Item: A study finds that between 1970 and 2009, melanoma skin cancer cases increased eight times in women aged 18-39, and four times in men, apparently from increasing use of tanning beds.
Item: Many of the evacuees around Fukushima are being allowed to move back into their homes because the low level of radioactive contamination poses no health threat.
What do these issues have in common? Two things; radiation, which in all its forms scares a lot of people, and choice, one of the most influential psychological characteristics that make radiation, or any risk, more scary or less. Together, these items provide a clarion lesson about how the perception of risk is subjective and emotional, and how that can be risky all by itself.
Consider the people who choose... PAY... to bathe themselves in carcinogenic radiation. Why? For a tan... for that 'nice healthy glow' society has come to associate with vigor and attractiveness. These people dismiss the risk by saying things like "It won't happen to me," which is known as Optimism Bias, or "I'm only doing it a little," fooling themselves that they are controlling the risk and therefore, somehow, they don't have to worry about the risk they are still taking. The more we feel we control a risk, the less afraid of it we are, and vice versa.
These are common psychological games we play with ourselves in order to do things we know are risky, because they offer some benefit and we want to do them. We play down the risk so we can enjoy the benefit. Driving after drinking or while using a cell phone to text or talk, weighing too much but overeating and not exercising, riding a bike or motorcycle without a helmet... there are tons of examples.
But a really big factor in how any risk feels is choice. A risk you choose feels less risky than if the very same risk is imposed on you by someone else. The cancer risk from radiation would feel completely different to those willing tanning bed customers if they were tied down and told that they were about to be tanned with radiation released from a nuclear power plant accident. (Ever been driving and talking on your cell phone, and you notice the driver in the next lane is talking on HER phone and weaving in and out of her lane and speeding up and slowing down, putting you at risk... and THAT makes you upset, even though you're doing the same thing? Like I said, there are lots of examples of how choice makes the same risk feel more, or less, risky.)
Now consider 67 year-old Akiko Tsuboi, who fled from her home in Tamura Japan near the Fukushima nuclear complex during the crisis last year, and has lived in emergency shelter housing since. She just returned to the house in which she raised her three kids, though low levels of radiation remain in the soil, and set out a vase of flowers to brighten the place up and said "I'm home!" Schools in Tamura will reopen soon.
That hardly seems to match the alarmist way some people talk about nuclear radiation, particularly opponents of nuclear power, who fear, often dramatically, that exposure to any dose is too high a risk to accept. In fact, while some radiation biologists believe that any dose does raise the risk of cancer, some studies (PDF) of the survivors of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki found that below a threshold, no biological effects could be detected in people who were within two miles of the detonations of atomic weapons. (That threshold is 100 milliseiverts. The levels in the soil in much of the Fukushima evacuation zone are well below that.)
Akiko is willing to accept that evidence, so she can enjoy the benefit of returning to her home, voluntarily. People who fear nuclear power are not, and one of those reasons for their fear is that radiation from a nuclear power plant accident is imposed on the victim. Same risk... very different feelings. Could there be a more clarion example of how risk is not some simple absolute truth, some set of facts and probabilities with which we can all agree? Risk is a feeling, a subjective interpretation of the facts and numbers through a set of subconscious instinctive and emotional filters that can make the same facts seem more scary, or less.
The real lesson is that this way of perceiving risk can be risky all by itself. As valid as our feelings feel, they sometimes cause us to be too afraid, or not afraid enough, and as this example teaches, that can raise new risks. It's raising the risk for people who aren't afraid enough of radiation and pay to expose themselves to a known carcinogen, and it's raising the risk for you and me., as excessive fear of the biological threat of radiation has lead to energy policy that favors fossil fuels, exposing us all to local particulate air pollution and global climate change.
Oops! These are lessons worth learning, in the name of keeping ourselves safer and healthier.
