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Good direction, Jerry, Jaro, Franz et al!
"Enlighten the people generally, then tyranny and oppression, of body
and mind,
Howard Long "Franta, Jaroslav" wrote: Jerry,I believe that simply stating that " the CDC study assumes a linear, no-threshold model, which is clearly wrong " is unconvincing to journalists and the public. Clear to whom ? Journalists ? The public ? Norm Cohen ? ....I don't think so.What's needed here is the old-fashioned "apples with apples" comparison : If the CDC folks figure they can apply LNT to doses below 3 mGy spread over a decade ( ie. less than 10% of natural background ), than we need to tell people what kind of numbers this approach produces when applied to that other 90+% of radiation exposure.According to UNSCEAR, the global natural radiation background collectiveeffective dose for 50 years at the current rate is 650 million person-Sv, orapproximately 100 times the weapons-testingcollectivedose (for atmospheric weapons testing, UNSCEAR gives 7million person-Sv committed in total from 1945 to 2200 A.D.). In those states neighboring the Nevada test sites the fallout was quite a bit higher than the average global figure, so the bomb testing fallout collective dose for that population subset would be more than one-hundredth of the natural background collective dose -- to as much as one-tenth in some local hotspots. But since we're dealing in collective dose, these small populations (those mountain states have a relatively sparse population to begin with) will have little impact on over-all numbers -- most of the collective dose total will have come from lower individual radiation exposures to the vast populations in the US midwest, east and south (also, the fallout from H-bomb tests in the Pacific Ocean and Siberia obviously bears no relation to the location of states relative to Nevada ).So, if the CDC study calculates 15,000 cancer deaths due to bomb testing fallout in the U.S., the same straight-forward application of LNT to the collective dose from natural background radiation will yield a figure on the order of 1,500,000 cancer deaths. On a global scale, the number of calculated cancer deaths due to bomb testing fallout will be something like 300,000, and for natural background radiation, on the order of 30 million.But some people may not believe the UNSCEAR figures, so we may also illustrate the point using the massaged figures of Dr. Rosalie Bertell, who calculates 1.138-billion-"victims" due to atmospheric weapons testing -- which would yield some 100-billion-"victims" due to natural background exposure -- in other words, we're all dying because of radiation, nothing else....Hopefully at this point, folks will begin to question some of the scary claims -- particularly if put in proper perspective with information about lack of detrimental effects of radiation in high-natural-background regions like Kerala, India, like Ramsar, Iran, and like Guarapari, Brazil. Whether the media will allow the debunking of their best-selling horror stories is another question.....Jaro |