The negligent promotion of nuclear panic

From Lee on March 27, 2011 at 10:29 pm:

Chernobyl – how to find it on google.

Grab the coordinates from the Wikipedia Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant entry: 51°23′22.39″N 30°05′56.93″E. Punch it into the Search bar on Google Maps: link. Voila.
Lee:

Look a little north of Kiev and you see a big round area without any towns. There used to be towns, cities, and villages there. In fact the buildings are still there.

That’s the Exclusion Zone (Wikipedia entry). Here is a 1996 map. Notice the map doesn’t show that many places north of the plant, and on the Google map north-northwest of the plant is a symbol for a park or reserve (pine tree). There doesn’t seem to have been that much around the plant to begin with, just mostly small places. Zone entry:

This predominantly rural woodland area was once home to 120,000 people, living in 90 communities (including the cities of Chernobyl and Pripyat), but is now mostly uninhabited. All settlements remain designated on geographic maps but marked as nezhyl. (нежил.) – “uninhabited”.

Lee:

Try google maps – zoom in north of Kiev. Very green towns appear – overly green, overly grown – and NO cars. No people either.

Zone entry:

Approximately 3,000 workers are employed within the Zone of Alienation. Employees technically do not live inside the zone, but work shifts. 75% of the workers work 4-3 shifts (four days on, three off) and 25% work 15 days on, 15 off, as of 2009. The duration of shifts is strictly counted regarding the person’s pension and healthcare issues. Everyone employed within the zone is monitored for internal bioaccumulation of radioactive elements.
The Chernobyl nuclear power plant is located inside the Zone of Alienation but is administered separately. Plant personnel, 3,800 workers as of 2009, reside primarily in Slavutych, a specially-built remote city in the Kiev Oblast, 45 km (28 mi) east of the accident site.

Lee:

Regardless of the death toll, hundreds of square miles are uninhabited – could people live there – probably; will they – not if there’s a choice.

Zone entry:

Thousands of residents refused to be evacuated from the zone or illegally returned there later. Over the decades this primarily elderly population has dwindled, falling below 400 in 2009. Approximately half of these resettlers live in the town of Chernobyl; others are spread in villages across the zone. After recurrent attempts at expulsion, the authorities became reconciled to their presence and even allowed limited supporting services for them. The population also includes some vagabonds and other marginalized persons from the outside world. These people (known as “samosely“, literally translated as “self-settlers”, i.e., squatters) declare their strong commitment to the surrounding nature and rural lifestyle. Samosely usually deny or are resigned to any significant damage to their health resulting from the high levels of radiation in the environment.

Lee:

Now Russia can maybe sustain losing a thousand square miles of prime land. I doubt Japan can.

Note: 1000 square miles is the area of a circle with a radius of just 17.84 miles (28.73 km).
Lee:

I suspect at a minimum all savings Japan has ever garnered from nuclear power are already wiped out. That plant is now surely a total loss.

The earthquake and tsunami, that made a lot of expensive damage. The Fukushima plant hasn’t done anything close, but it will be expensive for the plant owner to clean up.
Lee:

The real question is will tsunami land even be inhabitable. The loss of life due to the earthquake is tragic – but not being able to rebuild or worse not being able to reinhabit is the mega disaster.

I don’t see why not. It’s a mess of mud and devastation, it’ll take quite awhile, but the Japanese are adept at reclaiming and rebuilding. Just look at what they did with the “uninhabitable nuclear wastelands” known as Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Lee:

Panic isn’t really in order, but only because radiation is so slow. But it lasts, and it chases people away. Anyone discounting this because it is insufficiently deadly is really missing the point.

Like in “uninhabitable nuclear wastelands” like the Exclusion Zone and the abandoned “ghost town” of Pripyat (Wikipedia entry)?
Pripyat entry:

A natural concern is whether it is safe to visit Pripyat and the surroundings. The Zone of Alienation is considered relatively safe to visit, and several Ukrainian companies offer guided tours around the area. The radiation levels have dropped considerably, compared to the fatal levels of April 1986 due to the decay of the short-lived isotopes released during the accident. In most places within the city, the level of radiation does not exceed equivalent dose of 1 μSv (one microsievert) per hour.
The city and the Zone of Alienation are now bordered with guards and police, but obtaining the necessary documents to enter the zone is not considered particularly difficult. In 2005, a New York based entrepreneur David C. Haines founded a company to provide guided tours of the city. A guide will accompany visitors to ensure nothing is vandalised or taken from the zone. The doors of most of the buildings are held open to reduce the risk to visitors, and almost all of them can be visited when accompanied by a guide. The city of Chernobyl, located a few kilometers south from Pripyat, has some accommodations including a hotel, many apartment buildings, and a local lodge, which are maintained as a permanent residence for watch-standing crew, and tourists.

