A piece worth reading about Fukushima and Fear.
(NOTE BY OP: Even as I write this, the bones of 20,000 actual victims of 3/11/11 are drifting towards the West Coast and will start washing up in October. Consider how much thought has been given to them and how much has been given relatively to the nuclear situation and ask yourself if it isn't based on some kind of "less rational" fear.)
(ALSO: I offer this article for those interested in reading it. I live in Japan and this is a very important issue to me far beyond its use as entertainment fodder. I am not writing this to be called a nuclear apologist and indeed, I am not, being myself against nuclear energy.)
Nuclear Scientist Responds To Critics Of His Belief That Fukushima Refugees Are Victims Of Fear, Not Radiation
http://www.forbes.com/sites/christopherhelman/2012/03/16/nuclear-scientist-responds-to-critics-of-his-belief-that-fukushima-refugees-are-victims-of-fear-not-radiation/
Last week on the anniversary of the Fukushima nuclear disaster we published a piece by James Conca (see: Fukushima’s Refugees Are Victims of Fear, Not Radiation) where he explained his conviction that the potential threat to Fukushima refugees posed by radiation exposure has been overblown to the point where the irrational fear of radiation is more dangerous to Japan than the radiation itself. The piece generated a host of comments, some supportive, many not. Much of the discussion focused on the merits of Linear No-Threshold Dose hypothesis (LNT), which suggests there is no safe dose of radiation. Conca — who has spent decades researching radiological contamination at national labs — disagrees with LNT, and has prepared the following response to critics of the piece.
By James Conca
Seriously? LNT is not established science, it’s established policy. Ideology and policy are not science. I love Google and Wikipedia, but they don’t take the place of actual research. You need to go back and read the primary documents, review the actual data, read Hermann Mueller’s letters from 1946 and why he chose to ignore certain studies, understand the math of risk analysis, understand the Cold War environment under which LNT was adopted. The job of science is to understand. The job of ideology is to coerce. The people of Japan are not being hysterical, they’re being afraid because we told them to be. Without caring about the consequences. We know better, but sound bites don’t capture the subtleties of this problem.
So it’s all about LNT, the Linear No-Threshold Dose hypothesis, a supposition that all radiation is deadly and there is no dose below which harmful effects will not occur. Double the dose, double the cancers. Of course, this isn’t true. The millions of nuclear workers that have been monitored closely for 50 years have no higher cancer mortality than the general population but have had several to ten times the average dose. People living in Colorado and Wyoming have twice the annual dose as those in Los Angeles, but have lower cancer rates. These cannot occur if LNT were true, because LNT insists this could not occur. There are no observable effects in any population group around the planet that LNT is true below 10 rem/yr (0.1 Sv/yr) even in areas of the Middle East, Brazil and France where natural doses exceed 10 rem/yr (0.1 Sv/yr).
No matter what you feel about the corporate arrogance and lack of Government oversight that led Tepco to ignore warnings from the U.S. and the IAEA for 20 years, they did properly evacuate to 50 km immediately, told everyone not to eat anything from that region for 3 months while iodine-131 decayed away, and mapped out the dose contours of >10 rem/yr (>0.1 Sv/yr), 5-10 rem/yr (0.05-0.1 Sv/yr), 1-5 rem/yr (0.01-0.05 Sv/yr), and <1 rem/yr (<0.01 Sv/yr). Now they need to clean-up the >10 rem/yr (>0.1 Sv/yr) area as quickly as possible (we can do this, it’s going to cost on the order of $50 billion), provide each evacuee with a small alarming dosimeter pin that can be set at 2 or 5 mrem/hr, runs on a watch battery and comes with an easy-to-understand app (this will cost less than $20 million), repatriate anyone that wants to return, show that any foods grown outside the >10 rem/yr (>0.1 Sv/yr) area is safe (there’s only a few foods that bioconcentrate Cs or Sr, don’t grow those), while rebuilding the infrastructure that was destroyed by the tsunami and quake. And listen to the international community when we tell you you’re not prepared for something like this.
