Russell D. Hoffman on George Monbiot, 4/5/11:
Dear Readers,
According to British uber-pro-nuker George Monbiot in his column in today's Guardian (shown below), anyone opposed to the madness that caused Fukushima is a member of a "lobby"!
I suppose that means we have lobbyists, corporate funding, SEC and PAC violations, the whole nine yards.
He says we're all cherry-picking the data and basing our opposition on utterly unscientific conclusions.
Apparently, according to Monbiot, ANY additional radiation ANY member of the public EVER gets from Fukushima, in any dose, no matter what other radiation you receive in your life, and regardless of the prior condition of your immune system, is good for you! Or at the very least, harmless. That's Monbiot's stance, and he's sticking to it. He says it's what the science proves, and only conspiracy theorists disagree.
It appears that George Monbiot completely missed the distinguished Dr. John Gofman's entire career!
He missed Gofman's peer-reviewed studies of x-ray damage to humans (extremely "low" level radiation by most standards).
He missed Joe Magano's career too, and his (peer-reviewed) analysis of increased cancer rates around operating nuclear power plants.
He obviously completely missed Ernest Sternglass and Alice Stewart and Jay Gould and Chris Busby's and... well, you know. All of them. Far more than I can name. There's lots of scientific studies about radiation Mr. Monbiot had to avoid to reach HIS conclusions. Not that he's the only one who's avoided them.
And of course, George Monbiot had to completely overlook -- or rather, had to consciously avoid -- the thousands -- yes, George, thousands -- of scientists from Russia who have come forward to say that the facts are being actively suppressed about just exactly how much damage Chernobyl really did. And why it needs such a large exclusion zone. And why that zone ought to be even larger.
Mr. Monbiot never saw the sorry state of the liquidators and the downwinders as anything but normal. He wears rose-colored glasses and then denounces those who see clearly. He even accuses them of committing "a great wrong" that can only be righted by building thousands of new nuclear power plants as quickly as possible!
How many Fukushimas will it take for Mr. Monbiot to smell the caffeine in the coffee?
Let me try to explain a few things about statistics to Mr. Monbiot, who will surely claim he knows them already, but he acts like he doesn't, so I'll explain it anyway: Confounding Factors and Variance.
In any study of any randomly chosen population of a thousand people, perhaps 300 will get cancer. We all know the base cancer rate is between about 1 in 4 and 1 in 3, which, by the way, is a huge variance right there.
However, the variance between one randomly chosen population of a thousand people and another group of a thousand, also randomly chosen using exactly the same criteria, is likely to be much greater than the additional cancers caused by Chernobyl, even among those living fairly close to the reactor site. I think every scientist involved in studying Chernobyl would agree with that statement. But when there are hundreds of thousands, and even millions of people affected, the aggregate ADDITIONAL damage to the whole population can be quite substantial. And yet, hard to prove.
One reason for the variance from one sample group to the next might be "confounding factors:" Things the scientist didn't notice that affected the outcome of the study. Another might be the actual random variance among the possible populations that might be studied. No study can look at everyone, so samples must be taken -- a thousand people, for example -- and estimates concerning millions of people are then made, based on the carefully-analyzed data obtained from the sample population.
In any sample population of one thousand people, a single extra cancer out of the several hundred that will occur anyway would be statistically very difficult to measure, and impossible to notice any other way. One person, and their family, will notice it very much, but they won't know they're an "extra" cancer that shouldn't have happened. (Like the others should have, of course.)
10 extra cancers in a population of a thousand people, where several hundred will get cancer anyway, would ALSO probably be unnoticeable -- except to a very careful statistician.
Even a hundred extra cancers might be called an anomaly (certainly Mr. Monbiot would have such an explanation) or the result of poor data collection -- confounding factors -- and discarded.
Fault can be found with ANY study. That's one reason the Russian scientists who wrote the 2009 Chernobyl book reviewed THOUSANDS of studies. The IAEA reviewed a few hundred. Talk about cherry-picking...
I suppose one can look at the number of "potential" lethal doses being released at Fukushima and just simply assume that they will all be rendered harmless by the combined processes of dilution and radioactive decay.
For Iodine-131 released into the water, after 150 days or so, it will essentially all be gone and won't have made it to many foreign shores, except in fish caught off the waters of Japan and then flown elsewhere. And the doses will be so low, so soon... There's lots of water out there to dilute, dilute, dilute!
But what about the Iodine-129, with a half-life measured in millennia? What about the I-131 that is released into the air and is now falling on America's crops? What is the aggregate amount of radioactive Iodine being added to our nations's food supplies (let alone, to Japan's) and what quantities of what isotopes? Does Monbiot know or care? He can't know, because nobody knows exactly. He's shown that he doesn't care. If releases were ten times what they are, he still won't care. (This has actually been somewhat born out today because, in fact, there was a ten-fold increase in local contamination levels at the site, over yesterday, and I haven't heard that he's suddenly changed his mind.)
How many people will ingest these "low doses" of radioactive particles in their leafy greens, their root vegetables, their milk, water, or meats (if they eat meat)?
We are all filters for the environment. We breath in whatever is there. Some of it lodges permanently in our lungs, or enters our body some other way. Radioactive particles from Fukushima will be in everyone's bodies for a thousand thousand generations. Who signed on for this? I sure didn't! Our children and their grandchildren sure didn't, yet they are taking on the largest burden!
