2030 agenda target-ing Sustainable Development Goal 7 - Ensure access to af-fordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy for all. The approach of the new United Nation system must ensure comprehensive consideration of security, social and environmental aspects, particularly in priority areas such as ecological safety, comprehensive environmental conservation and risk reduction management. Only such approach will fa-cilitate sustainability and efficiency of the developing world.This issue is of special importance for my country. As you all know, yesterday the international community commemo-rated the 32nd year of the accident at the Chornobyl Nucle-ar Power Plant, the largest nuclear disaster in the history of mankind that has led to the loss of human lives, huge irre-versible health, environmental and economic consequences.It occurred on 26 April 1986 near the city of Prypyat, in Ukraine, which was under the direct jurisdiction of the central authorities of the Soviet Union. Before the di-saster the city had a population of about 50 000 people. Now it is a lifeless shadow of the ghostly nuclear catas-trophe, one of only two rated at a 7 on the IAEA scale.It had a serious political and security impact and changed attitudes towards many aspects of the day-to-day life,

in particular to the nuclear energy industry and its safe-guards. In modern history of Ukraine the scale of the ca-tastrophe can be compared only to the Great Famine of 1933 (Holodomor), Second World War and the ongo-ing Russian aggression in Crimea and the East of Ukraine.For 32 years Ukraine has made every effort to improve the well-being of affected communities and revive the econom-ic potential of the affected areas. This catastrophe disrupted the livelihoods of almost 2 million people in more than 2000 locations. Strengthening the resilience of affected commu-nities and restoration of their self-reliance is the foundation for their sustainable development and our absolute priority. In this regard, we are thankful for productive collaboration with the United Nations. Supported by UN agencies, Ukraine has suc-cessfully implemented a number of international projects aimed at sustained recovery and development of the affected areas..

“United Nations system must ensure comprehensive consideration of security, the

social and environmental aspects”

Dear colleagues, By all means, the shift from restoration of the area to its sustainable socio-economic development can only take place if radiation safety requirements are ful-ly met. Therefore, Ukraine places emphasis on converting the Shelter facility into an environmentally safe system and concluding the construction of the new safe confinement.In November 2016 the New Safe Confinement was erected. This construction project is unprecedented in the history of engineering. Never before has such a huge structure been con-structed at a heavily contaminated site. The next step is the com-pletion of the construction and commissioning of the facility.Having completed this work, we will create all conditions for the implementation of another ambitious project - the instal-lation of a land-based solar panels in the Chornobyl exclusion zone. A month ago a preliminary feasibility study on the instal-lation of the solar panels was presented. The potential demand for electricity is bigger than originally estimated, and can be up to 1.2 GW (gigawatts) of initial power. The study takes into ac-count the features of the territory, the level of radioactive con-tamination of the territory, where the planned location of solar


Summer - Fall 20184

energy facilities, the rules of radiation safety during the work. Dear participants, Let me mention another important aspect of the topic we discuss now. As of today the global terrorist threat within the peaceful nuclear development is an emerg-ing international issue. Therefore, Ukraine welcomes the focus of the international community on the physical protection of nuclear material. In this regard, the Chornobyl international cooperation may also include aspects of the scientific and se-curity infused cooperation under the coordination of the In-ternational Atomic Energy Agency and other UN agencies.

Understanding the long-term nature of the implications of the Chornobyl accident, we find it essential to continue collabora-tion with the United Nations and other international organiza-tions regarding the study and minimization of health, environ-mental and socio-economic consequences of the disaster. One of the primary lessons of Chornobyl was that the world should stay vigilant and united facing such disasters – something that was proved, for instance, by the Fukushima nuclear accident in 2011. Despite the considerable progress in rehabilitation of the affected areas, much remains to be done. The Chornobyl legacy will linger for a long while. And we should never forget about this. So I am convinced that we must continue to carry out various events within the UN just like you do right now.In this light, I would like to inform you that next week the Permanent Mission of Ukraine will be hosting a photo se-ries exhibition featuring Volodymyr Dyagel, a talented young Ukrainian photographer. Some of his works are displayed today on my right and left. The exhibition entitled “Chor-nobyl. Irreversibility” is dedicated to the 32nd Anniversa-ry of the Nuclear Catastrophe. With this in mind, I am us-ing this opportunity to invite you to the opening ceremony, which will take place on Tuesday, May 1, 1.30 pm, by the South Wall of the Conference Building on the first floor. I tried to shape the main ideas of the Ukrainian delegation in the United Nations on the issue and now I guess that it is time to listen to the views and approaches of my colleagues. Thank you.

PA’s Join Legislative Air and Water Pollution Control and Conservation Committee: 50 years

of Bipartisan Environmental Work

I would like to thank you for bringing us together for 27 years at the Health and Environment Conference, where we focus on shaping a healthy future for our children. I also welcome students from Chester County Pennsylva-nia who have been coming to this conferences since 1992. I would also like to welcome and introduce Coleen Engval, re-search analyst of Pennsylvania’s Joint Legislative Conservation Committee of which I am a member. The work of this Com-mittee is the topic of my brief presentation this morning. The Chornobyl nuclear disaster occurred seven years after a Penn-sylvania near nuclear disaster occurred at Three Mile Island, so there is a connection between Ukraine and Pennsylvania. Let me tell you a little bit about what we’re doing in Pennsylvania, and I hope it will be applicable to other states and countries as well. This year is the 50th anniversary of Pennsylvania’s Joint Leg-islative Conservation Committee, a small state agency that you’ve probably never heard of. However I believe this organi-zation, which was operating at its peak during the Three Mile Island and Chornobyl nuclear disasters, has valuable lessons for the modern conservation world. The committee on which I am now serving as a legislative member is bipartisan, serv-ing both Democrat and Republican members of the Pennsyl-vania legislature. In today’s especially contentious political climate, it might surprise you how much we’ve been able to accomplish. During the 60s and 70s the committee was instru-mental in remediating the dangerously polluted environment. Here are a few examples of the committee’s accomplish-ments. I’ll be focusing briefly on the Waste Tires Recy-

Hon. Carolyn Comitta

State Representative, Pennsylvanian House of Representatives

"Chornobyl legacy will linger for a long while"


Summer - Fall 2018

cling Act, and most importantly the Environmental Rights Amendment to the Pennsylvania Constitution. The Waste Tires Recycling Act of 1996 was drafted by the Joint Leg-islative Conservation Committee to address the mil-lions of illegally dumped tires which were littered across streams and forests across Pennsylvania. The Act passed both chambers unanimously and highlighted the ideal bal-ance between environmental and economic responsibility.

Piles of tires prior to the PA Waste Tires Recycling Act of 1996

Perhaps the most notable achievement of the Committee is the ratification of Pennsylvania’s Environmental Rights Amendment in 1971. Article 1 section 27 of the Pennsylvania State Constitution entrusts the protection and maintenance of the environment to the Commonwealth for both current citizens and for future generations. Just eight years after the ratification of this amendment, Pennsylvania bore witness to the nuclear accident and near disaster at Three Mile Island.

Seven years later in Chornobyl the International Com-munity saw a similar distrust and backlash after the hor-rific incident there. In places with strong democratic in-stitutions and citizens’ rights, environmental protections can help establish accountability as well as consequences.

Just recently, Pennsylvania has begun citing its own environ-mental rights amendment. Incredibly the first major use of the amendment was almost 50 years after its inception. Act 13 of 2012 established an impact fee and delegated most powers over natural gas drilling to the state government rather than

the local municipalities. In 2013 one of the first cases that cit-ed the environmental rights amendment, Robinson vs. Com-monwealth, challenged Act 13 and resulted in a decision by the PA Supreme Court which gave municipalities the ability to use zoning to protect their citizens health and their natural resources. In 2017 the amendment was cited again concerning natural gas drilling where the Supreme Court ruled that funds gathered from natural gas drilling must be used to mitigate the impacts of such operations - the funds had to be used for environmental purposes not just deposited into the general fund. As of today, the amendment has not yet been used in a broader context but we shall see how these developments evolve in the years to come. Environmental rights are vital to our citizens’ well-being. Laws and regulations can be amended or repealed, which is why a constitutional guarantee for access to healthy natural resources is vital for both the environment and the humans that depend on it. Thank you very much.or repealed, which is why a constitutional guarantee for access to healthy chiral resources is vital for both the environment and the humans that depend on it. Thank you very much.

