George Monbiot has had an uncomfortable year of revelations. Full credit to him for being willing to admit in public that he was wrong:
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.
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.
H/T to Chris Greaves for the link.
Update: Here’s wormme with a remarkably timely example of the sort of thing that George Monbiot encountered:
And Rana included this report, subtitled “Experts warn that any detectable level of radiation is “too much”.”
The only “experts” who would say that are political activists who are either ignorant of science or traitors to it.
“The U.S. Department of Energy has testified that there is no level of radiation that is so low that it is without health risks,” Jacqueline Cabasso, the Executive Director of the Western States Legal Foundation,
There’s only three possibilities here: 1) whoever testified for the DOE did a truly awful job (doubtful), 2) Ms. Cabasso misunderstood the testimony and paraphrased it according to her liking (quite likely), or 3) Ms. Cabasso is a dirty little liar (don’t rule it out).
For chronic (long-term) concerns, the DOE (and NRC) use the linear no-threshold model.
“But what does that mean,” our non-geeks cry. It means it’s assumed that any increase in dose is an increase in long-term risk. No threshold, see?
So is this model true? No. Anyone expert in radiation knows it isn’t true, because we have the whole wide world to look at. And natural doses vary greatly. People pick up between 200 and 2000 mrem/year (2-20 mSv). With absolutely no harm observed at higher doses, so how is there heightened risk? And thousands of Taiwanese picked up 5000-6000 mrem/year (50-60 mSv) for years and years and had a much lower incidence of cancer than usual.
Then why do the DOE and NRC assume risk? Because they couldn’t prove there isn’t. Still can’t, despite the real world examples above.
But that is also true about everything. Marshmallows have killed in the past, and they will in the future. Dihydrogen oxide is the greatest mass murderer of all time.
Ionizing radiation is held to standards that would basically outlaw every other activity and material on earth. Fukushima is proof of that. No one has been killed by radiation, but we’re staring at maybe 25,000 dead. And how much have we heard about non-nuke carcinogens, no doubt swirling around by the ton?