You can tell how worried various media types are about the lingering radiation:

# The city of Pripyat is the location of filming of the 2008 documentary White Horse.[citation needed]
# The short film The Door was shot in 2008 in Prypiat.[5]
# The 2009 documentary-style music video This Momentary by British music group Delphic was mostly shot in Pripyat.

Looks like there’ll be some hot spots to address, near the plant there’ll definitely have to be some serious cleanup… But within the Exclusion Zone the wildlife is flourishing, which invites hunting. The area previously supported a rural lifestyle, farming opportunities are there. Experts, armchair and otherwise, may think it’ll be hundreds of years until people can safely return. I’ll give it 30 to 50 years before humans largely resettle the area, finding it to be “safe enough.”

phlogiston –
Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Evironment by Alexey V. Yablokov, Vassily B. Nesterenko, Alexey V. Nesterenko
“Page 177
6.3 Cancer of the Blood-Leukemia
Radiogenic leukemia was detected in Hiroshim and Nagasaki a few months after the bombing and morbidity peaked in 5 years. The latency period for radiogenic leukemia is several months to years with the highest incidence occurring between 6 and 8 years after exposure (Sinclair, 1996). Owing to the secrecy and the official falsification of data that continued for 3 years after the catastrophe (see Chapter 3 for details), unknown numbers of leukemia cases in Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia were not included in any registry. These distortions should be kept in mind when analyzing the following data.”
In the Soviet system if you’re a doctor and told to attribute a medical condition to a cause other than the radiation from Chernobyl, you do it. Hence the catch-all ‘nervous because of fear of radiation’ so prominent in the white wash. Obviously not fear from seeing those around you dying in great number of various cancers and bearing physically and mentally deformed children, but some irrational fear because this great disaster had only a minor effect on health..
Which statistics would you really prefer to be using for your analysis, the massaged by vested interests to deliberately and cynically downplay the effects of radiation, or the statistics mostly unknown from the local people actually affected by this?
Extrapolate:
#Doctor Smolnikova checks baby Christina’s heart through her stethoscope, and advises Valia on the chances of an operation.
She has a long list of other patients like them.
“Those who say there is no link with Chernobyl should open their eyes and look at the medical statistics,” Doctor Smolnikova says.
She has been the village doctor here since long before the nuclear disaster.
“Before Chernobyl I’d never seen a child with cancer. Now it’s common.
“I treat many more children now with heart defects and kidney damage. To say it’s nothing to do with Chernobyl just isn’t honest.”#
From: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4485003.stm
I don’t know how old you are, but I ask again, how many of the children you went to school with had cancer or diabetes? How many from your parents schooldays?
Why is there this new meme going the rounds, that low level radiation is good for you? Because of so many potential sites of contamination from releasing radiation on a day to day basis in the proliferation of nuclear reactors around the world?
But back to Chernobyl, read this carefully: http://tech.mit.edu/V112/N20/chernobyl.20w.html
Extrapolate from it to the rest of the millions in the fall out area and to your information gathering experience.
Cancer, diabetes, auto-immune disease etc. rates have been rising dramatically in the 20th century, why is this elephant in the room of nuclear radiation so studiously ignored as a cause, when it is the ONE actually known direct cause of such illnesses?
Belarus received some 70% of the fallout. Their orphanages were full of sick and deformed children whose parents had died from the fallout, ask the charity workers who delivered aid what the real conditions were like. http://www.belarus-misc.org/bel.corg.htm
Read this letter published in the British Medical Journal in 1994: http://bmj.com/content/309/6964/1298.extract
This downplaying of the effects, this criminal cover up, has been polished since then, more organised, from the highest levels of ‘trustworthy’ sources (WHO) and totally biased sources (See the Huffington post link on the new study 3MI..) You can continue adding to that deceit or, as the good doctor above said, you can open your eyes.

