[ RadSafe ] Journalism 101 (The way it works)
Jerry Cohen
jjc105 at yahoo.com
Fri Dec 23 15:33:12 CST 2011
If you predict millions of deaths resulting from any given event. you will
likely gain
much notoriety and acclaim in the news media.
Years later, when your prediction fails to materialize. nobody will notice.
It's a "no lose" proposition.
Jerry Cohen
________________________________
From: Stewart Farber <SAFarber at optonline.net>
To: The International Radiation Protection (Health Physics) Mailing List
<radsafe at health.phys.iit.edu>
Sent: Fri, December 23, 2011 12:25:12 PM
Subject: Re: [ RadSafe ] The coming cancer [ABSURDLY OVERESTIMATED ] cost from
Fukushma according to Gundersen
Hello all,
Happy Holidays to All, and a New Year filled with Peace, Love, The Media
Becoming Scientifically Literate, and Charlatans Not Distorting the Truth
for Their Hidden Agendas: [Please Santa, is this too much to ask?]
The claims by Gundersen of millions of deaths from Fukushima are patently
absurd vs. a first-order consideration. If they were within 3 or 4 orders
of magnitude of being true, more people would be dying from cancer each year
than from all deaths. And careful studies of the effect of radiation on
human health have established that "Ubiquitous Background" radiation
exposure can be responsible for no more than about 2% of all cancer
mortality [ which is about 16% of all deaths], or about 0.3% of total cancer
deaths
We have no need to debate the LNT regarding Fukushima, or how many cancer
deaths, if any, the TMI accident might have caused. We simply need to
consider the facts of how much radiation exposure is delivered each year to
a population like the US as an example, and what overall health effects have
been seen, at a maximum vs. the population radiation exposure of a TMI
accident or Fukushima accident.
The US National Council on Radiation Protection in a recent major Report
[No. 160, "Ionizing Radiation Exposure of the Population of the US" -2009 ]
observed that Americans were exposed to more than 7 times as much ionizing
radiation from medical procedures in 2006 as was the case in the early
1980s, doubling overall rad exposure in the past 25 years. In 2006,
Collective Radiation Dose [Person Sv = A Summation of all radiation
exposure] to the entire US Population per year was estimated by the NCRP:
Annual
Exposure Category Person Sv % of Total
-Ubiquitous Background 933,000 50
-Medical 899,000 48
-Consumer-misc. 37,400 2
-Industrial 1,000 < 0.1
-Nuclear Power 150 < 0.01
TOTAL 1,870,000
So Medical radiation exposure is 6,000 times higher per year, and total
population exposure is 12,000 times higher per year than that that from 100
nuclear plants generating 20% of US electricity.
Many anti-nukes like a Caldicott, or the so-called "Physicians for Social
Responsibility" make erroneous claims and try to divert attentions from the
reality of medical exposure as a relevant factor. These parties argue that
medical radiation exposure in CT scans and Nuclear Medicine exams has
absolute benefits to patients, outweighing any possible cancer risk.
Nonetheless, there is growing recognition of a problem with "Unnecessary"
Medical Radiation exposure. The US FDA , Center for Radiological Health has
studied medical radiation exposure for decades. About one-third of total
Medical Radiation is what the FDA terms "Unnecessary Medical Radiation
Exposure" [*1] . This results from improper calibration and device
settings, repeats due to inadequate training, and other factors which expose
patients to radiation without clinical need or benefit. FDA estimates of
"Unnecessary Medical Rad Exposure" equates to 300,000 Person Sv , or 2,000
times more external and internal rad exposure to the US public each year
than than the 150 Person Sv from 100 nuclear power plants.
The US population receives 150 person Sv of "Unnecessary Medical Radiation"
every 4 hours. A minor effort to avoid 150 person-Sv in medical uses, would
reduce US population exposure by an amount equal to the fixation of
anti-nuclear scaremongers and charlatans [like - .... and .... and --- --
the list is growing since it is such an easy way for a person with no facts
to get their ego stroked] on shutting down 100 US units, and 300 more
international nuclear power plants. These scaremongers manipulate
statistics in trying to get society to stop what has been documented as the
safest form of power generation per unit energy produced, while asking the
world to squander roughly a thousand billion dollars invested in nuclear
electric generating plants operating today.
