[ RadSafe ] Busby, Sternglass, Mangano, et. al --RE: Rational Thought

[Stewart Farber]

Hello all,
As seen in the prior post, Busby continues to trot out the "studies"  of
totally discredited propagandists like Sternglass,  while making distorted
claims about his own "research". These actions shows Busby's total contempt
for the scientific method.

Time and again, claims made by activists like Sternglass and Busby and
others have used techniques which are totally unacceptable to the scientific
community. For example:

1) They select only the data, and generally only the extremes in the data,
which support their contentions, neglecting all other data

2) They fail to consider facts which would contradict their theories

3) They make comparisons between data which are not related

4) They repeatedly and quite knowingly make completely false and erroneous
statements, and erroneous interpretations of data

For many decades, Sternglass [of whom Busby apparently stands in awe given
Busby's claim and accepting that  Sternglass has found elevated child cancer
rates downwind of every  [ !!! ] nuclear plant in the US !!!], and now Busby
and Mangano as nescient clones, have been using methods similar to those
described above, despite the fact that many papers and reports have
criticized the basic techniques used by Sternglass, and discredited his
extreme and unsupported claims.

These US reports finding the work of Sternglass to be little more than
deliberate scientific fraud have been written by, among others, the US
Environmental Protection Agency, the Health Physics Society, US Public
Health Service, State Health Departments of a dozen or so states, the
National Cancer Institute, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and the US
Nuclear Regulatory Commission. 

UK Government sponsored independent radiation review Committees on which
Busby has managed to insinutate himself as a "stakeholder",  and many
scientific entities other than Busby's own in-house Green affiliated groups,
have examined Busby's claims and found them deficient. Of interest, the
record shows that Busby has acted repeatedly to obstruct the work of any
non-Green impartial committee with which he became involved. Of course this
increases his "street cred" with those who idolize his extreme, but
appealing to some, "scientific" distortions.

Things have not changed at all in the techniques used today by many
non-scientists  who try to use unscientific claims about radiation and
radioactivity to scare people and influence policy. The US National Academy
of Science Report of 1972 [BEIR (Biological Effects of Ionizing Radiation)
Report "The Effects on Populations of Exposure to Low Levels of Ionizing
Radiation"] is as completely relevant today as it was 39 years ago. The NAS
made the following comment in 1972 on page 178 regarding  the distortions
passed off by parties like Sternglass concerning his use of data:

"The evidence assembled by Sternglass has been critically reviewed by Lindop
and Rotblat, and by Tomkins and Brown. It is clear that the correlations
presented in support of the hypothesis depend on arbitrary selection of data
supporting the hypothesis and the ignoring of those that do not."


Today, distortions and misrepresentations of facts by mock-scientific
techniques used by Busby and Mangano have picked up the baton passed to them
by Sternglass. They can continue to get press and electronic media
attention, since the popular media generally have no ability, or
inclination, to critique their claims. Anti-nuclear activists like Busby
testify about their "theories" and "findings" at many, many legal
proceedings where their claims are almost uniformly rejected, or very
occasionally settled because it is less expensive for a defendant against
whom some extreme claim is made to pay something to a plaintiff rather than
incur the expense of playing whack a mole with the distortions of fact from
the plaintiff's "Expert Witness". In a very few cases a decision was made in
favor of a plaintiff, often reversed on appeal, or paid to just make it go
away.

I will post a link to a copy of Busby's own posted CV which runs to many
dozens of pages. It includes many dozens of the legal cases at which he has
testified and assorted other jobs such as where he was invited by Al Jazerra
TV to Iraq to "measure" DU in the field, and make extreme claims about the
impacts of DU increasing birth defects. It appears that he believes that
making extreme claims based on a few measurements of indeterminant accuracy
and precision for some field measurements of some radionuclide like DU,  and
specious interpretations make one an expert. This Busby CV to which a link
will be posted, is the most extreme example of puffery one can imagine if
reviewed carefully. 

I will also post a YouTube video link where Busby claims that millions of
people will die from  the Fukushima accident, starting off from his having
claimed to have found ONE particle on a filter of what he states was Am-241.
It wasn't clear if this one particle of Am-241 he discusses on this radio
program was on the same auto filter he analyzed from Japan where he claimed
some Cs activity in an endless thread on Radsafe a while ago. In this same
post-Fukushima interview, Busby agrees with the host that fuel rods from the
hydrogen explosions in the building outside the containment at Fukushima
blasted fuel rods a mile high into the atmosphere. Lot's of great content
showing what a responsible scientist we're dealing with. The video of the
studio host, which shows self-proclaimed expert [in all disciplines]  Busby
being interviewed on a radio show is great fun to view.

Regards to all,


Stewart Farber, MS Public Health
email: SAFarber at optonline.net
203-441-8433

==============================


-----Original Message-----
From: radsafe-bounces at health.phys.iit.edu
[mailto:radsafe-bounces at health.phys.iit.edu] On Behalf Of Busby, Chris
Sent: Tuesday, October 04, 2011 2:35 PM
To: The International Radiation Protection (Health Physics) Mailing List;
The International Radiation Protection (Health Physics) MailingList
Subject: Re: [ RadSafe ] Rational Thought

The disposal of the waste and the cost of this must surely be part of any
efficiency of the process to generate electricity. The efficiency of a
electricity generation process must be of the form: 

(Price of Energy generated over the lifespan of plant)/ (real costs
including health effects for all time of waste and uranium tailings, mining
and refining uranium fuel, isotope separation, building, operating, fueling,
and disposal of waste and decommissioning)

It is not a political matter. It is straight economics or if you like
physics, work put in / work taken out. 

You could do the same for coal. I dont know where you got your figures for
cancers near a coal fired plant, but I have examined the cancer deaths near
one coal fired plant and they are no different from expected. Do you have a
referenced study?  There are no child cancers near coal fired plants but
there certainly are near nuclear plants (e.g. Sellafield, KiKK Germany). The
US put  the opportunity cost of a child cancer at 1 million dollars. I have
shown statistically significant increases in cancers, particularly breast
cancer downwind of two nuclear plants in the UK and Sternglass and Gould and
Joe Mangano have published results showing the same in the USA downwind of
all nuclear plants in the USA using County data.  These results are in the
peer review literature. I have also found increases in infant mortality
downwind of one nuclear plant in the UK. 
Im not saying that coal plants are great. We need to have less electricity
generation generally, it is very wasteful. And I agree that coal mining is a
nasty business which kills the miners in many ways. But wind power is great.
Something for nothing. And solar power also. The storage problem is easily
soluble. Another way is compressed air and turbines. Very efficient. You
compress air into cylinders and recover it by turbine generation. There is
no dQ/T loss. 

Sincerely
Chris