Radiophobia is the ideological barrier to allowing fission power to check global warming and overcome energy poverty in developing nations. In other words. It is the cause of burdensome regulations that make fission power too expensive. It’s not an exaggeration to say…
Radiophobia causes global warming.
Even the New York Times participates in groupthink opposition to all ionizing radiation exposure. CT scans provide detailed 3D images of body parts, used by doctors for effective diagnoses of injuries and diseases. CT scan images are created by computer processing of multiple, low-dose exposures of the body part to X-rays.
The New York Times is dead wrong.
Construction and maintenance accidents for wind and solar sources are more deadly than fission power.
“What about the waste” is a common concern.
Answers: 1) There’s not much of it. 2) It’s not very dangerous.
Commonly used fuel rods from today’s fission power plants are placed in concrete casks to be stored on-site indefinitely. Alternatives such as reprocessing to recycle the useful uranium and plutonium are forbidden in the US and many countries.
In the US, the federal government insisted on owning the spent fuel. Underground repositories such as Yucca Mountain are expensive and opposed because of unfounded fear. Like the New York Times, the public and politicians assume all radiation is a deadly carcinogen so protest against all storage options.
This company has demonstrated the success of this storage technology, using non-radioactive spent fuel dummies. Years before this the US Department of Energy barely started attempts to drill a sample storage hole, caving to protests from the fearful public.
Summary: spent fuel has not been harmful, there’s not much of it, and inexpensive, sequestered storage options exist.
Radiation is a weak carcinogen.
You’ll see absorbed radiation described in units of mSv (millisievert) and mGy (milligray), which is energy absorbed per unit of tissue. (mJ/kg). In these scrolls you can ignore the difference. Mammography is safe.
Note that the denominator is one year! These dose examples are the accumulations over a full year. Such low dose rates perfectly safe. Some radiation-fearful people claim all radiation effects must be cumulative, adding up to real harm.
In the body’s normal process of metabolism, the cells’ mitochondria energy generators also release oxidants such as H2O2 (hydrogen peroxide) that are chemically reactive. At a rate of about once per second per cell, these reactive oxygen species can break a single strand of DNA. These single strand breaks are quickly repaired using the redundant information coded in the paired DNA strand.
100 mSv/y ionizing radiation effects are trivial in comparison to natural metabolic effects.
Double strand breaks occur naturally. They can occur by co-incidence. Slow, heavy ionizing alpha particles might create multiple local ionizations and break both strands. Alpha particles can not penetrate skin.
Feinendegen writes “at background radiation level, the probability of a radiogenic DSB to occur per day was calculated to be on average only about 1 in 10,000 cells”
Sylvain Costes writes “Double strand breaks occur one to 10 times per day per cell. (based on measurements made at Exogen with our finger prick kit)” More.
The process of repair of radiation ionization damage is well understood, but not by regulators, legislators, or the general public.
Not one citizen was killed or injured by radiation from the triple meltdown of fission power plants at Fukushima. 18,500 people died or disappeared in the earthquake and tsunami. Ignorantly frightened by low level radiation, the government forced 160,000 from hospitals and their homes, leading to the deaths of 1600.
Prolonged, low-level radiation is not dangerous. At study led by MIT’s Bevin Engelward and Jacquelyn Yanch (published in Environmental Health Perspectives) found that when mice were exposed to radiation doses about 400 times greater than background levels for five weeks, no DNA damage could be detected. Current U.S. regulations require that residents of any area that reaches radiation levels eight times higher than background should be evacuated.
Japan’s 2011 nuclear disaster ‘unlikely’ to have future health affects, says draft UN report and press release by United Nations.
A 2020 article by Church and Brooks compares the effects of radioactive fallout from 1953 atomic bomb testing in Washington County, Utah, to those of the Fukushima accident. Utah residents received 3-4 times the radiation doses of those in Japan. People were not asked to shelter in place except in the city of St. George, There were no health effects. Cancer rates in Washington county remain among the lowest in Utah, which has the lowest cancer rates in the US.
