Radiation: Are we getting the truth on its dangers?

I've stumbled across this post on the BBC news site from one Wade Allison, a nuclear and medical physicist, arguing the fear pandemic of radiation and its impact on the human body. Thought it may make an interesting read for those who have never come across it before like myself.

Nuclear radiation at very high levels is dangerous, but the scale of concern that it evokes is misplaced. Nuclear technology cures countless cancer patients every day - and a radiation dose given for radiotherapy in hospital is no different in principle to a similar dose received in the environment.

What of Three Mile Island? There were no known deaths there.

And Chernobyl? The latest UN report published on 28 February confirms the known death toll - 28 fatalities among emergency workers, plus 15 fatal cases of child thyroid cancer - which would have been avoided if iodine tablets had been taken (as they have now in Japan). And in each case the numbers are minute compared with the 3,800 at Bhopal in 1984, who died as a result of a leak of chemicals from the Union Carbide pesticide plant.

So what of the radioactivity released at Fukushima? How does it compare with that at Chernobyl? Let's look at the measured count rates. The highest rate reported, at 1900 on 22 March, for any Japanese prefecture was 12 kBq per sq m (for the radioactive isotope of caesium, caesium-137).

A map of Chernobyl in the UN report shows regions shaded according to rate, up to 3,700 kBq per sq m - areas with less than 37 kBq per sq m are not shaded at all. In round terms, this suggests that the radioactive fallout at Fukushima is less than 1% of that at Chernobyl.

The other important radioisotope in fallout is iodine, which can cause child thyroid cancer.

This is only produced when the reactor is on and quickly decays once the reactor shuts down (it has a half life of eight days). The old fuel rods in storage at Fukushima, though radioactive, contain no iodine.

But at Chernobyl the full inventory of iodine and caesium was released in the initial explosion, so that at Fukushima any release of iodine should be much less than 1% of that at Chernobyl - with an effect reduced still further by iodine tablets.

Unfortunately, public authorities react by providing over-cautious guidance - and this simply escalates public concern.

On the 16th anniversary of Chernobyl, the Swedish radiation authorities, writing in the Stockholm daily Dagens Nyheter, admitted over-reacting by setting the safety level too low and condemning 78% of all reindeer meat unnecessarily, and at great cost.


Bottled water was handed out in Tokyo this week to mothers of young babies Unfortunately, the Japanese seem to be repeating the mistake. On 23 March they advised that children should not drink tap water in Tokyo, where an activity of 200 Bq per litre had been measured the day before. Let's put this in perspective. The natural radioactivity in every human body is 50 Bq per litre - 200 Bq per litre is really not going to do much harm.

In the Cold War era most people were led to believe that nuclear radiation presents a quite exceptional danger understood only by "eggheads" working in secret military establishments.

To cope with the friendly fire of such nuclear propaganda on the home front, ever tighter radiation regulations were enacted in order to keep all contact with radiation As Low As Reasonably Achievable (ALARA), as the principle became known.

This attempt at reassurance is the basis of international radiation safety regulations today, which suggest an upper limit for the general public of 1 mSv per year above natural levels.

This very low figure is not a danger level, rather it's a small addition to the levels found in nature - a British person is exposed to 2.7 mSv per year, on average. My book Radiation and Reason argues that a responsible danger level based on current science would be 100 mSv per month, with a lifelong limit of 5,000 mSv, not 1 mSv per year.

People worry about radiation because they cannot feel it. However, nature has a solution - in recent years it has been found that living cells replace and mend themselves in various ways to recover from a dose of radiation.

These clever mechanisms kick in within hours and rarely fail, except when they are overloaded - as at Chernobyl, where most of the emergency workers who received a dose greater than 4,000 mSv over a few hours died within weeks.

However, patients receiving a course of radiotherapy usually get a dose of more than 20,000 mSv to vital healthy tissue close to the treated tumour. This tissue survives only because the treatment is spread over many days giving healthy cells time for repair or replacement.

In this way, many patients get to enjoy further rewarding years of life, even after many vital organs have received the equivalent of more than 20,000 years' dose at the above internationally recommended annual limit - which makes this limit unreasonable.

A sea-change is needed in our attitude to radiation, starting with education and public information.

