Sunday, May 23, 2010
NUCLEAR RADIATION - ASSESSING THE EVIDENCE FOR LINEAR NO THRESHOLD
Paul has sent a list of presumably the strongest evidence for the LNT theory that low level radiation is harmful rather than beneficial. So lets see
Here's a little more reading for you.
Huge numbers of deaths in the Ukraine due to Chernobyl.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2006/mar/25/energy.ukraine
Interview with John Gofman sacked for uncovering dangers of low level radiation.
http://www.ratical.org/radiation/CNR/CAmonthly.html
Well its the Guardian, a wholly corrupt government funded propaganda mouthpiece willing to lie to promote genocide & worse but perhaps we should not fully discount it for those reasons. The article written in 2006 says "In a series of reports about to be published, they will suggest that at least 30,000 people are expected to die of cancers linked directly to severe radiation exposure in 1986" but presumably Paul has not found any subsequent reports that it actually did happen. Predictions are not thenselves evidence. The failure of predictions is however evidence that those making them "The new estimates have been collated by researchers commissioned by European parliamentary groups, Greenpeace International and medical foundations in Britain, Germany, Ukraine, Scandinavia and elsewhere" are unreliable.
More about the dangers of low level radiation than any sane person could wish to read.
http://www.ratical.org/radiation/
This is the entry page to 15 linked articles. Life is too long & if there is actual evidence somewhere here Paul will doubtless say. However following the most promising "Nuclear radiation & its Biological Effects" leads to another 15 links. Following the best looking one of these on "Permissible levels of Exposure" which simply says that LNT is an "internationally accepted" "value judgement" without suggesting any evidence whatsoever. This, to such people makes it a "fact that there is no safe level of exposure to ionising radiation" but this is not how anybody with ant respect for science produces facts.
Here's a refutation of the arguments that low level radiation is good for you:
http://www.gfstrahlenschutz.de/docs/hormeng2.pdf
Which states in the intro "there exists no credible evidence for a reduction in radiogenic risk" & then spends the following pages rubbish the epidemiological & microbiological evidence, which if the author & anybody supporting his is irredeemably corrupt, does not exist. The rubbishing consists largely of saying the hormesis evidence is disputed. Saying that evidence is wrong because somebody, for unknown reasons, disputes it would be unduly eleveated by calling it a worthless circular argument.
This review looks at the association between childhood leukaemia and proximity to nuclear power stations.
http://www.ehjournal.net/content/8/1/43
A study looking at background radiation in Britain and childhood cancer found that when confounding factors were corrected for, there is a clear association. This study suggests that most childhood cancer is due to background radiation.
http://iopscience.iop.org/0952-4746/8/1/302
Says "KiKK study in Germany reported a 1.6-fold increase in solid cancers and a 2.2-fold increase in leukemias among children living within 5 km of all German nuclear power stations". It is the nature of random statistics that they be random rather than always totally evenly spread. If you toss a coin 100 times it is likely that at some point you will get 6 heads &/or 6 tails in a row. If you just select those 6 you will have a far stronger "evidence" the coin is weighted than any 1.6 increase. "As a general rule of thumb" says the editor of the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine Marcia Angell, "we are looking for a relative risk of 3 or more" before even accepting a paper for publication" (unless what you are doing is politically funded). The leukemia claim is even worse since childhood leukemia is very often found in clusters indicating a virus being spread. If the study had found a similar correlation at 2km, 4km, 10 km, in regions directly downwind, among children of workers, among workers or any other of literally hundreds of other classifications it would have been in their interest to say so so I assume they didn't. If so this is another wholly unscientific nonexistent "hobgoblin".
Nuclear reactor closes, children get healthier.
http://www.mindfully.org/Health/Nuclear-Reactor-Closing.htm
This tries to make bricks without straw. "Greatest potential risk of adverse health effects from radioactive releases live in Amador, El Dorado, Placer, and Sacramento counties", "Sacramento metropolitan area lies to the northwest, and technically not downwind of the reactor" but is included anyway. Even so the worst we see is that child deaths are down from 6.1 per 1,000 when the local reactor was running to 5.8 while the US average was down from 7.5 to 7.4. So not only below the national average & both following a downward trend but 1 or 2 extra random deaths would have changed this from a faster than average fall to a slower than average. As "evidence" this is mathematically meaningless - all it is evidence of is the lengths these people will go to try to find something where there is nothing. It compares badly even to the above German "study".