In Japan 160,000 people were evacuated and 1600 died from the government’s ignorant actions.
In an emergency the International Atomic Energy Agency advises families not to evacuate homes where radiation exposures are less than 25 microsieverts per hour.
These data were collected by the joint US/Japan Radiation Effects Research Foundataion life span study of atomic bomb survivors. Simply putting cancer incidence data in bins of none, 0-5, 5-100, 100-200 etc make it obvious that there are no cancer effects for exposures below 100 mSv. The blue bin counts people who normally resided in Hiroshima or Nagasaki but were not there at the time of the atomic bombing.
Average cancer rates in Japan are lower than in the US, probably due to diet.
The RERF foundation does not publish articles that disprove the LNT model.
The reports by the US National Academies are designed to obscure the effects of low dose radiation because they conflict with the tradition of the LNT (linear no threshold) model of harm from radiation, the basis of radiation regulation.
The NAS infers linearity from a least-square fit to an assumed straight line starting a an assumed dose of zero mSv. Look at the lowest plotted data point, which shows no harm. Harm is simply inferred by extrapolation, ignoring observations.
Similarly reports by the RERF coalesce and blur displays of data below 100 mSv (at the superimposed blue arrow).
The RERF objective is to show that all radiation is possibly deadly, in order to raise fears to dissuade the future use of atomic weapons.
The Radiation Effects Research Foundation publishes its cancer incidence data, available in bins of 5-20, 20-40, 40-60, 60-80, 80-100, etc mSv. Plotted here are cancer incidences from low radiation exposure. The Radiation Effects Research Foundation and National Academy of Sciences do not publish such detailed data.
The data shows that at low doses, cancer rates go down, not up. The red and blue bars represent +/- 1 standard deviation in the counts. The large sample sizes at low doses (19,369 people) illustrate statistically more accurate relationships between cancer and radiation than at the 6,411 higher doses used to extrapolate LNT.
The RERF objective is to increase radiophobia, hoping to lessen likelihood of nuclear weapons use. Does the end justify the means? Here are a few more sample critiques of RERF’s LNT advocacy.
The accident at Chernobyl was the worst imaginable. The Chernobyl Forum report is the most authoritative summary, including psychological effects and agricultural land contamination. The radiation exposure levels are now not harmful to people and animals living in the vicinity, but there remain hot spots of radioactive materials.
Despite the “possible increase in cancer mortality” cited by the Chernobyl Forum using LNT projections, the incidence of cancer caused by the Chernobyl accident is nil.
The emergency workers exposed to over 200 mGy did have more cancer than the general population, but better survival because of medical attention given to emergency workers.
Jarorowski was a physician and scientist before he became chairman of UNSCEAR. He wrote a professional, quantitative summary critical of the LNT projections of harm.
LNT predicts a cancer risk of 1% for each 100 mSv of radiation absorption. Cancer tissue cells do not recover from intense radiation. Spillover radiation affects nearby, healthy tissue cells, which have repair capability. Radiation oncologists understand well the biological effects of ionizing radiation. Regulators do not.
Radiologist Mike Waligorski explains:
Radiotherapy – is a way to cure cancer by radiation
1-Extremely high doses of X-rays must be applied in order to kill all cancer cells in a small part of the patient’s body.
2. To kill all cells in the cancer volume, doses of X-rays must be some 20 000 times higher than doses from natural background radiation, deposited in anyone’s body during one year – and are then given in Gy (For X-rays, 1 Gy = 1000 mSv). [I believe this may be the shortest cut to avoid Sv in cancer RT!]
3. To avoid harming the healthy tissues surrounding the cancer in the process of radiotherapy, the beam of X-rays must be well-focused on the cancer volume, and is often pointed from many directions.
