New Chernobyl Study Challenges IAEA Report on Chernobyl Consequences

Forum posts

• 12 April 2006, 16:03

  The ’greens’ have lost the nuclear war, so they are now intent on trying to terrify people again with guess-timates of future health effects based upon wild and unscientific extrapolations of junk science.

  The real harm of Chernobyl to people, occured in the first two months of the accident (31 dead). The UN has used the best science (UNSCEAR 2000, etc.) to try and honestly define present and future health effects.

  The Greens on the other hand are using the nonsense of collective dose extrapolations from doses that are down to almost zero, and about a thousand times LESS than natural background radiation to try to stir up the fears once more. I could do the same with natural background radiation across the the world’s entire population as they do, and extrapolate out as far as I need to, to terrify people with the ever-increasing numbers of millions to die, but that would be as dishonest as their tactic. At 20 years after the accident, we’ve seen the worst already that the accident can do. Now we are seeing the desparate worst (perhaps) that the hysterical greens can invent. They should go back to dressing like killer tomatoes and GM corn. It fitted their clown image better.

  If this is the best science that they can do, they will lose even more ground in the battle for the hearts and minds of people in an energy critical world.

  John K. Sutherland.

• 13 April 2006, 17:48

  Hi,

  Whatever the findings I was in Tchernobyl in 1990 as student and I had the chance to visit the place included Pripiat town. Fortunately, I had also the chance to have many detectors with me.

  I well remember being there wearing my usual clothing and measuring radioactivity below the level of cambria or britany for example.

  I well remember the newspaper showing in the same place where I was standing, at the same time (reports showing people standing in june 1990), with all kinds of special masks and so on just for the purpose of making a good picture. I am sorry but this does not seem very serious to me.

  Furthermore, I also had the chance to work in Russia for a year and a half between 1992 and 1994. I knew people who were in the first group of decontamination there. They received a high dose but their life was not endangered. I also met people who were not there but got a certificate that they actually were (with small money they could get one and this would allow them to travel free of charge in the underground), I finally met people who were ready to say black or white for any money provided to them, either in Kiev or in Moscow.

  One knows that most of these accidents (Except for Bhopal - union carbide for example) translate into a reduced number of death since people are followed by doctors when they were not before. This is a fact not a calculation.

  One more issue: when exposed to small level of radiation, the human body develops hugher resistance to radiation afterwards. This is what occured to 99% of the people exposed.

  Cheers

  Sebastien

• 16 April 2006, 00:16

  As a further contribution. The (TORCH) report by Drs. Fairlie and Sumner is an attempt to heighten future radiation concerns throughout the world, especially as they relate to Chernobyl. This pits two scientists working for the ‘greens’ against the more than 100 Radiation medical specialists of the various branches of the UN. Of course, even one dissenting scientific voice might be correct, but not based upon the speculative data they present.

  The conference at which the report is to be presented by Dr Fairlie, is to be held in Kiev just before the 20th Chernobyl anniversary, and is a meeting of the usual anti-technology and anti-social suspects: mostly anti-nuclear individuals and organizations, and other related ‘greens’.

  At this point their agenda becomes immediately suspect. They have nothing to contribute to society except future unwarranted fear and manipulated hysteria; as usual. It is a case of them gritting their teeth and reluctantly accepting the last 20 years of empirical data which already revealed their never-ending duplicitous intent. They widely floated rumors in 1986 and a few subsequent years, about many thousands that had died and been bulldozed into mass graves (this did not happen); circulated other rumors of numerous birth defects (which never arose but which – through radio-phobia - sparked about 100,000 unnecessary abortions throughout Europe); decided that Down’s syndrome births in Berlin and other large cities were attributable to Chernobyl when it was obvious that they were not; blamed later radiation emissions on a later Chernobyl, when they were actually from large hospitals and their patients, in all major cities throughout the world; anticipated human and other genetic mutations related to the accident (also which did not occur); said that the forests and vegetation had been totally killed off and that the area would become a desert (wildlife now thrives there in superb health and diversity, as does the vegetation); and suggested that the region would be uninhabitable for thousands of years (some people never left, and are happier, more secure, and healthier for it). The rest could now return, except that politicians oppose it as it would kill most of the benefit programs, and the greens oppose it as it would be a further nail in the coffin of their deceitful mendacity since 1986.