There is a severely damaged reactor containing significant amounts of plutonium (MOX) without any significant cooling and no control whatsoever. If there is a possibility that it goes supercritical, that DOES leave a concern for me.

Myrrh,
Do you believe that “natural” radiation is somehow safer than “man made”? If you don’t I do not see how you can believe your own writing.

The half life of plutonium, it turns out, is a whole lot longer than the entire history of human civilization (24,000 years).

News just out. Banner link on drudge report.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/radiation-levels-reach-new-highs-as-conditions-worsen-for-workers/2011/03/27/AFsMLFiB_print.html
Radiation levels at Japan nuclear plant reach new highs
By Chico Harlan and Brian Vastag, Monday, March 28, 1:35 AM
Basically the radiation in one of the six turbine rooms has reached 1000mSv/hr which gives a worker his yearly maximum exposure in 15 minutes. Half of those exposed for 4-5 hours would be killed (LD-50).
In a real “It’s worse than they thought” way:
The turbine room is outside the containment vessel. Pipes and/or valves between the containment vessel and the turbine failed and primary cooling water is leaking out. The valves could have failed during the intial scram or the pipes could have been damaged by the earthquake or subsequent explosions. The radiation level is far too high to get anyone near enough to fix the leak. There is still the possibility of a complete meltdown as things are not under control yet.

I stand corrected, the earliest report I can find that shows the actual dose rates was yeterday at about noon. These pools of water are what caused the exposures on Thursday. These readings are also at the water’s surface and will drop as you move away.

DirkH says:
March 28, 2011 at 1:27 am
So 100 mSv increases the lifetime cancer risk by 1/1,000; so, from about 20% to 20.1 %. Thanks.
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First, it’s 1/100 (not 1/1000) for 100mSv over a lifetime.
Second, I’ve already told you a couple of times that the cancer comment quoted from the Japanese spokesman in the BBC article referred to a radiation rate of 100 mSv *per year* (normal background is about 2 mSv per year) — not to 100mSv in a lifetime.

Now this is a very interesting article from a contrarian perspective. The author is the Scientific Secretary of the European Committee on Radiation Risk.
I noticed that the site that carries this (Aletho News) also has the latest WUWT piece on the lack of acceleration of global sea levels right on its front page: http://alethonews.wordpress.com/
(Moderators, if you think the article is too large, just post the title and link below)
Deconstructing Nuclear Experts
By CHRIS BUSBY, March 28, 2011
http://alethonews.wordpress.com/2011/03/28/deconstructing-nuclear-experts/
Since the Fukushima accident we have seen a stream of experts on radiation telling us not to worry, that the doses are too low, that the accident is nothing like Chernobyl and so forth. They appear on television and we read their articles in the newspapers and online. Fortunately the majority of the public don’t believe them. I myself have appeared on television and radio with these people; one example was Ian Fells of the University of Newcastle who, after telling us all on BBC News that the accident was nothing like Chernobyl (wrong), and the radiation levels of no consequence (wrong), that the main problem was that there was no electricity and that the lifts didn’t work. “ If you have been in a situation when the lifts don’t work, as I have” he burbled on, “you will know what I mean.”
What these people have in common is ignorance. You may think a professor at a university must actually know something about their subject. But this is not so. Nearly all of these experts who appear and pontificate have not actually done any research on the issue of radiation and health. Or if they have, they seem to have missed all the key studies and references. I leave out the real baddies, who are closely attached to the nuclear industry, like Richard Wakeford, or Richard D as he calls himself on the anonymous website he has set up to attack me, “chrisbusbyexposed”.
I saw him a few times talking down the accident on the television, labelled in the stripe as Professor Richard Wakeford, University of Manchester. Incidentally, Wakeford is a physicist, his PhD was in particle physics at Liverpool. But he was not presented as ex- Principle Scientist, British Nuclear Fuels, Sellafield. That might have given the viewers the wrong idea. Early on we saw another baddy, Malcolm Grimston, talking about radiation and health, described as Professor, Imperial College. Grimston is a psychologist, not a scientist, and his expertise was in examining why the public was frightened of radiation, and how their (emotional) views could be changed. But his lack of scientific training didn’t stop him explaining on TV and radio how the Fukushima accident was nothing to worry about. The doses were too low, nothing like Chernobyl, not as bad as 3-Mile Island, only 4 on the scale, all the usual blather. Most recently we have seen George Monbiot, who I know, and who also knows nothing about radiation and health, writing in The Guardian how this accident has actually changed his mind about nuclear power (can this be his Kierkegaard moment? Has he cracked? ) since he now understands (and reproduces a criminally misleading graphic to back up his new understanding) that radiation is actually OK and we shoudn’t worry about it. George does at least know better, or has been told better, since he asked me a few years ago to explain why internal and external radiation exposure cannot be considered to have the same health outcomes. He ignored what I said and wrote for him (with references) and promptly came out in favour of nuclear energy in his next article.
So what about Wade Allison? Wade is a medical physics person and a professor at Oxford. I have chosen to pitch into him since he epitomises and crystallises for us the arguments of the stupid physicist. In this he has done us a favour, since he is really easy to shoot down. All the arguments are in one place. Stupid physicists? Make no mistake, physicists are stupid. They make themselves stupid by a kind of religious belief in mathematical modelling. The old Bertie Russell logical positivist trap. And whilst this may be appropriate for examining the stresses in metals, or looking at the Universe (note that they seem to have lost 90% of the matter in the Universe, so-called “dark matter”) it is not appropriate for, and is even scarily incorrect when, examining stresses in humans or other lifeforms. Mary Midgley, the philosopher has written about Science as Religion. Health physicists are the priests. I have been reading Wade Allison’s article for the BBC but also looked at his book some months ago. He starts in the same way as all the others by comparing the accidents. He writes:
See entire article here:
http://alethonews.wordpress.com/2011/03/28/deconstructing-nuclear-experts/