Article 1 Section 27 of the Pennsylvania Constitution

The people have a right to clean air, pure water, and to the preservation of the natural, scenic, historic and esthetic values of the environment. Pennsylvania’s public natural

resources are the common property of all the people, including generations yet to come. As trustee of these

resources, the Commonwealth shall conserve and maintain them for the benefit of all the people.


Summer - Fall 20186

weapons of mass destruction. Iraq was successfully denuded of nuclear weapons of mass destruction in the first Gulf War. And with UN efforts in the aftermath of that in the 1990s, the mid-1990s, Libya no longer has weapons of mass destruction.

“...Nuclear weapons as a problem went away with the Cold War .. unfortunately this challenge

remains.”

That was an effort that was launched in 2003 and took over ten years to accomplish, but successful. And today with the chaos in Libya we are happy that there are no weapons of mass destruction available there. Syria, an amazing interna-tional effort that I had the honor to participate in, success-fully removed and destroyed 1,300 tons of chemical weap-ons from Syria, Sarin VX, very dangerous nerve agents. And Iran with the nuclear agreement is prevented from attaining nuclear weapons. That’s a great achievement. And the news today from the Korean Peninsula is extraordi-nary because North Korea is the last of the remaining five so-called rogue states that has nuclear weapons, chemical weap-ons, the largest chemical weapons deployed arsenal in the world, and biological weapons. So, we can hope that we’ll make progress in the near term to reduce that enormous remaining threat of state WMD programs. But in the last 12 months, just in the last 12 months, North Korea used a chemical weapon and nerve agent VX in an assassination in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Recently in Salisbury, England, the Russian gov-ernment operatives used a very advanced fourth generation chemical weapon called the Novacek agents in that assassina-tion that bungled failed assassination attempt. And we’ve seen repeated use as in Syria as President Bashar al-Assad com-mits crimes against humanity with chemical weapons, includ-ing sarin gas. So, there’s much more that needs to be done.

“In the last 25 years the number of countries that have bomb quantities of highly enriched uranium and plutonium has been reduced by more than

half”

And in terms of actual nuclear weapons, we’ve made prog-

Nuclear Energy, Nuclear Power and Human Health: Focus on SDG on Sustainable Energy

Thank you Dr. Durbak and Ambassador Yelchenko, our Ukrainian colleagues. “D’akuju” (Thank you in Ukraini-an). It’s a real honor to be here today, especially among so many emerging leaders. So, I’m going to share a few of my experiences, talk a little bit about recent history and the con-tinuing threat of nuclear weapons and nuclear terrorism.

In 1991, the Soviet Union collapsed and it turned everything upside down. The day before this happened, we were con-cerned about a strong adversary, the Soviet Union. And then after the coup against Gorbachev, where he lost command and control of nuclear weapons, we became concerned about the weakness, the chaos in the aftermath, that this enormous leg-acy of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, that the ma-terials, the weapons themselves, the experts would proliferate and spread and be exploited by even small terrorist groups. So, two visionary American senators Sam Nunn and Richard Lugar launched a program in 1991 called the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction program that was led by the United States Pentagon, Department of Defense. And I had the opportunity of spending much of my thirty-year ca-reer in government working on the program that they cre-ated. They had a vision that enabled Kazakhstan, Ukraine, and Belarus within years after the collapse to be free of nu-clear weapons and assisted with that very historic effort. During the course of my career, we’ve made a lot of progress on countering weapons of mass destruction, be they nuclear chem-ical or biological. We used to talk about five rogue states that had weapons of mass destruction programs. And one by one through international efforts we’ve denuded these countries of

Hon. Andrew WeberKEYNOTE

Former United States Assistant Secretary of Defense, Coucil on Foreign Relations


Summer - Fall 2018

ress. There used to be 70,000 nuclear weapons in the world. Many of them 10 or even a hundred times larger than the two that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 to end World War II. There are nearly 15,000 nuclear weap-ons today. And some of you, younger people in the audience, maybe thought that nuclear weapons as a problem went away with the Cold War but unfortunately this challenge remains. There are two paths to nuclear weapons. You need either highly enriched uranium or plutonium for a nuclear weapon. And there are two two ways that you can attain those bomb materials. One is through theft or diversion from state programs that have these materials, and the oth-er is by having a legitimate peaceful use of nuclear power program, but then covertly pursuing military applications. And that’s where the IAEA, the UN International Atomic Energy Agency, plays a very important role in overseeing the peaceful use of nuclear energy to make sure that it’s not diverted for nuclear weapons purposes. And they’re on the ground in Iran ensuring that our agreement is implemented with full verification. So, we’ve made a lot of progress on reducing the supply of nuclear weapons materials around the world. In the last 25 years the number of countries that have bomb quantities of highly enriched uranium and plu-tonium has been reduced by more than half from over 50countries to less than 25 countries today. And that has been an international effort. President Obama launched the Nucle-ar Security Summits that accelerated that work. But his vision in the Prague speech of A World Without Nuclear Weapons, we’ve made much less progress on arms control and disarma-ment. As a young man, a young United States diplomat, I re-member in 1992 reading an article in The Wall Street Jour-nal about the opening of our new embassy in a country called Kazakhstan. It said, the headline read, “U.S. embassy in Al-maty looking for diplomats who find (Paris abore) .” And I thought that’s me, so I volunteered. I spent 10 months learn-ing the Russian language. In the summer of 1993, I arrived in Almaty, Kazakhstan as an eager young diplomat. Within the first month of my arrival, I was approached by an au-tomobile mechanic, who asked me if I wanted to buy some uranium. I was of course very skeptical, but you need to fol-

low up these things and I said well maybe I’m interested. And this led to a series of events where I was introduced to the director of a factory in eastern Kazakhstan a place called Ust-Kamenogorsk. His name was Vitaly Mette. Over a period of months, I gained his trust. He told me that in his factory there were 600 kilograms of highly enriched uranium that had been left over from a secret Soviet naval reactor, submarine reac-tor program. With the approval of President Nazarbayev, I was invited to visit the factory. This metal bucket filled with highly enriched uranium rods that are directly usable in nuclear weapons. There was enough material there for doz-ens of nuclear bombs. It was protected by a good padlock.

Securing Nuclear Materials: Degelen Mountain

Soure: The Nunn-Lugar CTR program, Global Nuclear Security program

So we launched a secret project together with the government of Kazakhstan to secure and remove this bomb material, so it wouldn’t be available to Al-Qaeda. Or, at that time Irani-an agents were scouring the former Soviet Union for weap-ons of mass destruction, expertise, materials and weapons. You see here a convoy of trucks carrying safely packaged for transport, the six hundred kilograms of highly enriched ura-nium, to an airfield in Ust-Kamenogorsk. In this, I remember like it was yesterday driving from the factory at 3 o’clock in the morning. In this convoy, there was black ice on the roads. The trucks were sliding and I didn’t want to have to report to Washington that one of them slid off a bridge and was now floating down the Irtysh river. We made it to the airport. In the longest military transport flight, nonstop flight, in history, that material was flown to the United States where it was sent to Oak Ridge Tennessee and blended down for use in nuclear power reactors. That project took this material off the market.


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It was followed up by many similar efforts that reduced the number of countries that have these materials. It was described in a book by David Hoffman called The Dead Hand, and Cary Granat is now producing a movie about this Project Sapphire. This is the Semipalatinsk nuclear weapons test site, where the Soviet Union conducted 456 nuclear weapons tests. And over a hundred and fifty of those were atmospheric or above-ground tests. And the human toll and the surround-ing populations was devastating. I’ve become friends with an artist who now paints anti-nuclear paintings. He has no arms and legs because as a baby he was exposed to the fallout from these nuclear weapons tests. The area of this test site was as large as Belgium. And within it there’s an exclusion zone of 300 square kilometers that can never be used. But we worked secretly with our Russian counterparts and Kazakhstani coun-terparts to secure several hundred kilograms of plutonium that were left over at this test site. That project took 17 years to complete and was announced in Seoul by Presidents Medve-dev, Obama and Nazarbayev in 2012 at the Nuclear Security Summit. There are two very dangerous trends now happening in the world related to nuclear weapons. The first is that the risk of nuclear war is the highest it has been in my lifetime.

“For the first time in 40 years Russians and Americans are not negotiating a follow-on nuclear

arms control agreement.”

