The unpalatable truth is that the anti-nuclear lobby has misled us all

I've discovered that when the facts don't suit them, the movement resorts to the follies of cover-up they usually denounce　
George Monbiot
George Monbiot
The Guardian, Tuesday 5 April 2011
Article history

Over the last fortnight I've made a deeply troubling discovery. The anti-nuclear movement to which I once belonged has misled the world about the impacts of radiation on human health. The claims we have made are ungrounded in science, unsupportable when challenged, and wildly wrong. We have done other people, and ourselves, a terrible disservice.

I began to see the extent of the problem after a debate last week with Helen Caldicott. Dr Caldicott is the world's foremost anti-nuclear campaigner. She has received 21 honorary degrees and scores of awards, and was nominated for a Nobel peace prize. Like other greens, I was in awe of her. In the debate she made some striking statements about the dangers of radiation. So I did what anyone faced with questionable scientific claims should do: I asked for the sources. Caldicott's response has profoundly shaken me.
Daniel Pudles Illustration by Daniel Pudles

First she sent me nine documents: newspaper articles, press releases and an advertisement. None were scientific publications; none contained sources for the claims she had made. But one of the press releases referred to a report by the US National Academy of Sciences, which she urged me to read. I have now done so – all 423 pages. It supports none of the statements I questioned; in fact it strongly contradicts her claims about the health effects of radiation.

I pressed her further and she gave me a series of answers that made my heart sink – in most cases they referred to publications which had little or no scientific standing, which did not support her claims or which contradicted them. (I have posted our correspondence, and my sources, on my website.) I have just read her book Nuclear Power Is Not the Answer. The scarcity of references to scientific papers and the abundance of unsourced claims it contains amaze me.

For the last 25 years anti-nuclear campaigners have been racking up the figures for deaths and diseases caused by the Chernobyl disaster, and parading deformed babies like a medieval circus. They now claim 985,000 people have been killed by Chernobyl, and that it will continue to slaughter people for generations to come. These claims are false.

The UN Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (Unscear) is the equivalent of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Like the IPCC, it calls on the world's leading scientists to assess thousands of papers and produce an overview. Here is what it says about the impacts of Chernobyl.

Of the workers who tried to contain the emergency at Chernobyl, 134 suffered acute radiation syndrome; 28 died soon afterwards. Nineteen others died later, but generally not from diseases associated with radiation. The remaining 87 have suffered other complications, including four cases of solid cancer and two of leukaemia.

In the rest of the population there have been 6,848 cases of thyroid cancer among young children – arising "almost entirely" from the Soviet Union's failure to prevent people from drinking milk contaminated with iodine 131. Otherwise "there has been no persuasive evidence of any other health effect in the general population that can be attributed to radiation exposure". People living in the countries affected today "need not live in fear of serious health consequences from the Chernobyl accident".

Caldicott told me that Unscear's work on Chernobyl is "a total cover-up". Though I have pressed her to explain, she has yet to produce a shred of evidence for this contention.

In a column last week, the Guardian's environment editor, John Vidal, angrily denounced my position on nuclear power. On a visit to Ukraine in 2006, he saw "deformed and genetically mutated babies in the wards … adolescents with stunted growth and dwarf torsos; foetuses without thighs or fingers". What he did not see was evidence that these were linked to the Chernobyl disaster.

Professor Gerry Thomas, who worked on the health effects of Chernobyl for Unscear, tells me there is "absolutely no evidence" for an increase in birth defects. The National Academy paper Dr Caldicott urged me to read came to similar conclusions. It found that radiation-induced mutation in sperm and eggs is such a small risk "that it has not been detected in humans, even in thoroughly studied irradiated populations such as those of Hiroshima and Nagasaki".

Like Vidal and many others, Caldicott pointed me to a book which claims that 985,000 people have died as a result of the disaster. Translated from Russian and published by the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, this is the only document that looks scientific and appears to support the wild claims made by greens about Chernobyl.

A devastating review in the journal Radiation Protection Dosimetry points out that the book achieves this figure by the remarkable method of assuming that all increased deaths from a wide range of diseases – including many which have no known association with radiation – were caused by the Chernobyl accident. There is no basis for this assumption, not least because screening in many countries improved dramatically after the disaster and, since 1986, there have been massive changes in the former eastern bloc. The study makes no attempt to correlate exposure to radiation with the incidence of disease.

