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EPA Lab-Gate: How the EPA is Failing in its Routine Monitoring of America's Milk in 2012

May 23, 2012

Nuclearcrimes.org

So, I was wondering what happened since the EPA's sudden, disappointing and criminal decision twelve months ago to discontinue its 'special' monitoring of Fukushima fallout and resume 'routine' monitoring of drinking water, rainwater and milk in a small number of U.S. cities and rural areas. Since I haven't seen any of this routinely (quarterly) collected data from the EPA for a while, I decided to run a query on EPA's website for all milk and drinking water lab analyses done since January 1, 2012 for all manmade radionuclides in all EPA regions. I looked it over and here's the story (note the acronym MDC is short for Minimum Detectable Concentration; CSU is short for Combined Standard Uncertainty):

There are several EPA analyses for iodine-131 cesium-137 in milk that raise red flags. There were a series of EPA lab tests run this past February for milk (analyzed in 1 liter quantities for both isotopes) that have very, very low reliability and should have prompted the lab techs at the EPA to re-run the samples; or re-prep and re-do the samples; or run the analysis on additional samples. None of this was done.

Take the first value in the chart below for iodine-131 in San Fran milk. The MDC is huge (at 25) and the EPA's value for 'CSU,' which I looked up and is 7.5, means that the 4.8 pCi/L value should be taken as the 'best estimate' but we should really place 95% confidence that the actual I-131 value is somewhere between -10.2 to 19.8 picocuries per liter!! Holy cow! This is actually the same situation for all of the other values listed below. (The '95%' cesium-137 value for Tampa milk falls within the range of -5.3 to 10.7 pCi/L.) This is fine if you're in a lab and know what you should do next. But the EPA DIDN'T DO THAT. EVEN THOUGH IT HAD TAKEN 4 LITERS OF MILK FOR ITS SAMPLES, AND USED ONLY 1 UP, IT DIDN'T RUN ADDITIONAL TESTS. The EPA didn't re-run the sample on their instruments.

So, if an EPA lab run was faulty, they effectively gave up and moved on with their day. So, we see there are instances that NO ONE has done adequate testing of many U.S. cities' milk for radionuclides in 2012. What happened to assurances by the EPA 12 months ago it would keep a watch on our milk and water via ROUTINE MONITORING? Is it monitoring that only works when the lab instrumentation runs perfectly?

(The CSUs for the samples, in order, are 7.5, 1.2, 4, 1.1, and 3.4. EPA says 'if y is the "best estimate" of measured radioactivity, the 95% confidence interval around y ranges from about y-(2xCSU) to y+(2xCSU).' Also, In the query run, I counted 14 negative iodine-131 and cesium-137 values in milk analyses since January 1st.)

So, if the EPA was being 'bad in the lab,' what what would they find if they actually did take milk samples all across the continent for all isotopes? Well, milk bought from the shelves in Vancouver, British Columbia (Canada) in early January and mid-February 2012 and sent to a lab for testing by an independent monitoring group contained about 10 picocuries per liter of strontium-90, which is the same as the average levels in U.S. milk that prompted JFK to sign the Partial Test Ban Treaty (PTBT) in 1963 to stop open-air nuclear testing. This group is the Canadian Collaborative for Radiation Awareness & Monitoring (CCRAM) and they have been doing a better job than the EPA ever did. Visit their site. Get involved in your own monitoring because the EPA and Canada's CFIA/Health Canada have been corrupted from within government and are basically useless.