Follow David Ropeik on Twitter: www.twitter.com/dropeik
Can anyone say COFFERDAM, and it is going to be very expensive...
http://enenews.com/wall-100-feet-tall-be-built-underground-fukushima-daiichi-tepco-trying-prevent-contamination-ocean-construction-begins-tomorrow-ends-june-2014-photos/comment-page-1#comment-239376
The Nuclear Industry really got their money's worth on this bunch of Nuclear Baloney*...
Someone must know someone at AOL/HP to get this fluff piece posted!
Maybe the RISK of a Trillion Dollar Eco-Disaster is OK for the author but hey he is not living in Japan or having to have his Country pay for it YET...
* http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Nuclear+Baloney
"Seriously? LNT is not established science, it’s established policy. Ideology and policy are not science. I love Google and Wikipedia, but they don’t take the place of actual research. You need to go back and read the primary documents, review the actual data, read Hermann Mueller’s letters from 1946 and why he chose to ignore certain studies, understand the math of risk analysis, understand the Cold War environment under which LNT was adopted. The job of science is to understand. The job of ideology is to coerce. The people of Japan are not being hysterical, they’re being afraid because we told them to be. Without caring about the consequences. We know better, but sound bites don’t capture the subtleties of this problem."
"The LNT theory is an outdated and narrow interpretation on how to view the threat of radiation that was designed to accommodate the worst case scenario. Unfortunately it was never proven true and yet it is used by the regulatory and scientific community as fact. It’s called the linear no threshold (LNT) theory... It is based on the idea that any amount of radiation will cause harm to those exposed...Just because it is very easy to detect radiation, does not mean that it is dangerous..."
http://deregulatetheatom.com/2012/03/fukushima-foolishness-among-tohoku-terror/
http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=11340&page=311
Simply stated, the author is wrong. The risk of developing cancer among general public from 100 rem (1 Sv) dose of radiation is not 1/100, according to author of Forbes article, but 1/10. The risk of mortality from such a dose is 1/100. Similarly, he also got the projections for 10 rem (or 100 mSv) incorrect. These estimates are difficult to summarize, because they vary on the basis of age, gender, type of cancer or leukemia. But you can find them fairly well summarized here:
http://dels-old.nas.edu/dels/rpt_briefs/beir_vii_final.pdf
For a population of 100,000 exposed to 10 rem (100 mSv), BEIR VII suggest the following ERR mortality risk from exposure to radiation over the course of a lifetime: 410 (200 - 830 depending on age group) from all solid cancers if you are male, and 610 (300 - 1200 depending on age group) from all solid cancers if you are female. Death from leukemia far is lower at 70 for men and 50 for women. You be the judge if you're willing to roll the dice for a near 1% chance of winning the lottery (and hope you're not female, since women have a much higher relative risk, or below the age of 10).
"A collaborative retrospective cohort study was conducted to provide direct estimates of cancer risk after low-dose protracted exposures. The study included nearly 600,000 workers employed in 154 facilities in 15 countries. This paper describes the design, methods and results of descriptive analyses of the study. The main analyses included 407,391 nuclear industry workers employed for at least 1 year in a participating facility who were monitored individually for external radiation exposure and whose doses resulted predominantly from exposure to higher-energy photon radiation. The total duration of follow-up was 5,192,710 person-years. There were 24,158 deaths from all causes, including 6,734 deaths from cancer. The total collective dose was 7,892 Sv. The overall average cumulative recorded dose was 19.4 mSv. A strong healthy worker effect was observed in most countries. This study provides the largest body of direct evidence to date on the effects of low-dose protracted exposures to external photon radiation."
http://www.bioone.org/doi/abs/10.1667/RR0554.1
"Scientifically justifiable" does not mean "proven". It has never been possible to prove or disprove it by statistical methods, because the absolute risk is so low in comparison to natural causes for low dose / low dose-rates.
