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The Radiation Exposure Lie

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Re: The Radiation Exposure Lie

#41

Post by thomasmg »

beders wrote: post #24

Wow, this was a cherry-picking peace of misinformation, conveniently ignoring the actual counts of people affected by Chernobyl. There's no safe dose of radiation, there's only statistics. And I'm not sure what this article is supposed to justify? Building power generation technology with the potential to make whole regions unlivable is ok now? Willfully creating hazards that can affect people for thousands of years,…

There are studies that show cancer risk is higher near a nuclear plant. The reason is likely that poorer people live near a nuclear plant; it's _probably_ not because of radiation. My point is: Just having nuclear plants nearby lowers the market price of the property. If there _is_ an accident, the market price of many properties drops to zero. That's why no insurance company will insure the full risk of a nuclear accident: the remaining risk is on the population and land owners. (Property owners may get compensated - paied by taxes.)

In Switzerland there is now again the idea to build nuclear plants, by some (I'm pretty sure the political party that initiated this gets a lot of money from the nuclear lobby - unfortunately the money flow is intransparent in Switzerland.) A recent study in Switzerland [1] has shown nuclear plant are not competitive with solar, wind, hydro, and batteries, not even taking into account that accidents are not fully insured.

[1] https://www.20min.ch/story/akw-debatte-neue-atomkraftwerke-l...

Re: The Radiation Exposure Lie

#42

Post by ShinyLeftPad »

beders wrote: post #24

Wow, this was a cherry-picking peace of misinformation, conveniently ignoring the actual counts of people affected by Chernobyl. There's no safe dose of radiation, there's only statistics. And I'm not sure what this article is supposed to justify? Building power generation technology with the potential to make whole regions unlivable is ok now? Willfully creating hazards that can affect people for thousands of years,…

> There's no safe dose of radiation,

The article claims the opposite with sources.

> there's only statistics.

You forgot about lies.

Re: The Radiation Exposure Lie

#43

Post by jenadine »

beders wrote: post #24

Wow, this was a cherry-picking peace of misinformation, conveniently ignoring the actual counts of people affected by Chernobyl. There's no safe dose of radiation, there's only statistics. And I'm not sure what this article is supposed to justify? Building power generation technology with the potential to make whole regions unlivable is ok now? Willfully creating hazards that can affect people for thousands of years,…

> ignoring the actual counts of people affected by Chernobyl.

Do you know what's the count?

Re: The Radiation Exposure Lie

#44

Post by deepsun »

> Fifteen people have already died of these cancers

Don't forget that USSR and Belarus authorities did everything to attribute illnesses to anything but radiation. And it's really hard to prove that some illness is _due_ to radiation anyway. The reporting was way less transparent and non-biased than in democratic countries.

Re: The Radiation Exposure Lie

#45

Post by Retric »

sjmcmahon wrote: post #32
Symmetry wrote: post #9

Even before Linear No Threshold was a thing scientists were doing experiments showing that dosing fruit flies with radiation all at once would lead to a highly mutated second generation, but spreading that radiation out over the course of a month wouldn't.

Most radiobiological effects for acute exposures are actually quadratic in dose - this applies to things like mutations, chromosome aberrations, and lethal events. The quadratic term relates (loosely) to interactions between damage from multiple ionising particles which are present in cells at the same time. When you protract exposures, more damage is repaired before subsequent ionising particles arrive, and you see…

> a topic of much more debate.

People who want to step away from linear no threshold seem to ignore the extreme likelihood people will get cancer at some point. Which means for any given population there will be many people who are really close to the threshold of getting cancer.

Studying the effects of radiation on healthy tissue isn’t therefore representative of the general population. You need population level data, and the sensitivity just isn’t there to be able to detect if their model is correct or if linear no threshold is correct etc.