Its publication seems to have arisen from a confusion about whether Annals was a book publisher or a scientific journal. The academy has given me this statement: "In no sense did Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences or the New York Academy of Sciences commission this work; nor by its publication do we intend to independently validate the claims made in the translation or in the original publications cited in the work. The translated volume has not been peer reviewed by the New York Academy of Sciences, or by anyone else."

Failing to provide sources, refuting data with anecdote, cherry-picking studies, scorning the scientific consensus, invoking a cover-up to explain it: all this is horribly familiar. These are the habits of climate-change deniers, against which the green movement has struggled valiantly, calling science to its aid. It is distressing to discover that when the facts don't suit them, members of this movement resort to the follies they have denounced.

We have a duty to base our judgments on the best available information. This is not only because we owe it to other people to represent the issues fairly, but also because we owe it to ourselves not to squander our lives on fairytales. A great wrong has been done by this movement. We must put it right.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-12860842
26 March 2011 Last updated at 12:50 GMT　
Viewpoint: We should stop running away from radiation
By Wade Allison University of Oxford

More than 10,000 people have died in the Japanese tsunami and the survivors are cold and hungry. But the media concentrate on nuclear radiation from which no-one has died - and is unlikely to.
House and power station at Dungeness Modern reactors are better designed than those at Fukushima - tomorrow's may be better still

Nuclear radiation at very high levels is dangerous, but the scale of concern that it evokes is misplaced. Nuclear technology cures countless cancer patients every day - and a radiation dose given for radiotherapy in hospital is no different in principle to a similar dose received in the environment.

What of Three Mile Island? There were no known deaths there.

And Chernobyl? The latest UN report published on 28 February confirms the known death toll - 28 fatalities among emergency workers, plus 15 fatal cases of child thyroid cancer - which would have been avoided if iodine tablets had been taken (as they have now in Japan). And in each case the numbers are minute compared with the 3,800 at Bhopal in 1984, who died as a result of a leak of chemicals from the Union Carbide pesticide plant.
Continue reading the main story
Becquerels and Sieverts

A becquerel (Bq), named after French physicist Henri Becquerel, is a measure of radioactivity
A quantity of radioactive material has an activity of 1Bq if one nucleus decays per second - and 1kBq if 1,000 nuclei decay per second
A sievert (Sv) is a measure of radiation absorbed by a person, named after Swedish medical physicist Rolf Sievert
A milli-sievert (mSv) is a 1,000th of a Sievert

Q&A: Health effects of radiation
Energy solution or evil curse?

So what of the radioactivity released at Fukushima? How does it compare with that at Chernobyl? Let's look at the measured count rates. The highest rate reported, at 1900 on 22 March, for any Japanese prefecture was 12 kBq per sq m (for the radioactive isotope of caesium, caesium-137).

A map of Chernobyl in the UN report shows regions shaded according to rate, up to 3,700 kBq per sq m - areas with less than 37 kBq per sq m are not shaded at all. In round terms, this suggests that the radioactive fallout at Fukushima is less than 1% of that at Chernobyl.

The other important radioisotope in fallout is iodine, which can cause child thyroid cancer.

This is only produced when the reactor is on and quickly decays once the reactor shuts down (it has a half life of eight days). The old fuel rods in storage at Fukushima, though radioactive, contain no iodine.

But at Chernobyl the full inventory of iodine and caesium was released in the initial explosion, so that at Fukushima any release of iodine should be much less than 1% of that at Chernobyl - with an effect reduced still further by iodine tablets.

Unfortunately, public authorities react by providing over-cautious guidance - and this simply escalates public concern.
Over-reaction

On the 16th anniversary of Chernobyl, the Swedish radiation authorities, writing in the Stockholm daily Dagens Nyheter, admitted over-reacting by setting the safety level too low and condemning 78% of all reindeer meat unnecessarily, and at great cost.
Bottled water distributed in Tokyo Bottled water was handed out in Tokyo this week to mothers of young babies

Unfortunately, the Japanese seem to be repeating the mistake. On 23 March they advised that children should not drink tap water in Tokyo, where an activity of 200 Bq per litre had been measured the day before. Let's put this in perspective. The natural radioactivity in every human body is 50 Bq per litre - 200 Bq per litre is really not going to do much harm.

In the Cold War era most people were led to believe that nuclear radiation presents a quite exceptional danger understood only by "eggheads" working in secret military establishments.

To cope with the friendly fire of such nuclear propaganda on the home front, ever tighter radiation regulations were enacted in order to keep all contact with radiation As Low As Reasonably Achievable (ALARA), as the principle became known.

