A Place to Stand

A very informative letter in the Herald on Friday.

If anyone is pondering why there has been a recent upsurge in the number of small (12-15kW) windmills across the countryside, I would suggest this is driven by the recently enhanced financial subsidy rather than a desire to save the planet.

From yesterday, a new hidden subsidy called the Feed-in Tariff has been introduced which increases dramatically the hidden subsidy from around 5p per unit (kWh) to more than 26p per unit generated, regardless of whether the electricity is fed into the grid or not. This contrasts with the 12-14p per unit consumers presently pay our electricity supplier and, of course, the cost of this subsidy is added to the retail cost of electricity for all consumers.

This subsidy can be calculated to be of the order of £6,000-9,000 per year per windmill depending on capacity and the availability of wind. There are also grants and interest-free loans plus the savings in reduced electricity bills for the installer.

Saving the planet? I don’t think so.

G M Lindsay,

Absolutely right. The disgraceful thing is that this appears only in newspaper letter columns. The media have been full of puff pieces about how wonderfully windmills are helping local communities survive by shovelling money at them, here. That no questioning journalism appears in the "news2 pages &n it depends on the public to write letters on the subject to get any truth into the paper says a lot about how corrupt & obedient our media are.

And even when the public do draw their attention to the facts the media are still often going to decide to simply censor & deliberately promote the lies. Scottish Renewables, a lobby organisation for the entirely subsidy dependent windfarm industry published a letter which said that approx 25% of our power comes from renewables & that instead of wind needing back up from conventional baseload power, conventional systems need baseload back-up from wind. I wrote pointing out the facts & they didn't publish. However they did publish a gentler letter asking for evidence. They then published Scottish Renewables reply which simply repeated & extended their lie. I rewrote & sent the ubndernoted & this time they refused to publish any reply form anybody. The result is that the Herald have twice published something which they know to be a total pack of lies people working for a government supported fraud & deliberately refused even to allow replies from people they know to be telling the truth (having the references to prove it). This is not on a matter of opinion, for which there could be some excuse, but on a matter of clear & unambiguous lying about a matter of solid fact.

Once again Ms Hogan, speaking for Scottish Renewables, claims that "renewables" produce 1/4 of Scotland's power, of which 8% is wind & presumably the rest is traditional hydro. I would not wish to suggest that this represents anything other than the very highest standard of honesty to which the renewable lobby aspire. However she produces no figures & the most recently available figures Scottish Energy Study: Volume 1: Energy in Scotland: Supply and Demand, 2006 shows the total amount of renewable electricity, almost all of it hydro power, was 5.46 TWH out of 109.76, i.e. just under 5%. Since the only expansion of hydro since then has been the Glendoe project it is difficult to understand how hydro output can have increased nearly fourfold.

In her previous letter she said that wind was not only not an impractical generation method needing conventional power sources to provide the baseload but that wind should provide the baseload because conventional power was insufficiently reliable. However a previous wind spokesman for Scottish Renewables, Jason Ormiston, is on record as saying wind can be no part of baseload (in a letter in another paper explaining why wind will not be to blame when the lights go out). Again I would not wish to suggest that either assertion represents anything other than the very highest standard of honesty that we can expect from the eco-lobby but would appreciate knowing how such opposite claims can both be true.

We are facing blackouts. Energy production is a matter in which the laws of physics & indeed arithmetic rule absolutely. When 25,000 pensioners die annually from the effects of hypothermia because of fuel poverty because our electricity prices are up to 4 times what France has I consider it wicked when those seeking subsidy for their "Green" projects do not tell the truth & grossly irresponsible when the media do not discriminate in their reporting between facts & spin.

Neil Craig
200 Woodlands Rd.
Glasgow
G3 6LN
0141 332 7785
Ref the 2006 study - I simply do not believe we have built windmills producing an extra 20% of our power in the interim - if nothing else the fact that windmills work at only 28% capacity this would mean a capacity nearly equal to all our other power. http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Publications/2006/01/19092748/8 fig 21

The Ormiston letter was in the Scotsman a few years ago. I can give you the date if requested - it was on the same page as a letter of mine which I have kept.

This precedent means that to the question "are there any circumstances whatsoever, under which any statement made by this paper & claimed tom be truthful or factual, can be accepted as such without overwhelming supporting evidence" the answer must be no.

To be fair there may be some newspaper claim mentioned Orwell's 1984 which shows a greater degree of dishonesty there than our media/lobbyists/government tell, but I know of none.