4. A typical course of radiotherapy is about 60 Gy to the cancer volume, delivered in 30 daily “fractions” of 2 Gy each. Such “fractionated” delivery of radiation allows the irradiated healthy tissues to recover more readily than cancer cells, thus making the radiotherapy treatment mode effective.
LNT predicts that 100 mSv exposure creates a 1% chance of cancer, so the government launched a well-designed study to determine its liability to shipyard workers maintaining nuclear submarines. They measured health of 28,000 workers exposed to low levels of radiation and 33,000 matched workers who were not. LNT predicts the average 8 mSv exposure would create a 8/100 % chance of cancer, about a 4/100 % increased rate of death (0.04%). Instead, this aged-matched, job-matched, controled study showed a surprising effect: Low level radiation seemed to prolong life.
A steel-maker accidentally included a radioactive cobalt-60 radiation therapy source in a batch of recycled steel that was refabricated into steel beams. These slightly radioactive beams were unknowingly used in the construction of several apartment buildings in Taiwan. Because average absorbed doses were 48 mSv, the fallacious LNT model predicts cancer rates of 48/100 % for 7,271 persons, or 35 more cancers than normally expected in the Taiwanese population. The actual results were 20 fewer cancer cases than normal.
This is another example of hormesis, the stimulation of the immune system by low level radiation, improving health.
If you read the linked papers you’ll note that the authors claim the opposite conclusion, writing
“The results suggest that prolonged low dose-rate radiation exposure appeared to increase risks of developing certain cancers in specific subgroups of this population in Taiwan.”
Because the authors (or the peer reviewers authorizing publication) believe LNT must be true, the authors chose to write a conclusion based on a smaller, less statistically significant, subset of the data (cherry picking) that supports LNT. This, in spite of the fact that the very first line of their own data (Hwang 2006) Table III (“All cancers”) blatantly screams out the truth.
Hsieh published that the expected cancer rates would actually be higher because the residents were older at the end of the observation period. He also reduced the sample size because they had good dosimetry information on only 6242 residents. Mohan Doss then published a letter to the British Journal of Cancer and concluded that the headline on the slide above should actually read: “6,242 Taiwan apartment dwellers exposed to ~48 mSv had 47 fewer cancers than 296 predicted.” The chance of this observation being a fluke is 0.3%.
You may know the infamous story of young women hired to paint glow-in-the-dark numbers on watch dials. The paint contained radium which slowly decayed and stimulated phosphorescence. Unfortunately the women often pointed the brush tips with their tongues, slowly ingesting radium that lodged in their bones. Of the 3000 women, about 50 experienced bone sarcomas. Their radiation exposures were computed from analysis of radium in bone samples. We learned from this unfortunate accident that cancers were caused at exposure exceeding 2,000 mGy (200 centigray on the above chart). Subsequently dial painters were instructed not to lick the brush tips and no such cancers occurred.
“At cumulative dosages below the order of 1000 skeletal average rads no clinically significant radiobiological injury has yet been observed in the M.I.T. series over a time span of 40–50 yr in more than 500 persons. It may be that in the low-dose domain the rate of radiation injury is slower than the body’s recovery and repair rates.” [1000 rad = 10 Gray]
Radon is a radioactive gas emanating from uranium omnipresent in granite. It was thought to cause lung cancer because of experiences of uranium miners, who smoked and worked in unventilated, dusty mines. To test radon’s effect in normal environments, Bernard Cohen correlated 1,601 county-by-county measured levels of radon to corresponding county-by-county records of lung cancer incidence. His statistical analysis revealed the opposite. As low levels of radon increased, cancer rates diminished. Astonished, he analyzed other potential confounding factors that might have caused the statistical correlation; these included climate, altitude, geography, and 54 socioeconomic factors such as housing, and education. None explained decreasing cancer rates other than radon. The LNT model deviated from observed reality by 20 standard deviations, clearly proving LNT wrong. Regulators don’t care and regulate with LNT.
There are no direct observations that show significant death rates from household levels of radon. EPA assumes LNT is true by extrapolation from dangerous radiation levels, then warns home buyers about radon.
