Columbia Journalism Review critiques Associated Press;
A lot of cancer is more newsworthy than a little cancer, or so seems to be lesson of an Associated Press article about possible consequences of the Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster in Japan.
With a long-term population study of the impact of just getting under way, the AP set out to do a bit of enterprise reporting, asking what it might find with regard to cancer rates. The answer: “cancers caused by the radiation may be too few to show up” in such studies because “the ordinary rate of cancer is so high, and our understanding of the effects of radiation exposure so limited.” As the AP reported, “that could mean thousands of cancers under the radar in a study of millions of people, or it could mean virtually none.” Yet overall, its article is clearly structured to induce at least a modicum of fear. After all, scary stories sell papers.
And now a reader in the nuclear industry critiques CJR;
What’s ironic about this story is that the CJR criticizes the MSM for neglecting the notion that there will likely be no increased rates of cancer due to Fukushima, but they themselves seem to be unaware that there’s the distinct possibility that cancer rates could actually decrease. It’s known as hormesis, the effect of low levels of stressors which could provide positive biological benefit. Just as vaccination introduces minor toxins in order to prepare the body to fight major diseases, low levels of radiation exposure can help the body to better combat certain forms of cancers.
But since that goes against the official storyline, don’t hold your breath for even moderate voices to discuss this in respectable news media.
More: A different Fukushima flashback from James Delingpole, along with this related item from Scientific American.
Related update: “These findings mesh with those from numerous other studies that point to a sweet spot at which radiation becomes a help rather than a harm to human health.”
That Scientific American article is part of the “Close the Coal Plants!” propaganda storm that Barry made use of in his election campaign. The logical gaps in it are both obvious and insulting.
Oh, and notice the total lack of math or numbers in the article. “Scientific” American? As if.
Yes, coal plants AND nuke plants have increased background radiation, and the amount of human exposure increase is LESS than flying Buffalo to Phoenix. Which is less a dental x-ray.
Lies of omission.
Meanwhile;
[Germany pledges to shut down all its nuclear plants by 2022 following Fukushima disaster] mailonline
The main stream media is the biggest problem the world faces. It causes all kinds of grief. Why do they do it? Incompetence? Agenda? Dumb? Clueless?
Fukushima didn’t matter though – the world had already ended because of the BP oil disaster in April 2010.
Humans are notoriously inept at objective risk assessment. Big Media and Big Green unfortunately depend for their livelihood upon dramatic, emotional fear mongering recognizing that, since they have little of real value to offer, one can squeeze more money out of peoples’ limbic systems than their cerebral cortexes.
If I’m not mistaken, even Chernobyl, the worst nuclear accident ever, resulted in far fewer casualties than originally projected and indeed lower than the Vajont dam disaster in Italy in the 1960s. Every reasonable effort should be undertaken to make any power source as safe as possible. But science and sound statistical methods should govern risk/benefit analyses, not raw emotion and hysteria.
Yeah I recall a buncha hand wringers organized a programme of bringing “exposed” Ukranian children here to Canada…”to give them a break.”
These kids were thoroughly examined medically and basically that established that their health problems were not radiation but the effects of long standing malnutrician from being in the Soviet Society….
Basically except for some very small localized “hot-spots” there is no real reason for the extensive “exclusion zone.”
For pity’s sake…the melted core itself still lays in the parking lot..under a pile of Gravel….
Because “the China Syndrome” is a Hollyweed myth….( by the time a melting core manages to maelt it’s way out of a containment structure…however flimsy…it is diluted to the point it ceases to be critical(stops reacting).
Other than a multiple time increase in leukemia which is itself quite rare, increases in cancer in Hiroshima and Nagasaki are barely statistically significant. This study said that to 1978 340 cancers could be attributed to radiation and 10,000 were considered normal. That is not a disaster.
http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=940&page=329
It is really hard to find websites with an apparent neutral stance as everyone seems to be pushing a point. I remember reading that cancer deaths in Hiroshima and Nagasaki increased from something like 15 % of deaths to 16%. Significant if the 1% is you but otherwise not a disaster.
