RE: Rosalie Bertell

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

> Heinmiller, Bruce[SMTP:heinmillerb@aecl.ca] wrote on Wednesday July 19,
> 2000 6:21 PM
> 
<SNIP>
> Almost the entire "victim" tally is attributable, according to the
> opinion piece, to atmospheric weapons testing (1.138 billion).  (In the
> introduction, this gets categorized as part of "nuclear power".) 
<SNIP>
> The larger problem lies in the misrepresentation of
> UNSCEAR's dose estimates.  For atmospheric weapons testing, UNSCEAR gives
> 7
> million person-Sv committed in total (not per year) from 1945 to 2200 A.D.
> (or 30 million person-Sv committed to 10 000 years).  Using UNSCEAR's
> estimate (which she claimed to have done) and using her [ Bertell's }
> fanciful risk
> estimate, reduces the number of "victims" to date by a factor of more than
> 300.
> 
> For comparison, and also from UNSCEAR, natural background collective
> effective dose for 50 years at the current rate is 650 million person-Sv
> (approximately 100 times weapons-testing).  Medical collective effective
> dose for 50 years at the current rate is 165 million person-Sv (consisting
> of 90 million person-Sv diagnostic, and 75 million person-Sv therapy,
> excluding the tissue being treated).  Nuclear power collective effective
> dose (for the complete fuel cycle) for all years totaled and committed far
> into the future is 1 million person-Sv (including Chernobyl), and at the
> current rate for 50 years is 2 million person-Sv.  The actual effective
> dose
> delivered or committed by nuclear power for all years combined up to 1989
> is
> given by UNSCEAR as 0.01 million person-Sv.
> 
> Thus, natural background is number one, medical is second, weapons testing
> is a very distant third, and nuclear power is a very very distant fourth,
> in
> terms of collective effective dose delivered to the general population.
<><><><><><><><><><>

COMMENT:

Thanks very much to Bruce for his quick analysis.
There is another way to look at Bertell's claims and what they imply.
The collective effective dose breakdown has also been published in terms of
percentages -- 68% for natural background, 31 percent for medical, 0.6% for
bomb test fallout and 0.15% for the nuclear industry.
So if 1.138 billion of Bertell's nuclear "victims" are due to atmospheric
weapons testing, then we can also calculate how many victims Bertell's
method predicts for natural + medical radiation exposure by simply applying
a ratio :

1.138 billion x ( 68 + 31 ) / ( 0.6 + 0.15 )  =  150 billion "victims" of
natural + medical radiation exposure.

Or if Bertell's nuclear "victims" are already included the medical
exposures, then :

1.138 billion x ( 68 ) / ( 31 + 0.6 + 0.15 )  =  2.44 billion "victims" of
natural radiation exposure 
(one presumes that the majority of this huge number of victims would be very
conspicuous in high-background areas such as the State of Colorado - but in
fact just the opposite seems to be the case - high-background states have
lower overall death rates...).

And BTW, in those past fifty years the total number of actual deaths is
somewhere in the 2 to 4 billion range (assuming a death rate of 1000 - 2000
per 100,000 per year, and a world population from 3 to 5 billion -- sorry, I
don't have more precise figures....).

Jaro
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