The Three Mile nuclear plant Accident [a so-called "Disaster" in which no
one was killed because of a plant design that minimized rad releases] in
1979 resulted in a total population exposure of about 20 person Sv.
So, it would require about 15,000 TMI scale nuclear power plant "disasters"
per year at current Medical exposure levels to equal the FDA's estimated
annual "Unnecessary Radiation Exposure" from Medical uses of CT and
Nuclear Medicine.
The Fukushima accident will after thorough evaluation and calculation will
have delivered much more radiation exposure than TMI. But even if it causes
100 or 1000 times more than TMI, the total population exposure might be 2000
person-Sv [if 100 times more] or 20,000 person-Sv [if 1,000 times more]
than TMI. Importantly, we still have a handle on the MAXIMUM number of
cancers possible per person-Sv based on the LNT which shows the claims of
anti-nuke activists to be ludicrous.
Based on LNT, and what is likely to be an overestimate of the cancer deaths
predicted, it is estimated that one can expect at a very MAXIMUM about 1
cancer death per 20 person-Sv delivered to a population from whatever cause
per year, expressed over the lifetime of the exposed population. So if
Fukushima results in 20,000 person-Sv of population rad exposure [ or 1,000
times more than TMI] it can be expected that there would be an absolute
maximum of 1,000 cancer deaths expressed over the lifetime of the exposed
Japanese population. Gundersons unsupportable claims of 4,000,000 deaths
are at least 4,000 times higher than what would be expected at a very
maximum.
What also must be recognized in a discussion of health costs, are the Public
Health benefits of operating a nuclear plant vs. an alternative. The EPA
estimates that for EACH large coal plant in the US, one can calculate that
there will be 100 deaths per year from COPD, lung cancer, heart disease and
more causes, based on exposure to fine particulates, acid gases, and air
toxics [mercury & others]. So per single 1,000 MWe nuclear plant operating
in place of a 1,000 MWe coal plant over a 30 year period since the nuke
plant began operation as with Fukushima, a single 1,000 MWe nuclear plant
will have avoided about 100 environmental deaths x 30 year = 3,000 avoided
deaths.
As a sidebar, since the TMI accident 30 years ago which caused 20 person-Sv
and an estimated 1 cancer death, the 100 nuclear plants in the US will have
avoided about [3,000 deaths/plant over 30 years] x 100 plants = 300,000
deaths vs. coal fired power generation. The US nuclear generating capacity
from 100 nuclear plants avoided 300,000 deaths vs. a predicted one death
from TMI. The hand-waving by scaremongers like the long list of charlatans
and con-men we have seen reveling in the attention of fawning innumerate
media since Fukushima occurred does not change these likely level of risks.
I think Fukushima had a generating capacity of 4,400 MWe, so over the time
that thd Fukushima plant complex operated it would have avoided about 13,000
calculated excess deaths had the generation it supplied been supplied by
coal.
So Fukushima's operation for 30 years will have avoided a rough estimate of
about 13 times more deaths than will theoretically result from Fukushima
having caused 20,000 person-Sv of population radiation exposure.
The bottom line is that inflated and unsupported claims of 4,000,000 cancer
deaths by Gunderson, or Caldicot, or Busby, or Bertell from Fukushima are
disproved by the actual cancer deaths resulting from Background Radiation
and Medical Exposure. 4,000,000 deaths from Fukushima would equate to about
400 million cancer deaths in the US PER YEAR, or more than the entire US
population dying each year from cancer from annual background and medical
rad exposure. Obviously Gundersen's claims fail a first-order analysis of
the risks involved
Stewart Farber, MS Public Health
203-441-8433
[*1] "Initiative to Reduce Unnecessary Radiation Exposure from Medical
Imaging"- Center for Devices and Radiological Health, US Food and Drub
Administration, Feb. 2010
==================
-----Original Message-----
From: radsafe-bounces at health.phys.iit.edu
[mailto:radsafe-bounces at health.phys.iit.edu] On Behalf Of Brennan, Mike
(DOH)
Sent: Friday, December 23, 2011 12:24 PM
To: The International Radiation Protection (Health Physics) MailingList
Subject: Re: [ RadSafe ] The coming cancer cost from Fukushma ionising
radiationaccording to Gundersen
Hi, John.
