Coal ash needs proper regulation and enforcement

Occasionally I run into people who are opposed to nuclear who tell me that they fight it because we do not need the power. They forget that about 35-50% of the electricity in the United States comes from burning as much as 1.1 billion tons of coal per year. It is important to me that…

Fear of radiation has ruined far more lives than exposure to radiation

Ted Rockwell, one of my favorite nuclear energy professionals, recently shared the following comment on an email list that was discussing a recent report about the National Academy of Sciences effort to learn lessons from Fukushima. This fact should be stated loud and clear, right up front: In every “nuclear disaster”. radiation injured few if…

Out of 110,645 Chernobyl clean up workers, 19 might have contracted radiation related leukemia

On November 8, 2012, Environmental Health Perspectives, a monthly journal supported by National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, National Institutes of Health, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, published a report titled Radiation and the Risk of Chronic Lymphocytic and Other Leukemias among Chornobyl Cleanup Workers. The report details the final results of a…

Conservative groupthink afflicts US nuclear energy industry

Though I have a deep and abiding respect for the vast majority of the people I have met who work in the nuclear energy industry, it is time for me to risk losing a few friends with some brutal honesty. Decision making has become unbalanced in the “conservative” direction to a point of a dangerous…

Health effects of radiation – items that caught my attention

A friend shared a link to a prize winning essay titled The path to reconstruction in Fukushima as seen through fieldwork in Eastern Japan. It was written by Jun Takada, Doctor of Science Professor, Sapporo Medical University. Here is a sample quote: Following the nuclear accident in Fukushima that occurred as a result of the…

Media coverage – Chevron’s Richmond, CA refinery versus SCE’s San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station

On Monday, August 6, 2012, Chevron’s refinery in Richmond, California erupted in flames, spewing thick black smoke that included a mixture of hydrocarbons, heavy metals, and combustion products high into the atmosphere. A shelter in place order was issued and several hundred people experienced enough pain and discomfort from exposure to the smoke to seek…

Science Controversies and Print Edition Limitations – Jacobson versus radiation biology specialists

Last week, Professor Mark Z. Jacobson, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University, stepped way outside of his area of expertise by publishing a paper titled Worldwide health effects of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident that claimed to quantify the number of cancers that may be caused by the radioactive material released…

Jacobson misuses LNT to purposefully exaggerate effects of Fukushima radiation

Mark Z. Jacobson, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University, has a well known belief that human society can be powered entirely by wind, water, and sunlight. He was a coauthor with Mark A. Delucchi for a November 2009 Scientific American cover article titled A Path to Sustainable Energy by 2030. The…

Radiation Victims Are Not Black Swans

By Ted Rockwell An increasingly used anti-nuclear argument claims “it is impossible to prove the non-existence of something,” therefore we can’t be sure that low-dose radiation is harmless. Some day we may discover victims of low-dose radiation, just as we one day discovered the existence of black swans – lots of them (in Australia). We…

Systematic Bias Discovered in Atomic Bomb Survivor Cancer Comparisons

A friend sent me a link to an important paper titled EVIDENCE SUPPORTING RADIATION HORMESIS IN ATOMIC BOMB SURVIVOR CANCER MORTALITY DATA. Here is a quote from the paper abstract: Calculations show that a correction for such a bias can lower the ERRs in the atomic bomb survivor data to negative values for intermediate doses….