The Wish List
Nuclear energy,
the "peaceful" or the "military" atom, represents
a dearly beloved project of governments in the United States, Britain,
Russia, France, Germany, and Japan -- also India, China, Pakistan,
Iran, and other nations. Nuclear energy is fiercely defended by governments,
even as the parties in office change. They recognize that their fierce
defense is not aided if the public considers radiation to be harmful
-- harmful even at low doses. It is fair to surmise that nuclear promoters
have a wish-list for the outcome of radiation research which includes
the following "findings."
ONE.
Best of all would be a finding that a little extra radiation improves
human health. This speculation has a name: Radiation hormesis. Some
of its most avid proponents are already writing about the need to
treat society in general for Radiation-Deficiency Disease.
TWO.
In case hormesis cannot be sold to the public, the next best outcome
would be evidence supporting a threshold-dose of radiation below
which no harm at all occurs. The "safe dose - no risk"
claim has become exceedingly common after the Chernobyl accident.
For example, the Department of Energy (USA), in its 1987 report
on the probable health consequences from Chernobyl, experiments
with its "Zero-Risk Model." The report states that, if
all radiation doses below a half-rad are harmless, then Chernobyl
creates "zero risk" for some 500 million people exposed
by its fallout. When an abbreviated version of the report received
worldwide distribution in December 1988, via the peer-reviewed journal
Science, the assertion that Chernobyl may induce ZERO extra cancers
was repeated ten times in six pages. The pages included no mention
of the powerful evidence and logic which argue against the paper's
threshold speculation.
THREE.
If hormesis and thresholds are not successfully sold to the general
public, the next best "product" is the familiar claim
that a dose of radiation is far less harmful if it is received slowly
over time, than if the same dose is received all at once. Since
1980, the claim is "2 to 10 times less harmful." This
speculation is invoked to divide the observed cancers from the Hiroshima-Nagasaki
bombings by numbers up to 10, in predictions about injury by the
slow doses from Chernobyl.
The
Warning
As a scientist, I have always taken these wishes and speculations
seriously. I have spent years testing them with the existing evidence
and with logic. I, too, would prefer for radiation to be harmless.
Who would not? But unfortunately, evidence and logic do not support
the wish-list. On the contrary, evidence and logic require me to issue
a grave warning:
Low-dose ionizing radiation may well be the most important single
cause of cancer, birth defects, and genetic disorders. Therefore,
we do not want to add more radiation to our unavoidable doses from
nature.
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