Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Subscribe to Comments:

3 Comments

  1. Another attendee didn’t really ask a question but made a statement to the effect that if he was an antinuclear activist of any stripe, this is just the thing that he’d like– another study about nonexistant health effects.

    Check the Twitter feeds. Good points there, such as “Jaczko is dancing around the question of the need for another health study.”

    Later in the day, a fellow from the LaRouche PAC asked ANS President Sanders and his panel if they supported fusion rocket ships to get to and colonize Mars. Mr. Sanders had a serious response: “I think the only way to get to Mars is with a nuclear powered ship.” The guy responded, “fission or fusion?” Sanders: “I don’t care.”

  2. Lisa put together a very nice interview with the Chairman. His responses made me think this is just a publicity stunt. He said that low doses from nuclear plants are lost in the wash from the other natural sources and that the study would not be of sufficient statistical power to confirm or disprove LNT. So it sounds like he is having the study updated for political reasons. I have no problem with it as long as nobody claims that we will truly learn something new

    Great job again by Lisa. Your interview drew out these crucial points.

  3. Curiously when asked if his requested NAS study would relate comparative health impacts of other fuels Jaczko maintained that the NRC only had jurisdiction over (commercial) nuclear facilities — which would be irrelevant to the scope a NAS study; when asked if government facilities (outside NRC jurisdiction) or only commercial plants would be included in the study he deferred: “NAS would have most of the responsibility for determining the appropriate scope” of the study.

    The Abt Associates study, more recent than the National Cancer Institute (NCI) survey, found that “Fine particle pollution from U.S. power plants cuts short the lives of nearly 24,000 people each year, including 2800 from lung cancer.”

    The NCI survey (published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, March 20, 1991), examined 16 types of cancer in 62 counties with nuclear facilities and compared them with control counties, yet survey results often can be interpreted ambiguously especially by the media and even the researchers and peer reviewers themselves e.g. a UK study widely refuted yet often cited (“Cancer Near Nuclear Installations,” David Forman, Paula Cook-Mozaffari, Sarah Darby, et al. Nature, October 8, 1987) shows even random geographic “cancer clusters” can be misinterpreted in statistical data.

    In contrast we already have vary good data on mortality clusters attributable to individual coal plants, most notably along the Ohio river valley: see http://www.catf.us/coal/problems/pollution_locator/

Recent Comments from our Readers

  1. Avatar
  2. Avatar
  3. Avatar
  4. Avatar
  5. Avatar

Similar Posts