Then fresh safety standards should be drawn up, based not on how radiation can be excluded from our lives, but on how much we can receive without harm - mindful of the other dangers that beset us, such as climate change and loss of electric power. Perhaps a new acronym is needed to guide radiation safety - how about As High As Relatively Safe (AHARS)?

Modern reactors are better designed than those at Fukushima - tomorrow's may be better still, but we should not wait. Radioactive waste is nasty but the quantity is small, especially if re-processed. Anyway, it is not the intractable problem that many suppose.

Some might ask whether I would accept it if it were buried 100 metres under my own house? My answer would be: "Yes, why not?" More generally, we should stop running away from radiation.

Wade Allison is a nuclear and medical physicist at the University of Oxford, the author of Radiation and Reason (2009) and Fundamental Physics for Probing and Imaging (2006).

I'd like to think he was right, I'm confident the human body can withstand a lot more than we would be led to believe. After all, if everyone backed nuclear power, the oil, and coal (where they still exist) power stations would all but fade into history.

I think the safest bet for governments to keep their stranglehold on the oil is to make people terrified of new technologies like nuclear power. The ruse is that the populace argue against it, the government argue for it when in a transparent society it would be the other way around.

However, I'd like to hear a few more biophysicists' comments on human tolerances to radiation before I start planning my holidays in the Ukraine

"WE" generally do not get the "Truth" about anything.
The FDA is not your friend
The CDC is not your friend
The WHO is not your friend
The USDA is not your friend
All these corporations lie to all of us
You really think government is on your side,.
AS all listed above are part of the government

don't fall for this "radiation is actually good for you" nonsense please. i mean yeah it's right that we don't want everyone panicking, but the truth isn't being told about what's happening at fukushima. the truth still isn't being told about chernobyl! there's other studies, that haven't got government/NWO bull# through them that estimate that chernobyl is the cause of up to 900,000 deaths!! also, research thorium (i think that's the correct spelling) then you might come to a different conclusion about nuclear power.

reply to post by woodnut86


radiotion is VERY healthy havent u heard,the latest news is that smoking now also is good for u ,as is running through a red light,jumping of tall buildings,shooting urselff in the head ,eating rat poison,hanging urself,
thats now all considered very healthy,not as healthy as radiotion offcourse,thats just like vitamin c

In the Cold War era most people were led to believe that nuclear radiation presents a quite exceptional danger understood only by "eggheads" working in secret military establishments.

To cope with the friendly fire of such nuclear propaganda on the home front, ever tighter radiation regulations were enacted in order to keep all contact with radiation As Low As Reasonably Achievable (ALARA), as the principle became known.

A lot of that friendly fire wasn’t friendly fire. The hype was being backed by people that were sympathetic to outside governments (think Russia). Their thinking was that if they made us scared of the effects of such a nuclear war, that it would undermine our willingness to engage in such a war. That would allow them to defuse the “MAD” doctrine.

That would allow them to get away with nuking a small country. We wouldn’t retaliate in support of our allies because we would be too afraid of the effects of a nuke exchange with them to defend ourselves or our allies.

We would be so afraid of a nuke exchange that we would capitulate if we were invaded, or suffered a small first strike, before launching a retaliatory nuke attack in self defense. Because we wouldn’t want to bring on a full nuclear strike.

It also had the side benefit of cutting ourselves off from a new energy source. They knew that nuclear energy was going to be a key energy source in the future, and if they could make us so afraid of it that we wouldn’t be able to use it, then it would cripple us as a country.


That is why I often have wondered if Chernobyl wasn’t an intentional accident. Something to make the western world frightened of nuclear energy. A monument for their saboteurs across the globe to point to and say “this is what nuclear power will bring you”

Heck, around a quarter million babies were aborted in European countries for fear of radiation……. The Russians were able to lay waste to a quarter million Europeans without lifting a finger. That is the same as a large nuke strike with no repercussions.

Sorry, can I just clear this up obviously since the last time I made a thread there's been a pandemic of sarcasmitis.

I haven't once said that radiation is healthy, and unless I've misconstrued the article neither have they. The point that is trying to be made is that radiation is not as harmful as is led to believe, but it is true in controlled environments it is beneficial to human health ie. radiotherapy/gamma knife etc.

