Physicians For Social Responsibility Speak Irresponsibly

They have an anti-nuclear agenda and held a press conference earlier this month  The speaker compares a potential Braidwood (U.S. nuclear plant) accident with Fukushima.  Of course Braidwood is in Illinois, not likely to experience an earthquake of that magnitude nor a tsunami.  He does a similar thing with Indian Point (New York nuclear plant).

But why let facts get in the way?

He stated that hundreds of thousands will get sick and thousands will die from the radiation at Braidwood. At Indian Point it's tens of thousands of people killed, 100,000-500,000 people dying of cancer.

I'd say he made that up.

He mentions the manufacturoversy about low dose rate radiation being worse, which only exists in the minds of anti-nukes.  But he steers clear of going into it too much and sticks with LNT.  He lies about the age of the people in Hiroshima-Nagasaki study.  That study is still ongoing.  Why?  Because young people were exposed who haven't died yet.  As of 2007, 40% of the people were still alive, that's about 60 years later!

He mentions the 15 country worker study, which had dose data problem in Canada.  When Canada is removed from the data set, and the other 14 country's data was analyzed, no increased cancer risk.

I couldn't find the 2009 study itself, but here is a write-up that suggests no increased cancer risk (above LNT).  In fact, the risk was lower for workers compared to the public due to the "healthy worker effect".

The last study looks at several radiation worker studies and maps them against the H-N study.  Since there are large sources of error in the worker studies (compared to the H-N study), they show that the risk might be greater.  Of course!  That's why we rely more on a study with less errors!

So these studies don't "demonstrate the opposite" at all.

Yes, some pro-nukes are wrong to confuse a detection threshold with an effect threshold.

The speaker got his Techa River study and graph here, but the original report is here.  There is nothing to suggest that LNT isn't correct. 

Yes, radiation is harmful, but for the same reason we consider its use in medicine, we consider the benefits and risks in other areas.  Not "all radiation is dangerous"....as if the risks stand out beyond other risks which we don't typically describe as "dangerous".

Yes, children are 2-3 times more radiosensitive than adults, but at 20 mSv for 2 years (to use his example), then using BEIR VII and a background Japanese cancer risk of around 30% chance:

(1%/0.1 Sv) x (.020 Sv) x (2 years) x (3) = 1.2%

So their risk increases from 30% to 31.2%!!!