And The Propaganda Continues....

Arnie Gundersen at it again.

Let's dig in!

Since this video is long, I will just briefly point out the many fallacies employed to make you aware of them.  If further elaboration is desired, just leave a comment. 

1.  Gundersen is associated with his wife's company.  He hasn't been in the nuclear industry for decades.

2.  He says the chance of a meltdown is 1 every 6 years, because he adds Fukushima (3) to TMI (1) to Chernobyl (1) and gets 6 total - which is a math error.  And Fukushima is really one event.

3.  They then compare airline crashes with reactor failures.  If a plane crashes many people die.  If a reactor fails, the number of deaths depends on the extent of the failure.  For TMI, no one died.   For Chernobyl, many people died.

4.  Complex systems - a reactor is complex, but all the parts of a nuclear reactor are not associated with safety.  Likewise, an airplane is complex, but all its parts are not associated with safety.  Both technologies utilize redundant systems.

5.  Subsidies - coal, solar, wind are also highly subsidized.  But why mention that and ruin some good propaganda.   All of these technologies are dangerous to certain species of wildlife.

6.  Gundersen guesses on 1 million excess cancers from Fukushima.  Based on what?  A cherry-picked 1997 study of TMI which employs the ecological fallacy.  It's not "brilliant", it was criticized at the time by other epidemiologists.  Gundersen could use the 2006 National Academy of Sciences BEIR VII report, which avoids the ecological fallacy, but then, he couldn't scare you.

7.  Krypton and xenon are inert gases.  The don't concentrate in the lungs at all.  They are inhaled and then exhaled.

8.  Portland area - 100 disint. per second per square meter.  That's very low, just about background.  But Gundersen doesn't explain that.

9.  "The government didn't tell us".  I guess this doesn't exist.  The University of TX study (the 100,000 times greater than normal!) involved Xenon-133, which is not a particulate, it is an inert gas.   The increase in dose (notice how Gundersen avoids dose throughout the video because all doses are trivial) is from 16 uSv/day typically, to 16.4017 uSv/day while the gas is around (half life of only 5 days).  I could find no San Diego study, only one from San Franciso which shows no ill effect.  The third study, only illustrates that 10 particles per day are captured on a filter.  But there are plenty of radon decay particles in your house air right now.  What matters is the dose, which of course, is avoided.  Because the dose increase is trivial.

10.  Lung dose - the ICRP applies radiation weighting factors and tissue weighting factors to account for the mutation of cells.  But why let facts stand in the way of a good fable?

11. Waste disposal - whatever they dispose of, they dispose of.  Obviously, radioactive waste has to be disposed of and that occurs wherever independent nations choose to dispose of it.  But it's on Earth.

12.  Final cost comments - all energy sources are subsidized.  All industries are tightly knit with their regulators, people have to work.  The numbers associated with Japan are pulled out of thin air.