[ RadSafe ] Busby YouTube Videos - Claims to Public Audience of Millions of Deaths from Fukushima

Mon Oct 10 13:07:28 CDT 2011

The problem is that the mis-information from both TEPCO and the Japanese government immediately after the incident, continuing on during the incident and even after the incident is what causes the public alarm and gives a forum to others. Listening to the YouTube there is a lot of truth as to what is being stated. The public was misled, mis-information, deliberate or otherwise was the norm, so to question Chris regarding just his comments on Fukushima, is not as pertinent as one could say about other topics discussed here on Radsafe. Fukushima was a disaster with serious consequences and I am not confident that we have all of the facts as to what happened, what the current state is and how stable the reactors are, even today.

Regards,

Sandy

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-----Original Message-----
From: radsafe-bounces at health.phys.iit.edu [mailto:radsafe-bounces at health.phys.iit.edu] On Behalf Of Stewart Farber
Sent: Monday, October 10, 2011 9:54 AM
To: 'The International Radiation Protection (Health Physics) Mailing List'
Subject: [ RadSafe ] Busby YouTube Videos - Claims to Public Audience of Millions of Deaths from Fukushima

Hello all,

I had drafted much of the following post some time ago, but did not send it to Radsafe, because I expected that Dr. Busby would have faded away long ago.  However, since he has persisted in pushing beyond-the-fringe assertions,  I'm sending the YouTube links below so interested readers can see and hear Dr. Busby's even more extreme, and inflammatory behavior when he is talking to the general public than his comport in dealing with Radsafe.  If not interested in this subject any further, please hit delete.

It just hit me that there is a real benefit to Dr. Busby writing Radsafe. It consumes some of his time, we get the opportunity to think about, and gather facts about how to reply to anti-nuclear nonsense, and it keeps him from doing even more mischief with people who are influenced by a scientific shell-game.

It's hard to understand how some people can continue making claims after their assertions, or those of sources they cite as supporting their views like Sternglass,  have been so thoroughly discredited. But some never give up hope as is said,  that if you repeat a lie often enough, it somehow becomes true.  For those possibly interested in witnessing the public behavior of  a professional anti-nuke  -- there are some utterly fascinating statements  in a two-part YouTube Busby interview video  ["The Negative Health Effects of Low-Dose Radiation from Fukushima].

The two Busby YouTube segments give a sense of  how the public is being swept away by a tsunami of misinformation, as it were,  and conned by absurd claims of dedicated scaremongers. The two YouTube videos below show Dr.
Busby having a one-on-one interview with a Rush Limbaugh-like radio progam host on a Texas radio station after the accident at Fukushima.  It shows how a professional anti-nuke will make scary sounding and unsupported claims to get themselves interviewed,  and receive some sort of ego gratification, and the Lord knows what else as a motivating factor.

These YouTube clips provide further evidence that just  because an inflammatory claim is stated in a  British accent,  and preceded by SI units like Mega- or Giga- it is not necessarily true, or relevant to the issue at hand --and often quite meaningless.

See:

Christopher Busby - "The Negative Health Effects of Low-Dose Radiation From Fukushima ---Part 1 of 2":

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rCmP83mgUnk
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rCmP83mgUnk&feature=related>
&feature=related>

-Part 2 of 2:
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tZszDrDfL5A
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tZszDrDfL5A&feature=related>
&feature=related>

Dr. Busby's  extreme claims in the above YouTube performances stem from his
claiming to have  found ONE particle of Am-241 on HIS filter.   I'm not sure
whether the filter he is talking about is his widely touted automobile filter on which he had claimed previously to have detected some Cs-134  in a seemingly endless series of pointless discussions on Radsafe about the filtering properties of auto air filters, etc, etc. But whether Dr. Busby's one claimed Am-214 particle was trapped on his auto air filter, or from passing contaminated air around Fukushima through the felt of a very
fetching beret is really irrelevent to the issues involved.

In the video, he claims that whenever white smoke is seen emanating from one of the reactors, it indicates "particles" of isotopes of Am, Pu, and U are being released. Has it been found that white smoke always contains Am-241?
Did I miss a class or fail to read some credible research paper where it was documented that "White" smoke invariably contains Am-241, Pu-239, and U-235/238? From here it is only a small step for Dr. Busby to predict on this YouTube video that millions of people will die from the Fukushima accident.

There is little point in reviewing the details of most claims made by Dr.
Busby in the YouTube links above, but in his highlighting his ONE particle of Am-241 on HIS filter, he states it had an activity of 1.5 Bq -IN THE ENTIRE ONE PARTICLE.  He further states on the video that this one particle had a 5 micron diameter which he claims is the optimal size to penetrate
deep into the human lung.   This kind of accuracy and understanding gained
from as he told Radsafe

"studying so hard" and earning two PhDs, clearly qualifies a person as an
"Expert Witness".   As is known from actual scientific study, 5 micron
particles are much too large to pass through the nasopharynx and upper tracheo-bronchial region, and get into the deeper portions of the lung with any great probability. But let's not get too picky about details, especially about one particle. The inflamatory claims he makes on point after point in his YouTube video sound scary to a scientifically illiterate person. But scaring the public, and legislators, and regulators who don't know anything about science or nuclear technologies other than a few buzz words is rather the point of the exercise, is it not?