Obviously general body exposure will not be healthy in larger quantities, but given the numbers stated in the article, we're living in borderline deadly doses of radiation at any given point anyway.

Just to reiterate, maybe the body can withstand more radiation exposure than we've previously been told?

Please read what's said properly before dripping sarcasm folks

Here is a movie/documentary about 25 years after Chernobyl
and the effects of the radiation on the young people
and their families.

They suffer, don't kid yourself into thinking it is overblown.
A lot of good information so far, but I am still watching it, just wanted to share it as I do.
It is not as quick of a death as we all have been told,
kind of a slow suffering as time goes on.

Has anyone else been seeing any other strange animals on the west coast lately or are there any more photographs of this fish??

2 years later and Fukushima remains completely un-contained, yes i have concerns about the governments of our world.

The number of 28+15 dead from Chernobyl must be a joke.

There are some estimates that the death toll from Chernobyl is as much as 1,000,000

spectrum.ieee.org...

while more 'conservative' figures come to about 9000 dead.

Global assessments made ten years after the accident and reported at an IAEA conference in 1996 estimated that in the long run, the toll from Chernobyl in terms of premature or "excess" deaths would come to about 8,650.

But because the number of "background" cancer deaths in the population most severely affected--the 600,000-800,000 involved in clean-up operations--would come to 825,000, most of the excess cancer deaths would be "hard to detect epidemiologically," said Elizabeth Cardis, probably the world's leading expert on the subject.

If someone claims there was only 43 fatalities from Chernobyl they obviously have no idea about radiation and its (long-term) effects. I can only call this deliberate dumbing down of the general populace. And, by the way, the above link is not a fantasy site, it is a respected scientific publication. It is more than reasonable to initially estimate the death toll to "several thousands" with an unknown number upwards as a result, OF COURSE any mutation/cancers/deaths etc. following in the decades afterwards is difficult to *prove* and attribute directly to Chernobyl, but nevertheless is REASONABLE to assume.

That's the problem with radioactivity, it has long-term effects which can range decades if not centuries.

reply to post by NoRulesAllowed

I can't understand how people are just forgetting about fukushima instead of trying to actually doing something before it destroys half the world. This is way scarier than Chernobyl.. and for me much closer to home.

According to the documentary I posted, the death from Chernobyl and after effects is somewhere around 2,850,000 people I think or somewhere in that area,(not sure how correct that is) and the life expectancy in the Ukraine had dropped and still dropping, in about 10-20 years it will be 55 years old, down from 75 years old.
Only 10% of the children are healthy, the rest suffer from 4 to 5 chronic illnesses at any one time.
The list goes on and on.

It points out even that people are being fooled into thinking that nuclear power is safe, but when you look at what happened to Chernobyl and the fact that it has not been fixed, not even close and everything they are trying to do is only temporary until technology can find a way to fix or get rid of the radioactive waste that was generated and still being generated.

There are still 3 "active" nuclear power plants on site at Chernobyl, and it could blow at any time AGAIN, (the 4th reactor) and almost has a few times.

The area that is unlivable still continues to grow, and as the nuclear magma breaks down into dust it will spread over a much larger area.

The containment unit they are working on putting over the reactor won't hold down the dust, and if there is a fire inside, there is nothing they can do and no plan as to what to do...the list goes on and on...

The truth is that nuclear power is deadly, and this is just Chernobyl, not Japans melted down reactor.

They have no clue how to control these things once they melt down.

Even after so many years, they are as clueless as when it happened.

So the truth is, it is a bad thing, no matter what anyone says, if they say anything otherwise, they are full of......


LIES!!!!!!!!

reply to post by Darkblade71


"Gulf War Syndrome" and the horrible birth defects in Iraq due to depleted uranium.

Just wait 10 more years and you'll see how many people have brain tumors from holding those idiotic cell phones to their heads 18 hours a day.

De-population - It's good for TPTB.

reply to post by Happy1


That's part of the reason why I won't own a cell phone!
2nd line and an emocon

The secret to this type of "soft kill" is time... the afflictions that will arise over the next 10 to 20 years will blend in with all other death causes,... one of their many perfect long-term weapons....