Chernobyl deaths estimated at somewhere between 56 and 1,000,000.

I spent yesterday evening watching Channel 4 "What the Green Movement Got Wrong". As an experience, it was less unpleasant than scratching my eyeballs with a Brillo pad, but only slightly so, mainly because I am not used to doing the Brillo pad thing, whereas I am only too familiar with seeing the green movement misrepresented on telly.

The programme was a reprise of Ch4s "Great Global Warming Swindle", only this time they stuck a studio debate onto the back end to try to forestall complaints. There was no attempt at balance in the film itself : it was an all-out attack on the green movement by a handful of alienated ex-activists like Mark Lynas.

Luckily the debate had FoE, Greenpeace and George Monbiot on to rebalance the outrageous bias of the programme. They did very well.

The programme was basically a paean of uncritical praise for nuclear power and GM food, both of which are necessary to save the world.

As part of the case, they claimed that the damage from Chernobyl was over-hyped. They quoted a UN report, led by the International Atomic Energy Agency, concluding that only a 64 deaths are attributable to Chernobyl.

So that's all right then. Or is it?

John Vidal has a useful survey of estimates of Chernobyl related cancer and deaths. Here we go:


Agency                                              Deaths so far    Cancers predicted           Deaths predicted

UN/IAEA/WHO Report                               56                                                  4,000

UN International Agency for
Research on Cancer                                                                                         16,000

Russian Academy of Sciences              200,000

Belarus National Academy of Sciences   93,000                 270,000

Ukrainian National Commission
for Radiation Protection                       500,000

Assuming there is no double-counting, that brings the number of deaths in Russia, Belarus and Ukraine up to 793,000. This figure is reinforced by a book  "Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment," by Alexey Yablokov of the Center for Russian Environmental Policy in Moscow, and Vassily Nesterenko and Alexey Nesterenko of the Institute of Radiation Safety, in Minsk, Belarus, who examined over 5,000 scientific papers.

They challenge the UN/WHO figures on the 56 deaths among "liquidators" who went in physically extinguish the fire and clean up the Chernobyl reactor.


"The book finds that by 2005, between 112,000 and 125,000 liquidators had died."

Yablokov was a contributor to the Greenpeace review on this link.

In summary, we have a bit of a discrepancy here.

Chernobyl related deaths lie somewhere between 64 and 1,000,000.  

What is the explanation?


Part of the explanation is that the UN studies only included papers in written in English in peer-reviewed literature. Peer-review is OK, can't argue with that since we require it for climate science, but in English? Since when has it been that knowledge is only valid if it is written in English? This is an outrageous, blatantly political attempt to exclude unwanted data.

I am aware that I am beginning to sound like a climate change denier here. This is an interesting role reversal: in the case of climate science, the sceptics are in denial; in the case of radiation science, the deniers have got their hands on the levers of power.

The fact is that radiation medicine is very highly politicised, which is affecting how people view the facts.

There are doubts throughout the science, beginning with the estimation of the effects of radiation arising from the Hiroshima and Nagasaki experiments. Prof Chris Busby shows that there are two distinct modalities, one from external radiation like gamma, and another from internal irradiation, where a particle is lodged in the tissues and irradiates its environs with repeated doses of alpha. This means that the orthodox view of dose is unfounded. He likens it to the difference between warming yourself at a fire and eating a piece of coal. Chris Busby also posits a Second Event theory to explain the how the biological effects of internal radiation are underestimated by the orthodox paradigm.

There has been no methodical data collection over Chernobyl. The IAEA/UN report suggests that we will never know. Basically, it is not in the interests of the IAEA that we should. The truth is not in them. Their sole raison d'etre is that nuclear power should forge ahead, come what may. To this end, it seems very likely that they have co-opted and corrupted the WHO and other UN agencies.

Mark Lynas may say that in taking this view, I am being unrealistic.

If accepting IAEA lies and distortion, and starring in propaganda films is the way ahead for the NewGreens, then I prefer to remain an old Green, thanks Mark.