Just a remark about coal, since so many think it’s more acceptable than nuclear.
Has any of you actually been down a coal mine? Really down, not just walking around outside the mine shaft, or being taken down a few yards?
Well, it is a most dangerous environment, and too many miners have died there, sometimes in large numbers, not just in China but in the Western countries as well.
And that doesn’t take the long-lasting, killing diseases into account.
Look up ‘Black Lung Disease …:
“Black lung disease: A chronic occupational lung disease contracted by the prolonged breathing of coal mine dust. The silica and carbon in the coal dust cause black lung disease. About one of every 20 miners studied in the US has X-ray evidence of black lung disease, a form of pneumoconiosis.”
http://www.medterms.com/script/main/art.asp?articlekey=9818
That’s in the USA alone, where conditions are certainly better than elsewhere.
Of course, one can try and do open-cast mining, destroying vast areas of land in the process, provided the seams are pretty close to the surface. Wouldn’t be so good where the seams are over a mile below ground …
Here’s some more info from wales:
“Welsh Mining Disasters
The following is a list of mining accidents where there were Five or more fatalities.
Where blank means five or more, but the exact numbers are unknown to me at present.
As numerous as this list (over 6,000) it still represents only a small proportion of Welsh miners killed at their workplace. Although disasters are large and dramatic in number they only account for less than 17% of mining deaths in Wales. The total number (including those who died because of mining related illnesses) would be incalculable.”
http://www.welshcoalmines.co.uk/DisastersList.htm
And then there was Senghennydd – where 439 miners died that day:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senghenydd_Colliery_Disaster
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senghenydd
How many workers were killed, at once, in Chernobyl?
Yes, coal is fine – as long as one doesn’t have to crawl on one’s belly, in the dark, a mile or more below ground, to get it out …

