Even though he directed the pro-nuclear power documentary, Pandora's Promise.
He said:
“The new science is that there is a threshold below which radiation seems to have no epidemiological effect at all,” says Stone. “So that’s why these numbers can be played with and they might seem alarming, but people forget the huge number of people that die of cancer anyway.”
That isn't new science....that's old pseudo-science.
There is a STATISTICAL DETECTION threshold in epidemiology. But that is not the absence of a physical effect of radiation. Radiation damages DNA regardless of the dose.
In order to discern the excess health effect in a population, one compares the cancer incidence in an unexposed cohort with one that is exposed to the excess radiation. One has to be 90+% certain that any difference is NOT due to chance. This certainty creates a sort of statistical firewall between the two groups which depends on the number of people in each group. The greater the number of people, the lower the firewall (or, lower the confidence interval from 90+%, but then there is greater risk of fooling oneself that there is an effect, when there may not be).
Our best epidemiological study (many decades long, over $1 BILLION) is that of the Japanese atomic bomb survivors. In the 1960's the firewall (statistical detection threshold) was about 100 rem. In other words, we couldn't discern any increase in cancer incidence among those survivors who received less than 100 rem. As more time elapses, more excess cancers become self evident at lower doses. Today our firewall is below 20 rem.
This doesn't mean radiation has no physical effect below 20 rem. It means, given the number of people in the study, we can't statistically discern the increase in cancer incidence below that firewall today.
In the future, we may be able to discern with 90+% confidence, an increased incidence at lower doses. Or maybe using a greater number of people, we will be able to discern the incidence at lower doses.
An analogy is global warming. Each molecule of CO2 has the ability to trap a very tiny bit of infrared radiation. But you can't measure the global temperature increase from a new pound of CO2. It takes many, many pounds before an increase in temperature can be measured.
Don't confuse a measurement restriction, with the absence of an effect.
He isn't the only person connected with this movie having credibility issues. Stewart Brand was already in 2010 excoriated by Monbiot for telling porkies about DDT. And so on it goes.
ReplyDeleteAnd as Ed Lyman of the Union of Concerned Scientists writes:
> When Lynas says that in his previous life as an anti-nuclear environmentalist he didn’t know that there was such a thing as natural background radiation, or Michael Shellenberger admitted to once taking on faith the claim that Chernobyl caused a million casualties, the audience may reasonably wonder why it should accept what they believe now that they are pro-nuclear.
Well, the UCS says that they are neither pro- nor anti- nuclear power:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.ucsusa.org/nuclear_power/
Then they explain why they are anti-nuclear power:
http://www.ucsusa.org/nuclear_power/nuclear_power_and_global_warming/ucs-position-on-nuclear-power.html
Based on Lyman's logic the UCS should not be believed either.
Hmm. But did they claim silly things in defense of either position?
ReplyDeleteI wouldn't say "silly", but I would say overly pessimistic on nuclear power. Their claim that they are neither pro- nor anti-nuclear power is patently false. They are anti-nuclear power for all the same reasons most anti-nukes claim to be anti-nuclear, ie, because they don't feel the plants are safe or secure and then there's waste disposal.
ReplyDeleteObviously, they're not perfectly safe and secure, what is? But they are relatively safe and secure. If they'd stop fighting waste disposal siting efforts, there would be a solution to waste disposal. Instead, they're allowing the pro-nukes to demonstrate that high level waste can be safely stored at many locations above ground relatively safely.
Perhaps what they mean is that their opposition to nuclear power is not a priori but based on sound arguments. And in a way that's true... but of course clever people are good at disguising gut-level opposition behind what look like sound arguments.
ReplyDeleteActually storing nuclear waste above ground -- or at least reversibly -- is not a bad solution. I never liked the idea of "throw away and forget" for any waste, and for nuclear even less. And the amount halves every 30 years, for the first few centuries...
I don't know, but it seems to me it is a priori. If I wanted to improve human health, because I'm a concerned scientist, I'd be working on those things which most drastically effect human health. That could be anything from lack of exercise, to diet, to problems with medical care, etc. Nuclear power simply would be nowhere in the list of things to work on.
ReplyDeleteIn the U.S. no radioactive waste site operates on the "throw away and forget" principle. They are monitored for perpetuity, or until the waste can be shown to have substantially decayed.