Chris Addison wields the sword of Truth on HIGNIFY

Journalists are the Kings of Information, interpreting the world for we ignorant peasants who know nothing.  They process through the streets, basking in readerships measured in tens of thousands, clad in the gorgeous raiment of Truth.

I have just finished watching Have I Got News For You, the one with Martin Clunes and an Express journalist and Chris Addison. Chris majored on the inability of political journalists to grasp that this is a coalition Government, which means that two different parties are included. The journalists' underlying question since the election has been "But you are from different parties aren't you?" Which is a totally inane question, because it is perfectly obvious to all that they are from different parties. 

Anyway, he got loads of applause, and a lot of approval on Twitter. Well, quite a lot. For me, it was a huge relief to hear someone else criticising journalism.   If you the need to look at 25 blog postings by yours truly touching on journalism, click here.

Of all the professions, journalism is the least criticised. Doctors are always in the news for things that we got wrong, second only to politicians. Vicars and priests get the treatment, rightly. Cheating business men occasionally hit the news. Even judges are sometimes given a telling off. There was one, I remember anyway, one in my lifetime. Hand up skirt if memory serves.

Why, even organised criminals sometimes get taken to court and reported on.

But when do you ever read of a journalist doing something wrong. Like an editor? They never get criticised. Never. OK, once or twice Mr Clever Dick Anonymous Commentator, but not in proportion to their numbers and the number of mistakes they make. 

So Chris Addison may or may not be The Man, but he certainly is the little boy who said "The King isn't wearing any clothes!"

Today Programme: Kendall House: drugs and birth defects

The BBC Today programme reports of children in their early teens who were sedated in Kendall House, Gravesend, Kent, Church of England care homes in the 1970s and 80s producing offspring with birth defects.

The precise drugs were not spelled out in the Today programme, although Sparine (Promazine) and Valium (Diazepam) are mentioned but we can reasonably assume that they include major tranquillizers (Chlorpomazine, Haloperidol &c) antidepressants (Imipramine, Amitriptylene) and anti-Parkinson drugs such as Ophenadrine, Benzhexol and Procyclidine, because they were the standard issue drugs at that time.

The next step from the point of view of medical science should be to review the pregnancy of all mothers of children with birth defects to find out how many of them were given these drugs. Policy change should not have to await the conclusion of the science. The Bradford Hill Criteria are guidelines for deciding whether agent A caused condition B, but they are rarely applied systematically, since authority prefers to play around with the "no scientific proof" red herring that gullible corporate journalists are only too keen to buy into.

The data collected so far, 10 cases from Kendle House alone, means that there is a prima facie case for banning the use of drugs on girls, by the application of the Precautionary Principle.

Each woman has a finite number of eggs in her ovaries. The pregnancies occurred a number of years after the drugs were given, so it looks as if drugs given at that time affect the woman's whole stock of eggs. It seems from the Today report that the cases were collected by former Kendall House resident Teresa Cooper, whose three children all have birth defects. She set about contacting other previous residents, and has come up with this data. This is not the first time that important, ground-breaking ecological data has been discovered by non-scientists, and Teresa Cooper should be applauded for her work.

We can expect the pharmaceutical industry, the Church of England and the Department of Health to begin a long process of denial, obfuscation and delay, which will rely on "getting scientific proof" that the drugs caused the defects. This approach is wrong. There is no such thing as scientific proof, and the precautionary principle should be applied while research takes place.

This raises the question of how to treat psychologically disturbed children, or at least girls, without drugs. To be fair, drugs are used much less on children than before. There is evidence that they react differently to some psychoactive drugs:

A statistical analysis of paroxetine clinical trials in children and adolescents was conducted by the FDA in 2004. It indicated a statistically significant 2.7-fold raise in suicide behavior and ideation as compared to placebo. The trend for increased suicidality was observed in both trials for depression and for anxiety disorders.^[5]

Modern CBT psychotherapy is far more effective than the approaches we had in the 1970s. I would add to this the technique called "Cutting the ties" , which is an imaging technique that I and many others have found highly effective for overcoming the undue, negative influence of powerful persons in the child's life. Traumatic events (PTSD) can also be neutralised using the Mindfield's "Rewind" technique.

