Bury the Nuclear Renaissance Once and for All

[BridgeTheGap]

The words, "I told you so" sometimes brings guilty pleasure when uttered to your teenager or under your breath to a spouse. Uttering those words today brings nothing but despair and frustration at the worldwide lack of common sense and an adolescent level of simple risk management.

As I write this, the world is watching helplessly to see if the nuclear disaster unfolding in Japan will reach the level of the signature nuclear catastrophe of Chernobyl in 1986. For anyone who thinks this shouldn't portend the death knell to the nuclear power "renaissance," the contents of a new book should be required reading.

Written by Russian and Belarus experts, edited and published by the New York Academy of Sciences, the book, "Chernobyl : Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment" is by far the most well-researched book on the issue. Drawing from over 5,000 published articles and studies, the authors arrive at startling conclusions. Among them:

So far one million people from around the world have already died from Chernobyl radiation, including over 110,000 of the original 830,000 clean up workers. High doses of radioactive fallout reached much of Europe and the UK. 750 million people in the Northern Hemisphere received significant contamination. The release was 200 times more radiation than previously thought, hundreds of times more than the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

http://truthout.org/bury-nuclear-renaissance-once-and-all

[TheWraith]

1. More lies than is even usual for this nonsense.

One million dead? That's so amazingly contradictory to all known science that in terms of massive lies, it goes right up there with "Aliens run the world."

[madokie]

5. Just because you don't want to believe it

is all it amounts too. Nothing contradictory in this at all

[TheWraith]

8. Except that it contradicts science.

There has NEVER been a single scientifically executed study which backs up any of the outrageous claims of death tolls from Chernobyl: 250,000, 500,000, a million. The closest any study has come, the TORCH report--which was entirely run by anti-nuclear groups looking to criticize nuclear power--could only stretch the risk factors to say "30,000 to 60,000." More cautious approaches led by the WHO say 4,000 to 8,000.

[madokie]

11. Live in denial, I could care less

[CRH]

17. Fukishima contradicts what was thought to be, sound science, n/t

[wtmusic]

19. Actually no, it doesn't. But tuck that idea in bed at night and give it a kiss

if it makes you feel better.

[PamW]

23. How does Fukishima contradict science??????

Fukishima contradicts what was thought to be, sound science
=====================================================

The Fukushima power plant successfully survived a quake that was orders of
magnitude greater than the design basis requirements.

The plant was then hit with a tsunami. Tokyo Electric was foolish enough
to put the diesel generators in the basements of the reactor buildings where
they and their switchgear could get flooded and destroyed. Such a configuration
is not allowed by the NRC in the USA for the reason that a tsunami could destroy
this equipment.

The quake took out the off-site power, and the tsunami took out the diesel generators.
The plant has to have a source of power for the shutdown cooling system.

All the scientific pronouncements apply to plants that are properly configured with
proper placement of the diesel generators.

If the power company inappropriately locates the emergency backup equipment, then
all bets are off.

Science wasn't contradicted, the plant is doing exactly what one would predict given
the inappropriate loss of shutdown cooling power.

PamW

[Jan Steinman]

21. Uhm... there's 5,000 studies summarized in this book!

Do you only accept studies that you agree with?

Heck, Sternglass showed that there were 430 "excess infant deaths" following TMI, which was a relatively minor accident compared to Chernobyl. But unless you dig for it, it's been buried.

[leveymg]

6. The study was published by Wiley-Blackwell, a highly credible academic publisher.

You can't just dismiss this information out of hand because it conflicts with your preconceptions.

I'll try to find some more information on this book

[TheWraith]

7. I dismiss it because it conflicts with scientific fact. nt

[abqmufc]

9. Maybe YOUR science, but clearly not ALL science....n/t

[leveymg]

10. You can dismiss what you want. Here's the review extract in the Journal of

Radiation Protection Dosimetry, Ian Fairlie, * Oxford Journals
* Mathematics & Physical Sciences & Medicine
* Radiation Protection Dosimetry
* Volume141, Issue1
* Pp. 101-104.
http://rpd.oxfordjournals.org/content/141/1/101.short

Chernobyl: consequences of the catastrophe for people and the environment
Authors: A.V. Yablokov, V. B. Nesterenko, A. V. Nesterenko, .
Published by: Wiley-Blackwell, February 2010.
ISSN: 0077-8923; ISBN-10: 1-57331-757-8; ISBN-13: 978-1-57331-757-3; 327 pp (2010) $150/£80.00/€92.00.

In the few weeks before I was asked to review this book there was media coverage of two diametrically opposed views regarding the magnitude of health effects associated with the Chernobyl reactor accident. One is expressed in the book under review and the other came from Zbigniew Jaworowski (former chair of the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation, UNSCEAR).The opposing positions are placed either side of the ‘middle ground’ as expressed by organisations such as International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), UNSCEAR and WHO.