This 2016 article Rectifying Radon’s Record: An Open Challenge to the EPA shows the fallacy, but also is simply ignored by EPA.
The University of Oslo scientists wrote the free book, Radon, Lung Cancer, and the LNT Model to educate people.
University of Massachusetts Professor Edward Calabrese has written many papers exposing the original errors and false statements that evolved to become EPA LNT policy, agreed to by NRC and CDC. The National Academy of Sciences recently wrote an article defending their erroneous historical support of LNT, which Calabrese critiqued, to no effect.
Concerned radiologists, doctors, and radiation physicists, members of Scientists for Accurate Radiation Information, issued this statement. This contrasts with EPA and NRC regulations that prohibit exposures of as little as 1 mGy accumulated over an entire year.
Study this to learn a little statistics.
Sometimes enthusiastic scientists, disappointed in expected outcomes, seek a smaller data set that meets with their intuition.
Seeking but not finding…
One of 20 subsets of the data showed a correlation. The chance such a correlation would happen just by chance is only 5%. But by trying 20 different subsets of the data, finding such an accidental correlation is likely.
Two standard deviations, p < 0.05, 95% probably true, is the traditional hurdle for publishing a scientific result.
Publish or perish.
Great 19 minute video, filmed on the beach in Brazil. Low level radiation from thorium in beach sand is sought by people to cure their ills.
A single exposure of 100 mSv is not harmful, says SARI. Surely spreading it out over a full year is even more conservative and safe. Regulators claim the harm from radiation is linear, and it exists even at doses so low that harm can not be observed. Regulators typically set public safety limits at 1 mSv/year and worker limits of 20 mSv/year, but they then over-ride these limits with the ALARA rule (as low as reasonably achievable). They measure cumulative radiation exposure adding together exposures among large groups of people. Resulting regulations ratchet down constraints that raise cost of fission power plants to uneconomic levels.
Qualified scientists and doctors have petitioned the NRC to end reliance on ALARA and LNT and to set higher scientifically determined threshold radiation exposure limits.
One of the problems in overturning ALARA is that there are many scientists who have built their careers and reputations by using and endorsing the LNT model, publishing papers peer reviewed by like-minded people, establishing a consensus. However, science progresses when people reveal findings that conflict with accepted, settled science. Here’s an example from Michael Crichton, who studied science before becoming an author and movie producer.
Listen to the speech. The above quote appears at about 5:50 in the audio recording.
Each dot represents the construction of a nuclear power plant. So called “overnight” construction costs exclude financing during construction. Fear and ALARA regulations have increased US fission power plants beyond economic viability.
ThorCon founders presented plans to NRC before being discouraged. No rational investor will risk $1 billion depending on future NRC permission.
Although many foundations claim to seek ways to check global warming by building emission-free power plants, none support fission power.
Startup fission venture companies are opposed by rich environmental organizations that oppose fission power and have legal skills to bankrupt new entrants. Look at the long list of organizations striving to stop a new company with a small power plant design, a few weeks after filing a license application with NRC.
Consider the financial power that can be exercised by the above, supposedly pro-environmental, organizations, to campaign against nuclear power.
Available at Amazon.
I wrote this trifold handout. Jim Hansen posted my flyer at Columbia, too.
Fission is the safest power generation technology.
Metabolism within cells creates ionizing oxygen forms that cause thousands of times more DNA strand breaks than X-ray and CT scan machines do.
DNA strand breaks are repaired and cells and tissues regenerate, so cancer is a weak carcinogen.
The observed pro-health effects of radiation on Taiwan apartment dwellers, submarine workers, household radon breathers, and even some atomic bombing victims is ignored.
The safety thresholds are excluded by a priori assuming the LNT model of harm starting a zero radiation dose.
The low dose harm predicted by LNT is an unobserved phantom of belief.
Science and statistics have been warped to comply with consensus to get papers published.
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