When Radiation Is Not the Real Risk ...

Uranium (Nuclear Minerals) / Related Environmental Issues / Supporting Research

Date posted: 09/23/15

George Johnson opines that this spring, 4 years after the nuclear damage at Fukushima caused by the tsunsmis, a small group of scientists met in Tokyo to evaluate the deadly aftermath. No one has been killed or sickened by the radiation, a point confirmed last month by the International Atomic Energy Agency. Even among Fukushima workers, the number of additional cancer cases in coming years is expected to be so low as to be undetectable, a blip impossible to discern against the statistical background noise. But about 1,600 people died from the stress of the evacuation, one that some scientists believe was not justified by the relatively moderate radiation levels at the Japanese nuclear plant. Epidemiologists speak of stochastic deaths, those they predict will happen in the future because of radiation or some other risk. With no names attached to the numbers, they remain an abstraction. But these other deaths were immediate and unequivocally real. The government basically panicked, said Dr. Mohan Doss, a medical physicist who spoke at the Tokyo meeting. When you evacuate a hospital intensive care unit, you cannot take patients to a high school and expect them to survive. Among other victims were residents of nursing homes. And there were the suicides. It was the fear of radiation that ended up killing people, he said. All research like this is bedeviled by confounding factors, differences between populations that must be accounted for. Some are fairly easy (older people and smokers naturally get more cancer), but there is always some statistical wiggle room. As with so many issues, what should be a scientific argument becomes rhetorical, with opposing interest groups looking at the data with just the right squint to resolve it according to their needs. This is the case here....