Our hysterical fear of the nuclear option
The aversion to radiation harms the fight against climate change, says robert matthews
Just after 11am on this day in 1945, the southern Japanese city of Nagasaki was destroyed by the second, and last, atomic weapon so far used in anger (right). An estimated 140,000 people were killed. Combined with the attack on Hiroshima three days earlier, the two atomic bombs caused the deaths of at least 340,000.
In the early 1950s, doctors monitoring the survivors were bracing themselves for a second wave of horrific consequences. The good news is that it never came to pass. The bad news is that the presumption of danger associated with radiation has never taken this fact on board.
At the time, radiation experts expected that genetic damage to the survivors would lead to generations of malformed and handicapped babies. Even before the first such cases emerged, the International Commission on Radiological Protection introduced an exceptionally stringent standard to protect humans from such nightmarish consequences.Known as the Linear No-Threshold (LNT) assumption, it was a radical departure from any similar safety standard. Humans can tolerate poisons - the challenge lies in finding the threshold dose above which poisonous effects appear. But the LNT assumption singled out radiation as being so uniquely nasty that there is no threshold dose: the only safe dose of radiation is no radiation.
Back in the 1950s, this seemed entirely reasonable: no-one wanted to see a repeat of the genetic horrors of atomic bombing. But the doctors monitoring the hibakusha - those people 'affected' by the explosion within a mile or so of Ground Zero of the two bombs - soon noticed something odd. Babies were indeed being born with genetic abnormalities, but the rate was the same as it had ever been.
In 1994, the UN expert committee on radiation also found no extra cancer risk to survivors exposed to levels deemed utterly
unacceptable on the basis of the LNT assumption.
In short, the A-bomb survivors have proved the LNT is simply wrong: humans can cope with hefty doses of radiation without ill-effects. This is more than good news for nuclear workers and radiologists. It has profound implications for the debate about nuclear power, which many scientists insist has a key role in combating global warming.
Nuclear power has a reputation for being lethal even if the reactors don't explode. The demand to protect us all from even the minutest radiation from accidental discharges and disposal of its waste has made nuclear power punitively expensive.
Yet through their survival, the hibakusha are telling us that the LNT is nonsense - and that we are spending huge sums to protect ourselves from non-existent risks.
Unless we recognise the significance of their survival, nuclear power will remain under a mushroom-shaped cloud - and be unable to help save millions from the all-too-real effects of climate change.
Original Report
Are we being lied to by our governments and those who ultimately hold the power - the large oil companies? If Nuclear power is as safe as this report alleges, should we not be looking closer at it as means to reduce the burning of fossil fuels? Is the high monetary price paid for nuclear fuel as compared to fossil fuel generation justified?
If we are being lied to about the effects of radiation and our fears of dying a horrible death are being exploited to keep alive big oil and pollute our planet, I wonder how many other things that we have accepted as axioms are, indeed, lies.
John
