RE: "The Anti-Nuclear Game", anti-anti's

["Franta, Jaroslav" <frantaj@aecl.ca>]

Heinmiller, Bruce <heinmillerb@aecl.ca> wrote on Thu, 6 Apr 2000 14:54:55
-0400

I highly recommend this book, in spite of several technical errors, e.g.:
p33  Implication that alphas have a range of a few mm in tissue
p36  K-40 abundance given as 0.1% (0.01% is closer)
p91  Energy per fission given as 200 keV instead of 200 MeV;

and that some data are also out-of-date, e.g.:
p57  Theoretical cancer death risk given as 1 per 10000 person.rem;

and that some tables have out-of-date values (e.g. 0.5 and 1 mrem/y from
watching TV), and the spousal irradiation dose (which we've shot down in
previous posts) error is propagated in the book.

In spite of these errors, the book is well written, has lots of information,
is well-referenced, and is entertaining.

Bruce Heinmiller CHP
heinmillerb@aecl.ca

> ----------
> From: 	Karam, Andrew[SMTP:Andrew_Karam@URMC.Rochester.edu]
> Reply To: 	radsafe@romulus.ehs.uiuc.edu
> Sent: 	Thursday, April 06, 2000 11:58 AM
> To: 	Multiple recipients of list
> Subject: 	"The Anti-Nuclear Game", anti-anti's
> 
> Dear Colleagues:
> 
> I just stumbled across a book buried in our library (all five shelves of
> it)
> titled "The Anti-Nuclear Game", written by Gordon Sims and published in
> 1990
> by the University of Ottawa Press.
> 
<><><><><><><><>

COMMENT:

There was an extremely NEGATIVE book review of Gordon Sims' The Antinuclear
Game  in the Dec.29 1990 issue of The Montreal Gazette, by journalist Rick
Boychuk

My notes from that time say that when I obtained my copy of Sims' book -
three months prior to the publication of that review - I thought NO WAY is
this ever going to be reviewed in the Gazette - they wouldn't touch it with
a ten-foot pole!

Thats because the antinuclear game would never have become such a
spectacular success had it not been for the mass media and its disdain for
an educational function and embracing of much better-selling antinuclear
hysteria scare stories. I figured it is very unlikely that they would go to
any lengths in publicising any book thats chock-full of documentation
supporting such accusations!

Boychuk claimed impartiality, but he played the antinuclear game
masterfully: Instead of discussing the issues, he talked about the book
cover (!) and repeatedly implied that Sims' book contains ONLY HIS OWN VIEWS
- those of a "dogmatist... mean spirited... huckster."

{{ This particular antinuclear game tactic is decried by Prof. Cohen in his
own book:
	Media reports have said "Dr Cohen claims..."  But there is no
personal opinion involved here. Deriving these comparisons is simple and
straightforward mathematics which no one can question. I have published them
in scientific journals [Scientific American, Health Physics, Nature, etc.]
and no scientist has objected to them. If anyone has any reason to  believe
that these comparisons are not valid, they have been awfully quiet about it.
}}

And so it is was with Boychuk's attack on Sims' book: "On average, HE SAYS,
...survivors of the Hiroshima explosion... are healthier than other Japanese
of similar age,"  as though this alone should convince us of the hopeless
unreliability of the facts in Sims' book! Never mind the decades of
painstaking medical studies and recordkeeping that produced these results
said Boychuk  -  if facts contradict established dogma, then they must be
made to look bad no matter what. (The Japanese survivor survey includes all
diseases, including those other than cancer, and the peculiar result is
usually accounted for by the fact that the survivors are on average a more
resistant group of people than those who perished.)

In the case of Chernobyl, Boychuk arbitrarily multiplied the figure of 32
acute radiation syndrome deaths (the plant operators and firemen) by a
factor of ten and come up with the fictitious figure of 300 - in total
disregard for the well-known many-year latent poeriod for non-acute
consequences such as cancer [that figure - 300 - is still however way below
other antinuke exaggerations - like Bertell's, Caldicott's, etc.].

He then said that "the thousands of people who will develop cancer in the
coming years [as though this was a certainty!]... has underlined the fact
that the damage coal-fired power stations inflict pales next to a nuclear
accident."

Evidently he thinks himself more qualified to assess the situation than
Sims, whom Boychuk could have quoted as saying "if the average radiation
dose received by the population of Europe and the USSR is compared with the
annual background (ie. natural) radiation dose to which they were exposed,
then it is possible to say that for these populations the year 1986 had
fifty-eight weeks."

With the LNT calculation method, a 50-year global cumulative Chernobyl dose
of 60 billion millirems gives a total of 16,000 calculated deaths  -  which
Cohen notes "is still less than the number of deaths caused every year by
air pollution from coal-burning power plants in the United States," and far
less than the misery that would result if the US were to become an
energy-poor underdeveloped nation. (US DoE/ Harward University study
estimates 100,000 annual air pollution deaths, 30% of which may be
attributed to fossil fuel burning, ergo one would need at least one
Chernobyl each year to beat coal!)

My notes conclude that Sims' "assault on the reputations of Canada's leading
nuclear critics" (Boychuk) is a badly-needed warning about people like
Rosalie Bertell and Gordon Edwards, who have been poisoning people's minds
with outrageous statements like "planet earth today is so ruined by mankind
[mostly of US nationality] that as seen from space it is BROWN-LOOKING." 

....furthermore, you may also find, at URL
http://www.magma.ca/~jalrober/#evidence
the following:

-	G. Sims, in his book The Anti-nuclear Game, reported that, as the
result of an operating 
		error at the Key Lake uranium mine in Northern Saskatchewan,
tens of thousands of litres of water were released, most into a small lake.
"The CBC [Canadian Broadcasting Corp.] featured the 'disaster' as the lead
story in its broadcasts for two days. ... What was never mentioned by the
media in communicating this 'environmental disaster' to the public was the
fact that the spilt material was groundwater. It was water containing minute
quantities of naturally occurring radioactivity which had been pumped out of
the ground and which had been inadvertently returned to the ground." The
AECB and the Saskatchewan Department of the Environment agreed that there
was no hazard from the spill.

		G. Sims, in his book The Anti-nuclear Game, reported: "A few
days after the Chernobyl accident, 
		the CBC program The Journal devoted itself to an account of
the accident and its ramifications. To comment on the health effects to be
expected from Chernobyl, The Journal editors selected two people, one
Canadian (R. Bertell) and one American (C. Johnson), but both in the
antinuclear minority as far as views of the health effects of radiation are
concerned. ... The CBC did not inform the public that these two individuals
held minority opinions on this subject or suggest that their opinions might
be unnecessarily alarmist."

<><><><><><><>

Jaro
frantaj@aecl.ca

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