Indeed, The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists has moved the so-called Doomsday Clock to just two minutes before midnight, which is the closest to midnight it has been since 1953. And one of the driving forces for this increased risk of nuclear war is the blurring of the line between conventional weapons and nu-clear weapons. Both Russia and the United States are pursuing smaller, more usable nuclear weapons for nuclear war fighting in a limited regional conflict. And anybody whose ever been to Chornobyl or Fukushima, as I have, know that and the releases of radiation there were much smaller than even a small nucle-ar weapon. The devastation that would happen in even a small nuclear war and the risk that would escalate to a planet end-ing conflict nuclear exchange is too high, so we need to work against this trend of sort of the 1960s ideas that you could have

small battlefield nuclear weapons. And the other related nega-tive trend is that, with the breakdown of the arms control trea-ties, such as the intermediate nuclear forces treaty that Reagan and Gorbachev negotiated in 1987 and now the New START treaty between Russia and the United States. It expires in 2021 and it needs to be extended. But for the first time in 40 years Russians and Americans are not negotiating a follow-on nu-clear arms control agreement. So, we’re at the beginning of an unconstrained arms race and we’ve been there before and we shouldn’t go there. It will be costly. The United States plans to spend over the next 30 years on nuclear weapons moderniza-tion, including Donald Trump’s three new lower yield nuclear weapons that were announced earlier this year. 1.7 trillion dollars, 1.7, that’s one thousand seven hundred billion dollars on nuclear weapons modernization. And the same in Russia.

“...One of the driving forces for this increased risk of nuclear war is the blurring of the line between

conventional weapons and nuclear weapons.”

President Putin’s announcement in his speech to the Russian Federation earlier this year described more new nuclear weap-ons, including nuclear cruise missiles. And they’re the most dangerous and destabilizing class of nuclear weapons because you can’t tell if it’s carrying a conventional weapon or a nuclear weapon. There’s no way to discriminate. So, I’ve been working with governments in Europe and Asia to eliminate this danger-ous class of nuclear weapons, nuclear-armed cruise missiles. So my message to you it’s really a request to the emerg-ing leaders in the room. As I describe, these threats of weap-ons of mass destruction are still with us. They’re growing and indeed the very survival of the planet is at stake. And so, I had the privilege in my public service career of 30 years of working on trying to reduce these threats. And we made some progress. But much more progress needs to be made. And as you embark on your professional careers, whether you pursue science or journalism or public and global ser-vice, I would ask that you work on these issues because it’s individuals like you that will be the heroes in making the world a safer healthier and better place for our chil-dren and their children. So, thank you for your leadership.


Summer - Fall 2018

The Policy Interface of Sustainable Power and Human Health

Thank you very much. It has been an honor to work with Dr. Durbak the past 27 years. I want to acknowledge her in-credible leadership and energy without which there would be no WIT. Great thanks to Ukraine and to His Excellency Vladimir Yelchenko for their sponsorship these many years of the program. As a citizen of the Commonwealth of Penn-sylvania I’m particularly happy to follow the honorable Car-olyn Comitta. Her election to our Assembly is one of the very good political events we’ve had occur in recent years. My talk aims at providing an introductory overview of the interface between sustainability, energy and hu-man health. The UN has had a very important role in Sustainability. A key foundation document for Sus-tainability, Agenda 21, came out of the UN in 1992. It seems obvious that healthy humans are central to set-ting and achieving sustainable development goals. But when Agenda 21 was put together, there was quite a debate as to whether human health was an integral part of the 3 legs of sustainability. Economy, Environment, and Social. Health generally has been subsumed under the Social leg. Energy is central to sustainability in part because sus-tainability requires consideration of future generations. How will there be sufficient energy for a still growing population and for global development, which means more people with cars and energy using appliances? We sometimes think of sustainability as being the end goal, as if the eventual steady state will be this wonderful world of sustainable development. But Sustainability is a process, not an endpoint.

Dr. Bernard D. Goldstein

Dean Emeritus, University of Pittsburgh, School of Public Health

“The world will always be changing; global climate change will make that happen...if nothing else”

There will always be new technologies, as humans innovate. Dr Durbak in her opening remarks talked about the need to balance the potential value of innovation with the potential for adverse effects. With all of the disasters today we tend to speak more of resil-ience than of sustainability. What is the difference? Think of the figure of speech about the glass that a pessimist thinks is half empty and the optimist half full. But to someone inter-ested in sustainability, the glass is twice the size it needs to be. We do need the extra glass if we are going to be resilient, be-cause the amount of fluid in the glass will not be stable- it will constantly increase and decrease. We need enough to be able to cover the inevitable perturbations – but how much more? Resilient communities are particularly important; they antici-pate risk, limit impact and quickly adapt. We must be able to deal with these issues, because we are going to have even more changes and adverse events, if for no other reason that we are losing the Earth’s buffering capacity to deal with changes. The UN Sustainable Development Goal 7 contains a variety of sustainability goals put together as part of the Millennium Assessment program. The 2017 report describes the extent of progress in meeting energy goals and finds that for every goal energy progress falls short. Meaningful improvements will require higher levels of financing and bolder policy com-mitments. This is something that we need to keep in mind because when we do talk about new technologies, we’re also talking about new potential threats to the environment and to human health. We have to balance benefits and risks. One can consider the history of environmental protection in three stages. The first is Command and Control, which pri-marily consists of controlling visible air pollution emitted from smokestacks, and dirty effluents released into water or soil. The second stage is Risk Assessment and Risk Manage-ment. While we continue to control overt pollution sources,


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we realize that there are pollutants that we cannot see, smell, or touch, that harm the environment and humans. Now we must fully approach a third stage, that of sustainability. Un-der EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson, the National Academy of Sciences was asked to look at how the US Environmental Protection Agency could act in a sustainable fashion. While the report detailed a variety of potentially helpful processes and frameworks, it can be summarized as recommending that the EPA should approach a potential environmental problem by considering not only how to minimize risk but how to maximize benefits. That includes a broad consider-ation of the economy, the environment and social/health is-sues, including learning how to perform trade-off analyses. In the short time that I have let me use the example of shale gas and oil obtained through advances in hydraulic fractur-ing and other newer drilling technologies. Let me start with a positive. In 1973, at the time of the Arab oil embargo fol-lowing their failure to defeat Israel after their surprise at-tack in the Yom Kippur war, President Nixon said within 10 years the US will never have this happen again because we will be energy independent. Instead we went from 30% of oil imported to a high of 65% of oil imported. Now, be-cause of this new technology, the US is down to a net im-

Map of Basins with Assessed with shale Oil and shale Gas Formation, as of May 2013

Source: United States Basins from U.S. Energy Information Administration and United States Geological Sur vey; other basins from ARI based on data from Various published studies

port of about 15% which is virtual energy independence. This unforeseen response to new technology includes Is-rael and Egypt having energy deals because Israel has natural gas off its coast. How will that affect the whole se-ries of security issues, including Hezbollah obtaining a submarine? Another example of the worldwide impact of changing energy supplies was also evident at the lat-est NATO meeting when the issue of the EU obtaining its gas supplies from Russia was very much in evidence. In addition to energy independence there are other pos-sible benefits of shale gas, including economic well-being and replacement of coal as a more polluting energy source. But the new shale gas technology is not without problems - local, regional and global. Significant local and regional problems include noise, truck traffic, release of air and wa-ter pollutants, and diverse psychosocial and community impacts. All of these have been compounded by the indus-try’s attempt to obfuscate the issues, including actively mis-leading the public. Not all of the shale gas industry is guilty of communicating falsely, but overall this fragmented in-dustry lacks a peer structure that is responsive to 21at cen-tury standards of public communication from industry.


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And there’s the global issues. The industry has done a very good job of making the issue sound like methane produc-tion will more than offset the global climate change caused by fossil fuels such as coal. However, methane that is deep un-derground is not involved in causing global climate change. Once industry brings methane to the surface, the meth-ane is participating in the global climate change process. It should be industry’s responsibility not to just get below the global climate change forcing function of the amount of carbon dioxide produced by coal, but also to take responsi-bility to decrease methane releases from their drilling and distribution of shale gas to as low a level as possible. They have not done so. Let me emphasize that not all of the shale gas industry adheres to avoidable harmful practices – but overall the industry has been focused on making money to the detriment of the public and to a sustainable future.

