April 5th, 2011Dear Readers,
According to British
uber-pro-nuker George Monbiot in his column in today's Guardian (shown
below), anyone opposed to the madness that caused Fukushima is a member
of a "lobby"!
I suppose that means we have lobbyists, corporate funding, SEC and PAC
violations, the whole nine yards.
He says we're all cherry-picking the data and basing our opposition on utterly
unscientific conclusions.
Apparently,
according to Monbiot, ANY additional radiation ANY member of the public
EVER gets from Fukushima, in any dose, no matter what other radiation
you receive in your life, and regardless of the prior condition of your
immune system, is good for you! Or at the very least, harmless. That's
Monbiot's stance, and he's sticking to it. He says it's what the
science proves, and only conspiracy theorists disagree.
It appears that George Monbiot completely missed the distinguished Dr. John
Gofman's entire career!
He missed Gofman's peer-reviewed studies of x-ray damage to humans (extremely
"low" level radiation by most standards).
He
missed Joe Magano's career too, and his (peer-reviewed) analysis of
increased cancer rates around operating nuclear power plants.
He
obviously completely missed Ernest Sternglass and Alice Stewart and Jay
Gould and Chris Busby's and... well, you know. All of them. Far more
than I can name. There's lots of scientific studies about radiation Mr.
Monbiot had to avoid to reach HIS conclusions. Not that he's the only
one who's avoided them.
And of course, George Monbiot had to
completely overlook -- or rather, had to consciously avoid -- the
thousands -- yes, George, thousands -- of scientists from Russia who
have come forward to say that the facts are being actively suppressed
about just exactly how much damage Chernobyl really did. And why it
needs such a large exclusion zone. And why that zone ought to be even
larger.
Mr. Monbiot never saw the sorry state of the liquidators
and the downwinders as anything but normal. He wears rose-colored
glasses and then denounces those who see clearly. He even accuses them
of committing "a great wrong" that can only be righted by building
thousands of new nuclear power plants as quickly as possible!
How many Fukushimas will it take for Mr. Monbiot to smell the caffeine in the
coffee?
Let
me try to explain a few things about statistics to Mr. Monbiot, who
will surely claim he knows them already, but he acts like he doesn't, so
I'll explain it anyway: Confounding Factors and Variance.
In any
study of any randomly chosen population of a thousand people, perhaps
300 will get cancer. We all know the base cancer rate is between about 1
in 4 and 1 in 3, which, by the way, is a huge variance right there.
However,
the variance between one randomly chosen population of a thousand
people and another group of a thousand, also randomly chosen using
exactly the same criteria, is likely to be much greater than the
additional cancers caused by Chernobyl, even among those living fairly
close to the reactor site. I think every scientist involved in studying
Chernobyl would agree with that statement. But when there are hundreds
of thousands, and even millions of people affected, the aggregate
ADDITIONAL damage to the whole population can be quite substantial. And
yet, hard to prove.
One reason for the variance from one sample
group to the next might be "confounding factors:" Things the scientist
didn't notice that affected the outcome of the study. Another might be
the actual random variance among the possible populations that might be
studied. No study can look at everyone, so samples must be taken -- a
thousand people, for example -- and estimates concerning millions of
people are then made, based on the carefully-analyzed data obtained from
the sample population.
In any sample population of one thousand
people, a single extra cancer out of the several hundred that will occur
anyway would be statistically very difficult to measure, and impossible
to notice any other way. One person, and their family, will notice it
very much, but they won't know they're an "extra" cancer that shouldn't
have happened. (Like the others should have, of course.)
10 extra
cancers in a population of a thousand people, where several hundred
will get cancer anyway, would ALSO probably be unnoticeable -- except to
a very careful statistician.
Even a hundred extra cancers might
be called an anomaly (certainly Mr. Monbiot would have such an
explanation) or the result of poor data collection -- confounding
factors -- and discarded.
Fault can be found with ANY study.
That's one reason the Russian scientists who wrote the 2009 Chernobyl
book reviewed THOUSANDS of studies. The IAEA reviewed a few hundred.
Talk about cherry-picking...
I suppose one can look at the number
of "potential" lethal doses being released at Fukushima and just simply
assume that they will all be rendered harmless by the combined processes
of dilution and radioactive decay.
For Iodine-131 released into
the water, after 150 days or so, it will essentially all be gone and
won't have made it to many foreign shores, except in fish caught off the
waters of Japan and then flown elsewhere. And the doses will be so
low, so soon... There's lots of water out there to dilute, dilute,
dilute!
But what about the Iodine-129, with a half-life measured
in millennia? What about the I-131 that is released into the air and is
now falling on America's crops? What is the aggregate amount of
radioactive Iodine being added to our nations's food supplies (let
alone, to Japan's) and what quantities of what isotopes? Does Monbiot
know or care? He can't know, because nobody knows exactly. He's shown
that he doesn't care. If releases were ten times what they are, he
still won't care. (This has actually been somewhat born out today
because, in fact, there was a ten-fold increase in local contamination
levels at the site, over yesterday, and I haven't heard that he's
suddenly changed his mind.)
How many people will ingest these "low
doses" of radioactive particles in their leafy greens, their root
vegetables, their milk, water, or meats (if they eat meat)?
We are
all filters for the environment. We breath in whatever is there. Some
of it lodges permanently in our lungs, or enters our body some other
way. Radioactive particles from Fukushima will be in everyone's bodies
for a thousand thousand generations. Who signed on for this? I sure
didn't! Our children and their grandchildren sure didn't, yet they are
taking on the largest burden!
No matter what study George might find that says radiation doesn't harm
fetuses, it does.Mr.