However, the latest research (this is from December of last year) is capable of directly imaging cellular repair processes in living cells after exposure to radiation, and the time evolution of "radiation induced foci" (RIF) as the cell finds and fixes DNA breaks.
http://newscenter.lbl.gov/news-releases/2011/12/20/low-dose-radiation/
Here's the punch line: “Our data show that at lower doses of ionizing radiation, DNA repair mechanisms work much better than at higher doses,” says Mina Bissell, a world-renowned breast cancer researcher with Berkeley Lab’s Life Sciences Division. “This non-linear DNA damage response casts doubt on the general assumption that any amount of ionizing radiation is harmful and additive.”
In other words, LNT is busted.
The main applications for this research are for evaluating radio-sensitivity and dose-response relationships in radiotherapy for cancer treatments (and other ailments). Not re-evaluation of radio-protective guidelines covered by LNT assumptions, and measurable and statistical correlations found in population and epidemiological research (among nuclear bomb survivors, those exposed to contaminated sites, people who work in power plants, miners, the general public, etc.). I know how much nuclear evangelists love to argue these issues, but I point you to the following literature review to evaluate the "ready for prime time" significance (and often misapplication) of this research:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1852676/
Really? I take it you didn't vaccinate your kids, then.
In any event, you are setting up a straw man and knocking it down. The research I cited has nothing to do with hormesis. It merely says the obvious, that living organisms have DNA repair mechanisms for DNA damage, which occurs from normal oxygen metabolism ("free radicals") as well as ionizing radiation. The difference with this new methodology is that we don't have to guess at how well the repair mechanisms work by inferring it from statistical studies. We can see them operating in living cells from controlled doses of radiation, down to the level of single-cell hits.
I don't understand your point about "showing it on the scale of population studies". That's epidemiology, the use of statistics to track disease. This is more like seeing the pathogen under a microscope.
You're right, the researchers' primary interest is in understanding the risk to normal tissue from radiation treatment of cancer, but I don't see how the conclusions would somehow be different for environmental exposures.
This is incorrect.
http://www.mext.go.jp/english/incident/1305901.htm
Many locations inside evacuation zone have annual integrated doses of 200 mSv/year or higher.
There's also a large list of town outside the evacuation zone, where air dose monitoring stations have been set up, with integrated doses above 100 mSv/year.
Futaba county Namie town Akougi Kunugidaira: 220 mSv
Futaba county Namie town Akougi Ishikoya: 127 mSv
Futaba County Katsurao Viillage Katsurao: 108 mSv
Futaba county Namie town Hirusone (location n5): 237 mSv
Futaba county Namie town Hirusone (location n11): 150 mSv
Futaba county Namie town Akougi (location n2): 130 mSv
Futaba county Namie town Akougi (location n1): 126 mSv
Futaba county Namie town Akougi (location n4): 123 mSv
Futaba county Namie town Minamitsushima (location n7): 122 mSv
Futaba county Namie town Minamitsushima (location n6): 104 mSv
There is so much inaccurate about this article, I think we may need a correction from the author (and an explanation of how he got the source material so wrong in this case)?
You said that: "Many locations inside evacuation zone have annual integrated doses of 200 mSv/year or higher". There are 2 out of 64 locations in the evacuation zone that are 200 mSv/year or higher. I think most reasonable persons would say that your statement is incorrect. 2 out of 64 is not "many".
I think you need to apologize to the author for your incorrect accusations.
Look at the distances. Evacuation zone is 20 km radius from the power plants. 10 air sampling stations outside of the 20 km evacuation zone have HIGHER integrated doses than 100 mSv/year. Red and pink shaded areas inside the evacuation zone show integrated doses in excess of 200 mSv/year.
There is nothing fancy or complicated about this. The author, and your assessment of the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) documentation, is incorrect.
Salute!
Faved, already fanned!
People CAN control outcomes by doing just a little of a supposedly risky activity and taking proper precautions while doing so. Smoking an occasional cigar or pipe is an activity with virtually zero risk compared to habitually consuming a few packs of cigaretts per day in hopes of becoming more like "The Marlboro Man."