Incidentally this from John Brignal explains why even if it were produced & actually supplied to the grid (we electricity customers subsidise not only the windmillers who intend to feed electricity into the grid but even those who use it all themselves) it would still be worse than useless. Basically the grid managers need to have a very good idea of how much electricity they have at any moment or the grid may collapse. Again this gets censored by our free & honest media.

Labels: eco-fascism, Media, Unpublished letters

Since at least Roman times & probably much longer people have "taken the waters" for their health. I must admit I have not found any statistical evidence that it works, or indeed that it doesn't & it may be both supporters & conventional doctors have been unenthusiastic about making a definitive finding. Nonetheless thousands of years of repeat customers is a positive anecdotal result.

The waters that are taken are uniformly from springs deep underground, often polluted with sulphur & containing varying levels of radioactivity from radon & other deeply buried radioactive materials. If the sulphur isn't doing the good that leaves us with yet another example of radiation hormesis. Here is an example of the popularity of particularly highly radioactive spa.

Every day hundreds of elderly Germans splash around in the spa waters at Schlema, which contain low levels of radon, a radioactive gas generated from the decay of uranium, with the conviction it can cure ailments such as rheumatism...

Germany’s handful of radioactive spas have a tradition dating back a century and even in this post-Chernobyl age, more sensitive to radioactivity, local officials are betting on the radioactive spa to revive the town’s future.

Schlema, with a population of about 6,000, enjoyed its heyday during the Nazi era, when it boasted of being the most radioactive spot on Earth and had more than 100 hotels and guesthouses to receive visitors...

After the war, the victorious Soviet occupiers realized the uranium in this region about 150 miles south of Berlin was too valuable for just splashing around in... The spa was destroyed and visitors barred as mining continued until the collapse of East German communism in 1990...

“Radonia," a statuary tribute to radon personified as a water nymph, stands naked outside, drinking from a jug of irradiated water...

Spa marketing director Evelyn Weiss says radon treatments not only cure ailments, they revive visitors’ sex lives. As is normal in Germany, male and female guests share a naked sauna.

At the government’s Radiation Protection Agency, officials say the radon spa is fine for those suffering health problems.

{Since this does not fit the official LNT theory it would be astonishing if officals didn't oppose it, indeed it is surprising how little hysteria they are producing]

But some experts say the healing powers of radioactive radon are dubious and risky.

“Other aspects of the ‘spa experience’ may be beneficial overall, but the irradiation of internal organs by radon and its decay products or exposure to radon per se is unlikely to be helpful," said Otto Raabe, professor emeritus of radiation biophysics at the University of California at Davis.

William Field of the University of Iowa’s College of Public Health says patients suffering from arthritis may feel better after a hot bath in ordinary water.

And he says there are health risks from radon. “Numerous epidemiological studies of radon-exposed underground miners and the recent residential epidemiological study we performed in the United States indicate that radon gas exposure causes lung cancer," he said. [um not so, the opposite is the truth]

“The radon spas should not serve as a substitute for conventional health care," he continued. “While it is possible that the radon gas exposure does cause some beneficial health effect, owners of the spas should inform the spas’ users that there might also be some risk involved."

In Schlema, nearly everyone discounts such risks and cites a 1992 study that said radon was more effective than hot water. “On weekends we have little babies swimming here," Weiss said. “We couldn’t do it if it were dangerous."

Just in case, workers in the area of especially concentrated radon baths wear a dosimeter to measure radioactivity.

At the spa’s main swimming pool, a disco version of the Beatles “All My Loving" started playing as a geriatric water aerobics class got under way. Gray hair and candy-colored bathing caps bobbed up and down.

Off to the side rested Gerd Richter, 66, who once mined uranium in the nearby hills. Now he is turning to Radonia again, hoping the nymph can cure his aching joints after decades of tough work in the mines.

“I’ve noticed that it does help," he said, adding that he now comes twice a month.

I haven't found the 1982 study mentioned but have found this paper on Radon spas in Montana.

the people who use radon therapy are predominantly elderly. With increasing age, the body metabolizes medications less efficiently, and compounding the problem, age brings more chronic illnesses, and the increased likelihood that multiple medications are being taken. Drug side effects, which can be severe at any age, can be worse for elderly people. And, according to many mine visitors, the medications they had been taking had lost their effectiveness over time. 03-31-2010, 11:56 PM lazybratsche

This fits very well with an intelligent suggestion of an evolutionary mechanism by which radiation particularly slows the effects of aging that I got in an online discussion in which I had possibly overstated the relevance of evidence of animal hormesis to humans.