This attempt at reassurance is the basis of international radiation safety regulations today, which suggest an upper limit for the general public of 1 mSv per year above natural levels.

This very low figure is not a danger level, rather it's a small addition to the levels found in nature - a British person is exposed to 2.7 mSv per year, on average. My book Radiation and Reason argues that a responsible danger level based on current science would be 100 mSv per month, with a lifelong limit of 5,000 mSv, not 1 mSv per year.
New attitude

People worry about radiation because they cannot feel it. However, nature has a solution - in recent years it has been found that living cells replace and mend themselves in various ways to recover from a dose of radiation.

These clever mechanisms kick in within hours and rarely fail, except when they are overloaded - as at Chernobyl, where most of the emergency workers who received a dose greater than 4,000 mSv over a few hours died within weeks.
Continue reading the main story
“Start Quote

Some might ask whether I would accept radioactive waste buried 100 metres under my own house?”

However, patients receiving a course of radiotherapy usually get a dose of more than 20,000 mSv to vital healthy tissue close to the treated tumour. This tissue survives only because the treatment is spread over many days giving healthy cells time for repair or replacement.

In this way, many patients get to enjoy further rewarding years of life, even after many vital organs have received the equivalent of more than 20,000 years' dose at the above internationally recommended annual limit - which makes this limit unreasonable.

A sea-change is needed in our attitude to radiation, starting with education and public information.

Then fresh safety standards should be drawn up, based not on how radiation can be excluded from our lives, but on how much we can receive without harm - mindful of the other dangers that beset us, such as climate change and loss of electric power. Perhaps a new acronym is needed to guide radiation safety - how about As High As Relatively Safe (AHARS)?

Modern reactors are better designed than those at Fukushima - tomorrow's may be better still, but we should not wait. Radioactive waste is nasty but the quantity is small, especially if re-processed. Anyway, it is not the intractable problem that many suppose.

Some might ask whether I would accept it if it were buried 100 metres under my own house? My answer would be: "Yes, why not?" More generally, we should stop running away from radiation.

Wade Allison is a nuclear and medical physicist at the University of Oxford, the author of Radiation and Reason (2009) and Fundamental Physics for Probing and Imaging (2006).

フランス国の、安全証明野菜への態度。福島・栃木・茨城・千葉・群馬・宮城産品。
IRSN Fukushima-Daiichi Accident Information Bulletin No.3,13/04/2011

2. GENERAL RECOMMENDATIONS FOR FRENCH CITIZENS LIVING IN JAPAN
・・・・・
2.1Food consumption recommendations for all French citizens living in Japan
IRSN recommendations:
* avoid consuming vegetables [spinach,celery,broccoli,bok choy,parsley]and fresh milk produced since March 11 in the districts of Fukushima,Tochigi,Ibaraki,Miyagi and Gunma;
* make sure that all fresh foods listed above originating from districts where standard threshold levels for safe consumption have been exceeded[Saitama,Tokyo,Kanagawa,Chiba]are compliant with applicable Japanese regulations;
* in the absence of information on the origin and radiological quality of fresh foods, consume a diversity diet, avoiding the repeated consumption of leaf vegetables as much as possible [spinach,hana wasaki,kakina,komatsuna,lettuce,chrysanthemum,cabbage,white cabbage,celery,broccoli,bok choy,parsley].
No restrictions are necessary regarding the use of tap water for food preparation and cooking.

Hermetically sealed products[canned foods,dry foods,long-keeping milk, and bottled spring water]
may be consumed without risk.

It is important to note that the occasional consumption of foods with contamination levels slightly exceeding authorized threshold limits does not pose a significant health risk.

2.2 Recommendations for French citizens living in areas most affected by radioactive deposition

Generally speaking, the districts of Miyagi,Fukushima,Ibaraki and Tochigi,in particular those areas east of the Fukushima district,should be avoided unless absolutely necessary to prevent useless exposure to external radiation doses due to radioactive deposition.
French citizens living in thesedistrists should observe all instructions given by Japanese authorities.In case,the IRSN recommends the following:
* prepare all food for infants and young children using bottled spring water,
* minimize the consumption of foods originating from home gardens,
* carefully wash all fruits and vegetables.
・・・・・・・

PSRのサイトを見ると精神のバランスが保てます。
PSR Physicians for Social Responsibility March 2011
・・・・・・
It is important to know that there is no such thing as a "safe" level of exposure.
The scientific consensus is that exposure to ionizing radiation at any level carries some risk of harm.Low doses carry less chance of harm.Higher doses carry more chance of harm.For those who like the technical descriptions, this is referred to as the "linear,no threshold model."