In the context of the Chernobyl accident Jaworowski ( 1) criticises publications, which use a linear-no threshold (LNT) dose response to evaluate cancer risks at very low doses and contrasts predictions of thousands of late cancer deaths with deficits (compared with Russian national statistics) of solid cancers in Russian emergency workers and the populations of most contaminated areas. He claims that the application of LNT led to the unnecessary ‘sufferings and pauperisation’ of millions of inhabitants of contaminated areas. In contrast to the views of Jaworowski the current book under review by Yablokov et al., considers that the excess cancer cases related to the Chernobyl accident have been grossly underestimated.

In the opinion of this reviewer, the wide range of estimates that can be found in the scientific literature is mainly due to different estimates of population dose, the use of different radiation risk figures and different interpretations of epidemiological data (particularly the use of different control groups). Published estimates of excess deaths also frequently differ in terms of which countries and time periods they refer to. This often makes meaningful comparisons difficult or impossible although it often remains clear that there is a large disparity between different authors. With such a range of views, an already vast and increasing literature, and …

Related articles

Book Review:
o Ian Fairlie
Chernobyl: consequences of the catastrophe for people and the environment Radiat Prot Dosimetry (2010) 141(1): 97-101 doi:10.1093/rpd/ncq180
o Extract
o Full Text

The remainder of the review is for purchase ($34), but if I'm reading this correctly, it says that opinion and methodologies within the scientific community are dramatic split on the subject of actual mortality resulting from Chernobyl. Neither side appears to have a consensus, so to dismiss this study out-of-hand is, itself, unscientific.

[hunter]

12. You can purchase it for $34. That tells you something, no?

The journal publishers are sharks and dinosaurs, they'll take a bite out of anything. It's not the publisher's name that gives any given journal or study credibility.

[kristopher]

13. Which mortality stats from Iraq did you trust - the "official" count or the Lancet Study?

As the fog of war has receded and the passions over the right and wrong of it have subsided a bit, we are now seeing a broader range attempts to assess the number of deaths and injuries that were a consequence of the invasion of Iraq. However during the high point of combat we saw the same argument play out there as we are now witnessing in relation to the effects of radiation releases from Chernobyl.

One approach, that used by governments with vested interests in minimizing the APPEARANCE of collateral damage, established a system of counting that relied on, literally, counting dead bodies. If the body wasn't physically inspected by an official counter, then the PRESUMPTION was that it did not exist.

Yet another even more ad hoc method counted the number of death reported in the papers. If it didn't appear in the paper, it didn't happen.

And yet if you had listened to supporters of the war - including the media - it was the final method, employed by epidemiologists with no vested interests in the outcome of the study, that was "junk science". This one used statistical modeling and a proven effective scientific sampling method to compare rates of death before and after the invasion.



I'll leave it to you to decide what method is "scientific" and what is "junk science", but I'm curious about one point: When a physicist considers the events that are happening during a loss of cooling accident, do they use established theory and proven sampling methods that they then interpret with statistical analysis?

Of do they count all of the individual atoms that they can observe being split, and then presume that no other atoms were affected?

[wtmusic]

18. Apparently one of the effects of radiation is exaggeration

No one seems to notice (or want to acknowledge) that the closer a scientist is to Chernobyl, the more inflated his mortality figures get. It would probably be a good idea to see if these studies are cited as part of a request for government aid.

[kristopher]

20. More smearing of science that negatively impacts the fission industry?

Smears rather than substance. You take great joy in that type of debate, don't you.

[Name removed]

15. Deleted message

Sub-thread removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[Jan Steinman]

22. By "all known science" you mean "all the science *I* know"

There's quite a bit of "known science" that shows pretty severe consequences to even minor amounts of chronic radiation exposure.

No less than the US National Cancer Institute will gladly take your data on where you lived and what sort of milk you drank and tell you how much greater your thyroid cancer risk is.

Sternglass showed that 430 "excess infant deaths" occurred after TMI, in a peer-reviewed study.

I think that by "all known science," what you REALLY mean is "all science known by me."

[FiveGoodMen]

2. Amen!

[frebrd]

3. K&R!

[GliderGuider]

4. Quants rule!

The quants and the poets

The fight between the pro-nukers and the anti-nukers, for example, is actually quite archetypal. Though both sides pretend to be informed by ’science’ and ‘facts’ both are actually informed primarily by prejudice. Whether you like nuclear power or not is a reflection of the kind of worldview you have: whether you are a confident embracer of the Western model of progress or whether it frightens or concerns you; whether you trust science or tend not to; whether you are cautious or reckless; whether you are ‘progressive’ or ‘conservative.’ On issues ranging from GM crops to capitalism, these are the underlying stories that actually inform the green debate. That they are then supported by a clutch of cherry-picked facts – easy to come by, after all, in the age of Wikipedia – is a footnote to what’s really going on.

[Fledermaus]

14. "He's dead Jim."

[hunter]

16. "Bird populations in California plummeted a month after Chernobyl...

...and there is no other plausible explanation."

None? Really?

Frankly, I think Hands Across America" with Mickey Mouse, Goofy, Reverend Robert Schuller, Kenny Loggins, and John Stamos, backed by Papa Doo Run Run" frightened all the birds into hiding.

Or maybe it was something less terrifying, like El Niño.