Doug Badgero says:
March 28, 2011 at 10:21 am
Are any of these arguments based on facts or just ad homs on those that disagree with him?
================
I think Chris Busby gives plenty of fact-based arguments. As for ad-homs, other than the passing remarks about the blathering silliness of some physicists outside of their field (something to which most readers here are accustomed: e.g. James Hansen is a physicist, and he is indisputably silly), I don’t see any.
I’ve culled a few excerpts from his article:
===========
[…]
I will briefly refer to two Chernobyl studies in the west which falsify Wade Allison’s assertions. The first is a study of cancer in Northern Sweden by Martin Tondel and his colleagues at Lynkoping University. Tondel examined cancer rates by radiation contamination level and showed that in the 10 years after the Chernobyl contamination of Sweden, there was an 11% increase in cancer for every 100kBq/sq metre of contamination. Since the official International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) figures for the Fukushima contamination are from 200 to 900kBq.sq metre out to 78km from the site, we can expect between 22% and 90% increases in cancer in people living in these places in the next 10 years. The other study I want to refer to is one I carried out myself. After Chernobyl, infant leukaemia was reported in 6 countries by 6 different groups, from Scotland, Greece, Wales, Germany, Belarus and the USA. The increases were only in children who had been in the womb at the time of the contamination: this specificity is rare in epidemiology. There is no other explanation than Chernobyl. The leukemias could not be blamed on some as-yet undiscovered virus and population mixing, which is the favourite explanation for the nuclear site child leukemia clusters. There is no population mixing in the womb. Yet the “doses” were very small, much lower than “natural background”. I published this unequivocal proof that the current risk model is wrong for internal exposures in two separate peer-reviewed journals in 2000 and 2009. This finding actually resulted in the formation in 2001 by UK Environment Minister Michael Meacher of a new Committee Examining Radiation Risks from Internal Emitters CERRIE. Richard Wakeford was on this committee representing BNFL and he introduced himself to me as “BNFL’s Rottweiler”. No difference there.
[…]
But the IAEA themselves, not known for their independence from the nuclear industry, report that contamination levels out to 78km were between 200 and 900kBq/sq metre. And Wade has been rather selective with his data, to put it kindly. The UN definition of radioactively contaminated land is 37kBq/sq metre just as he writes, but actually, in all the maps published, the inner 30km Chernobyl contamination exclusion zone is defined as 555kBq/sq metre and above. This is just a fact. Why has he misled us? In passing, this means that there are 555,000 radioactive disintegrations per second on one square metre of surface. Can you believe this is not harmful? No. And you would be correct. And another calculation can be made. Since the IAEA data show that these levels of contamination, from 200,000 to 900,000 disintegrations per second per square metre, exist up to 78km from Fukushima, we can already calculate that the contamination is actually worse than Chernobyl, not 1% of Chernobyl as Wade states. For the area defined by a 78km radius is 19113 sq km compared to the Chernobyl exclusion zone of 2827 sq km. About seven times greater.
[…]
ow I turn to the health effects. Wade trots out most of the usual stupid physicist arguments. We are all exposed to natural background, the dose is 2mSv a year and the doses from the accident are not significantly above this. For example, the Japanese government are apparently making a mistake in telling people not to give tap water containing 200Bq/litre radioactive Iodine-131 to their children as there is naturally 50Bq/l of radiation in the human body and 200 will not do much harm. The mistake is made because of fears of the public which apparently forced the International Commission on Radiological Protection, ICRP, to set the annual dose limits at 1mSv. Wade knows better: he would set the limits at 100mSv. He is a tough guy. He shoots from the hip:
Patients receiving a course of radiotherapy usually get a dose of more than 20,000 mSv to vital healthy tissue close to the treated tumour. This tissue survives only because the treatment is spread over many days giving healthy cells time for repair or replacement. A sea-change is needed in our attitude to radiation, starting with education and public information.
But Wade, dear, these people are usually old, and usually die anyway before they can develop a second tumour. They often develop other cancers even so because of the radiation. There are hundreds of studies showing this. And in any case, this external irradiation is not the problem. The problem is internal irradiation. The Iodine-131 is not in the whole body, it is in the thyroid gland and attached to the blood cells: hence the thyroid cancer and the leukaemia. And there is a whole list of internal radioactive elements that bind chemically to DNA, from Strontium-90 to Uranium. These give massive local doses to the DNA and to the tissues where they end up. The human body is not a piece of wire that you can apply physics to. The concept of dose which Wade uses cannot be used for internal exposures. This has been conceded by the ICRP itself in its publications.
[…]
Why is the ICRP model unsafe? Because it is based on “absorbed dose”. This is average radiation energy in Joules divided by the mass of living tissue into which it is diluted. A milliSievert is one milliJoule of energy diluted into one kilogram of tissue. As such it would not distinguish between warming yourself in front of a fire and eating a red hot coal. It is the local distribution of energy that is the problem. The dose from a single internal alpha particle track to a single cell is 500mSv! The dose to the whole body from the same alpha track is 5 x 10-11 mSv. That is 0.000000000005mSv. But it is the dose to the cell that causes the genetic damage and the ultimate cancer. The cancer yield per unit dose employed by ICRP is based entirely on external acute high dose radiation at Hiroshima, where the average dose to a cell was the same for all cells.
[…]
http://alethonews.wordpress.com/2011/03/28/deconstructing-nuclear-experts/