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The Committee to Minimize Toxic Waste brought out its big – uh – guitars at a Monday afternoon rally/press conference where their “shut down the labs” message came through in song and speeches. 

“I’m sad to say, it leaked one day,” sang activist folk-artist Carol Denney. “We had to live with the tritium trickle down.” The Funky Nixon Band was also on the scene, in front of the North Berkeley Senior Center. Several dozen supporters showed up to underscore the message. 

The occasion was an unveiling of a report by Bernd Franke, a consultant hired by the city to look at the way the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory measures tritium emissions at its National Tritium Labeling Facility. 

Tritium is a radioactive substance the labs use in medical research. The tritium is released into the air regularly from the labs, which are run by the Department of Energy and overseen by the University of California. Scientists at the labs say the emissions of tritium present no more of a danger to humans in terms of radiation exposure than taking a trip by airplane to New York. But the Committee to Minimize Toxic Waste claims there is no safe level for tritium. 

Franke, of the Institute for Ecology and Environmental Research in Heidelberg, Germany, said the law allows for an amount of radiation that is an “acceptable risk.” He said he agrees with the law, but if the activists disagree with it, they should target the statute. 

To prove the point that the labs are a danger to the community, members of the Committee to Minimize Toxic Waste distributed copies of a memo noting an “Unplanned release from the National Tritium Labeling Facility.” The release took place at about 7:30 p.m. March 7 and was observed by a worker who monitors releases from his home computer. The release was stopped by midnight, according to the memo. The release of 4.7 curies was below the internal reporting level of 25 curies, according to the report.  

Paul Lavely, director of the office of radiation safety for UC Berkeley, described the release as “a very small increase” over the regular emissions. He noted that “The system worked. We were able to stop it.” 

In a written statement, the activists said this release is “especially troubling in the current context, when there is a great deal of citizen concern in Berkeley about the tritium facility – one would suppose that the authorities and managers of the Lab would be especially careful to avoid such accidents....” 

Councilmember Dona Spring addressed the gathering, reminding people that the city had voted twice to shut the labs down, but that it was overridden by the DOE. “With all of us working together, we’ll shut them down,” Spring said. 

An article in Wednesday’s Daily Planet will highlight Franke’s report.