A Place to Stand

This is in response to an Independent letter by a guy who had had leukemia & had been to Chernobyl suggesting cause & effect, an idea also popular with parents of autistic children & those whose paths are crossed by balck cats. This letter is a retread of one of my earliest with new 1st & last paragraphs (I'm not daft enough to write this much for a paper which doesn't print opposing views as indeed they didn't).

First time round I put it to papers all over the UK, US & world & it got publishrd by Pravda! Later I got it into New Scientist's online page, but only online, because they owed me a favour - they had published a letter rubbishing mine in support of nuclear power & not noticed the prat had got his figures out by 4 millionfold.

This is a very major science story which disproves absolutely the anti-nuclear paradigm & which only 1 newspaper in the world (possibly excluding Taiwan) is willing to publish:

Dear Sir,
In reply to Dr Arnold Cooke's question as to whether his visit to Chernobyl was responsible for his contracting leukemia, or whether, as with most things it just happens. It is clearly the latter.

In 1983 a group of 180 apartment buildings was completed in Taiwan. Somebody had made a serious mistake. They had mixed into the concrete a considerable amount of highly radioactive cobalt 60. This meant that ultimately 10,000 people lived in buildings for from 9 to 20 years so radioactive that they received an average of 74 mSv of radiation per year in 1983, declining thereafter as cobalt 60 has a half life of 5 ½ years. This compares with a rate of 0.5 mSv above background which is the normal maximum exposure for radiation workers & total of 15 mSv maximum safe limit for land fit for habitation according to US government standards.

According to the linear no threshold (LNT) theory currently in use world-wide for assessing nuclear risks there is no lower limit to the level at which radioactivity kills (hence the term "no threshold") & this, inhabited for a decade & a half before the radioactivity was traced & measured, should be the site of a truly massive cancer death rate. It isn't. A thorough & methodical tracing of all the 4,000 families by a team led by W. L Chen of Taiwan's Director of Medical Radiation Technology of Taiwan's National Yang-Ming University (the full report is available in English on http://www.jpands.org/vol9no1/chen.pdf ) has resulted in an unequivocal & spectacular result. Cancer rates in that highly radioactive building are down to 3.6% of prevailing Taiwanese rates. For many years there has been an unfashionable alternative to the LNT theory called hormesis. This is an effect, long observed in plants & cultures, whereby intermediate level radioactivity actually stimulates life & improves health. There has been significant evidence for this (the deaths at Hiroshima did not appear to fit the LNT pattern, there are places in India & Iran with background radiation of 15mSv or higher with no observed increase in cancer & numerous studies of radon in homes have found a reverse correlation between radon levels & cancer). Nonetheless, such has been our fear of all things nuclear that the LNT theory has been absolutely accepted despite the fact that there has NEVER been any actual evidence for it. This study, however, is so detailed, has such well-defined boundary conditions & in proving a reduction in cancers of 96.4% has such a clear result that there can no longer be any intellectual doubt whatsoever. Radioactivity, up to 50mSv, is good for us. This is reminiscent of the time when Gallileo turned his telescope to the skies & for all time disproved the, then politically correct though scientifically shaky, theory that the Sun revolved around the Earth. True the Pope of the time forced him to recant or be dealt with as heretics then were. True it took a long time to bury. However from the time of Galileo's observations the official theory was dead. Unlike normal life, in science the truth always wins in the end though sometimes the end can be a long time coming & much pain may be caused in the interim. This is because while opinions change repeatable science results remain the same - that is the nature of the universe.

The naturally occuring background radiation in Cornwall is less than that at Chernobyl. Despite it's inhabitants being subject to a lifetime exposure leukemia is not unusually common as it would have to be if the LNT theory were in any way true.
Yours Faithfully
Neil Craig