Getting a little sun or visiting a tanning bed for short periods of time will stimulate beneficial results; habitually striving for the perfect tan and trying to maintain that look through all seasons carries risk that is orders of magnitude higher.
Making a quick "I'll be home soon" call using a hands free device puts no one at risk, carrying on emotional conversations while driving puts many at involuntary risk.
Living in an area where the ground contains enough Cs-137 to give an annual dose that is less than 100 mSv carries no excess risk according to honest analysis of studies like the Life Span Studies of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, the nuclear shipyard workers, the British nuclear workers, and the radium dial watch painters.
Being exposed to 1 Sv (1000 mSv) instantly during an atomic bombing imposes slightly higher chances of getting radiation related cancer.
Risk PERCEPTION is often based on consistent marketing campaigns designed to create fear. The fossil fuel industry has 100s of billions of dollars worth of motive to keep as many people as possible trembling about radiation.
How many Fukushima's will it take to make you accept that...
Fukushima is and continues to be a Trillion Dollar Eco-Disaster...
One question: Have tanning beds ever made thousands of square miles uninhabitable
In the area around Chernobyl, there lived a small number of very stubborn people, often women, who had been exposed to very little television or other media during their lives. When told to leave their homes, they simply refused. They have been living off of the land in the evacuated areas ever since the accident - which occurred in 1986, more than 25 years ago.
http://www.more.com/entertainment/food-travel/chernobyl-women-nuclear-holly-morris-pictures
As the PBS documentary titled "Radioactive Wolves" illustrated, wildlife that also has not spent its life being influenced by commercial media messages to fear radiation has also lived quite successfully in the evacuated areas.
http://atomicinsights.com/2011/10/what-should-radioactive-wolves-teach-critical-thinkers.html
Rod Adams
Publisher, Atomic Insights
Bureaucrats. Is that right, Rod? So these bureaucrats wene
Bureaucrats. Is that right, Rod? So these bureaucrats weren't following the advice of public health scientists when they made these decisions? If only you were the bureaucrat in charge. Then things would be different, right, Rod? You'd let kids play in all that highly radioactive dust, no problem, right, Rod?
"there lived a small number of very stubborn people, often women, who had been exposed to very little television or other media during their lives. When told to leave their homes, they simply refused."
I don't know of any women of child bearing years who refused to leave. Mostly old people refused to go. Do you have documentation on these populations, Rod? Or is that all classified?
"As the PBS documentary titled "Radioactive Wolves" illustrated, wildlife that also has not spent its life being influenced by commercial media messages to fear radiation has also lived quite successfully in the evacuated areas."
Really? A PBS documentary had the final say and longitudinal studies are not necessary, right? How expedient of you, Rod. I could point you to a documentary, Rod, but I won't. I'll point you to science instead
Google this
Elevated frequency of abnormalities in barn swallows from Chernobyl
The article quotes a study showing that tanning beds are one of the primary contributors to increased skin cancer rates; that disease being a major cause of death. In contrast, no public deaths, and no measurable public health impact has occurred as a result of using nuclear power in the US, over ~50 years.
Another pertinent comparison. Fossil fueled power plants (mainly coal) are known to cause ~20,000 deaths in the US, every single year. They are also the leading cause of our global warming (CO2) emissions. This compares to no CO2 emissions, and no measurable health impact from nuclear power. There is universal scientific concensus that the public health risks and environmental impacts of nuclear power are orders of magnitude smaller than those of fossil fuels.
The article is dead on at the end, about how undue fear of nuclear power and radiation has actually resulted in a huge increase in overall public health risk, as well as vastly increased environmental impacts.
Ha Ha Ha
According to LNT, if radiation is measured in Sieverts, it IS all the same, because that calculation already factors in the differences in ways of exposure and radiation type. This is really basic stuff.
I.e. the dose conversion factor for Cs-137 is 97 nSv/Bq for Inhalation (medium speed path, adult), 130 nSv/Bq for Ingestion and 3,5 ((nSv/a)/(Bq/m²)) for external exposure.