Hormesis actually fits quite well with evolutionary theory. First you must realize that evolution does not select for long lifespan, but reproductive success. There's only a slight fitness advantage to living longer in order to reproduce more often. The basic argument (supported by quantitative genetic modeling) is that genes that allow an individual to age a bit slower and reproduce successfully for an extra season or two don't confer much of an advantage since that individual is likely to be killed off through a multitude of other causes (disease, predation, competition, etc). Furthermore, there's a strong link between reproductive timing and longevity. Experiments have shown that if you take a population and select for earlier reproduction, you also get shorter lifespans. The converse is also true -- select for delayed reproduction, and you get animals with longer lifespans.

How does this connect with hormesis? Well, that hits another fundamental evolutionary trade off: should I spend the resources to reproduce now, or grow and maintain my body so I can better reproduce later? In times of plenty, with good conditions and availability of food, a successful individual will reproduce as much as possible. But in harder times, that individual will have greater success by conserving resources to survive until better conditions arrive again. Hormesis is thought to be part of the mechanisms involved in sensing conditions, and allocating resources in the body accordingly.

Dietary restriction is probably the most obvious sort of example -- it's not exactly the same as hormesis, but it has a lot of shared underlying genetics. When there isn't much food around, reproduction is clearly a foolish choice, since neither the parent nor the offspring are likely to survive. So under those conditions, animals activate genetic pathways that allocate resources away from reproduction and instead to maintenance and longevity. Similar results occur from other types of stress that are known to cause hormesis.

(FWIW, I study the genetics of longevity and hormesis, using aforementioned worms.)

Labels: Hormesis, nuclear, Social

In a request for information issued yesterday, Pentagon scientists say they would like to hear proposals for "deployable nuclear reactor technologies for the generation of electrical power and military logistic fuels (JP-8) in forward land based and maritime military operations".

JP-8 is standard US forces jet fuel, regarded as relatively easy to synthesise from commonly available ingredients compared to the other main military fuel, diesel.

Boffins at the US Naval Research Laboratory have already developed processes by which it would be possible to make JP-8 using carbon dioxide and hydrogen extracted from sea water. The process would require a lot of energy, but in a US naval context this might not be a problem: American aircraft carriers have powerful nuclear reactors to drive their propulsion and catapults, which would have plenty of surplus grunt whenever full-speed launch operations weren't in progress...

Pentagon RFI has this to say:

Technical approaches to fuel production should accommodate a broad range of hydrogen and carbon feedstocks (water/seawater, biomass, waste materials, etc). Concepts that involve carbon capture or sequestration should be well justified in terms of technical feasibility ...

"Biomass/waste materials" most probably alludes to the huge, odorous lakes of sewage which have accumulated next to some of the bigger bases in Afghanistan, much complained of by the resident servicemen. This could potentially be an excellent carbon source, and turning it into jetfuel would have the added benefit of making the bases pleasanter to be in.
From The Register (H/T Ivan)

Now if the armed forces are doing it that doesn't mean it is commercially feasible in normal life. They are doing it for remote places (Afghanistan, deep ocean) where transporting jet fuel is as or more expensive than the stuff itself. However the sort of small reactors they use don't have the economies of scale of commercial 1000 MW reactor either. Best of all, because reactors produce at a flat rate day & night the electricity they can produce after midnight isn't much use.

If "boffins" have already produced the technology to do this on a major scale then it can clearly be applied to nuclear power stations & civilian "bio-mass" disposal works & at rates which, depending if the nuclear plants' costs are largely engineering ones or multiplied by politicians parasitism,

Nuclear can not only now* supply us with all the cheap electricity we want but also with oil & hydrogen fuels. And it solves our big waste problem.


*Well as soon as we build them.

Labels: Fixing the economy, nuclear, Science/technology

I thought I had pretty much covered the full range of prizes here & here etc. but there are a few more mentioned here.

1904: Deutsch-Archdeacon Grand Prix de Aviation
French aviation enthusiasts Ernest Archdeacon and Henri Deutsch de la Meurthe put up 50,000 francs for the first airplane to fly 1 kilometer in a circular course. The prize is won by Henri Farman in 1908, giving French aviators a boost in their public-relations battle with the Wright brothers.