Absolute claims that a certain exposure is "not harmful to the public"are,to be blunt, incorrect.Actually, it is implying a value judgement: that the levels of exposure[and doses]are not viewed as significant enough to warrant concern.A judgment like this is often based on two[related]beliefs:

*Exposure levels below regulatory standards are not dangerous to public health.
Regulatory standards are basically government determinations of how much harm society is willing to tolerate from some sort of hazard[i.e.,exposure to toxins].
Except in rare examples, regulatory standards reflect complex trade-offs between the kinds of harms we want to avoid[e.g.,additional cancers in a population], economic costs, and our values about what is important. In other words, assertions that even a small level of radiation "will not harm human health" is really an assertion that "the levels will not cause intolerable levels of harm among the public, even though ther is a small risk." Fuurthermore, arguments have been put forward that regulatory standards for radiation exposures are not always protective enough.
・・・・・
右も左も網羅した研究レビューはこれかと。
買って読んだ方がいたら、ガーディアンの記事についてコメントしてください。
ECCR Recommendations 2010 [Purchasing information]

The presentation in 2003 of the new radiation exposure model of the European Committee on Radiation Risk caused something of a revolution in the focus of scientists and politicians on the adequacy of previous scientific theories of the effects of radiation on living systems. This was long overdue, of coyrse, since evidence has been available for more than 40 years that it was unsafe to use studies of external acute radiation to inform about risk from internal chronic exposures to evolutionarily novel radionuclides. Such a scientific paradigm shift is not easy: the course and direction of the nuclear,military,economic and political machine dedicated to the development of nuclear energy and its military applications is monolithic and has massive inertia. It was therfore surprising and encouraging that ECRR2003 received such attention, and effectively brought about a new and intense interest in the flaw in the then current philosophy of radiation risk: the pphysics-based concept of absorbed dose. The support and encouragement for the new model, and its success in many court cases [where it was invariably set against the ICRP model]was perhaps assisted by the increasing evidence from Chernobyl fallout exposures and from examination of Depleted Uranium effects which were emerging at the time of ECRR2003.The success of the ECRR model is that it gives the correct answer to the question about the numbers of cancers and other illnesses that follow an exposure to internal fission products. This is immediately clear to anyone: to juries and judges as well as ordinary members of the public. It received poerfil support from reports of increases in cancer in Belarus after Chernobyl and also from the epidemiological studies of Martin Tondel of cancer in northern Sweden published in 2004: Tondel's findings of a statistically significant 11% increase in cancer per 100KBq/m2 Cs137 contamination from Chernobyl are almost exactly predicted by the ECRR2003 model.

There have also been developments in laboratory science that can be explained in the new model but are quite impossible to explain in the old ICRP model. One of these is the understanding that elements of high atomic number, like Uranium [but also non-radioactive elements like Platinum, Gold etc.] have the ability to alter the absorption characteristics of tissues in which they are embedded.
Uranium is the central element around which the nuclear fuel cycle revolves, and huge quantities of the substance have been contaminating the biosphere since early in the last century. It is therefore necessary to update the ECRR risk model and include consideration of these 'phantom radiation effects'. The widespread dispersion of Uranium from weapons usage has made it necessary to add a chapter on Uranium weapons. Since its founding in Brussel in 1988, the ECRR has been joined by many eminent radiation scientists from many countries. It will be clear from this new revised edition, that the pressure on politicians and scientists to change their understanding of the health effects of ionizing radiation is now too great to ignore.

またカネで魂を売るバカが湧いたな。
内部被曝の影響が出るのは何年も後だっつうの。

だそうです。
「はっきりしない」−ので→「安全」ではなく
「はっきりしない」−ので→「発生確率が増加すると仮定して」
そういう社会をつくっておいて、後になって安全だと分かったら、「昔の人は過剰防御だったなぁ。ハハハ、でもそのおかげで自分たちが生きられているのかも」と子孫に笑われましょう、ということです。

水素爆発を起こした周囲で本当に死人が出ていないのか？
⇒出ていると思う。福島原発の死者はゼロと言うけれど
東電と政府が事実を公表していない可能性もある。
また、作業員ならば隠蔽される可能性大。ノーネームですから。