"1-2% of cancers are from commercial power plant radiation releases. "
This is, what this study suggests for the cohort of nuclear workers. Not general public.
"These studies are full of arbitrary chosen variables and assumption are made to "compensate" for various possible conflicting influences, that the slightest change in anyone of them would totally change the result. "
What does your study assume about smoking? Why do you like one study and dislike another?
Regarding the Ramsar study, you didn't read that closely either, as it says something about adaptive response (which is an accepted fact and easily reproduced i.e. in animal experiments). The authors explicitely say they did not want to make a claim about hormesis.
Note that none of your arguments touches the articles points. It's just another anti nuclear rant that could be posted below any other article with a nuclear topic.
If you believe in LNT, would you suggest that people living with high natural radiation (i.e. Denver, Colorado Plateau) should be evacuated?
Remove the "Love, Tolerance, Enlightenment", each of them is uncalled-for.
REMS and Sieverts is an attempt to take thousands of different poison and put them all on a single scale. Every poison is different. Fact of life and death.
Measuring the overall radiation using a standard Geiger counter, tells you very little. It does not tell you what the spectrum, the color of the radiation is, x-rays, gamma rays, alpha or beta particles. More sophisticated detectors do, but the are almost never deployed to the field. These detectors cannot even detect an alpha emitter through a piece of paper. If you inject an alpha emitter it is one of the worst cancer causers.
So first of all, we have essential zero data from the field that matters to the danger presented by the radiation. At best we have the overall emitted radiation as a proxy for probably other radiation and radioactive particles.
Ramsar study used 14 controls and 21 subjects. It never should have passed peer review, of course the HPS organization couldn't survive without nuclear power. The people of Ramsar are completely biased toward maintaining the myth the radium baths are good for you. It's really sad this has not been caught before.
They admit to using anecdotal evidence of no increased cancer rates.
They were duped by the Ramsar chamber of commerce!
http://www.probeinternational.org/Ramsar.pdf
That's a lie. We have gamma (and where needed alpha, neutron) spectrometer data. We also know that in case of a nuclear accident in a western plant, dominant isotopes are from iodine and caesium. Strontium levels are already a factor ~1000 lower, insignificant compared to natural background, and all the rest is in the ppm range.
"Ramsar study used 14 controls and 21 subjects."
First it's 10'000, now it's 35. That tell's a lot about your use of numbers.
The study's subject were blood cell counts, immunological changes and chromosomal aberrations, which are easy to measure. Your doctor is able to do the first two with a sample of ONE person. Once again: You do not understand what you are writing about.
The case of Ramsar has, since then, been confirmed by many other studies. Adaptive response to ionizing radiation is an established fact, you can find hundreds of scientific documents about it. Basically everyone with a X-ray machine who is willing to sacrifice a few mice is able to reproduce it.
Again, background radiation is a different spectrum, a different color, a whole different bunch of atoms.
External radiation is general not nearly as cancerous as injected particulate emitters of radiation.
Your 2nd sentence, above, is completely wrong. Both natural backround radiation (isotopes) and isotopes associated with nuclear power produce all types of radiation (alpha, beta, gamma), over the entire range of energies. Any health effects are from ionization of molecules, particularly in DNA. Ionizing radiation is ionizing radiation.
All differences in how isotopes behave in the body, energy levels, etc.., are fully accounted for in the dose calculations. Dose is dose, in terms of health impact, and the fact is that public exposures (doses) from nuclear power are several orders of magnitude below those from natural background, medical exposures, etc....
Even assuming LNT, nuclear power has negligible health impacts, many many orders of magnitude below those of fossil fuels.
Thanks
We have to learn to differ between enough and too much. All anti UV-propaganda use "too much" arguments and evidences. And with that approach, almost anything in this world could be made "carcinogenic". The latest study you refer to, from the Mayo Clinic, doesn't even have a reference to tanning beds in the report itself. Only in a comment from one of the authors in the press-release, spun to make it look like indoor tanning was to blame. The other fact is that nation-wide statistic shows that melanoma cases in the examined gender and age interval actually is shrinking, not growing. The county selected for the survey also happens to have 15 times more dermatologists per inhabitant than the US average. And, as we all know, the more police the higher crime-rate.