1959: Kremer Prize
British industrialist Henry Kremer offers a 5,000-pound prize for human-powered flight, and by the time Paul MacCready wins the prize in 1977, it is worth 50,000 pounds, or $95,000. MacCready wins the prize by flying a figure eight along a half-mile course with his Mylar-skinned Gossamer Condor. Kremer immediately offers another prize of 100,000 pounds for the first human-powered aircraft to cross the English Channel. Only two years later, MacCready's Gossamer Albatross wins that prize as well.

1992: Super Efficient Refrigerator Program
A consortium of U.S. electric utilities, seeking to enhance environmental quality and energy efficiency, announced a prize of $30 million to be awarded to the most energy-efficient refrigerator design that did not using environmentally harmful CFC refrigerant. Fourteen manufacturers submitted entries. The winning company, Whirlpool Corp., devised a refrigerator that used 25% less energy than the most energy-efficient available model before the contest, and 40% less than the Federal energy efficiency standard for new refrigerators.

1995: Feynman Grand Prize
The Foresight Institute offers $250,000 Feynman Prize to the person or team that devises both a motor no more than 100 nanometers wide in any direction, capable of moving atoms around, as well as a 50-nanometer-wide machine capable of adding numbers. The prize has not yet been won.

1997: Budweiser Cup
Anheuser-Busch, one of the world’s largest beer companies, offers $1 million to the first team to circumnavigate the globe nonstop in a balloon. The prize is won in 1999 by Switzerland’s Bertrand Piccard and Britain’s Bryan Jones, who launched the Breitling Orbiter 3 from the Egyptian desert and landed back in Egypt after a 19-day, 22-hour journey.

----------------------------

This is pretty much rounding out the list - unless somebody knows better. The full range of discussion can be found on the X-PRIZE sections of my annual index. Suffice it to say that prizes have repeatedly demonstrated success at a fraction, often less than 1/10th, of what particular governments have spent on similar projects (eg the US army project for an automated driver programme cost $3 million in prizes when the army acknowledged they couldn't have done it for under $100 M or the director of the Smithsonian who got $50,000 from Congress to develop an airplane & failed just as the Wright Brothers were succeeding). Relatively few have failed & even the Spanish longitude prize of 1598, while not won, resulted in a method of measuring longitude slowly on land revolutionising map making - and that without costing anything. Indeed in some cases, eg the Fredkin Prize, the value of the achievement has been recognised as so great that another party has offered to massively increase the award even after it is clear progress has been so much it is going to be done.

The downside of prizes seems to be entirely in the realm of the loss of patronage by those in charge. The NASA paper, which was broadly supportive listed "create jobs; influence political support by way of job creation; broaden the participation of traditionally underrepresented groups in science and technology; and prop up a particular supplier or group of suppliers" all of which are pork barreling or more politely patronage. I also discussed how the Mohole project was given to a company whose prime qualification was that they had given money to LBJ. Th's was also the complaint in Scot Lib Dem leader Tavish Scott's speech attacking the Saltire Prize on the grounds that it hadn't been won & that it was thus depriving their friends of more government largess merely because they had nothing to show for it.

Which in turn implies that the British government decision that, space development being a comparatively popular programme, virtually our entire space budget will go to Europe, where nobody expects it to actually achieve anything except contracts for friends & expenses for bureaucrats. Note the Lord Mandelson was & Lady Ashton is a very well funded bureaucrat in an entirely different part of the mandarinate & no reciprocal arrangement for our overly rewarded bureaucrats is possible ;-)

Labels: Government parasitism, Science/technology, X-Prizes

I would like to thank Jerry Pournelle for taking the time to report my quite complex, heavily linked, recent post on radiation hormesis & the herd of irradiated cattle put down when they reached record breaking ages. He added:

A reader sends this. It was not easily formatted, and it takes some attention to understand, but the subject is important. I had thought that the LNT people were slowly giving up, but perhaps not.

------------------

There is a great deal of money at stake in this. The tort bar lawyers will be involved.

That latter is a point I had not thought of - perhaps because I live in a less litigious society. I had realised that, since the LNT is fundamental to any opposition to the use of nuclear power in electricity generation; in the prevention of the Orion nuclear space project achieving its perfectly feasible goals of "Mars by 1965, Saturn by 1970"; & in low level radiation medicine not being half as effective at saving lives as smoking is at ending them it has had an immensely destructive effect on humanity. How anybody can pay for that I cannot see but I can now see some lawyers will want to find out. Beyond any economic cost the post Hiroshima & justified fear that scientists had let the djinn out of the bottle nust have been exacerbated by the largely unjustified fear of the insidious radiation boogyman, which has done so much to power the whole anti-technology movement.