How on Earth did things get this bad? I mean, really! It’s not that people now are more corrupt, more incompetent, stupider than they have been. ‘Twas ever thus. What explains the apparent fact that the professional liars think they operate under license to lie? Culture of mendacity, indeed.
The Delingpole piece, and especially the Lewis Page bit, is delicious. Thanks, Kate.
Scar, the total number of excss deaths from Hiroshima and Nagasaki from the entire population exposed at the time is approximately 600. The total exposed population was approximately one million in the region. However, the life expectancy of this same group of Hiroshima and Nagasaki survivors is significantly longer than the Japanese national average.
What has always been in the medical literature ever since, though never mentioned by the media, is that these results show that radiation is a relatively weak causation of cancer, compared particularly to very high causation factors like smoking or chronic exposure to benzene.
Sasquatch: “…the melted core itself still lays in the parking lot..under a pile of Gravel…”
Not quite. Of the entire inventory of uranium and plutonium in the Chernobyl core, 99 per cent of it remained in the reactor. All of it melted and flowed down through holes in the reactor vault into the floors below. Of the 1% which escaped, all of it fell out within 1/2 km.
Of the fission fragments, about 40% of the cesium and strontium escaped, nearly all of it falling out within 10-50 km. Of the Iodine 131, virtually all of it escaped, falling out on a global basis.
Now in the case of Fukushima, all of the uranium and plutonium remains in the core. A small fraction of the cesium and strontium escaped, most of it plating out on the interior structures of the reactor containment. Of the Iodine 131, a small fraction of it escaped, primarily waterborne, not airborne like Chernobyl. Aside from traces, it was all local to the plant site.
One other little point of interest, what was discovered at Three Mile Island was that the core of that reactor did not have enough heat to melt through the containment vessel. As the molten fuel flowed down the sides, its surface area expanded, accelerating the cooling. In the case of Fukushima, as BWRs the core penetrations are in the bottom, and some small amounts may have leaked through the seals. However, even leaking through the bottom seals, the melted fuel is still within containment.
DrD, the precise number of immediate fatalties at Chernobyl was 31, 30 from very high radiation exposure and one from bulding collapse. The subsequent number of fatalties from cancers induced by radiation is 25 to date, with all of these victims being plant workers and firemen receiving doses in excess of 2,000 mSv. Approximately a further 200 were hospitalized for radiation exposure.
Unlike Fukushima, the RBMK reactors at Chernobyl had no upper containment structure, and thus nothing to prevent the release of radiation once it escaped from the reactor vessel.
There has been claimed an excess of 1500 thyroid cancers (three of them fatal) among children in Belarus since the Chernobyl accident. However, there is no certainty in this claim for two reasons. First, Belarus has a naturally high natural level of thyroid cancer due to low-salt diets. Second, it is difficult to claim an excess when there is no reliable base line data of public health conditions prior to the accident.
A controlled dose of radiation is often used as a treatment for cancer. If the AP was reporting this, they would somehow attribute the treatment as the cause of the cancer.
Low level radiation used extensively in a hospital is highly theraputic but any level natural or otherwise in any other enviroment is considered dangerous. Right.
ron in kelowna asks: “Why do they do it? Incompetence? Agenda? Dumb? Clueless?”
I know that’s a rhetorical question, but it bears answering anyway, because the answer is important.
They do it TO SELL NEWSPAPERS. Even says that in Kate’s quote.
A much overlooked feature of Moral Panics is the huge amount of MONEY they create for the people pushing them. Just think about the square miles of newspaper advertising space that’s been sold by the DDT moral panic. The gun control panic. The global warming panic. The porn panic. The video gaming panic. I could go on and on.
They’re making money from feeding us BS. Want to make them stop? Unplug your TV.
ron in kelowna, all four, with the addition of Phantom’s phrase “to sell newspapers”.