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Tuesday, June 19, 2012

Caldicott Is A Pathological Liar

It's pretty much the same schtick I've addressed before, but I guess I'll go through the exercise again (video and comment below fold).  I stopped at about 28:30 where she shifts from nuclear energy to nuclear weapons:



There's that Chernobyl book which is no longer published by the NYAS because it was erroneous.  She says the WHO didn't study Chernobyl nor Fukushima.  Explain this and this.  And of course there's the photos of malformed kids...that's an old trick (one has to do proper epidemiology to show cause and effect.  The Russians didn't.  That's why the book was pulled, it wasn't because of a peer review issue).

She claims that IAEA and other international nuclear agencies only consider external radiation.  Just read the two previous links and you'll see she's lying.

She repeats her "if I lied, I'd be deregistered" claim, which itself is a lie because she has lied and she hasn't been deregistered (as far as I know).

She says a lot of the radionuclides which get into the environment haven't been studied from a "biological perspective".  Again, look at the previous links (two out of tens of thousands of studies) and you'll see they consider many radionuclides.

There is no human epidemiological evidence of increased genetic disease from radiation, though you wouldn't know it from her dishonesty.  We do calculate a genetic risk by using mouse epidemiological studies and the risk is very small.  See the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, BEIR VII, Chapter 4.

There are good reasons for not creating panic, because people can die.  That is a reality that the Japanese government had to deal with, but Caldicott is free to ignore.

Yes, our government is full of corporate prostitutes, but it's not just the nuclear industry.  It's a governmental problem.

And I knew it was coming..."you only need a millionth of a gram (of plutonium) to cause cancer".  I have a page addressing that lie.  A particle and a millionth of a gram are essentially the same thing.

She goes on about "hotspots" in lungs...that's not scientific, how much dose did they get?  She doesn't say because it would be trivially small.

She makes the leap of Sr-90 in Hershey's chocolates.  Just because Hershey's hasn't sued her doesn't mean she's right.  She needs measurement data, which she doesn't have.

Fetuses are not thousands of times more radio-sensitive than adults.  The risk estimate for cancer is 6% per Gray, for adult it's 10% per Sv (which is a Gy for gamma radiation).  For non-cancer effects there are dose thresholds which have to be met before effects are observed.

Then there's the "no dose is safe" lie.  It depends on the benefits.  If the benefits exceed the cancer risk than the dose is safe.  It's like eating.  You might choke on your food and die, but the benefits of eating far exceed the risks.  So ALL OF US, consider eating to be safe.  There are also safe radiation doses, but it depends on the circumstances.

I'll bet $3,000,000 that there won't be evidence of 3,000,000 people dead from Fukushima.  It's an easy bet based on the WHO report I linked to above.

There's the #4 fuel pool myth...if there's an earthquake it might collapse, but only a tiny fraction of the radioactivity would be released.

She thinks Fukushima means the end of Japan financially and the end of nuclear power, but we know today that Japan has restarted some plants and Egypt (see my post of today on the topic) is pursuing nuclear power.  Japan's restart will prevent its financial demise, that's why they're doing it.  The benefit is greater than the risk.

She says Obama is a captive of the nuclear industry even though he ordered the U.S. DoE to withdraw its license application for Yucca Mountain!  That's some captive! (Yucca Mountain has been researched for more than 30 years and was selected to be the site of U.S. high level waste disposal, much needed by the nuclear energy industry).

Nuclear power does not contribute greatly to global warming.  The uranium centrifuges could be powered by a nuclear plant.  That's the point, replace fossil fuel plants with nuclear plants and renewable sources.

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