I can imagine a number of people, such as those on the British investigation who said that the evidence would fit absolutely any line whatsoever, going through their emails to see if they have ever admitted trying to "hide the decline". And of course, all the politicians who have lied to promote this scare saying they never knew better, though the decision to get rid of the cattle must have been either a political or military one & there is no reason the military would want it.

Professor Fred Singer, publisher of SEPP also accepts that radiation hormesis is the proven scientific paradigm. This is from one of the articles republished by SEPP:

According to the LNT hypothesis, such levels [background radiation levers in the early days of the planet] should have sterilized the earth and eradicated all life. Instead, radiation may have produced multiple new mutations in existing life forms, with the negative disadvantageous mutations disappearing rapidly, and the positive advantageous mutations prospering and propagating. Indeed, it seems likely that this radiological imperative was a significant factor in the evolution of all species...

This current zeal for zero-tolerance of radiation is reminiscent of the puritanical efforts of early missionaries visiting South Sea Islands for the first time. Because of their zero-tolerance for alcoholic beverages, these newcomers coerced the natives into giving up their fermented home-brews containing many natural nutrients, which eventually led to deficiency states of several vitamins and minerals. Inadvertently, these missionaries documented the Law of Unintended Consequences -- and helped pave the road to hell with their good intentions.

It has already been documented that nuclear workers with additional low-level exposures (LLE) have statistically significant longer life spans and lower cancer incidences than matched-control workers without the LLE. Our current radiation antipathy and LNT hypothesis would never predict this result, so this unexpected improvement for exposed workers continues to be largely ignored and unacknowledged. An Internet search for "radiation hormesis" produces a wealth of positive information, information that is almost completely lacking in prior and current medical textbooks and physics publications.

It may well turn out that, as with global warming an awful lot of scientists had been persuaded that the LNT theory, like warming, was a "scientific consensus" & to keep quiet about their doubts because in a consensus there must be some people who actually know. If so, because there is so much much evidence against it particularly repeatable plant & animal experiments, it may prove even more brittle than the catastrophic warming "consensus". Certainly I have found nobody able to put a coherent argument for LNT except ad hominum ones.

Labels: Hormesis, nuclear, Science/technology

Whitelee windfarm

Scotland's 322-megawatt (MW) Whitelee project – Europe’s largest wind farm, located near Glasgow, Scotland – was brought to a standstill after a rotor blade snapped off one of the Siemens-made turbines.

The 150ft blade reportedly crashed to the ground on the evening of 19 March, triggering an alarm in the control room. Operators initially shut down the unit in question, before moving to halt the entire project

From the Telegraph. Which makes it worth reprinting, for UK readers, some recent stuff from Al Fin:

A recent detailed analysis (focusing mainly on Spain) finds that for every job created by state-funded support of renewables, particularly wind energy, 2.2 jobs are lost. Each wind industry job created cost almost $2-million in subsidies.

and

turbine gearboxes have yet to achieve their design life goals of twenty years, with most systems requiring significant repair or overhaul well before the intended life is reached [3,4,5]. Since gearboxes are one of the most expensive components of the wind turbine system, the higher than expected failure rates are adding to the cost of wind energy. In addition, the future uncertainty of gearbox life expectancy is contributing to wind turbine price escalation. Turbine manufacturers add large contingencies to the sales price to cover the warranty risk due to the possibility of premature gearbox failures. In addition, owners and operators build contingency funds into the project financing and income expectations for problems that may show up after the warranty expires.

and

Many wind farm operations and maintenance teams are so resource constrained that they are barely able to keep up with unscheduled maintenance repairs. Even regularly scheduled preventative maintenance such as gearbox lubrication and oil changes are falling behind.

and

I wish no one the hell we are living in ! Do not let them fool you just to make money on your home and neighbourhood like they did to ours. Wind turbines close to your home is nothing but torture... Protests do not often help - the democratic rules and ordinary laws do not apply to wind turbines. Strange ! Then they, like we, find out the hard way that the noise is unbearable for human beings and that the shadows from the rotating blades in your home and garden drives you and your children mad. Just to look at the wind turbines rotating stresses you and finally you cannot stay in your own home. In Sweden many people have left their homes, many more are planning to. Nobody is interested in buying my house unless I make a huge reduction in the price.

and

-- the unpredictability of big wind energy is the equivalent of sabotage. In fact, it would be easier to deal with an eco-terrorist dynamiting a high voltage tower, than to deal with the violent fluctuations of power output from large scale wind.

and

some wind-farms are now being built solely for tax credits, and to fill renewable energy portfolios. Such "tax credit" wind farms are likely to end up idle and rusting in the weather -- never having generated significant power, but still having served the purpose of providing tax breaks for wealthy and cynical green investors.