I had the honor of spending four months in Germany in the University of Cologne comparing the US and the EU ap-proaches to shale gas. Much of the difference is due to prop-erty right issue. In the US property rights are a very important. Most property owners in the US own their subsurface prop-erty rights, which is true in almost no other place in the world. By owning subsurface property rights an American can obtain a fair amount of money. In Europe, the local property owner can have no benefit and only risk from state-sanctioned shale gas drilling on their property as they only own surface rights. Further, property rights are guaranteed in our constitution and are particularly important to Americans. My colleague, J. Hudak and I found that anti-sustainability activity in the

Source: U.S. Energy Information Adminstration

US was highly related to a strong belief in property rights and a concern that sustainability was a guise to take away these property rights. In this era of global climate change it is an is-sue that is growing more and more within the right wing of the US Republican party. In contrast, by studying EU right wing party platforms and the comments of those supporting Brexit, we found that the issue of property rights in Europe related to environmental matters or sustainabilitysimply does not exist. The natural gas issue also illustrates the breadth of energy issues in other ways. For example, although the EU has its own shale gas now deep underground, and desires to free itself from dependence on Russia, it has not drilled for gas but instead asked for US guarantees of gas supplies. Presi-dent Obama came to Brussels in 2014 to basically argue that the EU needs to be paying more for its defense by increas-ing its NATO expenditure. At the press conference he kept getting questions about the US sending the EU natural gas. His somewhat frustrated response was to say that the US had taken on some of the difficulties and challenges of en-ergy development and Europe is going to have to go through some of these same conversations as well. Another broad issues bought up by the natural gas experience includes the role of the precautionary principle. American industry has argued that precautionary principle precluded the EU oil in-dustry developing the advanced technology to obtain deep underground shale gas because each step of the way they would have needed to submit to intense EU governmental bureaucratic oversight. Yet another EU/US difference is the complete unanimity of NGOs in opposition to shale gas in the EU while at least some US NGOs, such as EDF, are will-ing to cautiously work with industry to explore the potential value of shale gas as a bridging fuel. This is similar to the lockstep anti-GMO beliefs of EU NGOs as compared to the more nuanced approaches to GMOs within some US NGOs. I will finish with a very positive picture of what Germany is doing in relation to global climate change. While driving through Germany it is very impressive to see fields of solar panels and windmills. But you have to look very quickly if you want to see them because you are driving about a hun-



Margaryta Rayets

Head of Information External Relations and Public Relations of Ukraine

From ‘Black’ to ‘Green” Point: Exclusion Zone Transformation

Thank you. Dear ladies and gentleman, distinguished del-egates, my name is Magaryta Rayets. I work for the State Agency of Ukraine on exclusion zone management. I am pleased to be here to shortly focus my presentation on the exclusion zone activities. So, as you may know, the exclusion zone is a huge territory contaminated with long-lived radio-nuclides, as a result of the Chornobyl disaster. You may see some numbers just to remind you of the catastrophic plan-etary scale. We often compare our exclusion zone to Lux-embourg, of course not by the territory took… occupied… of course by the territory it occupies, not by the welfare.

For those of you who may not be familiar with the functions of our agencies, it is important to know that we have four core tasks, such as exclusion zone management, Chornobylnuclear power plant decommissioning and transforma-tion of the “Shelter” object into an ecologically safe system. Overcoming the consequences of the Chornobyl disaster and state waste management in all of Ukraine. Our activity iscoordinated by the Minister of Ecology and Natural Resourc-es of Ukraine and is important to mention that the recent number of enterprises under our management fulfilling its own functions regarding to the exclusive zone maintenance The key trends of the reform and of the exclusion zone led with success move from black point, through recovery to de-velopment, and so-called green point. They are engineering, construction and science which altogether provide for the positive changes. In this regard, it is vital to provide open policy, create investment opportunities and change the sta-tus of exclusion zone to “self-sustaining economic entity”. The main direction of practical exclusion on transforma-tion are as follows. The first one is the creation of the Chor-

dred miles an hour. The Germans admit that this fast driving costs 13% of their automotive fuel with resultant increase in carbon dioxide emissions. Culturally, Germans like to drive very fast but to live in population dense cities. We tend to drive much more slowly but like to sprawl in big homes with large yards which has its own global climate change conse-quences. Similarly, German opposition to nuclear power has led them to close all of their nuclear power sites, but the en-ergy replacement is achieved largely through burning rather poor grade coal. That coal is adding to carbon dioxide re-leases and causing lots of particulate pollution, which is of greater concern in the US (think of the Volkswagen scandal). Let me conclude by asking all to respect these very important cultural and geographical issues, while at the same time working within our cultures to achieve maximum sustainability through developing and efficiently using appropriate energy sources.

Source: Energy Transition, The Global Energiewende

Germany Renewable Energy

“...Once the renewable energy infra-structure is built, the fuel is free for-ever. Unlike carbob-based fuels, the wind and the sun and the earth itself provide fuel that is free, in amounts that are effectively limitless".

- Al Gore


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nobyl Radiation and Ecological Biosphere Reserve. Next one is solar energy development, my colleague will touch upon this issue in the day later and infrastructure develop-ment. By infrastructure, I mean the state waste manage-ment facilities and others. By the decree of the President of Ukraine, in order to preserve natural systems, provide ter-ritorial remediation and ensure the barrier function, the Chornobyl Biosphere Reserve was created actually. Its im-portant to mention that the exclusion zone is open to visitors since 2010. The visited exclusion zone became very popular.

Exclusion Zone Biosphere Reserve

Actually it is forbidden to touch animals in the exclusion zone but this fox, is a fox named Semyon, he is the symbol of exclu-sion zone. He is very friendly, he eats foods from your hands. Animals in the exclusion zone are very lovely and they are not afraid of people even wolves. Of course there is no end to development of the exclusion zone and we have an intention to just provide water tours in the nearest future, air tours and ecotourism for visitors and we welcome everyone in Chor-nobyl. Please come and see with your eyes the animals, nature reservation and our facilities. They are very huge and unique.

So to conclude my brief presentation, I’d once more like to stress that there has been a long way to the exclusion zone transformation through legislation, many negotiations with stakeholders and mutual efforts with our international part-ners. And the exclusion zone is a really unique polygon for us for scientific research, international cooperation and I am sure that it has a bright future. So thank you for your attention.

Kateryna Pavlova

Head of International Affairs of Ukraine on Exclusion Zone Management

Alternative Step of Chornobyl to Green Energy

Thank you. Hello dear Colleagues, and guests and thank you Dr Durbak to invite us to this possibility to inform about situation, about the Chornobyl exclusion zone. I will try to be short and clear but with concrete points about the solar park in Chornobyl.

The implementation and realization of the solar energy devel-opment project is considered a new stage in the organizations of consequences resulted from the accident of the Chornobyl nuclear power plant. So what we have for today? We have huge territories, which are forever withdrawn from agricultural cir-culation. We also have very powerful electrical power trans-port, network capacity which is very important for investors to be sure that grid connection for future solar park, it will be pro-vided. Also we have Paris Agreement regarding of issue until 2020, 11 process of energy in Ukraine with alternative source.

Source: State agency of Ukraine on Exclusion Zone Management

We also created territory by two parts. How my colleague said, it would be big reserve, natural reserve and it would be 10 kilo-metres zone territory of special use, industrial use and exactly on this territory, it would be the solar park. Our engineers and



staff who work in Chornobyl NPP, they have found some spe-cial areas which are totally flat, especially for this big solar park.

Chornobyl Radiation-Ecological Biosphere Reserve

Source: State agency of Ukraine on Exclusion Zone Management

As the territory is located on the same latitude as Germany and France which meet their energy needs from alterna-tive sources for more than 10 years and we already, our agencies receive more than 60 applications for land lease.