No matter what study George might find that says radiation doesn't harm fetuses, it does.
Mr. Monbiot is surely willing to admit -- okay, maybe not -- that vast quantities of poisons are being released. If actually given to humans directly (undiluted) enough poison is being released to cause thousands of lethal cancers EACH! That's thousands of cancers PER PERSON! We have to guess at the total. TEPCO's data is unreliable.
But everyone know what they say about a pound of plutonium, if distributed in everybody's lungs? That's basically what's happening right now. Japan is distributing highly carcinogenic radioactive particles into everybody's lungs. Yours. Mine. Everyone's. However, Monbiot welcomes them into his lungs, as does Ann Coulter here in the U.S..
Thousands of billions of lethal doses worth of fission products, activation products, uranium and plutonium have already escaped or been purposefully released from the plant, and deadly releases might continue for years, and might even get horribly worse.
Multiple reactor meltdowns might already be occurring, slowly. Slowly isn't much help. It's just slower.
Mr. Monbiot could admit that the real reason the evacuation zone isn't 50 miles, as the U.S. Government has been officially advising U.S. citizens, is probably that three enormous cities fall within that zone... You just can't evacuate that many people without trauma... and ensuing poverty... perhaps it would even cause riots and violence... Is New York ready to do the same thing at a moment's notice? And wait patiently in traffic as the winds from Indian Point blow over the city?
Mr. Monbiot could also admit, while he's at it, that Depleted Uranium is a cruel weapon, devoid of heart for the people who will breath its dust, years after the conflict it is used in. Even if he only believes in heavy metal poisoning, he should denounce such weaponry.
Mr. Monbiot wants peer-reviewed studies of low level radiation damage, and there's an abundance of that. Mr. Monbiot wants official studies sanctioned by the "scientific community" as if there is such an official organization that can sanction such things, and no scientific fact had ever been "hotly" debated before. What he doesn't want is an abundance of caution, or even a healthy dose of it.
But if all he wants are peer-reviewed studies, there's plenty of that. And there's plenty of evidence of cover-ups. Is it an "organized" crime, like The Mob or Wall Street? It all depends on your definition of organized, I suppose. DOE, IAEA, WNA and many other organizations certainly actively promote the crime against humanity of nuclear power. Pro-nukers don't need rallies in order to do their dirty work: They just need a few back-room deals, some taxpayer-backed government loan guarantees, and an unconstitutional law that shields them from culpability (known as the Price-Anderson Act in America, all nuclear countries have similar laws).
It's all very clean and polished. Like using a sterile needle to inject a lethal poison into a prisoner. What's the point of such antiseptic treatment? People are dying. Why?
Trees changed color, as shown on the cover of the book about Chernobyl which George Monbiot denounces. Why did they do that, George?
Children are suffering horrible deformities and meanwhile, radiation IS blamed by the scientific community as one of usually many causes of hundreds of different kinds of cancers, including bladder cancer which this author survived once already and doesn't look forward to a recurrence. WHY DO THESE PEOPLE HAVE TO SUFFER, MR. MONBIOT?
What if we're wrong? What if Stewart, Gofman, Sternglass, Gould, Mangano, Busby and all the others are wrong but the world follows their warning anyway?
That's not such a bad outcome: If the world's following their advice, we wouldn't turn to coal, as you suggest we would instead of nuclear. We would build solar solutions, which are perfectly capable of providing electricity for the population, without the risk. And we would stop creating enormous piles of fission products which have a proclivity to get out into the environment despite all the best assurances in the world.
That's the worst-case scenario! It's not a denial of global warming, as Monbiot claims it is. Instead, it's a BETTER solution whether global warming is real or not! It removes both the threat of global warming AND the threat of meltdowns. And anyone who thinks it can't happen just hasn't looked at the facts about renewable energy.
Maybe Monbiot is right: It's not a conspiracy. We're just all really stupid.
Whether Busby and all the others are right or wrong is almost irrelevant at this point. Any fool can see that a poison that the scientific consensus agrees there is no threshold dose to, no Hormesis effect except in very unscientifically "controlled" conditions and for limited observations of the full effects, no benefit whatsoever except electrons in wires, which can be obtained safely a thousand other ways -- any fool can see that such a poison shouldn't be created here on earth if possible (and it's very possible to live without nukes) and shouldn't be released into the environment if possible (and it's NOT possible to STOP such releases with nukes).
Any fool can see we've poisoned nearly seven billion people alive today, and all the billions who will come later, and George Monbiot, for one, isn't the least bit apologetic.
An activist posted an interesting question a few days ago on her Facebook page. What if "civilized" humans had created, say, 15,000 years ago, long before written records were kept, all this spent nuclear fuel that the rest of us had to take care of and stay away from for the past 15,000 years? What if?
Would we curse those people who created this problem? Of course we would!
Our generation will be cursed. Thank you for that, George Monbiot. Not.
Sincerely,
Ace Hoffman
Carlsbad, CA
The author's book on nuclear issues, which Mr. Monbiot has undoubted not yet read but will probably suddenly glide through it and denounce, is available online for free here: www.acehoffman.org . His essays for the past 15 years are available online as well. (Please see additional URLs below.) The author is a 54-year old educational software developer. His products, which he programmed himself and in some cased also wrote, include tutorials about pumps, statistics, the periodic table, and the human heart, and are used at over 1,000 colleges and universities around the world.
.