So. Another scandal unfolds, and the various authorities that we pay to look after our interests will be busy reaching for the broom and lifting the corner of the scientific carpet, instead of applying the principles of reason and humanity to the situation.

Rebuttal to John Gray's attack on the Greens in the Observer

John Gray, a political philosopher, writes in the Observer (20.1.2008) with an attack on the Green Movement.

He begins with a breathtaking assertion to the effect that Bush and the Greens have pretty much the same agenda. It would be ironic, he concludes, if “greens were to end up as much a threat to the environment as George W Bush”. He arrives at this remarkable conclusion on the basis that Bush and the Greens agree that it is our addiction to fossil fuels that is harming the planet.

The least that we could expect from a philosopher is that he would avoid logical fallacies, but in this case he is committing the fallacy of guilt by association.

He supports his association in the following line: “The aim should not be to master nature or turn it into a mere resource for humans to exploit, as Bush and the greens, in their different ways, end up doing”. There is no attempt on his part to provide evidence that the greens regard nature as a mere resource. Nature is indeed our resource for water, food and energy, but we have always fought to use the resources provided in a sustainable way, often to our political disadvantage.

The essay unwinds into an attack on the Green movement, in a series of breathtakingly unsubstantiated statements “…[the greens] are …resisting the most fundamental fact about the environmental crisis, which is that it cannot be resolved without a major reduction in our impact on the Earth”. Reducing our impact is exactly what green political philosophy is, and always has been, about.

“Green activists, free-market economists and religious fundamentalists may not seem to have much in common, but they are all agreed there can be no such thing as overpopulation, or at any rate, nothing that can't be solved by better distribution, faster growth or a change in human values.

This is not true. I was present at the Green Party Conference in the 1990s when we debated population in terms of the undeniable ecological limit of carrying capacity. I remember the thrashing the party got from the media for daring to suggest that the UK’s carrying capacity is already exeeded. I do not recall any political philosopher by the name of John Gray getting up to defend us. The Green Party still has policy regarding population limitation, based on understanding and education rather than coercion.

He attacks the solutions offered by environmentalists: “Unsightly and inefficient wind farms will not enable us to give up fossil fuels”. Here the philosopher is using the “straw man” fallacy – putting forward a misrepresentation of our position, which he proceeds to abuse. Greens are not offering wind as the sole solution. The basis of our argument is that the solar energy reaching the surface of the earth is something like 250,000 times greater than our total energy usage. The known technologies on offer are energy conservation, energy efficiency, wind, wave, tide, solar thermal, solar electric, solar concentration, and biomass (not to be confused with biofuels). Despite the best efforts of the British Government to sideline these technologies, they are available now, ready for deployment, and the fact remains that they represent energy revenue, as opposed to fossil fuels and uranium, which represent a finite energy capital.

Gray admits that “organic methods of food production can have significant benefits in terms of animal welfare and reducing fuel costs, but it does nothing to stop the devastation of wilderness that goes with expanding farming to feed a swelling human population”. Well, no. And burying oral contraceptive pills in the ground is not a good way of growing crops either, John. Organic farming is for growing food sustainably, not about limiting the population. Again, Gray is using the Straw Man fallacy, which leads him on to say “So conventional green nostrums are not all that different from Bush's business-as-usual policies”.

“Contrary to the greens, there is not the remotest prospect that the world will renounce the use of fossil fuels”. Well, as a matter of fact, they will if renewable energy becomes cheaper than fossil fuels. Demand on oil is about to outstrip supply, and the world economy is probably about to crash into the bargain, both factors that will tend to reduce fossil fuel use. There is certainly a titanic struggle about to take place over the issue of fossil fuel use, and Bush’s global warming denialism has been a part of that struggle.

