Wells In South Jersey Flow Radium, and Anxiety

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Sunday, September 7, 2008 http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9404E1DF103CF933A0575BC0A96E958260New York and RegionDrinking Water, And What Else?; From Wells In South Jersey Flow Radium, and Anxiety By ANDREA KANNAPELL LIKE most people in southern New Jersey, Catherine Rabbai learned about the water from news reports. The delicious drinking water from the well in the backyard of her two-story Pittsgrove home might have radium in it. The first article on the subject was on the front page of The Philadelphia Inquirer on Aug. 9. Under the headline ''Radium Tainting Water in N.J. Wells,'' it began: ''Federal scientists have found widespread evidence of cancer-causing agents in the major source of drinking water for hundreds of thousands of people in South Jersey.'' The evidence, a report issued in June, was compelling: 33 percent of sampled wells showed levels of radium that exceeded Federal standards. In developed areas, the proportion went up to 65 percent. As other newspapers around the country picked up the story, phone calls started flooding New Jersey's Bureau of Safe Drinking Water. ''We couldn't keep up with the phone traffic,'' said Barker Hamill, the bureau chief. Ms. Rabbai wasted no time: she found a lab certified to perform tests for radioactivity, Teledyne, in Westwood. She even got an extra testing kit for her neighbors. ''I am very concerned,'' Ms. Rabbai said, after the tests showed that her water registered as mildly radioactive. ''We have the second-largest nuclear power company in the nation in New Jersey, and we have background radiation, radiation from the ground and from the sun. And this in addition makes me very concerned.'' Over the last few weeks, more questions than answers about the radium seem to have emerged. And the answers themselves are not simple, involving hard sciences like physics, geology and hydrology, as well as the inner workings of scientific organizations and public bureaucracies. One thing that is clear: discoveries by New Jersey's scientists are changing the way the nation looks at -- and for -- radioactive contaminants in drinking water. There is unquestionably radium floating around in South Jersey's most accessible aquifer, the Kirkwood-Cohansey, as indicated in the report that caused the recent furor, a June fact-sheet from the United States Geological Survey. The radium is not industrial waste. It is what uranium and thorium in surface rocks turn into as they undergo the normal process of radioactive decay, losing protons and neutrons as they progress toward atomic stability, eventually becoming lead. But the radium has been entering the aquifer in larger than normal quantities over the last 35 years. It is doing so, New Jersey's scientists have discovered, because of the overuse of agricultural and lawn fertilizers, lime, road salt and other materials that either loosen the radium's grip on the rocks in which it occurs, or further acidify the already acidic aquifer, which keeps the radium from resolidifying and attaching itself to other rocks. Fearsome Carcinogen Or Trivial Trace? Not everyone is afraid. Mark Malench, a 38-year-old Vineland farmer, hasn't tested his well in 15 years. ''I don't think it's anything to worry about,'' he said of the radium. ''It's like getting stressed out about being 100 feet away from someone smoking a cigarette. When the person is smoking a cigarette and the people 100 feet away start dropping dead, then I'll worry.'' But for many people, the mere mention of the word radium draws space-age shivers of terror -- especially in a state with relatively high overall cancer rates (183 deaths per 100,000 people annually), at least one suspected cancer cluster, and an acknowledged problem with radon, the radioactive gas that seeps into basements. Scientists, fascinated by radioactivity in general, can offer detailed accounts of radium's behaviors and effects. But how dangerous is it? Chemically, the problem is simple. Radium is structurally similar to calcium, so the body absorbs it into bones. There, its radioactive characteristics determine its threat. Radium, like many of the 92 natural elements in the periodic table, comes in varieties -- isotopes -- that have slightly different radioactive properties depending on the mass in each atom's nucleus. Those properties determine the danger. An isotope is called radioactive if it ejects particles in its progression toward a stable inner structure. When the ejected particles are a combination of protons and neutrons from the atom's nucleus, the emission is called alpha radiation. Alpha emitters are dangerous only if they are ingested or inhaled, because the particles do not have enough energy to penetrate skin. Once inside the body, the particles damage tissues.