Since the MDC increases in correlation with the CSU, I thought it might be a good exercise to find all occurrences in 2012 where the EPA's lab analyses resulted in a 2 or greater MDC for milk which might show more cases of bad 'lab-runs'. There were 38 such occurrences for iodine-131 or cesium-137 and 22 of them were negative values (none of them were less than -1.0). Eight result values were greater than 1.0 - six are listed in the table. The two other ones include February Buffalo milk ran in the EPA lab in April at 1.2 pCi/L with a MDC of 3.4 and CSU of 1. There was also January-collected February-lab-run Memphis milk at 1.22 pCi/L with a MDC of 2.8 and CSU of 0.85. (I did the same search - for all nuclides analyzed since beginning of 2012 with MDC greater than 2 - for drinking water and found only oodles of analysis results for tritium - another story, another time perhaps - and zero results for precipitation. I did the search again for the period of 6/15/2011 to 1/1/2012 just for milk and found a batch of samples run in mid-October that resulted in a high MDCs for iodine-131 but the results were predominantly negative, with a maximum low of -2.5, for Tacoma, WA. Also, a batch of milk samples run on August 17-18, 2011 for I-131 had no result values shown in the EPA database but showed MDC values between 13 and 35. Strange. Then I did a search for the second half of 2011 for strontiums - and oh boy. See the table below. The Phoenix milk samples were taken on Sept. 1-2, 2011 and the rest were collected on Aug 1-2, 2011. Note: since 6/15/2011 the EPA only analyzed these milk samples for strontium-89, none others).

UNIT	Analysis date	CITY NAME	RESULT	CSU	MDC	RESULTS	ANALYTE	95% Confidence Range
Liter	2/27/2012	WILMINGTON	9.1	4.9	35	PCI/L	Strontium-89	-0.7 to 18.9
L	2/29/2012	WILMINGTON	9.1	4.9	35	PCI/L	Strontium-89	-0.7 to 18.9
L	3/1/2012	PHOENIX	17.1	7	35	PCI/L	Strontium-89	3.1 to 31.1
L	3/8/2012	KNOXVILLE	21	11	35	PCI/L	Strontium-89	-1 to 43
L	3/6/2012	PHOENIX	17.1	7	25	PCI/L	Strontium-89	3.1 to 31.1
L	2/29/2012	KNOXVILLE	21	11	25	PCI/L	Strontium-89	-1 to 43
L	3/7/2012	KNOXVILLE	21	11	25	PCI/L	Strontium-89	-1 to 43
L	3/2/2012	PHOENIX	17.1	7	25	PCI/L	Strontium-89	3.1 to 31.1
L	2/24/2012	WILMINGTON	9.1	4.9	16	PCI/L	Strontium-89	-0.7 to 18.9
L	2/28/2012	KNOXVILLE	21	11	16	PCI/L	Strontium-89	-1 to 43
L	3/7/2012	PHOENIX	17.1	7	16	PCI/L	Strontium-89	3.1 to 31.1
L	2/23/2012	WILMINGTON	9.1	4.9	16	PCI/L	Strontium-89	-0.7 to 18.9

Does anyone think it is strange that each city (milk sample) has the SAME VALUE each time the milk was analyzed for strontium-89, even when the sample size varied?? In terms of method, a lab tech will find *variation* in the analytical results going from one to the next sample - and even reading the same sample twice. You might also notice, however, that the MDCs do vary. That is because of the analytical sample size. The 16 MDCs correspond to a 65 milligram (MG) sample. The 25 MDCs correspond to a 50.2 MG sample. The 35 MDCs correspond to a 48 MG sample.

OTHER FINDINGS: There were values from samples collected in the year 2010 and analyzed in 2012 that reflect the EPA's very, very slow turnaround time for testing environmental samples for strong alpha emitters, like uranium. A drinking water sample collected *over two years* ago in Los Angeles (on 12/31/2010) had 0.086 pCi/L (MDC was 0.089) of uranium-235, 1.87 pCi/L of Uranium-234 (MDC was 0.065), and 1.7 pCi/L of Uranium-238 (MDC was 0.074). A value of 0.206 pCi/L of uranium-234 was detected in a drinking water sample collected in West Chicago also on New Years Eve 2011 (MDC was 0.047).

More recently, 0.159 pCi/L of iodine-131 was found in a drinking water sample collected on May 11, 2012 from Sante Fe, New Mexico (the MDC was about the same, or 0.160). Surely, New Mexicans should take notice and ask their state government to do lots of tests on drinking water for iodine-131.

   

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