Warren Buffet’s MidAmerican Energy project calculates that it can break even after six years, without ever producing any electricity. And Boone Pickens is offering his investors a 25% return on a 4000 MW wind-farm based entirely on federal tax credits.
(It has also been admitted that UK windfarms make more money from subsidy than from electricity) and

Pieces of blade are documented as traveling over 400 m, typically from much smaller turbines than those proposed for use today. In Germany, blade pieces have gone through the roofs and walls of nearby buildings.

Windmills are simply a scam promoted by those with political access. They can form no part of baseload & cost 10 times as much as nuclear. There is no case whatsoever for turning our countryside into an industrial landscape dominated by these useless & dangerous 300 ft monsters.

Labels: eco-fascism, Fear, Fixing the economy

Trinity A-Bomb test 1946

Among the various bits of evidence against the LNT theory (that radiation is dangerous even at low levels) & for radiation hormesis (that it is beneficial even as high as 260 mSv - 17 times the official unsafe level) was this:

In 1964, the cows exposed to about 150 rads after the Trinity A-Bomb in 1946 were quietly euthanized because of extreme old age.

Destroying data & scientific evidence is the 2nd worst crime in science, the worst being total fabrication. I thought this deserved deeper coverage.

I couldn't find anything new about the euthanizing but did find this pdf (p 29) from the report on Trinity

cattle that grazed on Chupadera mesa suffered local beta burns and temporary loss of dorsal hair (Hempelmann 1947, Hacker 1987, Stannard 1988). Patches of hair grew back discoloured. The army bought in 75 head of cattle from all ranchers, the 17 most significantly marked were kept at Los Alamos, while the rest were shipped to Oak Ridge for long term observation. It was estimated that the doses required to produce such effects were between 4,000 & 50,000 R, most likely around 20,000 R (Hacker 1987)

That must be it. This (page 4) refers to the EPA having maintained a cattle testing station at Oak Ridge since 1964 which I presume means they have taken over the military facilities once they had disposed of the evidence. Los Alamos also still have a facility which has been used for forensic tests on cattle mutilations.

By the somewhat varied units used to measure radioactivity 1 R seems to match 100,000 millisieverts so 20,000 R means 2 billion mSv!! This does not match the 150 rads mentioned, which would be a slightly more credible 15 million mSv & I suspect I am misunderstanding the units involved.

So we are talking about a herd in 1946 of between 75 & 58 cattle at Oak Ridge, depending on what happened to those at Los Alamos. That is a statistically significant number. We don't know how many were still alive in 1964 but if it was described as a herd being put down there must have been a fair number. The animals were a random selection from the cattle of a number of ranchers - the only obvious selection criteria being that they were the ones most effected or expected to be. That means their ages in 1964 should run from 0 to 7 years. Older than that they are no longer commercial & get sold. So in 1964 they were aged between 18 & 25. How "extreme" is that for well cared for cattle?

This chart provides the expected maximum life span for a variety of animals in years. Many of the values are based on record life spans taken from various sources.

Cow - 22

So when these cows were put down several of them would have passed the maximum longevity for cattle. Even if an assumption was made that none of those which had been adults in 1946 were more than 3 or 4 years old they would still be about to make records. If one assumes the LNT theory was being heavily pushed by government as the official truth one can see why they had to be disposed of. Because this is virtually irrefutable evidence of radiation hormesis & of it occurring even at high levels of radioactivity.

I regard the destruction of these animals not only as a crime against science but a crime against humanity since it has prevented study of a phenomenon that if made use of, over the last 46 years, could not have failed to extend many millions of lives.

My guess is that although the experiment was destroyed the files & results for the preceding 18 years could not have been since that would have made it blatantly clear what was being done & why. These records probably still exist filed in some warehouse beside the Lost Ark.

If so, bearing in mind how much easier it is to use data nowadays with personal computers available & that more information must have been collated about ordinary cattle providing control group statistics, it is possible, just from the measurements & death records left, to make a good calculation of the statistical effect of hormesis on longevity in large mammals. If so there is a PhD or perhaps even Nobel for some American who uses their Freedom of Information Act to get the data & use it.

A further thought occurs - did these animals have calves (it seems likely that at least in the early years when mutations were expected this would have been encouraged)? If so what happened to them?

Labels: eco-fascism, Hormesis, Science/technology