Companies and potential investors are very interested about the zone and we received from France, Denmark, USA, China, Germany, and also from Belarus and Ukraine. The potential interest for electricity is up to 1.2 GW. So this proj-ect is a big onel. On July 4, 2017, at a meeting of the Cabi-net of Ministers of Ukraine, a decision was taken of the Ministry of Energy and Coal Industry, and Ministry of En-vironment and state agency of Ukraine on exclusion zone management, with the participation of the state enterprise “NEC Ukrenergo”. This is to ensure the project development for the construction of infrastructure for collecting and is-sue power. Grid connections pre-flexibility study. And thedevelopment of infrastructure construction project and the result was already presented in December, 2017. We also have a big initiative from international experts, for example, ENGIE, a French company, initiated the feasibility study on the solar energy project, funded y the Government of France and close cooperation with Minister of Environment and the Natural Resources of Ukraine and State Agency of

Ukraine on Exclusion Zone Management. The calculation of the feasibility study for the project was carried out. In March 2018, according to the results of the calcu-lations of the flexibility study, the French company, ENGIE, concluded that from technical and economi-cal point of view, the construction of the Solar Park with a capacity of 1.2 GW in exclusion zone is possible. So problems faced by investors. One of the most im-portant issues investors face building alternative pow-er objects is the connection to the electricity networks. Second, is the investors’ concerns about performance features on radioactively contaminated territories.

Global Irradiation and Solar Electricity Potential

Source: PGVIS European Communities 2001-2008

And the solution we see is to create state electric power transport enterprise on the basis with the involvement of high qualified staff from Chornobyl NPP, who will be interested in building alternative energy objects. We have a lot of specialists engineers and other staff which can provide and service this project in the future. Provid-ing companies and investors with full range of services for construction and installation work. Services of operat-ing maintenance and other related services, meals, trans-port, accommodation. So this project is also one of the future issue and future decision for exclusion zone and we will work hard to provide it. Thank you so much.


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Effect of Radiation on Children

Thank you for inviting me to this very interesting conference.

The goals of this presentation are to present the latest find-ings on the health effects of radiation exposure to chil-dren, drawing from the key studies, and to emphasize the state-of-the-art lifetime perspective on radiation risks. Risk of radiation exposure cumulates through life.

Source: Dr. M. Linet, Epidemiologist, National Cancer Institute

The topics for this presentatio include: sources of radiation, why study children, and cancer and other health risks

Radiation and Health Outcomes – History

Radiation was discovered more than a hundred years ago. Serious health effects from high exposure levels soon became apparent including cancer, reported within a few years.

Radiation Health Outcomes – First Systematic Studies

The first systematic studies of large populations were car-ried out in the 1940-s-50s. The main effects I will dis-cuss are cancer, mental health problems cataracts and cardiovascular disease. Early health effects were first ap-

Martha Linet

Epidemiologist,National Institute of Health, USA

preciated in workers, radiologists, radium dial paint-ers, and then with the atomic bomb survivors in Japan.

Radiation Exposure Sources and Types

There are three major sources of radiation exposure: medical, environmental, and occupational.

Radiation Exposure: Comparative (Effective*) Doses

The levels vary by orders of magnitude from a tiny dose for one transatlantic flight, low doses from diagnostic x-rays, somewhat higher doses from CT scans, moder-ate doses among young persons residing near Chornob-yl to very high doses to those undergoing radiotherapy.

Radiation Doses to Organs from Medical Procedures

But effective doses are not biologically meaning-ful; it is doses to organs that are important biologi-cally. Organ doses also range by orders of magnitude.

Radiation Exposure Per Capita

Radiation exposure has changed dramatically over time world-wide. Comparing 1980 and 2006 in the United States, natural background accounted for about 75% of the exposure in 1980, whereas 1/2 of population radiation exposures were from med-ical sources in 2006; CT scans were the largest source, but nu-clear medicine and interventional procedures also increased.

Why Study Children?

So why study children? Children are the most sensitive to radiation - the foetus because of the very rapid organ and tissue development; the child due to smaller body diam-

Source: Mettler et al Radiology 2009



In Utero Radiation and Cancer Risks post-Chornobyl

In utero studies of cancer risk following radiation exposure from the Chernobyl accident (mostly from I-131 [fallout] instead of external exposure) among 2,600 mother-child pairs in Ukraine revealed an excess risk of 12-fold increase (high, but not statistically significant, because of the very small number of thyroid cancers, which is a rare condition.

In Utero Radiation and Cancer in Techa river Residents

Another population that was exposed in utero was in the southern Ural Mountains in Russia. This is a population liv-ing in proximity to the Mayak plutonium refining plant, where during the 50s and the 60s radionuclides were dumped into the nearby Techa River. This study showed no excess of solid or hematopoietic cancers with increasing in utero exposure. Because the women and then their offspring continued to ingest the radionuclides from the river, risk rose with in-creasing postnatal exposures. This echoes the findings from the atomic bomb survivors, where it looks like early child-hood exposures may be more important than fetal exposures.

Childhood and Adolescent Radiation Exposure

Pediatric CT scans and Cancer Risks

In a study of pediatric CT scans and cancer risk in the Unit-ed Kingdom that linked radiologic exams with cancer reg-istry data, a three-fold increase was seen for leukemia and for brain tumors with increasing red bone marrow dose and

eters and organ sizes, and they drink milk which can be contaminated by fallout; and adolescents resulting from growth spurts and tissues proliferation (such as the breast).

Early Life Time Periods of Radiation Exposure The main emphasis of the talk will focus on three periods: pre-natal; childhood/adolescence; and preconception exposures to germ cells.

In Utero X-rays and Childhood Leukemia Risks

In epidemiology we measure risk by comparing risk in ex-posed to risk in unexposed. In a very striking first report that appeared in the 1950s describing risks for women who un-derwent prenatal exams using x-rays (prior to the advent of ultrasound), a very large study based on maternal interview showed a 50% increase in risk of childhood leukemia was seen among the offspring of women who underwent prenatal x-rays. Although the study was greeted with a huge amount of scepticism, a Harvard study based on medical records found the same result - a 50% increase at risk of leukemia among offspring of women who had undergone prenatal x-rays. More recently a study in the United Kingdom again using medical records found a smaller increase in risk (about 35% elevated), but the recent study was a mixture of offspring of women who had undergone prenatal x-rays and ultrasound. Ultrasound, a form of non-ionizing radiation, is not linked with increased risk. In a meta-analysis carried out in 2008 of 32 studies, overall the risk was about 30 percent increased. Exposures from in utero radiation are considered low-dose generally defined as about a hundred milligray or below.

In Utero A-Bomb Exposures and Solid Cancer Risks

This is a paradigm- changing study of in utero that found that risk per dose of radiation increased about twofold. In com-parison, those exposed in early childhood under age six ex-perienced risk that was a little bit higher. What was striking was that elevated risks were not apparent following in utero exposures until 50 plus years after the atomic bombings. Also surprising was that the cancer risk per 10,000 person-years following the in utero exposure was considerably lower than risks following early childhood exposure. Reasons are unclear.

ERR/mGy= 0.036 (95%CI: 0.005 - 0.120) p-trend=0.010

Leukemia Source: Pearce MP et Lancet, 2012


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brain dose, respectively. The absolute risk is estimated to be one excess case for 10,000 head CT scans. Studies are under-way internationally to see whether these findings can be rep-licated. It is also important to point out that these CT scans may be life-saving, and cost-benefit needs to be considered.

Brain Tumors Source: Pearce MP et Lancet, 2012

Multiple childhood and adolescent x-rays for scoliosis and

breast cancer mortality risks

For children and adolescents with curvature of the spine monitored through multiple childhood and adolescent x-rays, an Increasing risk of breast cancer was seen with in-creasing radiation dose many years after the initial x-rays.

Natural Background Radiation and Childhood Leukemia

Do we need to worry about natural background radia-tion since the doses are extremely low? We are all exposed. In the United Kingdom, an extremely large study was car-ried out that demonstrated a small but measurable excess relative risk of childhood leukemia per millisievert of cu-mulative red bone marrow dose from gamma radiation. No excess risk was seen from radon exposure, which is much less penetrating to tissue than natural background gamma radiation. No significant associations were seen for other childhood cancers. An enlargement of this study is underway.

Source: Kendall GM et al Leukemia 2013

Manmade radiation and childhood cancer

In studies of cancer risks from above-ground nuclear tests, the main effects have been thyroid cancer/thyroid nod-ules, because the main exposure is i-131, which heads to the thyroid gland but no consistent evidence of increased cancers. Studies of cancer risks among populations liv-ing in proximity to about 200 nuclear plants have found in-creased childhood leukemia near three, but no excess near 197. Reasons for the excess risks observed near the three plants (two in the UK, one in Germany) are not known.

The Chornobyl Accident, Ukraine, 26 April 1986 The main question was whether I-131 from fallout is as carci-nogenic as external radiation.