Gray resorts to ad hominem arguments when he says that “a sustained capacity for realistic thinking, … is not the strong point of the environmental movement “ and worse, when he accuses us of being of unsound mind: “…demonising nuclear power is conventional green thinking at its delusional worst. In that use of the “appeal to ridicule” fallacy, he by-passes a mass of detailed arguments over the economy, safety, and limitations of nuclear power. He betrays his ignorance of these arguments by saying “Ask any competent energy economist and you will discover that no expansion of renewables can satisfy the demand for energy that is being generated in China and India”. So if in fact you are an energy economist that has spent long months putting together feasibility studies for renewables in India, you are ipso facto incompetent. Nice one John.

Of nuclear power, he says “Nuclear energy has well-known problems of security and waste disposal and it is nothing like a universal panacea. That is no reason for turning our back on nuclear, which is already virtually emission-free. Here he shows his ignorance of the calculation that the fossil fuels used in creating nuclear power stations and refining the uranium for use mean that Nuclear has CO2 emissions roughly 1/3^rd as high as gas, and lower grade uranium will need more energy to refine it than it will yield in use.

Finally, Gray implies that greens are against intelligent use of technology. This is not true: the renewable energy modalities that we advocate are all intelligent use of technology. We are rightly against facile techno-fixes which offer “jam-tomorrow” type solutions of the kind Gray offers when he supposes that genetically modified food has a part to play in feeding the world. The evidence for this is so scant that the drive to market GM foods is based on unscientific assessments based on the doctrine of substantial equivalence, which blanks out the detailed biochemistry of GM foods. Remarkably he tries to create a distinction between GM and “industrial-style agriculture, whose destructive impact is all too clear”, when no such distinction exists.

In conclusion the political philosopher John Gray has issued a farrago of fallacious arguments and unsubstantiated assertions trying to identify the Green movement with the aims of the Bush administration. It is to be hoped that the Observer will allow equal space for his rebuttal.

Gavin Esler Newsnight Science Blunder

I have just logged a complaint with Newsnight in protest at Gavin
Esler's question to the Greenpeace spokesman tonight (23rd October).

Esler asked "Is there any science that would make you accept nuclear power?"

That was a meaningless question.

Comprehension of the physics of nuclear power is a matter of science,
and I have no doubt that the Greenpeace spokesman was as competent as he
needed to be in his grasp of the science of nuclear power.

Acceptance or rejection of nuclear power is not a matter of science, it
is a matter of political judgement, and as a political programme Newnight
should know that.

It is a matter of balancing up risks and benefits. Some of these, such
as causation of cancer and leukaemia by internal radiation from ingested
radionuclides are indeed matters of science. Others, such as the
likelihood of a nuclear power station being hit by al Quaeda, are a
matter that can only be decided on by speculation.

So acceptance or rejection of nuclear power is a matter of judgement,
comprising many factors. The case against nuclear power has many
components, including questions such as the limited amount of high grade
uranium, the question of nuclear weapons proliferation, the lack of
meaningful insurance for nuclear power stations, the health effects of
radionuclides, the vulnerability of nuclear power stations to terrorist
attack, their vulnerability to sea level rise, the waste problem, and
the economic effect of sucking funds away from energy efficiency and
renewables.

How can "science" in the abstract, as presented by Gavin Esler, overcome
that case? The question was in the same category as "Have you stopped
beating your wife?" since it is designed simply to put the interviewee
in a bad light, as holding an unscientific view.

To show that I, as an example of an antinuclear campaigner of many years
standing am not absolutist about the matter, I can say that I would be
prepared to accept nuclear power, despite the above objections, if it
could be shown that a new generation of stations could neutralise and
make safe all the plutonium and other fissile materials in the world's
nuclear weapons stocks. But that it not a question "science", it is a
matter of political will.

The use of this question puts Newsnight in a bad light. An apology is
called for, or if not an apology, then a new programme, to set the
nuclear power and weapons debate fairly in the framework of the
political framework that favours nuclear power and nuclear weapons.

This might even happen if loads of people send email to: newsnight@bbc.co.uk