  Having been shown to be repeatedly and magnificently wrong by undeniable history, they now fall back on the one tool that can never be denied by anyone: invent future deaths which no-one can yet disprove, by manipulating some very weak science. To do this they ignore the major differences in effects between acute and chronic doses; misuse collective dose statistics and extrapolate them out for many decades; they develop tables of data which show Relative Risk effects of less than 2 and suggest a significant health effect. Any scientist worth his qualifications knows that an RR of less than two or even three is unreliable and too shaky to place much credible reliance upon.

  The currently accepted social risks per sievert (Sv) of radiation dose, were derived from the Hiroshima/Nagasaki bombings of more than 60 years ago – still the only reliable data to the present time. These were massive ACUTE doses delivered in a fraction of a second and in which living cells receive the full damage possible in the briefest time. All public doses following Chernobyl were CHRONIC doses, mostly delivered at an ever reducing rate from 1986 forward, and usually far less than those received in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Cellular repair mechanisms are continually at work to mitigate all the small radiation effects spread out over time, just as they do from natural radiation, and have done for all life for the last few hundred million years.

  In Radiation Protection we assume that all radiation is harmful even down to zero dose (the Linear No Threshold (LNT) hypothesis), but this does not make it true; it is merely a convenient tool. Acute risks are assumed to apply to Chronic doses to make the radiation protection assumptions and process simple and uniform, but this over-estimates chronic radiation risks by a factor of up to about 10; ignores cellular repair mechanisms, and ignores a well defined beneficial process called hormesis, in which a small (still relatively large compared to natural background) amount of radiation is stimulating.

  The assumption of the validity of the LNT, is directly comparable to the invalid and obviously flawed argument, that if 1 person dies after taking 200 aspirin (a fatal dose), that we would expect one death in a population of 200 individuals where each of them takes one aspirin (200 person aspirin collective dose) and also expect one death for every 200 aspirins, distributed over whatever size of population. THIS is the fatality of the collective dose assumptions. I think you would have difficulty persuading anyone rational, that if a million people each ingest a fraction of an aspirin tablet such that they reach a collective dose of 200 aspirin in the entire group, that one of them will die because of the defined toxicity of aspirin.

  The total Collective Dose of about 600,000 person sieverts from Chernobyl is made up of some few who received relatively massive but non-fatal chronic doses, and millions who received doses considerably less than natural background radiation. For perspective, this collective dose should be compared with the collective dose each and every year to the population of the entire world from nature of 120,000,000 person sieverts, and which does not definably kill or injure anyone, though one can (dishonestly) calculate that it may do so (12 million deaths per year!).

  As further perspective for those who seem to be impressed with large – but actually meaningless numbers - each of us is exposed to natural radiation in the following inescapable way and without definable injury:

  From the Sky: About 100,000 cosmic ray neutrons and 400,000 secondary cosmic rays pass through us each hour; more if we live in high rises, or at elevation, as in Colorado.

  From the air we breathe: About 30,000 atoms of radon, polonium, bismuth and lead disintegrate each hour in the lung. In some high radon areas it can be even thousands of times larger than this without definable injury, though the EPA disagrees.

  From Diet: About 15,000,000 potassium-40 atoms per hour disintegrate within our bodies, and about 7,000 natural uranium atoms disintegrate each hour within us.
  From soil and building materials: Over 200,000,000 gamma rays pass through us each hour.

  In short, the TORCH report is unscientific. It does not see any difference between acute and chronic doses; it misuses population (collective) dose data – which is the entire basis of their argument; it lacks necessary perspective, especially on collective doses; and it misuses relative risk data.

  It was also annoying to see that the authors went to the trouble to wrongly define a ‘curie’ as 3.7E9 Becquerels, when any reputable student of radiation knows that a curie is 3.7E10 Bq.

  John K. Sutherland.

• 16 April 2006, 02:22

  It was not the IAEA alone that found less than 60 deaths directly attributable to Chernobyl and a maximum of 4,000 premature deaths (for this they used the Linear No Threshold model which is though by many scientists to be a gross exaggeration). The Chernobyl Forum is made up of eight UN bodies including the World Health Organization and the United Nations Environment Program, two organizations that are not known for down-playing health and environmental issues. The Greens should stop making up ne numbers with no evidence and except the 20 years of work done by the Chernobyl Forum. And thank goodness the Chernobyl accident was not so disastrous after all. Let’s get on with building nuclear energy to replace fossil fuels like coal and natural gas that emit massive amounts of greenhouse gas.