ScribbleLive

wow, Ian is onto something, there are lots of links there. These articles come to the conclusion that especially for children "norma/safe" levels of radiation are harmful to kids even if the plants are operating properly, and much worse if they blow up at TMI or Chernobyl and now Fukushima, and they're going by Strontium, which isn't even being measured compared to the Iodine and Cesium that they're worrying about decontamination around Fukushima. Now if Busby cited stuff like this he'd be a bit more credible. STANDARD MORTALITY RATIO ELEVATED 6-10 YEARS AFTER STARTUP
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
Int J Health Serv. 2006;36(1):113-35.
A short latency between radiation exposure from nuclear plants and
cancer in young children. Mangano JJ. Abstract Previous reports
document a short latency of cancer onset in young children exposed to
low doses of radioactivity. The standard mortality ratio (SMR) for
cancer in children dying before age ten rose in the period 6-10 years
after the Three Mile Island and Chernobyl accidents in populations
most exposed to fallout. SMRs near most nuclear power plants were
elevated 6-10 years after startup, particularly for leukemia. Cancer
incidence in children under age ten living near New York and New
Jersey nuclear plants increased 4-5 years after increases in average
strontium-90 in baby teeth, and declined 4-5 years after Sr-90
averages dropped. ...the very young are especially susceptible to adverse effects of
radiation exposure, even at relatively low doses.

www.scribd.com Here's that short latency paper, search for the title to find a copy of the doc. It mentions the "khalili" hypothesis that there are studies showing no unsual cancers besides thyroid after the chernobyl disaster, but everything else in the paper points to statistically scary increases in all kinds of bad stuff linked to radiation from both normally operating and melting down nuclear plants.

@Ian supra-linear... thanks that makes everything much clearer (hmm, looks liike not as bad as exponential)

@artnuke, yes it does mean increased risk with increased exposure, though it's not a linear function. Consider also the graphs for life in the Chernobyl exclusion zone www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov they're straight but are in fact non-linear log-log graphs, and they also show harm at every non-zero level of exposure. These graphs fall as number of living creatures declines with increasing radiation, and both axis are logarithmic. Radiation is manifestly is anti-life, or lifeocidal.

@Edano My reading of the technology review piece is that while animals and plants show some problems with mutations, the lack of people more than makes up for this and it's practically a wildlife refuge in some parts in terms of animal population growth. You just can't (or it's inadvisable) to shoot the animals to eat though.

@Ian, have you come across Dr. Louise Reiss and the Greater St. Louis Citizens’ Committee for Nuclear Information yet? Read more here: www.nytimes.com

@Edano, right, there are some who say the exclusion zone is a wildlife haven, when in reality it's a killing machine. Those claims of the true believers are ad-hoc observations -- look at the birds, look at the bees and all the lush trees, oh, the exclusion zone a veritable paradise before our eyes! But when Møller and Mousseau www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov actually went and counted the numbers of various species over differential contamination zones they found a one-one dose response to less life. And think about it, it only makes sense. At a certain distance from a given mass of nuclear fuel you'll die in minutes, further away for it, in hours, further still, in years ... And always as a function of the number of radiative traversals of your body, ie, the number of subatomic bullets fired into your cells. And just like the more bullets fired in a crowed the more people are hit and killed, the more subatomic bullets fired into your body, the more cellular and genetic damage and the harms that can entail.

@Edano , I believe that is because people don't drop like flies. If they did, like they used to with plague, cholera, typhoid fever etc, there would be no debate. Effects of low level radiation are just creeping different.

Parents in Japan may be interested in replicating Dr. Reiss' idea and have their children's first teeth examined for radioactive strontium.

@Edano, and he died from the sheer volume of subatomic disintegration caused by subatomic radiative bombardment. And if I recall Po210 is an alpha emitter, so really brutal massive subatomic ***ulative damage. I found a case in the literature of a Cs137 suicide; it demolished his heart.