Some May be More Dangerous Than Radiation
Deconstructing Nuclear Experts
By CHRIS BUSBY
Since the Fukushima
accident we have seen a stream of experts on radiation telling us not to
worry, that the doses are too low, that the accident is nothing like
Chernobyl and so forth. They appear on television and we read their
articles in the newspapers and online. Fortunately the majority of the
public don’t believe them. I myself have appeared on television and
radio with these people; one example was Ian Fells of the University of
Newcastle who, after telling us all on BBC News that the accident was
nothing like Chernobyl (wrong), and the radiation levels of no
consequence (wrong), that the main problem was that there was no
electricity and that the lifts didn’t work. “ If you have been in a
situation when the lifts don’t work, as I have” he burbled on, “you will
know what I mean.” You can see this interview on youtube and decide for
yourself.
What these people have in common is ignorance. You
may think a professor at a university must actually know something about
their subject. But this is not so. Nearly all of these experts who
appear and pontificate have not actually done any research on the issue
of radiation and health. Or if they have, they seem to have missed all
the key studies and references. I leave out the real baddies, who are
closely attached to the nuclear industry, like Richard Wakeford, or
Richard D as he calls himself on the anonymous website he has set up to
attack me, “chrisbusbyexposed”.
I saw him a few times talking down the accident on the television, labelled
in the stripe as Professor Richard Wakeford, University of Manchester.
Incidentally, Wakeford is a physicist, his PhD was in particle physics at
Liverpool. But he was not presented as ex- Principle Scientist, British Nuclear
Fuels, Sellafield.
That might have given the viewers the wrong idea. Early on we saw
another baddy, Malcolm Grimston, talking about radiation and health,
described as Professor, Imperial College. Grimston is a
psychologist, not a scientist, and his expertise was in examining why
the public was frightened of radiation, and how their (emotional) views
could be changed. But his lack of scientific training didn’t stop him
explaining on TV and radio how the Fukushima accident was nothing to
worry about. The doses were too low, nothing like Chernobyl, not as bad
as 3-Mile Island, only 4 on the scale, all the usual blather. Most
recently we have seen George Monbiot, who I know, and who also knows
nothing about radiation and health, writing in The Guardian how
this accident has actually changed his mind about nuclear power (can
this be his Kierkegaard moment? Has he cracked? ) since he now
understands (and reproduces a criminally misleading graphic to back up
his new understanding) that radiation is actually OK and we shoudn’t
worry about it. George does at least know better, or has been told
better, since he asked me a few years ago to explain why internal and
external radiation exposure cannot be considered to have the same health
outcomes. He ignored what I said and wrote for him (with references)
and promptly came out in favour of nuclear energy in his next article.
So what about Wade Allison? Wade is a medical
physics person and a professor at Oxford. I have chosen to pitch into
him since he epitomises and crystallises for us the arguments of the
stupid physicist. In this he has done us a favour, since he is really
easy to shoot down. All the arguments are in one place. Stupid
physicists? Make no mistake, physicists are stupid. They make themselves
stupid by a kind of religious belief in mathematical modelling. The old
Bertie Russell logical positivist trap. And whilst this may be
appropriate for examining the stresses in metals, or looking at the
Universe (note that they seem to have lost 90% of the matter in the
Universe, so-called “dark matter”) it is not appropriate for, and is
even scarily incorrect when, examining stresses in humans or other
lifeforms. Mary Midgley, the philosopher has written about Science as Religion.
Health physicists are the priests. I have been reading Wade Allison’s
article for the BBC but also looked at his book some months ago. He
starts in the same way as all the others by comparing the accidents. He
writes:
More than 10,000 people have died in the Japanese
tsunami and the survivors are cold and hungry. But the media concentrate
on nuclear radiation from which no-one has died - and is unlikely to.
Then we move to 3-Mile Island: There were no known deaths there.
And Chernobyl:
The latest UN report
published on 28 February confirms the known death toll - 28 fatalities
among emergency workers, plus 15 fatal cases of child thyroid cancer -
which would have been avoided if iodine tablets had been taken (as they
have now in Japan).
This is breathtaking ignorance of the scientific
literature. Prof. Steve Wing in the USA has carried out epidemiological
studies of the effects of 3-Mile Island, with results published in the
peer-review literature. Court cases are regularly settled on the basis
of cancers produced by the 3-Mile Island contamination. But let us move
to Chernobyl. The health effects of the Chernobyl accident are massive
and demonstrable. They have been studied by many research groups in
Russia, Belarus and the Ukraine, in the USA, Greece, Germany, Sweden,
Switzerland and Japan. The scientific peer reviewed literature is
enormous. Hundreds of papers report the effects, increases in cancer and
a range of other diseases. My colleague Alexey Yablokov of the Russian
Academy of Sciences, published a review of these studies in the Annals of the
New York Academy of Sciences (2009).
Earlier in 2006 he and I collected together reviews of the Russian
literature by a group of eminent radiation scientists and published
these in the book Chernobyl, 20 Years After. The result: more than a million
people have died between 1986 and 2004 as a direct result of Chernobyl.