Childhood/Adolescent Exposure to Fallout from Chornobyl

and Risk of Thyroid Cancers In follow-up of about 12,000 to 13,000 children in Ukraine and about 12,000 in Belarus under age 19 at the time of the ac-cident, increases of thyroid cancer with increasing dose were seen (based on 65 thyroid cancer cases in Ukraine and 85 in Be-larus). The increases in risk were similar about a two-fold ex-cess risk per Gray. Risks were higher for earlier age at exposure.

Brenner et al. Environ Health Perspect 2011

Zablotska et al. Br. J Cancer 2011

Ukraine Incidence, n=65ERR/Gy P

Total 1.95 <0.001

Age at exposure0-4 7.43 0.405-11 1.57

12-18 0.69

Belarus Prevalence, n=85EOR/Gy* P

Total 2.15 <0.001

Age at exposure0-4 4.02 0.485-11 1.95

12-18 1.40

Cancer type Cases/Controls RR/mSv 95% CI P-valueLymphoid leukemia 7,267/9,571 1.13 1.02-1.24 0.01

Myeloid leukemia 1,316/1,737 1.05 0.87-1.28 0.60

Other leukemias 475/604 1.25 0.87-1.78 0.40

Total leukemia 9,058/11,912 1.12 1.03-1.22 0.01ERR/mGy = 0.023 (95% CI: 0.010 - 0.049) p-trend<0.0001



Childhood/Adolescent Risk of Thyroid Cancer after the

2011 Fukushima Accident Because of the work done in Chornobyl, a lot was learned that helped influence what went on following Fukushima. In a study of 300,000 children who underwent ultrasound ex-amination of the thyroid three years following the Fukushima accident, 113 thyroid cancers were identified which the inves-tigators reported to be a substantially higher rate than in un-exposed Japanese. Among the numerous criticisms: (1) ultra-sound examination detects clinically insignificant lesions, that may have just gone away just by themselves; (2) comparison of rates in screened versus unscreened is very problematic since what it is reported to Japanese cancer registries are restrict-ed to clinically detected cancers; (3) there was no significant difference in rates of thyroid cancers between the screened with low versus high estimated radiation exposures (if risk is related to radiation, there should be a significant difference with those who had higher doses showing higher risks of thy-roid cancer; and (4) based on the findings from the studies inChornobyl, the latency was way too short. For Chor-nobyl, the first thyroid cancers were not reported until four to five years later. This is a survey done within three years, so overall there this study was quite problematic.

Preconception Radiation and Cancer in Offspring – 1 Preconception radiation exposure studies evaluate ef-fects in offspring of people who are exposed to radia-tion. From studies have been carried out in radia-tion workers, no excess radiation has been seen in nuclear worker offspring, or in medical worker offspring.

Preconception Radiation and Cancer in Offspring – 2

In studies of atomic bomb survivors followed up through 2009 (mean follow-up is 54 years) have shown no excess cancer mortality risks in offspring of the exposed survivors.

Preconception Radiation and Cancer in Offspring – 3

Studies of childhood cancer survivors (who have generally received high doses of radiation) have reported no excess cancer in offspring. But the studies are not very large and small risks might not be apparent; larger studies are needed.

Radiation and Outcomes Other than Cancer

Now I will talk briefly on radiation and outcomes other than cancer.

Radiation and Mental Health Outcomes Important mental health outcomes have been related to radiation such as anxiety, depression, fear, somatic com-plaints, behavioural problems and post-traumatic stress dis-order. In well-done studies, the overall excess risk is about 20% in the first year in exposed compared to unexposed populations. Higher risks have been reported in mothers of young children, and those with prior psychologic prob-lems. These studies suggest that more attention is needed.

Radiation Exposure and Other Diseases Other conditions associated with radiation expo-sure include non-malignant thyroid diseases, a.k.a hy-pothyroidism, cardiovascular disease at high expo-sures and a meta-analysis showing excesses at low to moderate exposures, and cataracts. But there has been rela-tively little research on these long-term effects on children.

Measures to Reduce Adverse Health Effects from Radiation

Exposure in Children For diagnostic radiation, use something other than ionizing radiation for imaging, e.g. ultrasound and MRIs, etc. Radi-ologists have developed and implemented appropriate algo-rithms to optimize the strategy about whether an imaging exam is needed and to minimize dose to produce reasonable

• Mental health conditions long associated with disasters involving radiation exposures• Conditions: anxiety; depression; fear; somatic

complaints; social, thought and behavioral problems; other symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder• Overall excess risk is 20% after first 12 months• Increased susceptibility: females, mothers of young

children, & those with prior psychological problems• First long-term follow-up studies: after Three Mile

Island and Chornobyl nuclear accidentsSource: Hagan JP et al Pediatrics 2005; Neria Y et al Psychol Med 2008; Schonfeld DJ et al Pediatrics 2015;


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images, but at much lower doses. Manufacturers have created software to reduce doses from x-ray equipment. Radiation oncologists have also developed algorithms to reduce doses and improve use of blocking, Newer radiotherapy modalities have been developed to reduce radiation scatter to the sur-rounding issue. The major approaches for reducing radia-tion exposure from radiation emergencies include increasing shielding by staying indoors in rooms (preferably basements with thick walls, decontamination by taking off all clothes and undergoing showers, potassium iodide taken immediately to reduce risk of thyroid cancer, and treatment to mitigate re-spiratory or gastrointestinal absorption and primary toxicity.

In summary, I have described risks of radiation exposed can-cer and other outcomes following prenatal radiation expo-sures from diagnostic procedures. Those have been reduced with the advent of ultrasound, although pregnant women still do get x-rays, following injuries and other events. I have talked a little bit about the in utero A-bomb exposures that showed increasing risk with increasing exposure, but not clinically observed for decades after the bombings. We talk-ed a little bit about childhood and adolescent radiation ex-posures. From multiple monitoring x-rays for patients with scoliosis, and exposures during early childhood from CT exams, the atomic bombings and the Chernobyl accident. We discussed the absence of findings to date on preconcep-tion radiation exposures for offspring of radiation work-ers, A-bomb survivors and cancer childhood cancer sur-vivors. Finally, we discussed measures to reduce exposure.

Enhancing the Prospects for Acheiving the Sustainable Development Goals

Thank you for the introduction. This conference is a call to action on our part. We need to come to our senses and be more aware of our environment. We are sitting in this United Nations, which was created to help us guide our path through the world in a way that will al-low us all to relate to each other constructively and creatively, rather than pursue the destructive paths that led to the cre-ation of this organization, following the two World Wars.

Three years ago, the United Nations created an agenda, a fifteen year agenda for Sustainable Development Goals. Looking around at the world, we see clearly the problems that confront us in terms of the environment; war, vio-lence, the loss of life in the oceans, degradation in so many ways, and the inhumanity and inequality on our planet. Today, we are deal with one of the 17 Sustainable De-velopment Goals, having to do with affordable and clean energy, in the context of other 16 goals that re-quire our attention. There’s so much that needs to be done in terms of creating a path for ourselves ahead.Although we tend to think in terms of the objectives that need to be accomplished, what I want to do today is to focus on another dimension, another element, which is the human dimension. All of the things that we deal with in the world to-day have to do with us as people. Our ability to achieve these noble goals depends on our ability to inter-act creatively and constructively with each other.

“Looking around at the world, we see so clearly the problems that confront us!”

Dr. Peter Salk

President, Jonas Salk Legacy Foundation

Radiation Source Mitigation strategies

Diagnostic radiation exposure

• Alternate imaging: no ionizing radiation• Appropriateness algorithms• Optimization strategies

Therapeutic radiation

• Use of blocks• Newer radiotherapy modalities to reduce

radiation scatter to surrounding tissue• Alternate treatment

Radiation emergencies

• Acute radiation syndrome: decontamination; treatment to mitigate respiratory or gastrointestinal absorption, and primary toxicity

• Reduce thyroid cancer risk: potassium iodide

Sources: http://www.remm.nlm.gov,http://fda.gov/drugs/emergencypreparedness/bioterrorismdrugspreparedness



My father, Jonas Salk, was known for his contributions in the field of health, in the middle of the 1950s. He and his research team, in the University of Pittsburgh, created the first vaccine against polio, a devastating disease which crip-pled children, adults, and affected over a half million people in the world each year. Polio today, as a result of that vac-cine is almost gone. There are fewer than a hundred cases of Serket Polio, caused by circulating polio viruses in the world. We are on the brink of success. But, we are still be-ing hampered by the fact that we can’t get the vaccines in war torn countries and some political and religious objections that are preventing a complete success in eliminating polio.

