AW: AW: [ RadSafe ] Chernobyl's Reduced Impact

[Rainer.Facius at dlr.de]

John:

 

Man-made and natural disasters are REAL phenomena. 

 

Fear of health risks from chronic low level ionizing radiation is unreasonable and in case of Chernobyl was excessive (to the utmost) and hence meets the criterion for phobia (see below). Its spell on the minds of the afflicted victims derives mostly (in my view entirely) from the ill-advised notion that "any small amount of radiation entails some health detriment" which is the layman's version of the LNT postulate. 

 

The extent of this lunacy reached - as so often - its ridiculous though relatively harmless pinnacle in Germany when some 8000 tons of  "contaminated whey"  (try "verstrahlte Molke" or "Strahlenmolke" in Google) were transported cross-country (Bremen  < -- >  Nordrhein-Westfalen < -- > Niedersachsen  < -- >  Bayern) to and fro under police protection, kept in safe interim custody in army depots until after a decade it was - in part - 'decontaminated' in a "hazardous waste" combustion plant at costs of more than 1000 DM per ton. The cows yielding the original milk had been grazing on 'contaminated' Bavarian meadows in the weeks after the Chernobyl debacle. If you are capable of reading German you might wish to amuse yourself by checking the URLs below. Yet, since in Germany the putative aftermath of the Chernobyl disaster turned out to become the "founding myth" of the Green movement which finally succeeded to terminate the legal use of nuclear power generation, it might not be too amusing to read these manifestations of radiophobia.

 

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Diagnostic Criteria for "Phobia" (http://www.mentalhealth.com/dis1/p21-an04.html <http://www.mentalhealth.com/dis1/p21-an04.html> ):

 

"Marked and persistent fear that is excessive or unreasonable, cued by the presence or anticipation of a specific object or situation"

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http://www.strahlentelex.de/Nahrungsmittel-Belastungen.htm#Milch

http://www.germnews.de/archive/gn/1996/04/17.html#13

 


________________________________

Von: John Jacobus [mailto:crispy_bird at yahoo.com]
Gesendet: Fr 09.09.2005 21:37
An: Facius, Rainer; michael.g.stabin at Vanderbilt.Edu; radsafe at radlab.nl
Betreff: Re: AW: [ RadSafe ] Chernobyl's Reduced Impact



Rainer,
<...>
Radiophobia is a nice term.  However, you see these
same symptoms when natural or man-made disaster occur,
and people are displaced.  Blaming every preceived
problem on the use of the LNT hypothesisis the same as
anti-nuclear people blaming radiation for every
cancer. 

Simplisticc, but not very scientific.