I will briefly refer to two Chernobyl studies in the
west which falsify Wade Allison’s assertions. The first is a study of
cancer in Northern Sweden by Martin Tondel and his colleagues at
Lynkoping University. Tondel examined cancer rates by radiation
contamination level and showed that in the 10 years after the Chernobyl
contamination of Sweden, there was an 11% increase in cancer for every
100kBq/sq metre of contamination. Since the official International
Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) figures for the Fukushima contamination are
from 200 to 900kBq.sq metre out to 78km from the site, we can expect
between 22% and 90% increases in cancer in people living in these places
in the next 10 years. The other study I want to refer to is one I
carried out myself. After Chernobyl, infant leukaemia was reported in 6
countries by 6 different groups, from Scotland, Greece, Wales, Germany,
Belarus and the USA. The increases were only in children who had been in
the womb at the time of the contamination: this specificity is rare in
epidemiology. There is no other explanation than Chernobyl. The
leukemias could not be blamed on some as-yet undiscovered virus and
population mixing, which is the favourite explanation for the nuclear
site child leukemia clusters. There is no population mixing in the womb.
Yet the “doses” were very small, much lower than “natural background”. I
published this unequivocal proof that the current risk model is wrong
for internal exposures in two separate peer-reviewed journals in 2000
and 2009. This finding actually resulted in the formation in 2001 by UK
Environment Minister Michael Meacher of a new Committee Examining
Radiation Risks from Internal Emitters CERRIE. Richard Wakeford was on
this committee representing BNFL and he introduced himself to me as
“BNFL’s Rottweiler”. No difference there.
Wade then turns to a comparison of contamination:
So what of the radioactivity released at
Fukushima? How does it compare with that at Chernobyl? Let's look at the
measured count rates. The highest rate reported, at 1900 on 22 March, for any
Japanese prefecture was 12 kBq per sq m (for the radioactive isotope of
caesium, caesium-137).
A map of Chernobyl in the UN report shows regions
shaded according to rate, up to 3,700 kBq per sq m - areas with less
than 37 kBq per sq m are not shaded at all. In round terms, this
suggests that the radioactive fallout at Fukushima is less than 1% of
that at Chernobyl
But the IAEA themselves, not known for their
independence from the nuclear industry, report that contamination levels
out to 78km were between 200 and 900kBq/sq metre. And Wade has been
rather selective with his data, to put it kindly. The UN definition of
radioactively contaminated land is 37kBq/sq metre just as he writes, but
actually, in all the maps published, the inner 30km Chernobyl
contamination exclusion zone is defined as 555kBq/sq metre and above.
This is just a fact. Why has he misled us? In passing, this means that
there are 555,000 radioactive disintegrations per second on one square
metre of surface. Can you believe this is not harmful? No. And you would
be correct. And another calculation can be made. Since the IAEA data
show that these levels of contamination, from 200,000 to 900,000
disintegrations per second per square metre, exist up to 78km from
Fukushima, we can already calculate that the contamination is actually
worse than Chernobyl, not 1% of Chernobyl as Wade states. For the area
defined by a 78km radius is 19113 sq km compared to the Chernobyl
exclusion zone of 2827 sq km. About seven times greater.
Now I turn to the health effects. Wade trots out
most of the usual stupid physicist arguments. We are all exposed to
natural background, the dose is 2mSv a year and the doses from the
accident are not significantly above this. For example, the Japanese
government are apparently making a mistake in telling people
not to give tap water containing 200Bq/litre radioactive Iodine-131 to
their children as there is naturally 50Bq/l of radiation in the human
body and 200 will not do much harm. The mistake is made because of fears of the
public
which apparently forced the International Commission on Radiological
Protection, ICRP, to set the annual dose limits at 1mSv. Wade knows
better: he would set the limits at 100mSv. He is a tough guy. He shoots
from the hip:
Patients receiving a course of radiotherapy
usually get a dose of more than 20,000 mSv to vital healthy tissue close
to the treated tumour. This tissue survives only because the treatment
is spread over many days giving healthy cells time for repair or
replacement. A sea-change is needed in our attitude to radiation,
starting with education and public information.
But Wade, dear, these people are usually old, and
usually die anyway before they can develop a second tumour. They often
develop other cancers even so because of the radiation. There are
hundreds of studies showing this. And in any case, this external
irradiation is not the problem. The problem is internal irradiation. The
Iodine-131 is not in the whole body, it is in the thyroid gland and
attached to the blood cells: hence the thyroid cancer and the leukaemia.
And there is a whole list of internal radioactive elements that bind
chemically to DNA, from Strontium-90 to Uranium. These give massive
local doses to the DNA and to the tissues where they end up. The human
body is not a piece of wire that you can apply physics to. The concept
of dose which Wade uses cannot be used for internal exposures. This has
been conceded by the ICRP itself in its publications. And in an
interview with me in Stockholm in 2009, Dr Jack Valentin, the
ex-Scientific Secretary of the ICRP conceded this, and also made the
statement that the ICRP risk model, the one used by all governments to
assess the outcome of accidents like Fukushima, was unsafe and could not
be used. You can see this interview on the internet, on www.vimeo.com.
