By Mike Smith
There is no question that the events in Japan are ongoing and serious. That said, I believe a lot of people are being misled by much of the news coverage. Take a look at these headlines from the Christian Science Monitor and from Channel News Asia, respectively,
and,
“Three Mile Island” and “Chernobyl” sounds scary, right?
Let me ask a couple of questions? How many were killed by the Three Mile Island incident?
100?
10,000?
100,000?
Answer here
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Volt Aire, “The papers you cite paint a very diferent picture to that claim of yours. I consider both very good and suggest everyone read them through with care. They go on about widespread cancer problems in several occasions with valid reasons why the exact number of fatalities can never been known.”
No they state exactly what I claim and specifically show that the case has not been made for increased cancer fatalities due to radiation as you claim. The empirical evidence does not exist to support your conclusions and the numbers I gave are the only hard numbers available. The first report I mentioned explicitly states,
““there is no clearly demonstrated increase in the incidence of solid cancers or leukaemia due to radiation in the most affected populations”
and,
“The number of deaths attributable to the Chernobyl accident has been of paramount interest to the general public, scientists, the mass media, and politicians. Claims have been made that tens or even hundreds of thousands of persons have died as a result of the accident. These claims are highly exaggerated. Confusion about the impact of Chernobyl on mortality has arisen owing to the fact that, in the years since 1986, thousands of emergency and recovery operation workers as well as people who lived in ‘contaminated’ territories have died of diverse natural causes that are not attributable to radiation. However, widespread expectations of ill health and a tendency to attribute all health problems to exposure to radiation have led local residents to assume that Chernobyl-related fatalities were much higher.”
The second says,
“This Chernobyl disaster provided many invaluable lessons. One of them is a recognition of the absurdity of LNT which assumes that even near zero radiation dosage can lead to cancer death and hereditary disorders. Chernobyl was the worst possible nuclear power catastrophe. It happened in a dangerously constructed nuclear power reactor with a total meltdown of the core and ten days of free emission of radionuclides into the atmosphere. Probably nothing worse could happen. Yet the resulting human death toll was small, compared with major accidents involving other energy sources.”
It does not get anymore clear than that.
@ur momisugly poptech
Yes, hard numbers are impossible to get, this we seem to agree on. This is why the reports you posted both give expert opinions about likely effects and additional mortality and sickness percentages with remarks about impossibility of statistical analysis due to a multitude of control problems. The reports claim that there is an increase in cancers, maybe some percentages above normal occurence.
Radiation is a known source of cancers, amongst other causes. What evidence is there that additional radiation would not cause additional cancers when N is large enough? That would be a nobel find…
Any of the increases in cancer have not been empirically proven to be the result of radiation exposure. The only ones that likely are related to the Thyroid cases of which they has only been 15 deaths. The rest is unsubstantiated.
That is true. As radiations connection to cancers has been proven beyond any doubt and over a hundred million people will live with the fallout for decades to come it is clear that 65 is not the actual death count. I would so very much like you to be correct in this but the mathematics of the scenario unfortunately tell a different story.
This is why the original post is in extremely bad taste, trying to make Chernobyls effect look like it is comparable to a bus accident. For any single person, the risk to get cancer from the fallout is minimal, that is granted. Still it is logically dishonest to claim a population of 100 million will not rack up deaths from the incident.
If you disagree I suppose we will not find common ground in this. Hopefully Japan will not settle this matter for us in the coming decades.
My original post is accurate (65) and there is no empirical or scientific evidence of any more deaths that can be linked to radiation exposure from the Chernobyl accident. How many millions of people who received a low dose of radiation due to the Chernobyl accident is irrelevant to the instances of cancer that can be linked to radiation exposure let alone deaths from said cancer.
What is logically dishonest is to argue a position there is no evidence for. You wanting more people to have received cancer and died from the accident does not make it true.
@poptech
Did Chernobyl cause an increase in radiation?
Does radiation cause cancer?
I suppose one of these questions is a “no” to you?
http://ec.europa.eu/energy/nuclear/radiation_protection/doc/publication/125.pdf
“a recent analysis of the Japanese A-bomb data that showed a raised cancer risk for doses between 0 and 100 mSv, with an upper confidence limit for a dose threshold of 60 mSv. It was emphasised in the discussion that this does not mean that the data support a threshold of this magnitude, but rather that the data cannot exclude this possibility. In contrast, higher values for any threshold are inconsistent with the A-bomb data. This represents an advance from earlier assessments based on this study, which could not exclude values for a threshold below 100 mSv. Furthermore, the latest Japanese A-bomb data are consistent with a linear no-threshold hypothesis for cancer risks at low doses.
Any your claim that I want there to be more deaths, reread my previous comment with care. It is pretty simply put there what I would like to have happened.
@ur momisugly Volt Aire
If radiation at low doses always caused cancer, then radiotherapy to treat/cure cancer would never have developed into the life saving procedure that it has been proved to be – i.e. new cancers would always appear in the surrounding healthy tissue that inevitably receive a lower but still significant collateral dose.
If a single gene mutation or DNA strand disruption was sufficient for cancer induction, then the human race would never have evolved. The body’s natural repair system has been shown in many studies to be quite capable of mopping up damaged genetic material & the LNT theory remains unproven. The popluation of several small mammal sepcies living in the exclusion zone at Chernobyl have been studied and found to be in robust good health – in fact there has been a postulation (contentious, naturally) that low level readiaiton exposure may actually “harden” the DNA and help protect it from damage in a continuously higher radiation background environment.