My father also wrote four books on humanity and its fu-ture. One was called Survival of the Wisest, which is a play on words that are attributed to Charles Darwin and his concept of survival of fittest. Another book was writ-ten with my youngest brother Jonathan, which was called World Population and Human Values: A New Reality.

And what I want to do is start to look at some of the thinking that my father proposed and put forth in his writing and in his talks that give a perspective on our situation as a species. He looked at things from an evolutionary perspective. We tend to think of evolution as Darwinian in terms of biolog-ical evolution, the evolution of one species to another. He looked at evolutionary progress over time, starting from the first appearance in the world of fundamental particles and at-oms and molecules, their coalescence into stars and galaxies and planets. And this was a phase of pre-biologic evolution.

This is before considering anything having to do with life but the universe was evolving, and I am giving us a scientific perspective. One could think of things in religious terms. I think that these are very compatible in many different ways, but I’m just going to use the language that I am familiar with. So, the second phase of evolution is the biologic phase that we tend to think about ordinarily, which has to do with the appearance of living organisms, individual cells, multicellular organisms, and then ultimately from our personal perspec-tive, the appearance of humans on the scene. So, that’s the

next stage of evolution, which is what we usually think about. But, we are in a different phase of evolution right now. Hu-manity has dominated the planet and we are in a phase that my father considered to be meta biologic evolution, which is not with evolving difference physical character-istics like the number of fingers on the hand. It has to do with the evolution of our minds, of our cultures, of our so-ciety, of the products of our thinking. We look at the world around us and this is what dominates our situation today and that’s where the evolutionary issues are taking place.

If we look at world population growth through history, its rather remarkable that for millions of years the human population was relatively stable and only in the last 2 to 3 hundred years, as the population shot up because of our increased ability to master the issues in our environment with the Industrial Revolution, the Scientific Evolution, and the Agricultural Revolution. Look what has happened to the population on our planet. Where do we go from here?

The first line, which is the dotted line A, just shows what has been happening: unlimited exponential growth but it is clear that cannot persist. We live on a finite planet. There is only so much room for people. There are only so many resources. It’s certainly within the possibility for humanity that we misuse our resources and we get to a tipping point, where we can no longer survive. Also, as a result of a nuclear war, curve A.

Source: Peter L. Salk, M.D., Jonas Salk Legacy


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Much more desirable is the curve labeled B, which shows the population growth slowing, still increasing, but the rate going from an up turning rate to one where growth is beginning to slow and plateau. That, if we are to be successful in moving into this future. As we look back, that should be the curve that we will have followed.

“Change resides within ourselves and our consciousness"

My father’s conceptualization of this kind of S-shaped curve, which you see in nature very frequently. He recognized, there are two different epochs to this curve. The first epoch, which he called epoch A, had to do with continually increasing rate of growth. I was born into an epoch where the sky was the limit. My father, Dr. Jonas Salk, saw that there was a second phase of this potential outcome of epoch B, where the growth will begin to slow and plateau. And what he recognized is that there are two different realities, one epoch A and a different reality in epoch B. We are facing different issues, people who are being born now are being born in a different reality on this planet. n epoch A, we were focused as a species on overcoming exter-

nal restraints. We wanted to grow. Growth was the predomi-nant driving factor whereas in epoch B. Where we find our-selves now, our task is to impose self restraints. The sky is not the limit. We have to recognize that we have to take control of ourselves. In epoch A, competition was the driving force. Who wins? Who creates? This is what drove the progress. Now, in this epoch, what is much more important is cooperation. We have to begin to work together. In epoch A, the domi-nant driving force in a sense was selfish; myself, my family, my community, my country. Whereas if we are going to sur-vive in this age what is going to be most important to em-phasize will be mutuality. We have to see how we can ap-proach a win-win attitude where everyone gains from the outcomes that we want to see. And to move from a state of mind which is limited in scope, to one which is broader, long-range thinking, and seeing a universal context in which our own actions are taking place. So this is a transition that we need to make, all of these different attributes are natural for the human being. They’re all part of our genetics, to be selfish, to be generous. But, the emphasis needs to change as we make the transition to this new aspect of our reality.

World Population Group Through History




“Our ability to achieve these noble goals depends on our ability to interact

creatively and constructively with each other.”

The important change resides with ourselves, our conscious-ness, where we have to make the advances if we are going to succeed. We look around us in the world, we read the newspapers and we see consciousnesses being disordered, consciousness being narrow. We all know what it’s like not to get a good night’s sleep. And you wake up in the morn-ing and things are blurry and it’s hard to make decisions and what ends up happening when consciousness is not functioning clearly. You end up with the disordered con-sciousness with these things being thrown together. What we’d much rather see is clear consciousness when we wake up feeling good and clear in the morning and whatever we can do to help clarify our consciousness create the kind of broader comprehension and broader understanding. There are many approaches to human development. The idea that meditation as a concept is a way that one might be able to draw on these deeper aspects of our own existence and make use of it, not only for ourselves, but also for society. And the concept that this group is being brought together with people practicing these techniques can have an influence that spreads

Civil War in Lebanon June 1983 –August 1985


at the deepest level of nature and can have a positive effect.

There have been some studies undertaken, looking at the influence of practicing mediation techniques, on, in this case, the civil war in Lebanon the night in the mid 1980s. And there were three groups that were brought to-gether during that period and in each case this is a War Peace Index, pieces in the upward direction. Wars in the downward direction and coinciding with these three dif-ferent groups, some at great distance from Lebanon. There was an improvement in the war that was ongoing at that point. The next figure, looking at seven such groups during a two and a half year period during that war, and in each case you saw that in comparison to the 10% of the 90% of the time when nothing was taking place and then these 7 different interventions, covering about 10% of the time, a reduction of the conflict in the war in Lebanon and a re-duction in war fatalities. You cannot get a more solid hard statistic than that, a 71% reduction in fatalities in Leba-non by group in association with groups brought together as far away as Iowa, Washington, and the Netherlands.

“We Live on a Finite Planet. There is Only so Much Room for People"


Summer - Fall 2018

Gilad Regev

Co-managing Partner of 910 Partners and CEO, Moneta Bank

Rewarding Sustainable Behavior

Thank you very much, Dr. Durbak, your Excellency, for invit-ing me to speak here in front of you today. I agree with Dr. Goldstein that sustainability is a process, but as an impatient entrepreneur, I believe that that process should be accelerated. So, we all know about the very important decision that took place in Paris. I want to remind ourselves that it took over two decades to reach such a global target. Reality check provides that we are on the target of reaching this goal but we are go-ing in the other direction. What you see here is a very im-portant indicator ppm of CO2 that should be reduced to 350 globally, but actually continued rising to frightening heights.

As we can see, oil and products consumption has con-tinued to rise, as according to international climate agency, it will start to decline 22 years from now—that is, 2040. Astonishingly, according to Bloomburg, in-vestments in renewables are on the decline, globally.

Source: Gilad Regev, Moneta Bank

In 2016, there was a decline of 23 percent of an investment in re-newables, and 2017 was not much better. Ironically, this decline is that renewables became more efficient, and as a result, govern-

The photo below is recognizing the relationship with Ukraine. I just wanted to point out that there was a summit held in Kiev, a global union of scientists for peace, looking at me-diation as a way of intervening for soldiers with post-trau-matic stress syndrome, quieting their minds, having good effects. And with these kinds of programs being introduced, there is a possibility of increasing peace. President Porosh-enko of Ukraine met with David Lynch, a famous American film director who is helping to fund programs of this type.

We are faced with opportunities to use technologies of all sorts to improve our lives. In addition to the outside tech-nologies, external technologies, and internal technologies. My father’s, when he received the Jawaharlal Nehru Award for International Understanding in 1977, acceptance ad-dress was titled with a question: Are We Being Good An-cestors? I think I would like to see us take the kinds of ac-tions that would allow our children and our children’s children to look back upon us and answer that question: YES. Thank you.



ments stopped supporting them and we can see the sad reality.

