On March 21, 2013, Ed Calabrese, professor of toxicology at the University of Massachusetts, gave a talk to Cato Institute titled A Looming Scientific Revolution in Environmental Regulation. During the talk he provided a brief history of dose response models, the evolution of regulations based on those models and then summarized his decades worth of […]
LNT
Study of Port Hope radium and uranium processing workers shows longer lives
The results of a study titled Mortality (1950–1999) and cancer incidence (1969–1999) of workers in the Port Hope cohort study exposed to a unique combination of radium, uranium and γ-ray doses have recently been published on BJM Open, which describes itself as follows: “An open access, online-only general medical journal dedicated to publishing research from […]
Radiation Superstition
By Robert Hargraves Nearly a million people each year die of breathing particulates from burning coal; the climate temperature may increase 2°C this century; more than a billion people have no electricity. Yet within our reach is a solution to these global crises of increasing air pollution deaths, climate change, and the growing populations of […]
Rockwell’s perspective on the history of nuclear power regulation
Ted Rockwell has been an active participant in the development of nuclear energy production in the United States since the very earliest days of the technology. He started his nuclear career as an engineering troubleshooter in 1943 at the site that is now Oak Ridge National Laboratory during the Manhattan Project. He was one of […]
Atomic Show #195 – Health effects of low level radiation
On Sunday, January 13, 2013, I had a conversation with Dr. Jerry Cuttler and Dr. A. David Rossin. Each of these distinguished gentlemen has a long history of working with ionizing radiation and studying its biological effects on human beings. Dr. Jerry Cuttler earned his PhD in 1964. He has performed radiation research, designed radiation […]
Understanding history of risk assessment models for chemicals and radiation
Edward Calabrese has published a fascinating and terribly important paper in the University of Chicago Law Review titled US Risk Assessment Policy: A History of Deceptionthat needs to be widely distributed and discussed. Here is the quoted introduction: Strategies to limit the general public’s exposure to toxic substances—via national standards such as community-based drinking water […]
Dr. Wade Allison – A revolution in radiation protection
Dr. Wade Allison, author of Radiation and Reason, recently shared a short paper titled A revolution in radiation protection that would lead to safer and cheaper nuclear power. He described it as “reference light”, explaining that his intended audience for this work is not the journal-reading academic community but the kind of people who want […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
