Flossing and Fissioning: The Importance of Evidence

Your ‘evidence’ is anecdotal. You need to check the reviews of the 90 peer-reviewed studies on this topic. This is a very complex subject. There are 2 main types of radiation effects: immediate cell-killing effects and long-term (many decades later) effects such as cancer, mutations and cardiovascular effects. Essentially the UNSCEAR report you refer to only recognises the former (100 deaths) and chooses to ignore the more important and numerous latter effects. However in the fields of radiation biology and radiation epidemiology there is little doubt that the latter exist. For example, we are still in 2016 measuring the cancer deaths of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. This is why the TORCH-2016 results yield 40,000 eventual deaths in Europe.
See: Late lessons from Chernobyl, early warnings from Fukushima by Paul Dorfman, Aleksandra Fucic and Stephen Thomas at http://bit.ly/2aPnAeu; and The silent spring of Chernobyl and Fukushima at http://bit.ly/2aOSeIU

David, your ‘sources’ make a valiant attempt to pass off standard anti-nuke gospel as credible academic study. But after covering a range of topics from radiation, to economics, to policy in any country of the world where a nuclear accident has occurred, it’s clear authors are shaping their results to justify their pre-determined agenda. Propaganda, vs. science.

“…its failure to plan for the cascade of unexpected beyond design-base accidents, the regulatory emphasis on risk-based probabilistic assessment has proven very limited. An urgent re-appraisal of this approach, and its real-life application seems overdue.
Whatever one’s view of the risks and benefits of nuclear energy, it is clear that the possibility of catastrophic accidents must be factored into the policy and regulatory decision-making process. In the context of current collective knowledge on nuclear risks, both the regulation of operating nuclear reactors and the design-base for any proposed reactor will need significant re-evaluation.”

Only a grossly-uninformed evangelist could come to such a conclusion when the possibility of catastrophic accidents has been factored into the policy and regulatory decision-making process for decades. And how does one plan for a “cascade of unexpected beyond design-base accidents” if they’re unexpected? Hmm? Seems like one would have to resort to one’s imagination, where the sky is the limit, and campaigns funded by fear can prove immensely lucrative.

David, as this sketch from the National Academy of Science’s BIER VII report shows, there is no doubt that radiation dose response shows a threshold*, the only question is whether the response is zero below the threshold, or just very low. It is very difficult to design a study which can distinguish the two, but it turns out not to matter to the most important question: whether nuclear energy is safer than fossil fuels. Even with very conservative assumptions about the effects of low level radiation (i.e. LNT), nuclear energy is so much safer than fossil fuel, that using fossil fuel which is diluted 90% with renewables (which is probably not affordable) is still more dangerous to human health and the climate than using nuclear power.

Of course, LNT and the resulting ALARA goals (making radiation exposure “As Low As Reasonable Achievable”) do increase the cost of using nuclear power (imposing a needless burden on the poor), so it is worthwhile stating how wrong LNT actually is.

* The threshold for radiation induced cancer is about the same as the threshold for radiation sickness (about 10 Rem= 100 mSv): if the dose is not large enough to cause nausea or hair loss, then it is also not large enough to cause observable increases in cancer rates. No one ever need fear long-term harm from a radiation exposure that they can’t see/feel and produces no symptoms; there will be no detectable long term result.