Monbiot is surely willing to admit -- okay, maybe not -- that vast
quantities of poisons are being released. If actually given to humans
directly (undiluted) enough poison is being released to cause thousands
of lethal cancers EACH! That's thousands of cancers PER PERSON! We
have to guess at the total. TEPCO's data is unreliable.
But
everyone know what they say about a pound of plutonium, if distributed
in everybody's lungs? That's basically what's happening right now.
Japan is distributing highly carcinogenic radioactive particles into
everybody's lungs. Yours. Mine. Everyone's. However, Monbiot
welcomes them into his lungs, as does Ann Coulter here in the U.S..Thousands
of billions of lethal doses worth of fission products, activation
products, uranium and plutonium have already escaped or been
purposefully released from the plant, and deadly releases might continue
for years, and might even get horribly worse.
Multiple reactor meltdowns might already be occurring, slowly. Slowly isn't
much help. It's just slower.
Mr.
Monbiot could admit that the real reason the evacuation zone isn't 50
miles, as the U.S. Government has been officially advising U.S.
citizens, is probably that three enormous cities fall within that
zone... You just can't evacuate that many people without trauma... and
ensuing poverty... perhaps it would even cause riots and violence... Is
New York ready to do the same thing at a moment's notice? And wait
patiently in traffic as the winds from Indian Point blow over the city?
Mr.
Monbiot could also admit, while he's at it, that Depleted Uranium is a
cruel weapon, devoid of heart for the people who will breath its dust,
years after the conflict it is used in. Even if he only believes in
heavy metal poisoning, he should denounce such weaponry.
Mr.
Monbiot wants peer-reviewed studies of low level radiation damage, and
there's an abundance of that. Mr. Monbiot wants official studies
sanctioned by the "scientific community" as if there is such an official
organization that can sanction such things, and no scientific fact had
ever been "hotly" debated before. What he doesn't want is an abundance
of caution, or even a healthy dose of it.
But if all he wants are
peer-reviewed studies, there's plenty of that. And there's plenty of
evidence of cover-ups. Is it an "organized" crime, like The Mob or Wall
Street? It all depends on your definition of organized, I suppose.
DOE, IAEA, WNA and many other organizations certainly actively promote
the crime against humanity of nuclear power.
Pro-nukers don't need
rallies in order to do their dirty work: They just need a few back-room
deals, some taxpayer-backed government loan guarantees, and an
unconstitutional law that shields them from culpability (known as the
Price-Anderson Act in America, all nuclear countries have similar laws).
It's
all very clean and polished. Like using a sterile needle to inject a
lethal poison into a prisoner. What's the point of such antiseptic
treatment? People are dying. Why?
Trees changed color, as shown
on the cover of the book about Chernobyl which George Monbiot denounces.
Why did they do that, George?
Children are suffering horrible
deformities and meanwhile, radiation IS blamed by the scientific
community as one of usually many causes of hundreds of different kinds
of cancers, including bladder cancer which this author survived once
already and doesn't look forward to a recurrence. WHY DO THESE PEOPLE
HAVE TO SUFFER, MR. MONBIOT?
What if we're wrong? What if
Stewart, Gofman, Sternglass, Gould, Mangano, Busby and all the others
are wrong but the world follows their warning anyway?
That's not
such a bad outcome: If the world's following their advice, we wouldn't
turn to coal, as you suggest we would instead of nuclear. We would
build solar solutions, which are perfectly capable of providing
electricity for the population, without the risk. And we would stop
creating enormous piles of fission products which have a proclivity to
get out into the environment despite all the best assurances in the
world.
That's the worst-case scenario! It's not a denial of
global warming, as Monbiot claims it is. Instead, it's a BETTER
solution whether global warming is real or not! It removes both the
threat of global warming AND the threat of meltdowns. And anyone who
thinks it can't happen just hasn't looked at the facts about renewable
energy.
Maybe Monbiot is right: It's not a conspiracy. We're just all really stupid.
Whether
Busby and all the others are right or wrong is almost irrelevant at
this point. Any fool can see that a poison that the scientific
consensus agrees there is no threshold dose to, no Hormesis effect
except in very unscientifically "controlled" conditions and for limited
observations of the full effects, no benefit whatsoever except electrons
in wires, which can be obtained safely a thousand other ways -- any
fool can see that such a poison shouldn't be created here on earth if
possible (and it's very possible to live without nukes) and shouldn't be
released into the environment if possible (and it's NOT possible to
STOP such releases with nukes).
Any fool can see we've poisoned
nearly seven billion people alive today, and all the billions who will
come later, and George Monbiot, for one, isn't the least bit apologetic.
An
activist posted an interesting question a few days ago on her Facebook
page. What if "civilized" humans had created, say, 15,000 years ago,
long before written records were kept, all this spent nuclear fuel that
the rest of us had to take care of and stay away from for the past
15,000 years? What if?
Would we curse those people who created this problem? Of course we would!Our
generation will be cursed. Thank you for that, George Monbiot. Not.
Sincerely,Ace Hoffman
Carlsbad, CA
The
author's book on nuclear issues, which Mr. Monbiot has undoubted not
yet read but will probably suddenly glide through it and denounce, is
available online for free here: www.acehoffman.org
. His essays for the past 15 years are available online as well.
(Please see additional URLs below.) The author is a 54-year old
educational software developer. His products, which he programmed
himself and in some cased also wrote, include tutorials about pumps,
statistics, the periodic table, and the human heart, and are used at
over 1,000 colleges and universities around the world.
http://acehoffman.blogspot.com/2011/04/slow-agonizing-death.html
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
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