In this YouTube video we witness his claim of "Millions of deaths" from Fukushima,  of fuel rods blasted a mile high into the atmosphere due to the hydrogen explosions outside the plant containment, and then crashing to earth,  etc, etc. Wow.

Dr. Busby waxes ecstatic in this YouTube video about Am-241 having  "GBq per kg"  showing how serious a threat it represents.  Who talks about the Specific Activity of any radionuclide in units of Bq per kg?  And so what?
What am I missing? Yes, Am-241 has a SA of 120 GBq/kg =  120,000,000,000 Bq/kg = 3.24 Ci/g.  Gosh, the SA of Am-241 in SI units like 120 GBq/kg sounds so much more scary than  3.2 Ci/g.  One could also state that Am-241 has a SA of:

120 E-3 TeraBq, or

120 E-6 PetaBq

120 E-9  ExaBq

120 E-12  ZettaBq

120 E-15  YottaBq

Is 120 E-15 YottaBq somehow less dangerous than 120  GBq or 3.24 Ci??

What is the SI prefix larger than Yotta one may ask??.  How about we propose the unit  "Lotta" [ = 1,000 Yotta ], and "WholeLotta"  [= 1,000 Lotta].
Sorry, the Devil made me do it. J

In considering it, the move to SI units is the best present the anti-nuke movement ever received, since it made nuclear power immediately 3.7E+10  [or
37 Giga times]  more dangerous that the danger of a Ci vs. a Bq.

As a side-bar thought regarding Specific Activity, the natural particulate isotope Be-7 is constantly falling to earth from the upper atmosphere as it is created by cosmic ray interactions in the stratosphere, and it ends up in the mesophere. Be-7 is a gamma emitter which generally shows up at easily measurable concentrations on any environmental air filter analyzed by decent sensitivity gamma spec after the short-lived Radon daughters are allowed to decay.

Be-7 has an SA of  3.5E+5 Ci/gram or 13,000,000 GBq /kg!!   Is Be-7
therefore 108,000 times [the ratio of their SA ] more hazardous than Am-241?
Certainly not, but it would be if you have an anti-nuke agenda.

Think of it.   Be-7 with a large SA is present in small particles [and not
just ONE as with THE particle of Am-241 claimed to have been found by Dr.
Busby] we're all inhaling as we read this!!! Should we be wearing high end respiratory protection to try and reduce our inhalation of 13 Mega-GigaBq per kg Be-7 particles? This would be the case if one believes the basis of concern expressed by experts like Dr. Busby? We know that Be-7 delivers a certain trivial dose [ about very approx. 7 uSV or 0.7 mrem/year ] to each person on earth as part of the background radiation dose received by humanity [approx 3.1 mSv/year  avg in US].

This 7 uSv  annual average dose from natural Be-7  represents more radiation dose than will be delivered, on average, to each member of the world's population from Fukushima. To believe anti-nuke fear-mongers who are so easily manipulating lazy reporters and making  exaggerated risk claims with the public,  if Fukushima will result in 4 million deaths, then 3.1  mSv from normal background to every person on earth would cause about 1.2 billion deaths per year.  That's Billion with G for Giga J.

Medical radiation exposure averages about 3 mSv/year in the US and less in developing countries. Let's assume a quickly calculated, based on conservative assumptions, weighted average of 0.7 mSv/year to each person on earth from Medical exposure. If one believed Dr. Busby's stated claims of 4 million deaths from Fukushima, medical exposure each year would cause 250 million deaths a year from radiation exposure.

It only takes the back of an envelope and a few facts to see the absolute absurdity of such claims.  If 1.5 billion people could be expected to die each year from ubiquitous background radiation and medical rad exposure, it would be rather obvious and the world population would not be growing exponentially.  Many years ago there was a book published: "Population Control" Through Nuclear Pollution by  Dr/ Arthur Tamplin after he joined John Gofman and K.Z. Morgan in their geriatric anti-nuclear actions.
Perhaps Radiation should be added to the four Horseman of the Apocolypse.

Obviously, whether Am-241 has a SA of  120 GBq/kg  vs. Be-7 with 13,000,000 GBq/kg by itself has no significance regarding total risk,  no matter how much hand waving someone does.  We need to know what are the exposure pathways and what doses are received by how many people.

Apparently,  Dr. Busby is trying to be the SI incarnation of Carl Sagan  who
used to love to say "billions and billions" of ... Various things.    Today
we have someone who can't resist saying "Giga and Giga Bq", or GBq per kilogram.....

As someone with a much longer CV than I once said,

Cheers,

Stewart Farber, MSPH

Farber Medical Solutions, LLC

Bridgeport, CT 06606

email: SAFarber at optonline.net

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