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5 Nuclear
math in meltdown By Gayle
Greene
It is one of the marvels of our
time that the nuclear industry managed to
resurrect itself from its ruins at the end of the
last century, when it crumbled under its costs,
inefficiencies, and mega-accidents. Chernobyl
released hundreds of times the radioactivity of
the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs combined,
contaminating more than 40% of Europe and the
entire Northern Hemisphere.[1]
But along
came the nuclear lobby to breathe new life into
the industry, passing off as "clean" this energy
source that polluted half the globe. The "fresh
look at nuclear" - in the words of a May 13, 2006,
New York Times makeover piece [2] - paved the way
to a "nuclear Renaissance" in the United States
that Fukushima has by no means brought to a halt.
That mainstream media have been powerful
advocates for nuclear
power comes as no
surprise. "The media are saturated with a skilled,
intensive, and effective advocacy campaign by the
nuclear industry, resulting in disinformation" and
"wholly counterfactual accounts .. widely believed
by otherwise sensible people," states the
2010-2011 World Nuclear Industry Status Report by
Worldwatch Institute. [3] What is less well
understood is the nature of the "evidence" that
gives the nuclear industry its mandate, Cold War
science which, with its reassurances about
low-dose radiation risk, is being used to quiet
alarms about Fukushima and to stonewall new
evidence that would call a halt to the industry.
Consider these damage control pieces from
major media:
The "miniscule quantities" of radiation in the
radioactive plume spreading across the US pose "no
health hazard", assures the Department of Energy
(William Broad, "Radiation over US is Harmless,
Officials Say," NYT, March 22, 2011).
"The risk of cancer is quite low, lower than
what the public might expect," explains Evan
Douple, head of the Radiation Effects Research
Foundation (RERF), which has studied the A-bomb
survivors and found that "at very low doses, the
risk was also very low" (Denise Grady, "Radiation
is everywhere, but how to rate harm?" NYT, April
5, 2011).
An NPR story a few days after the Daiichi
reactors destabilized quotes this same Evan Douple
saying that radiation levels around the plant
"should be reassuring. At these levels so far I
don't think a study would be able to measure that
there would be any health effects, even in the
future." ("Early radiation data from near plant
ease health fears," Richard Knox and Andrew
Prince," March 18, 2011) The NPR story, like
Grady's piece (above), stresses that the Radiation
Effects Research Foundation has had six decades
experience studying the health effects of
radiation, so it ought to know.
British journalist George Monbiot,
environmentalist turned nuclear advocate, in a
much-publicized debate with Helen Caldicott on
television and in the Guardian, refers to the RERF
data as "scientific consensus," citing, again,
their reassurances that low dose radiation incurs
low cancer risk. [4]
Everyone knows that
radiation at high dose is harmful, but the
Hiroshima studies reassure that risk diminishes as
dose diminishes
until it becomes
negligible. This is a necessary belief if the
nuclear industry is to exist, because reactors
release radioactive emissions not only in
accidents but in their routine, day-to-day
operations and in the waste they produce. If
low-dose radiation is not negligible, workers in
the industry are at risk, as are people who live
in the vicinity of reactors or accidents - as is
all life on this planet .
The waste
produced by reactors does not "dilute and
disperse" and disappear, as industry advocates
would have us believe, but is blown by the winds,
carried by the tides, seeps into earth and
groundwater, and makes its way into the food chain
and into us, adding to the sum total of cancers
and birth defects throughout the world. Its legacy
is for longer than civilization has existed;
plutonium, with its half life of 24,000 years, is,
in human terms, forever.
What is this
Radiation Effects Research Foundation? The
Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission (ABCC), as it was
originally called, began its studies of the
survivors five years after the bombings. (It was
renamed the Radiation Effects Research Foundation
in the mid-'70s, to get the "atomic bomb" out, at
around the same time the Atomic Energy Commission
(AEC) was renamed the Department of Energy (DOE)).
Japan, which has the distinction of being
twice nuked, first as our wartime enemy then in
2011 as our ally and the recipient of our GE
reactors, has also been the population most
closely studied for radiation-related effects, for
the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings created a
large, ready-made population of radiation-exposed
humans. "Ah, but the Americans - they are
wonderful," exclaimed Japan's radiation expert
Tsuzuki Masao, who lamented that he'd had only
rabbits to work on: "It has remained for them to
conduct the human experiment!" [5]
The
ABCC studied but did not treat radiation effects,
and many survivors were reluctant to identify
themselves as survivors, having no wish to bare
their health problems to US investigators and
become mired in bureaucracy and social stigma. But
sufficient numbers did voluntarily come forth to
make this the largest - and longest - study of
radiation-related health effects ever.