Explanation of why low level radiation may appear to improve health.
http://www.llrc.org/belarus.htm"More than 15 years after the event, the health outcome of the Chernobyl catastrophe has been extremely difficult to evaluate. How is this possible?" Well that all the scares are false would be one way. This "study" then focusses on an apparent increase in childhood Leukemia in Scotland & Wales fiollowing Chernobyl 1,500 miles away. This is not evidence unless more direct causes can be eliminated - the most obvious being doctors being told to check for such things more intensely. As evidence this increase could motre easily be taken as "proof" that the adoption of the EU flag in May that year, was the cause. Since Wales is part of the RU the effect was more direct. All this proves is that eurosceptics are infinititely more concerned about real & clear evidence that the pseudo-scientists supporting the LNT scare story. But then they aren't paod by government.
Who do you believe, the nuclear industry, WHO and the UN, or the coal and petrochemical industries? These seem to be the parties who might benefit or not from nuclear power plants.
By "nuclear industry" you actually mean industry of government nuclearvregulatorsd. This is an argument from authority & has yhus no intellectual validity whatsoever. The LNTists are reduced to saying that what they say is right because, although they can produce no actual evidence they are saying it. Worse the authorities chosen are all branches of government which, as we know, exists largely to produce false scare stories to allow it to pose, expensively, as rescuing us from & thus worthy of our money.
Here's a little more reading for you.
Huge numbers of deaths in the Ukraine due to Chernobyl.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2006/mar/25/energy.ukraine
Interview with John Gofman sacked for uncovering dangers of low level radiation.
http://www.ratical.org/radiation/CNR/CAmonthly.html
Well its the Guardian, a wholly corrupt government funded propaganda mouthpiece willing to lie to promote genocide & worse but perhaps we should not fully discount it for those reasons. The article written in 2006 says "In a series of reports about to be published, they will suggest that at least 30,000 people are expected to die of cancers linked directly to severe radiation exposure in 1986" but presumably Paul has not found any subsequent reports that it actually did happen. Predictions are not thenselves evidence. The failure of predictions is however evidence that those making them "The new estimates have been collated by researchers commissioned by European parliamentary groups, Greenpeace International and medical foundations in Britain, Germany, Ukraine, Scandinavia and elsewhere" are unreliable.
More about the dangers of low level radiation than any sane person could wish to read.
http://www.ratical.org/radiation/
This is the entry page to 15 linked articles. Life is too long & if there is actual evidence somewhere here Paul will doubtless say. However following the most promising "Nuclear radiation & its Biological Effects" leads to another 15 links. Following the best looking one of these on "Permissible levels of Exposure" which simply says that LNT is an "internationally accepted" "value judgement" without suggesting any evidence whatsoever. This, to such people makes it a "fact that there is no safe level of exposure to ionising radiation" but this is not how anybody with ant respect for science produces facts.
Here's a refutation of the arguments that low level radiation is good for you:
http://www.gfstrahlenschutz.de/docs/hormeng2.pdf
Which states in the intro "there exists no credible evidence for a reduction in radiogenic risk" & then spends the following pages rubbish the epidemiological & microbiological evidence, which if the author & anybody supporting his is irredeemably corrupt, does not exist. The rubbishing consists largely of saying the hormesis evidence is disputed. Saying that evidence is wrong because somebody, for unknown reasons, disputes it would be unduly eleveated by calling it a worthless circular argument.
This review looks at the association between childhood leukaemia and proximity to nuclear power stations.
http://www.ehjournal.net/content/8/1/43
A study looking at background radiation in Britain and childhood cancer found that when confounding factors were corrected for, there is a clear association. This study suggests that most childhood cancer is due to background radiation.
http://iopscience.iop.org/0952-4746/8/1/302
Says "KiKK study in Germany reported a 1.6-fold increase in solid cancers and a 2.2-fold increase in leukemias among children living within 5 km of all German nuclear power stations". It is the nature of random statistics that they be random rather than always totally evenly spread. If you toss a coin 100 times it is likely that at some point you will get 6 heads &/or 6 tails in a row. If you just select those 6 you will have a far stronger "evidence" the coin is weighted than any 1.6 increase. "As a general rule of thumb" says the editor of the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine Marcia Angell, "we are looking for a relative risk of 3 or more" before even accepting a paper for publication" (unless what you are doing is politically funded). The leukemia claim is even worse since childhood leukemia is very often found in clusters indicating a virus being spread. If the study had found a similar correlation at 2km, 4km, 10 km, in regions directly downwind, among children of workers, among workers or any other of literally hundreds of other classifications it would have been in their interest to say so so I assume they didn't. If so this is another wholly unscientific nonexistent "hobgoblin".