Source: Short-Term Energy Outlook, March 2018

These are the numbers that IMF is predicting as a result of climate change. We are talking about 3 million deaths per year as a direct result of climate change, and in the short pro-cess of my talk, there will be losses of more than $100 billion as a result. So we can see that innovation and technologies are not really working. We are innovating and then we are abandoning the technologies that we are developing, I don’t suggest that we should stop technological development, but based on history, rewarding behaviors give better results than punishments. And what have really not been working are carbon credits, because polluting countries and entities are simply paying out and continuing to pollute. What we really need is to recreate the system, so that we reward a sustain-able behavior: a system that is not dependent on regulations, as they are too volatile and slow; a system that is not depen-dent on Wall St., as it is only interested in the bottom line; what we really need is a simple system that can provide for the masses who are interested in sustaining their bills more so than sustaining the world. So what we are doing: we are creating a new global sustainable bank, Moneta Bank, and our mission is to facilitate with massive acceleration, sustainable behavior, by simply rewarding it with a dedicated currency.We call it the curo. We turn renewable energy into money. The way I see it that’s actually energy preservation, and this mission will only succeed if we can all build up trust in this currency and all of us will be dedicated. I want to emphasize, that we are not a feel-good movement that is calling people to go hug trees. I like to hug trees, but that’s not the purpose.

We are not a sophisticated technology designated only for geeks or techies, nor are we trying to create any sort of system trying to make anyone reach overnight. We are developing a monetary system that is accessible to and useable by anyone. Even my mother — she is 85— even she understands that and she doesn’t have to break her savings or become a rocket sci-entist in order to use the system. So how are we going to do it? Very simple: we are simply going to issue curos to anyone who produces renewable energy. I want to emphasize that we are not going to buy renewable energy. People producing the energy can still do whatever they want with it — sell it to their neighbors; sell it back to the grid — instead, we will reward them with issuing an amount of the currency based on the size of the renewable energy they produce, and according to loca-tions. To those of you who do not know there are between 1.5 and 2 billion people who are living in what is known as energy poverty. So, what we are going to do, is Moneta Bank is plan-ning to pay three times more per unit of energy produced in this region. We are going to change the market of renewable energy. In the next stages, we will cover other necessary sus-tainability requirements, such as transportation, food, and re-cycling. For example, we will pay for anyone who walks, uses a bike or public transportation. This vision requires certain policy guidelines, and it is important to realize that everyone needs to be included, and that the currency needs to be trusted.

Source: Bloomberg New Energy Finance

I am an entrepreneur and investment banker, who has been dreaming of developing this vision for over five years, and now with my team, with my colleagues, you are all invited to join. Thank you very much.


Summer - Fall 2018

Apurv Gupta

Youth Representative and Board of Directors, World Information Transfer Inc.

A Future to Look Forward to: Sustainable Energy and Youth

Thank you Dr. Durbak. Your Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen, distinguished delegates, and most of all, fel-low students. We have heard some brilliant insights to-day from the faculties on the various efforts being under-taken to transition our world from a carbon-intensive energy sector, to a greener, more-sustainable future; how-ever, let there be no doubt: our voyage to such a future has just begun, and our generation will inherit a colossal crisis.

Globally, 1.1 billion people do not have access to electric-ity. In India, although progress has been made, about 240 million people in the country continue to live in the dark, quite figuratively. One-third of the world’s population—that’s 2.5 billion people—rely on the traditional use of sol-id biomass to cook their meals, and heat their water. Even by the most optimistic estimates of the Paris Agreement to curb CO2 emissions, the challenge continues to be huge. But the future that I am looking forward to is one that is being silently fought by the many inspiring men and women working in their communities, to increase energy efficiency, and to make the future more palatable.

“young people remain burdened by the wheels of inaction, fighting an uphill battle”

A young man, like fifteen-year-old Kevin Do from Si-erra Leone, who taught himself engineering by col-lecting trash and scraps, and by the age of thirteen, created batteries to power lights in nearby homes. A young social entrepreneur, like Siddarth Malik from New Dehli, who left an illustrious career in the United States, to

start a renewable energy venture in India, that amalgam-ates solar thermal systems with fossil fuels, guided by his personal philosophy, that, at least when the sun is shin-ing, fossils need not be fired. Or, even Terri Gonzales Gar-cia, a young woman from Mexico, who has started a global movement to repurpose plastics and soda bottles to create sustainable light sources, called Litre of Light, and has be-come a global icon for ecological and low-cost lighting so-lutions for underprivileged communities around the world.

We have gathered here today in resolute, determined to find solutions and remedies for global environmental chal-lenges, but I request: let our voice not only reach world lead-ers from the United Nations today, but also future leaders.

“The voice of the future is unanimous”

We must be in service of their fight, and the fight of the many other unsung heroes around the world, who have used their compassion and knowledge in ways that bet-ter the health of their communities and the earth. Yet, young people remain burdened by the wheels of in-action, fighting an uphill battle for quality education and decent employment, facing restrictive legal poli-cies on becoming entrepreneurial, and remaining mar-ginalized by capital flows and financial incentives.

We have gathered here today to discuss energy cri-sis, but Dr. Durbak, I want to invert that, and I want to say that in this crisis, there is energy; there is pas-sion; there is unwavering commitment by young people, and we must ensure that this energy is allowed to grow,and that innovative solutions for the future can be-come a possibility. The voice of the future is unanimous: we are a generation that does not play the blame game. We are a generation whose conviction is not curbed by political incorrectness. We are a generation whose pas-sion is not dwindled by bureaucracy. We are a genera-tion whose courage is not weakened by inaction, and we are a generation whose resolve is not wavered by apathy. This, is the future we are looking forward to. Thank you.



World Information Transfer, Inc., (WIT) is a not-for-profit, non-govern-mental organization in General Consultative Status with the United Na-tions, promoting environmental health and literacy. In 1987, inspired by the Chornobyl (Ukrainian spelling) nuclear tragedy, in Ukraine, WIT was formed in recognition of the pressing need to provide accurate ac-tionable information about our deteriorating global environment and its effect on human health. WIT exercises its mandate through:

• World Ecology Report (WER). Published since 1989, the World Ecol-ogy Report is a quarterly digest of critical issues in health and envi-ronment, produced in four languages and distributed to thousands of citizens throughout the developing and developed world.

• Health and environment conferences: Since 1992, WIT has convened annual conferences, held at United Nations headquarters on the growing clinical evidence supporting the link between environmen-tal degradation and its effect on human health. The Conferences have been co-sponsored by UN member states and its organizations and has been convened as a parallel event to the annual meetings of the Commission on Sustainable Development. The scientific papers from the Conferences are available on our website.

• Internship. World Information Transfer (WIT) offers internships in New York City. Our goal is to assist future leaders understand what the world needs to be sustainable, encouraging them to learn about health and environment issues. Our interns spend the majority of their time at the United Nations Headquarters. There are 3 sessions, fall, spring and summer - all require applications.

• Health and Development CD ROM Library. This project consists of a library of CDs each of which focuses on a subject within the over-all topic of Development and Health information. CD ROM Library consist of CD’s developed by our partners HumanInfoNGO which ad-dress the digital divide. The project is continuous with future topics being developed.

• Humanitarian Aid. In conjunction with the K.Kovshevych Foundation, WIT provides humanitarian aid to schools, and orphanages in areas devastated by environmental degradation.

• Scholarship Program. WIT assists the K.Kovshevych Foundation, in finding intellectually gifted university students in need of financial assistance to continue their studies in areas related to health and en-vironment.

• www.worldinfo.org WIT provides, through its website, science based information on the relationship between human health and the nat-ural environment, including the papers from the WIT’s annual confer-ences, the archived World Ecology Reports, and our new Speaker’s Series.

World Information Transfer is a Non-Profit, 501(c)3,Non-Governmental Organization in General Consultative Status with the United Nations, Promoting Health and Environmental Literacy.

Board of DirectorsDr. Christine K. Durbak, CHAIR & CEORoland DeSilvaEXECUTIVE VICE CHAIRDr. Claudia Strauss VICE CHAIRApurv GuptaSECRETARYArnaud LaFlecheTREASURERMariam AzarmHon. Carolyn T. Comitta Cary GranatDr. Bernard D.GoldsteinAmb. Valeriy KuchinskyDr. Brian LandzbergDr. Patricia MyskowskiDr. Scott RatzanDr. Mark RobsonDr. William N. RomRichard Whiteford

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- Margaret Mead

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WORLD INFORMATION TRANSFER’S · 2018-11-30 · World Ecology Report World Information Transfer Summer - Fall 2018 2 direction, according to Vox. But globally deaths from starvation