Re: The Radiation Exposure Lie

#46

Post by KennyBlanken »

There's some very suspicious cherry-picking going on with the author's choice of Ukrainian milk and raw numbers (which is never how public health researchers describe impact from things like this, it's per-population stats and relative increases/decreases) about childhood thyroid cancer rates. For an unspecified region, presumably Ukraine, but the author doesn't specify...also suspicious.

Chernobyl is the northern part of Ukraine. The plume was highly directional and initially blew almost directly north into Belarus:

https://radioactivity.eu.com/articles/nuclearenergy/chernoby...

Not surprisingly, the majority of contamination was, overwhelmingly, in Belarus:

https://radioactivity.eu.com/articles/nuclearenergy/chernoby...

The author goes on:

"Radiation impacts on Scandinavia and Germany, where there were major fears about the effects of the fallout, were nugatory"

Well, yeah, because very little ended up in those areas comparatively?

If you wanted to trick the average person into thinking "wow even in the country where the reactor was, there was almost no health impact", the author's repeated choices in terms of information presented would be a fantastic way to do so.

The real facts: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16832789/

"The study carried out in Minsk showed 40-fold increase of the incidence of thyroid cancer in the years 1986-1994, in comparison to the period 1977-1985. An increase of the incidence of thyroid cancer has generally been observed in many countries after the Chernobyl accident."

Later the author goes completely off the rails with whataboutism talking about Bhopal (which he claims isn't well known. I say: it's probably one of the most famous chemical industry disasters of all time? and the China dam disaster, which is pretty well known, mostly because nuclear proponents bring it up incessantly.)

This is nearly as bad as the nuclear proponents who always compare nuclear to coal, when in the US alone solar is what's replacing nuclear at a ratio of 6MW of solar for every 1MW of nuclear, and coal has been getting phased out for well over a decade because it's expensive.

Re: The Radiation Exposure Lie

#47

Post by KennyBlanken »

throw0101a wrote: post #19

Reminded of something that Geraldine Thomas, founder of the Chernobyl Tissue Bank, wrote when the Fukushima drama was going on, "Look at the science – smoking and obesity are more harmful than radiation": * https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2011/apr/26/obesity-... > I can assure you that none of us are in the pay of the nuclear industry. I was anti-nuclear until I worked on the after effects of the Chernobyl ac…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism

Re: The Radiation Exposure Lie

#48

Post by duskwuff »

> Chernobyl is the only accident in commercial nuclear history that has exposed people to large enough doses of radiation to poison and kill them.

The Tokaimura incident (Japan, 1999) comes to mind as a counterexample.

https://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/Publications/PDF/TOAC_web.pdf

TL;DR: enriched uranium solution was poured into a tank with improper geometry and reached criticality; three workers were severely irradiated, and two of them subsequently died.

Re: The Radiation Exposure Lie

#49

Post by wat10000 »

throw0101a wrote: post #19

Reminded of something that Geraldine Thomas, founder of the Chernobyl Tissue Bank, wrote when the Fukushima drama was going on, "Look at the science – smoking and obesity are more harmful than radiation": * https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2011/apr/26/obesity-... > I can assure you that none of us are in the pay of the nuclear industry. I was anti-nuclear until I worked on the after effects of the Chernobyl ac…

That doesn't even make any sense. How can you compare the harm of completely different things with completely different mechanisms and exposures? And why would nuclear winter have anything to do with it?

Re: The Radiation Exposure Lie

#50

Post by BigTTYGothGF »

rozab wrote: post #25
epistasis wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Luckily? The NRC is considering it, hopefully they follow science rather than popular propaganda. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-026-69285-4 > in a world where there is no safe low radiation dose, it would be quite easy to generate the data to demonstrate this. This is the classic fallacy seeing an absence of evidence and using that as evidence of absence! And the lack of evidence goes both ways, it should be…

I am looking at their county level distance-to-power-plant map and it's literally xkcd 1138.

Try looking a little closer, and you'll find it's not. South Carolina and Tennessee are obvious discrepancies in one direction, as are New York up by Lake Ontario, central Pennsylvania, eastern Washington, and the Iowa-Nebraska border.
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