Nuclear reactor closes, children get healthier.
http://www.mindfully.org/Health/Nuclear-Reactor-Closing.htm
This tries to make bricks without straw. "Greatest potential risk of adverse health effects from radioactive releases live in Amador, El Dorado, Placer, and Sacramento counties", "Sacramento metropolitan area lies to the northwest, and technically not downwind of the reactor" but is included anyway. Even so the worst we see is that child deaths are down from 6.1 per 1,000 when the local reactor was running to 5.8 while the US average was down from 7.5 to 7.4. So not only below the national average & both following a downward trend but 1 or 2 extra random deaths would have changed this from a faster than average fall to a slower than average. As "evidence" this is mathematically meaningless - all it is evidence of is the lengths these people will go to try to find something where there is nothing. It compares badly even to the above German "study".
Explanation of why low level radiation may appear to improve health.
http://www.llrc.org/belarus.htm"More than 15 years after the event, the health outcome of the Chernobyl catastrophe has been extremely difficult to evaluate. How is this possible?" Well that all the scares are false would be one way. This "study" then focusses on an apparent increase in childhood Leukemia in Scotland & Wales fiollowing Chernobyl 1,500 miles away. This is not evidence unless more direct causes can be eliminated - the most obvious being doctors being told to check for such things more intensely. As evidence this increase could motre easily be taken as "proof" that the adoption of the EU flag in May that year, was the cause. Since Wales is part of the RU the effect was more direct. All this proves is that eurosceptics are infinititely more concerned about real & clear evidence that the pseudo-scientists supporting the LNT scare story. But then they aren't paod by government.
Who do you believe, the nuclear industry, WHO and the UN, or the coal and petrochemical industries? These seem to be the parties who might benefit or not from nuclear power plants.
By "nuclear industry" you actually mean industry of government nuclearvregulatorsd. This is an argument from authority & has yhus no intellectual validity whatsoever. The LNTists are reduced to saying that what they say is right because, although they can produce no actual evidence they are saying it. Worse the authorities chosen are all branches of government which, as we know, exists largely to produce false scare stories to allow it to pose, expensively, as rescuing us from & thus worthy of our money.
Labels: Government parasitism, Hormesis, nuclear
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Neil, you clearly are not a scientist and don't seem to understand statistics or what constitutes scientific evidence.
You seem to misunderstand the German study, which concludes, "the study is statistically strong and its findings statistically significant". This has nothing to do with random chance, it looks at "all cancers at all 16 nuclear reactor locations in Germany between 1980 and 2003, including 1,592 under-fives with cancer and 4,735 controls, with 593 under-fives with leukemia and 1,766 controls".
You also seem to misunderstand the impact of Chernobyl on Wales and Scotland where there was measurable radioactive fallout. You don't diagnose more cases of leukaemia by "looking more closely".
I thought I had posted this as well, though I suppose you disagree with anything the Guardian reports on principle:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2006/mar/25/energy.ukraine
"At least 500,000 people - perhaps more - have already died out of the 2 million people who were officially classed as victims of Chernobyl in Ukraine," said Nikolai Omelyanets, deputy head of the National Commission for Radiation Protection in Ukraine. "[Studies show] that 34,499 people who took part in the clean-up of Chernobyl have died in the years since the catastrophe. The deaths of these people from cancers was nearly three times as high as in the rest of the population. We have found that infant mortality increased 20% to 30% because of chronic exposure to radiation after the accident. All this information has been ignored by the IAEA and WHO. We sent it to them in March last year and again in June. They've not said why they haven't accepted it."
The Chernobyl disaster happened in 1986. Solid cancers due to radiation usually appear 25-50 years after exposure, so if the LNT is correct we should start to see a large rise in solid cancers over the next 25 years or more in areas exposed to radioactive fallout from Chernobyl. That includes Scotland and Wales, despite what you wrote.
That should settle the issue once and for all.
Do you really believe that there is a cover-up to make big businesses like the nuclear industry spend millions on protecting their workers unnecessarily?