The dermatologists in USA is fighting for the control of a multi-billion dollar market for having indoor tanning confined to their clinics. And that is only one of their driving forces.
Have a look at this video. It will show what I mean: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F_CrPZLbkE8
Faved and fanned!
Dear author.
All radiation is not the same.
http://www.epa.gov/radiation/docs/federal/402-r-99-001.pdf
EPA radionuclide exposure coefficients
all radiation is different and routes of exposure matter.
LNT is the law of the world, and for good reason.
1-2% of cancers are from commercial power plant radiation releases.
http://www.bmj.com/content/331/7508/77.full
Just what LNT predicts.
"Ninety per cent of workers received cumulative doses < 50 mSv and less than 0.1% received cumulative doses > 500 mSv. "
Perceived safety can also be an illusion.
As it is with nuclear power.
You do remember that it was supposed to be 10,000 years before we would get a Chernobyl of a Japan, and we have had one every 25 years.
Your statement about 1-2% of cancers coming from nuclear plant "releases" is grossly misleading, if not an outright lie. The study you cite merely claims to support LNT, and suggests that 1-2% of nuclear worker cancers are from radiation exposure (many other studies disagree).
Even assuming LNT, cancer risks to the public from nuclear plants are completely negligible, due to the fact that releases (if any) are negligible, as are public exposures/doses. Nuclear plants cause, at most, a 0.1% increase in exposure for local populations, over natural background. Meanwhile, natural background varies by a factor of several, for different locations, and no correlation between background radiation levels and cancer incidence has ever been found.
No, the vast majority of studies support LNT. Hormiosis is the fringe science.
The world's largest study confirmed LNT and Leukemia being even worse.
Significant release was supposed to be 10 times less frequent (i.e., once per 250 years). With Fukushima, we've had one such event after ~50 years of (non-Soviet) nuclear power operation. However, it must be noted that such studies were considering the chance of an accident just happening (due to equipment breakdown or operator error) and not the effect of a massive (biblical) external event, like a 9.0 earthquake and/or a 45-ft tsunami. All in all, the studies were not that far off.
And of course, given all the lessons learned and improvements after Fukushima, the risk/frequency of large accidents will go down even further (substantially).
We have had 3 such events. not one.
Of course they won't change, big money cuts corners till things break.
Duh.
"According to the official “Risk Study of Nuclear Power Plants“, commissioned by the German Government in 1980
1
,
the total risk of a nuclear melt-down in a German nuclear power reactor is 2.9 x 10
-5
(that’s 0,000029 or 1 nuclear
meltdown in 30.000 years)."
http://www.ippnw-students.org/chernobyl/meltdown.pdf
The sad thing is that you think a meltdown every 25 years is ok, and you want to increase that to a meltdown every 5 years.
No, it's not. This is one of the big myths anti nukes promote to keep the gov breaks they need to survive.
http://www.epa.gov/radiation/docs/federal/402-r-99-001.pdf
EPA radionuclide exposure coefficients
all radiation is different and routes of exposure matter.
So these attempts to prove radiation is good for you are based on false assumption. For instance that external radiation is as bad as internal ingested hot particles.
Alpha does not even penetrate the skin, but it sure makes a mess in your lungs.
Remember when you hear about Ramsar and the other handful of examples where they claim hormiosis, that they are so rare, in comparison with documented cases of excess cancers, as to proof the point that LNT is correct, and these are just statistical anomalies. Not counter examples.
These studies are full of arbitrary chosen variables and assumption are made to "compensate" for various possible conflicting influences, that the slightest change in anyone of them would totally change the result.
In this study the changes the cohort from 2k people to 10k people without a good explanation. That's enough to reverse the findings.