No
medical study has had such resources lavished on
it, teams of scientists, state of the art
equipment: this was Atomic Energy Commission (AEC)
funding. Since it is assumed in epidemiology that
the larger the sample, the greater the statistical
accuracy, there has been a tendency to accept
these data as the gold standard of radiation risk.
ABCC examination of Hiroshima
victims The Japanese physicians and
scientists who'd been on the scene told horrific
stories of people who'd seemed unharmed, but then
began bleeding from ears, nose, and throat, hair
falling out by the handful, bluish spots appearing
on the skin, muscles contracting, leaving limbs
and hands deformed. When they tried to publish
their observations, they were ordered to hand over
their reports to US authorities.
Throughout the occupation
years (1945-52), Japanese medical journals were
heavily censored on nuclear matters. In late 1945,
US Army surgeons issued a statement that all
people expected to die from the radiation effects
of the bomb had already died and no further
physiological effects due to radiation were
expected. [6] When Tokyo radio announced that even
people who entered the cities after the bombings
were dying of mysterious causes and decried the
weapons as "illegal" and "inhumane," American
officials dismissed these allegations as Japanese
propaganda. [7] The issue of radiation poisoning was
particularly sensitive, since it carried a taint
of banned weaponry, like poison gas. The A-bomb
was not "an inhumane weapon", declared General
Leslie Groves, who had headed the Manhattan
project. [8] The first Western scientists allowed
in to the devastated cities were under military
escort, ordered in by Groves. The first Western
journalists allowed in were similarly under
military escort.
Australian journalist
Wilfred Burchett, who managed to get in to
Hiroshima on his own, got a story out to a British
paper, describing people who were dying
"mysteriously and horribly" from "an unknown
something which I can only describe as the atomic
plague ... dying at the rate of 100 a day".
General MacArthur ordered him out of Japan; his
camera, with film shot in Hiroshima, mysteriously
disappeared. [9]
"No Radioactivity in
Hiroshima Ruin," proclaimed a New York Times
headline on September 13, 1945. "Survey Rules out
Nagasaki Dangers," stated another headline:
"Radioactivity after atomic bomb is only 1000th of
that from luminous dial watch," October 7, 1945.
[10]
There were powerful political
incentives to downplay radiation risk. As State
Department attorney William H Taft asserted, the
"mistaken impression" that low-level radiation is
hazardous has the "potential to be seriously
damaging to every aspect of the Department of
Defense's nuclear weapons and nuclear propulsion
programs ... it could impact the civilian nuclear
industry ... and it could raise questions
regarding the use of radioactive substances in
medical diagnosis and treatment". [11] A pamphlet
issued by the Atomic Energy Commission in 1953
"insisted that low-level exposure to radiation
'can be continued indefinitely without any
detectable bodily change.'" [12]
The AEC
was paying the salaries of the ABCC scientists and
monitoring them "closely - some felt too closely",
writes Susan Lindee in Suffering Made Real,
which documents the political pressures that
shaped radiation science. [13] (Other good sources
on the making of this science are Sue Rabbit
Roff's Hotspots, Monica Braw's The
Atomic Bomb Suppressed, and Robert Lifton and
Greg Mitchell's Hiroshima in America).
The New York Times "joined the government
in suppressing information on the radiation
sickness of survivors" and consistently downplayed
or omitted radioactivity from its reportage, as
Beverly Ann Deepe Keever demonstrates in The
New York Times and the Bomb. [14] Keever, a
veteran journalist herself, writes that "from the
dawn of the atomic-bomb age, ... the Times almost
single-handedly shaped the news of this epoch and
helped birth the acceptance of the most
destructive force ever created", aiding the "Cold
War cover-up" in minimizing and denying the health
and environmental consequences of the a-bomb and
its testing.
The Atomic Bomb Casualty
Commission scientists calculated that by 1950,
when the commission began its investigations, the
death rate from all causes except cancer had
returned to "normal" and the cancer deaths were
too few to cause alarm. [15]
"It's
nonsense, it's rubbish!" protested epidemiologist
Dr Alice Stewart, an early critic - and victim -
of the Hiroshima studies. [16] Stewart discovered,
in 1956, that x-raying pregnant women doubled the
chance of a childhood cancer: this put her on a
collision course with ABCC/RERF data, which found
no excess of cancer in children exposed in utero
to the blasts.
Nobody in the 1950s wanted to
hear that a fraction of the radiation dose "known"
to be safe could kill a child. During the Cold
War, officials were assuring us we could survive
all-out nuclear war by ducking and covering under
desks and the US and UK. governments were pouring
lavish subsidies into "the friendly atom". Stewart
was defunded and defamed.
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