Why is the ICRP model unsafe? Because it is based on
“absorbed dose”. This is average radiation energy in Joules divided by
the mass of living tissue into which it is diluted. A milliSievert is
one milliJoule of energy diluted into one kilogram of tissue. As such it
would not distinguish between warming yourself in front of a fire and
eating a red hot coal. It is the local distribution of energy that is
the problem. The dose from a singly internal alpha particle track to a
single cell is 500mSv! The dose to the whole body from the same alpha
track is 5 x 10-11 mSv. That is 0.000000000005mSv. But it is the dose
to the cell that causes the genetic damage and the ultimate cancer. The
cancer yield per unit dose employed by ICRP is based entirely on
external acute high dose radiation at Hiroshima, where the average dose
to a cell was the same for all cells.
And what of the UN and their bonkers statement about
the effects of the Chernobyl accident referred to by Wade Allison?
What you have to know, is that the UN organisations on radiation and
health are compromised in favour of the nuclear military complex, which
was busy testing hydrogen bombs in the atmosphere at the time of the
agreement and releasing all the Strontium, Caesium, Uranium and
plutonium and other stuff that was to become the cause of the current
and increasing cancer epidemic. The last thing they wanted was the
doctors and epidemiologists stopping their fun. The IAEA and the World
Health Organisation (WHO) signed an agreement in 1959 to remove all
research into the issue from the doctors of the WHO, to the atom
scientists, the physicists of the IAEA: this agreement is still in
force. The UN organisations do not refer to, or cite any scientific
study, which shows their statements on Chernobyl to be false. There is a
huge gap between the picture painted by the UN, the IAEA, the ICRP and
the real world. And the real world is increasingly being studied and
reports are being published in the scientific literature: but none of
the authorities responsible for looking after the public take any notice
of this evidence.
As they say on the Underground trains in London: Mind the Gap.
Wade Allison and the other experts I refer to need to do just this for
their own sake. The one place that this gap is being closed rapidly and
savagely is in the courts. I have acted as an expert witness in over 40
cases involving radiation and health. These include cases where Nuclear
Test veterans are suing the UK government for exposures at the test
sites that have caused cancer, they include cases involving nuclear
pollution, work exposures and exposures to depleted uranium weapons
fallout. And these cases are all being won. All of them. Because in
court with a judge and a jury, people like Wade Allison and George
Monbiot would not last 2 minutes. Because in court you rely on evidence.
Not bullshitting.
Joseph Conrad wrote: "after all the shouting is over, the grim silence of
facts remain".
I believe that these phoney experts like Wade Allison and George
Monbiot are criminally irresponsible, since their advice will lead to
millions of deaths. I would hope that some time in the future, I can be
involved as an expert in another legal case, one where Wade Allison, or
George or my favourite baddy, Richard Wakeford (who actually knows
better) are accused in a court of law of scientific dishonesty leading
to the cancer in some poor victim who followed their advice. When they
are found guilty, I hope they are sent to jail where they can have
plenty of time to read the scientific proofs that their advice was based
on the mathematical analysis of thin air.
In the meantime, I challenge each of them to debate
this issue with me in public on television face to face, so that the
people can figure out who is right. For the late Professor John Gofman, a
senior figure in the US Atomic Energy Commission until he saw what was
happening and resigned, famously said: "the nuclear industry is waging a war
against humanity."
This war has now entered an endgame which will decide the survival of
the human race. Not from sudden nuclear war. But from the on-going and
incremental nuclear war which began with the releases to the biosphere
in the 60s of all the atmospheric test fallout, and which has continued
inexorably since then through Windscale, Kyshtym, 3-Mile Island,
Chernobyl, Hanford, Sellafield, La Hague, Iraq and now Fukushima,
accompanied by parallel increases in cancer rates and fertility loss to
the human race.
There is a gap between them and us. Between the
phoney scientists and the public who don’t believe what they say.
Between those who are employed and paid to protect us from radioactive
pollution and those who die from its consequences. Between those who
talk down what is arguably the greatest public health scandal in human
history, and the facts that they ignore.
Mind the Gap indeed.
Chris Busby is Scientific Secretary
of the European Committee on Radiation Risk. He is visiting Professor
at the University of Ulster and also Guest Researcher at the Julius
Kuehn Institute of the German Federal Agricultural Institute in
Braunschweig, Germany. He was a member of the UK Committee Examining
Radiation Risk on Internal Emitters CERRIE and the UK MoD Depleted
Uranium Oversight Board. He was Science and Policy Interface leader of
the Policy Information network on Child Health and Environment based in
the Netherlands. He was Science and Technology Speaker for the Green
Party of England and Wales. He has conducted fundamental research on the
health effects of internal radiation both at the theoretical and
epidemiological level, including recently on the genotoxic effects of
the element uranium.
http://www.counterpunch.org/busby03282011.html
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
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