You seem to misunderstand the German study, which concludes, "the study is statistically strong and its findings statistically significant". This has nothing to do with random chance, it looks at "all cancers at all 16 nuclear reactor locations in Germany between 1980 and 2003, including 1,592 under-fives with cancer and 4,735 controls, with 593 under-fives with leukemia and 1,766 controls".
You also seem to misunderstand the impact of Chernobyl on Wales and Scotland where there was measurable radioactive fallout. You don't diagnose more cases of leukaemia by "looking more closely".
I thought I had posted this as well, though I suppose you disagree with anything the Guardian reports on principle:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2006/mar/25/energy.ukraine
"At least 500,000 people - perhaps more - have already died out of the 2 million people who were officially classed as victims of Chernobyl in Ukraine," said Nikolai Omelyanets, deputy head of the National Commission for Radiation Protection in Ukraine. "[Studies show] that 34,499 people who took part in the clean-up of Chernobyl have died in the years since the catastrophe. The deaths of these people from cancers was nearly three times as high as in the rest of the population. We have found that infant mortality increased 20% to 30% because of chronic exposure to radiation after the accident. All this information has been ignored by the IAEA and WHO. We sent it to them in March last year and again in June. They've not said why they haven't accepted it."
The Chernobyl disaster happened in 1986. Solid cancers due to radiation usually appear 25-50 years after exposure, so if the LNT is correct we should start to see a large rise in solid cancers over the next 25 years or more in areas exposed to radioactive fallout from Chernobyl. That includes Scotland and Wales, despite what you wrote.
That should settle the issue once and for all.
Do you really believe that there is a cover-up to make big businesses like the nuclear industry spend millions on protecting their workers unnecessarily?
# posted by 
: May 29, 2010
: May 29, 2010
Paul by implication you are claiming to be a scientist. Unfortunately I have found so many "environmentalists" making that claim while obviously ignorant that I have to ask you to substantiate this.
"Solid cancers due to radiation usually appear 25-50 years after exposure" - this is, of course, wholly & completely untrue as anybody who had scientific knowledge of Hiroshima would know. Excess cancers appear shortly or not at all.
That a poltical German study claims not to be political is not evidence that it isn't. Similarly the fact that Belarus & Ukraine have received billions in "aid" because of Chernobyl provides some disincentive to accurate measurement. The UN scientific report was clear on there being no detectable longh term deaths & no credible scientific institution claims thaty any statistical examination has found them.
The claim that more cancers aren't found by searching is profoundly ignorant. Many tumours are removed not because they are known to be harmful but because they may possibly be but are more likely to be benign & clear up themselves. It should be obvious that a tumour which will disappear on its own is one which may not be found before it clears up therefore searching finds more. Strange that a "scientist" should be so ignorant.
The radioactive hill sites in Wales & Scotland are as radioactive as first recorded while the radiation at Chernobyl has almost gone. Highly radioactive material has, by the nature of the physics, a short half life. Any scientist knows this. Since the Scots/Welsh sites do not have the same, or any neasurable, half life they must represent natural radiation not from Chernobyl. As such the fact they have been inhabited since the ice ages without recorded excess deaths is inconsistent with the LNT theory.
Once again I ask if you or anybody can produce any evidence at all for the LNT theory?
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"Solid cancers due to radiation usually appear 25-50 years after exposure" - this is, of course, wholly & completely untrue as anybody who had scientific knowledge of Hiroshima would know. Excess cancers appear shortly or not at all.
That a poltical German study claims not to be political is not evidence that it isn't. Similarly the fact that Belarus & Ukraine have received billions in "aid" because of Chernobyl provides some disincentive to accurate measurement. The UN scientific report was clear on there being no detectable longh term deaths & no credible scientific institution claims thaty any statistical examination has found them.
The claim that more cancers aren't found by searching is profoundly ignorant. Many tumours are removed not because they are known to be harmful but because they may possibly be but are more likely to be benign & clear up themselves. It should be obvious that a tumour which will disappear on its own is one which may not be found before it clears up therefore searching finds more. Strange that a "scientist" should be so ignorant.
The radioactive hill sites in Wales & Scotland are as radioactive as first recorded while the radiation at Chernobyl has almost gone. Highly radioactive material has, by the nature of the physics, a short half life. Any scientist knows this. Since the Scots/Welsh sites do not have the same, or any neasurable, half life they must represent natural radiation not from Chernobyl. As such the fact they have been inhabited since the ice ages without recorded excess deaths is inconsistent with the LNT theory.
Once again I ask if you or anybody can produce any evidence at all for the LNT theory?
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