Did you ever wonder why we ever started doing radon testing and radon mitigation in homes? Did someone just get up in the morning and think to themselves, “I think I’ll check my house for radon today.” No, that would
be silly! But, this story is actually a very interesting tale!
On December 2, 1984, Stanley J. Watras, an engineer working on construction of the new Limerick nuclear power plant near Pottstown, Pennsylvania, arrived at work.
The plant was scheduled to begin generating power within three weeks, and the construction crew had just installed radiation detectors at the plant doors—a standard safeguard to ensure that nuclear workers don’t exit the plant with any radioactive contamination on their bodies. When Watras arrived that day, he set off the alarms on the detectors as he walked into the plant. Over the following two weeks he would set off the alarms every morning. Further investigation revealed that his clothes were contaminated with radioactivity that he had picked up at his home!
When radiation safety personnel from the plant visited Watras’s home, they discovered what they didn’t think possible. There was more radon gas in the Watras house than was found in a typical uranium mine—nearly 20 times as much! Surprised, the radiation safety technicians checked the radon levels in the neighboring houses. “Our house,” Watras remarked in consternation, “had perhaps the highest contamination level in the world, but our next door neighbors had none.” How could this be?
The Watras house was located on the Reading Prong, a geological formation full of uranium deposits in the eastern United States. Radon, a radioactive gas produced through the long decay chain of uranium into other isotopes, leaks from the ground in this area and then mixes with aboveground air. The fact that radon seeps from the ground over uranium-containing earth had been known since 1908. Nevertheless, geologists hadn’t previously appreciated how spotty radon leakage could be. Some ground locations can have virtually no leakage, while a spot a few hundred feet away could have huge amounts of radon streaming out.
Just as water travels great distances along crevices in bedrock, subterranean radon travels along ground faults to emerge as a "spring" of gas.
As it turns out, subterranean radon behaves like subterranean water. Just as underground water gathers in pockets and travels great distances along crevices in the bedrock, often to emerge in discrete locations on the ground surface in the form of a natural spring of water, radon travels along ground faults to emerge as a “spring” of gas. The Watras home was built right on top of a spring of radon gas. How many other houses built on radon springs were out there and, more importantly, how much danger did they pose to their residents?
The Watras family had moved into their house in January of that year, so they had been exposed to the radon for less than a full year. Nevertheless, doctors told them, based on risk estimates of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), their brief exposure to radon made them seven times more likely to die of lung cancer within 10 years compared to a person without radon exposure. Their three young children might not make it to adulthood.
The family moved out of the house immediately and tried to resume their normal lives. As Stanley Watras explained at the time, “[If we] keep worrying about it, we might not live long enough to see whether the doctors were right, because depression and psychological pressure would be too much for us to survive.”
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It had been firmly established since 1944 that breathing a lot of radon carries a substantial lung cancer risk. But after that, things get a little murky. Why? Because another major cause of lung cancer poses a much bigger threat than radon, and this of course is cigarette smoking. Cigarette smoke produces a statistical haze through which all radon data must be viewed.
Expert panels have evaluated mountains of data on miners in an attempt to precisely determine the amount of lung cancer risk that could be attributed specifically to radon exposure, rather than to smoking, but their analytical efforts were hampered. This is not only because smoking was so prevalent among miners and nonminers alike, but also because smoking makes the lung cancer risk from radon worse—much worse.
Smokers may be hypersensitive to radon because they have damaged their lungs to the point that their bronchi—the treelike tubes of air passageways—are no longer able to efficiently remove particles that are breathed in. Particles laden with radon may stay in the smoker’s lungs longer, resulting in a higher radiation dose to a smoker’s lungs than to a nonsmoker’s lungs, even when they’re breathing the same amount of radon. It’s not clear which of these two possible mechanisms is correct. It might even be both, or perhaps neither. Nonetheless, smokers definitely are at higher risk of lung cancer caused by radon—six to eight times higher.
To provide peace of mind, the EPA recommends testing your home after any lifestyle changes, renovations, and every two years as part of routine home maintenance.
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