Monday, April 04, 2011

George Monbiot, Helen Caldicott and the Nuclear Consensus

There is a debate on Democracy Now! between Helen Caldicott, the anti-nuclear medic, and George Monbiot.

Basically George takes the broad consensus of the high level scientific community that discounts the effect of internal emitters, and the work of Ukrainian scientists. The latter are set aside because they were not published in the right journals.

So he believes that the deaths from Chernobyl were about 50, not 1,000,000.

He is stuck with the a false analogy between climate change science controversy and the radiobiology controversy.

This is interesting.

The fact is that the scientific community can and does get things wrong. That's how science moves: there is a consensus, new evidence comes along, there is a battle, and the consensus shifts.

With climate change, the consensus was that man-made CO2 cannot affect the climate. Over the last 30 years a huge body of evidence has built up showing that we can. This new view is resisted by politically motivated diehards, who rely on cherry-picking data to support their battered case.

With radiobiology, the old view is that external radiation should only be reckoned with, and internal emitters should be set aside. Predicted effects of a given amount of radiation on populations can be calculated from 50 year old datasets from the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and new empirical data that suggest greater damage are discounted.

Nuclear scientists tend to prefer the scholastic to the scientific method.
[Update:
This means that they estimate the amount of radiation that people have received, go back to tables based on the single dose of gamma radiation received by people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and from that calculate how much disease should have been caused. If there is more disease than their calculations allow for, it is put down to chance. This is scholastic, because it assumes that all truth is already known and written down.

The scientific approach on the other hand looks in detail at the radiation dose given to people affected by Chernobyl fallout, looks at the incidence of disease, compares the disease with levels existent before the disaster, and also makes comparisons with similar populations who were not affected by Chernobyl.

This requires an enormous amount of work. Much data collection was carried out in the Ukraine, but it was not published in Western, English language journals, and ended up being discounted by the UN report.]

The challenge for George Monbiot is to look at the work of Yablokov and be open to the data he has suggested that the effects of Chernobyl are far greater than the models espoused by the nuclear industry predicts.

The other question he needs to answer is whether he accepts that nuclear power should now take out fully comprehensive insurance, instead of the 1% insurance it currently enjoys.

I have tweeted both these questions to George, who has ignored them. If they questions are put to him repeatedly, he will have to address them.

[update 5th April;
A brisk debate has started over this matter. George has attacked Helen Caldicott's evidence. In an effort to get a cool overview, I have gone to the TORCH report commissioned for Green MEPs.

It seems reasonable, stressing the scientific uncertainties, in marked contrast to George, who seems very certain that only 56 or so died.

I think Monbiot's weakness is the difficulty in getting scientific data on epidemiological matters. It takes a massive amount of expensive work. Much work was published in non-English journals, which do not then reach the mainstream "peer-reviewed" journals.

This is going to be a messy and time consuming business. At present my priority is to prevent the escape of Fukushima radiation to the environment.

Estimates of the cancer burden in Europe from radioactive fallout from the Chernobyl accident.


Update ends]

10 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi there,

do you have some sort of reference for the 1,000,000 figure? I've been interested in Chernobyl since it happened while I was studying A Level Physics. I now have to teach it at secondary level.

JC said...

Does the scientific consensus actually discount the effects of internal emitters? Or is the probability for a person to ingest such a large does of radioactive substance, even after a nuclear accident, just considered too small to worry about?
@jessecusack

DocRichard said...

Anonymous
It is in the links provided.

JC

Chris Busby of Green Audit (www.llrc.org) has been pushing this forward for many year Slowly getting acceptance.
It is not neccessary to inget a large dose. The point itcles of alpha emitters sit in the tissues, giving tiny areas of surrounding tissues large doses of alpha.

Anonymous said...

Sorry Richard,

do you mean the 'article' she refers to when she says: "an article for the New England Journal of Medicine"

I can't find a link to a peer-reviewed paper in the links. I'm probably being thick, could you help please?

Anonymous said...

Found it Richard

here's a PDF I managed to dig up.

bit long....

http://www.strahlentelex.de/Yablokov%20Chernobyl%20book.pdf

Anonymous said...

this from Monbiot regarding the NY Academy of Sciences reference:

A devastating review in the journal Radiation Protection Dosimetry points out that the book achieves its figure by the remarkable method of assuming that all increased deaths from a wide range of diseases – including many which have no known association with radiation – were caused by the accident(15). There is no basis for this assumption, not least because screening in many countries improved dramatically after the disaster and, since 1986, there have been massive changes in the former eastern bloc. The study makes no attempt to correlate exposure to radiation with the incidence of disease(16).

Its publication seems to have arisen from a confusion about whether the Annals was a book publisher or a scientific journal. The academy has given me this statement: “In no sense did Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences or the New York Academy of Sciences commission this work; nor by its publication do we intend to independently validate the claims made in the translation or in the original publications cited in the work. The translated volume has not been peer-reviewed by the New York Academy of Sciences, or by anyone else.”

http://www.monbiot.com/2011/04/04/evidence-meltdown/

DocRichard said...

Another comment that did not get through:
Anonymous:

this from Monbiot regarding the NY Academy of Sciences reference:

A devastating review in the journal Radiation Protection Dosimetry points out that the book achieves its figure by the remarkable method of assuming that all increased deaths from a wide range of diseases – including many which have no known association with radiation – were caused by the accident(15). There is no basis for this assumption, not least because screening in many countries improved dramatically after the disaster and, since 1986, there have been massive changes in the former eastern bloc. The study makes no attempt to correlate exposure to radiation with the incidence of disease(16).

Its publication seems to have arisen from a confusion about whether the Annals was a book publisher or a scientific journal. The academy has given me this statement: “In no sense did Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences or the New York Academy of Sciences commission this work; nor by its publication do we intend to independently validate the claims made in the translation or in the original publications cited in the work. The translated volume has not been peer-reviewed by the New York Academy of Sciences, or by anyone else.”

http://www.monbiot.com/2011/04/04/evidence-meltdown/

DocRichard said...

Anonymous, sorry, my links are in this post: http://greenerblog.blogspot.com/2010/11/chernobyl-deaths-estimated-to-be.html

JamiePuddle said...

'The point itcles of alpha emitters sit in the tissues, giving tiny areas of surrounding tissues large doses of alpha.'

Yep, a single lone Radon atom sends off one alpha particle, possibly damaging one atom on its way - but there is evidence that cells can repair this. Contrast with a speck of plutonium oxide (insoluble) which sits on or in the cell, constantly bombarding it with alphas - that is what the cell can't resist, and is why plutonium is more harmful than 'background' radiation mostly due to radon.

Worth reading the actual UN report Monbiot quotes. It doesn't say only 56 died. It says that we can only prove 56 deaths - and admits that there may be thousands that we can't prove!

Monbiot actually said in an interview; 'Nobody has died yet from Fukushima'. So you can see his rather limited understanding of the effects of exposure to radioactive materials!

nader paul kucinich gravel mckinney said...

Fukushima Internal Emitters

An ill wind comes arising
Across the cities of the plain
There's no swimming in the heavy water
No singing in the acid rain

Absalom Absalom Absalom