AlaskaDenise
In Memoriam
From Scientific American...
It is frightening to watch what’s going on with Japan’s nuclear plant at Fukushima. It is also worrying to watch the fear racing around the world as a result of those events, fear that in some cases is far in excess of what’s going on, or even the worst case scenarios of what might happen.
The Japanese are facing the danger of a meltdown and release of dangerous amounts of radiation into the environment.
But the world is facing the risk of getting the risk of nuclear power wrong, and raising the overall risk to public and environmental health far more in the process. It is vitally important to keep our fears in perspective as we weigh all our energy choices in a world confronted both by climate change, and by several hundred thousand premature deaths from local particulate pollution from burning fossil fuels each year.
There is serious trouble at the Daiichi plant. Explosions, releases of low levels of radiation, failure of cooling systems, damage to the nuclear reactor. A meltdown of at least some of the highly radioactive fuel seems frighteningly probable. The word ‘catastrophe’ is showing up more and more in the news, and is a realistic possibility.
But the Japanese themselves have taught us, in the most awful way imaginable, what the actual health danger of radiation like this might be, and we need to keep the lessons of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in mind as we assess how catastrophic events like this actually are.
We know from studying the survivors of those bombings, who were bathed in horrific doses of high level radiation - far worse than anything that could come from the Daiichi plant (or that came out of Chernobyl) - that ionizing radiation from nuclear energy is a carcinogen, but a relatively weak one. The roughly 100,000 survivors of the two atomic bomb blasts are known in Japan as hibakusha, and they are honored, and given special rights.
They have also been extensively studied, and 66 years later, by comparing them to cancer rates among Japanese not exposed to radiation, public health researchers estimate that only about 500 of the hibakusha died prematurely from cancer due to radiation exposure. Radiation-induced cancer killed roughly half of one percent of the exposed population. (This research is done by the Radiation Effects Research Institute, a Japanese organization supported by international public health agencies)
We also know that many of the children of hibakusha women pregnant at the time they were exposed suffered horrible birth defects. Studies of the atomic bomb survivors have also taught us, however, that there is apparently no generational genetic impact from radiation exposure. Kids born to parents who got pregnant after the exposure, were normal.
Based on studies of atomic bomb survivors, the World Health organization estimates the maximum lifetime death toll from cancer due to radiation exposure from Chernobyl, of roughly 800,000 people, will be about 4,000.
And what about environmental damage? A huge area around Chernobyl is off limits to humans for hundreds of years. But that’s to limit human exposure to ionizing radiation which, while dangerous, is less so than many of us presume. With people removed, wildlife in those areas is thriving
So why the nuke-o-noia? It is human nature that when we hear about a risk, we react quickly and instinctively, before we have all the facts, by interpreting the first facts we hear through what we already know. (The academics called this the ‘representativeness’ heuristic.)
(snipped)
And something called Confirmation Bias – we listen to and believe the people and information that confirms what we already believe - means that anybody predisposed against nuclear power will magnify the scarier aspects of what’s going on. (There is a long and frightening list of heuristics and biases that contribute to the instinctive way we make judgments here.)
On top of that, psychologists have found that risks have certain ‘personality traits’, psychological characteristics that make some feel scarier than others. Nuclear power is scary because it is invisible and odorless, which means we can’t detect it and protect ourselves, and feeling like we lack control makes any risk scarier.
Read more of this really good article at:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/b...arfear-2011-03-12&WT.mc_id=SA_CAT_MB_20110316
It is frightening to watch what’s going on with Japan’s nuclear plant at Fukushima. It is also worrying to watch the fear racing around the world as a result of those events, fear that in some cases is far in excess of what’s going on, or even the worst case scenarios of what might happen.
The Japanese are facing the danger of a meltdown and release of dangerous amounts of radiation into the environment.
But the world is facing the risk of getting the risk of nuclear power wrong, and raising the overall risk to public and environmental health far more in the process. It is vitally important to keep our fears in perspective as we weigh all our energy choices in a world confronted both by climate change, and by several hundred thousand premature deaths from local particulate pollution from burning fossil fuels each year.
There is serious trouble at the Daiichi plant. Explosions, releases of low levels of radiation, failure of cooling systems, damage to the nuclear reactor. A meltdown of at least some of the highly radioactive fuel seems frighteningly probable. The word ‘catastrophe’ is showing up more and more in the news, and is a realistic possibility.
But the Japanese themselves have taught us, in the most awful way imaginable, what the actual health danger of radiation like this might be, and we need to keep the lessons of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in mind as we assess how catastrophic events like this actually are.
We know from studying the survivors of those bombings, who were bathed in horrific doses of high level radiation - far worse than anything that could come from the Daiichi plant (or that came out of Chernobyl) - that ionizing radiation from nuclear energy is a carcinogen, but a relatively weak one. The roughly 100,000 survivors of the two atomic bomb blasts are known in Japan as hibakusha, and they are honored, and given special rights.
They have also been extensively studied, and 66 years later, by comparing them to cancer rates among Japanese not exposed to radiation, public health researchers estimate that only about 500 of the hibakusha died prematurely from cancer due to radiation exposure. Radiation-induced cancer killed roughly half of one percent of the exposed population. (This research is done by the Radiation Effects Research Institute, a Japanese organization supported by international public health agencies)
We also know that many of the children of hibakusha women pregnant at the time they were exposed suffered horrible birth defects. Studies of the atomic bomb survivors have also taught us, however, that there is apparently no generational genetic impact from radiation exposure. Kids born to parents who got pregnant after the exposure, were normal.
Based on studies of atomic bomb survivors, the World Health organization estimates the maximum lifetime death toll from cancer due to radiation exposure from Chernobyl, of roughly 800,000 people, will be about 4,000.
And what about environmental damage? A huge area around Chernobyl is off limits to humans for hundreds of years. But that’s to limit human exposure to ionizing radiation which, while dangerous, is less so than many of us presume. With people removed, wildlife in those areas is thriving
So why the nuke-o-noia? It is human nature that when we hear about a risk, we react quickly and instinctively, before we have all the facts, by interpreting the first facts we hear through what we already know. (The academics called this the ‘representativeness’ heuristic.)
(snipped)
And something called Confirmation Bias – we listen to and believe the people and information that confirms what we already believe - means that anybody predisposed against nuclear power will magnify the scarier aspects of what’s going on. (There is a long and frightening list of heuristics and biases that contribute to the instinctive way we make judgments here.)
On top of that, psychologists have found that risks have certain ‘personality traits’, psychological characteristics that make some feel scarier than others. Nuclear power is scary because it is invisible and odorless, which means we can’t detect it and protect ourselves, and feeling like we lack control makes any risk scarier.
Read more of this really good article at:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/b...arfear-2011-03-12&WT.mc_id=SA_CAT_MB_20110316