You are correct that we cannot KNOW that "zero" cancers resulted from
Three Mile Island. We can, however, look at the releases
(overwhelmingly thermally hot noble gasses, that went up and dispersed),
and conclude there is very little source term to cause cancer. We can
look at the number of well done studies (as opposed to the poorly
designed, often lacking in evidence studies) that have not found a
statistically significant increase in the cancer rate among the
population that might conceivably been exposed, let alone those for whom
there is a good reason to believe were exposed. It is possible that
somewhere there are people who were exposed to some number of atoms of
radioactive material from TMI, and that one of those atoms decayed at
just the right time and in just the right place to induce a mutation in
a cell, causing it be reproduce in an uncontrolled manner. It is also
possible that that person's anti-cancer systems failed to detect and
destroy that particular cancer before it manifested to the level it
could be detected my medical science. However, to date we can't pick
that out of the background rate of cancer.
I would also submit that the evidence is good that high levels of stress
have been demonstrated to have a number of negative effects on an
individual's wellbeing, including their ability to fight cancer. I
would submit that as bad at TMI was engineering-wise, many, many people
were made to feel more stressed that the actual hazard warranted by
anti-nuke "experts" saying things they knew to be false. This is
especially true in the subsequent years, after the release had stopped
and the released material dispersed and decayed away, but the anti-nuke
"experts" strove to keep stress high for their own political reasons.
While it is at least as difficult to measure stress induced cancer in a
human population as it is to measure radiation induced cancer from small
exposures, I submit that we cannot KNOW that "zero" cancers were cause
by the irresponsible utterances of the anti-nuke community in general,
and their most noted spokespersons in particular. Since we cannot know
that either that accident or the anti-nuke response caused any cancers,
we can consider those two sources equal.
Thus, it is not incorrect to say it can be demonstrated that Arnie
Gundersen personally has caused as many cancers as TMI did.
-----Original Message-----
From: radsafe-bounces at health.phys.iit.edu
[mailto:radsafe-bounces at health.phys.iit.edu] On Behalf Of John R Johnson
Sent: Friday, December 23, 2011 4:51 AM
To: RADSAFE
Subject: Re: [ RadSafe ] The coming cancer cost from Fukushma ionising
radiationaccording to Gundersen
Christina
There is no way that we could know that "there were zero cancers as a
result
of Three Mile Island". Has there been "no cancers" in that region of the
world since it occured?
John
-----Original Message-----
From: Roger Helbig
Sent: Friday, December 23, 2011 3:18 AM
To: RADSAFE
Subject: [ RadSafe ] The coming cancer cost from Fukushma ionising
radiationaccording to Gundersen
Gundersen really has a knack for outdoing Busby or maybe just channels
him - he certainly peddles hype and hysteria with considerable aplomb
- amazing since there were zero cancers as a result of Three Mile
Island - is that not correct?
The coming cancer cost from Fukushma ionising radiation
by Christina MacPherson ( christinamacpherson at gmail.com )
Nuclear Expert: 1,000,000 cancers from Fukushima in Japan over next 20
years ENE News - First thyroid, then lung, organ, brain, leukemia
(VIDEO) Title: Fukushima - Total Cost
http://enenews.com/nuclear-expert-forecasts-1000000-cancers-from-fukushi
ma-in-japan-first-thyroid-then-lung-organ-brain-leukemia-vide0
Dec 21, 2011
Description: Arnie Gundersen of Fairwinds Associates (a leading
nuclear expert) and Warren Pollock (http://www.wepollock.com )
redefine the Fukushima nuclear incidents (meltdowns and explosions) in
terms of human and total cost. [...]
I think the 20 year cost from Fukushima will be about one million
cancers
Based on Three Mile Island studies
About a 20% increase in lung cancer 3-5 years after TMI
And that was small compared to Fukushima
And in a much lower population density
First thyroid cancer
Then lung cancer
Then organ cancer, leukemia, brain cancer, things like that
Christina MacPherson | December 23, 2011 at 8:09 am | Categories:
Resources -audiovicual | URL: http://wp.me/phgse-5mE
Trouble clicking? Copy and paste this URL into your browser:
http://nuclear-news.net/2011/12/23/the-coming-cancer-cost-from-fukushma-
ionising-radiation/
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