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Nuclear Fears Trumping
Reality in Wake of Fukushima
Fukushima Nuclear Plant
EMF Computer Protection
Magnetic Field Detector
January 30, 2012
New lessons are beginning to emerge from the Fukushima
earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear power plant shutdown. Amid
tens of thousands of deaths from non-nuclear causes, not a
single life-shortening radiation injury has occurred. Not
one!
Yet based on media coverage of the issue, many and perhaps
most Americans believe more people died from the nuclear
power plant shutdown than the earthquake and tsunami
combined. The reality is nuclear fears are taking a stronger
toll on residents near Fukushima than nuclear radiation.
Safe Radiation Levels
While some people in residential areas near Fukushima are
wearing cumbersome radiation-blocking suits, filtered gas
masks, gloves, and booties, there are many people living
carefree in other places like Norway, Brazil, Iran, and
India where folks have lived normal lives for countless
generations with radiation levels as much as 100 times
greater than forbidden areas of the Fukushima homes.
Few if any people decide where to live, or how to live, on
the basis of radiation level. There is no reason they should
start doing so now. Let the good people of Fukushima return
home and get on with their lives.
Regulating Mother Nature
Who gave the radiation police the right to give their
particular concern priority over all other considerations?
That question is not limited to Japan. A proposed European
Community directive dated Oct. 17, 2011 notes the
doses of radiation being regulated in Europe are small
compared to doses people receive in the normal course of
living.
Yet instead of reaching the commonsense conclusion that they
should therefore stop trying to regulate harmless doses of
radiation, they instead decided they have to regulate
Nature! They want us to wage an endless war against our
naturally radioactive planet, when there is good evidence
that without radiation, life withers and dies.
In November 2011 British radiation expert Wade Allison,
author of the book Radiation and Reason, proposed on
Japanese television that radiation limits be set the same
way other such limits are set: not by striving for the
lowest possible exposure, but by determining what is a safe
level of exposure and then including a generous safety
factor. The answer regarding radiation is about 1,000 times
the current “permissible limit.”
At Fukushima this is no abstract issue. People are being
told they cannot return home for an indeterminate period,
perhaps as long as two years. Efforts to decontaminate
residential neighborhoods may require stripping off all the
rich topsoil and calling it radioactive waste. This is
unnecessary and counterproductive to the health and welfare
of Fukushima-area residents.
Moderate Radiation Benefits Health
In 2002, U.S. Regulatory Report NCRP-136 examined the
question of establishing permissible radiation limits. After
looking at the data, it concluded most people who get a
small dose of radiation are not harmed by it and in fact are
benefitted.
That is what the science said: Most people would benefit by
receiving more radiation, within the hormetic or beneficial
range. According to the report, increasing radiation
exposure would reduce the incidence of cancer, and genetic
damage would be less than it would be without additional
radiation.
The scientific evidence is clear that, except for a few
identified hotspots, radiation levels at homes near
Fukushima are not life-threatening. The current restrictions
are based on a desire to be excessively cautious. No matter
how well-intended, this caution is cruelly destructive.
We have had three uncontrolled releases of radioactivity
from serious malfunctions of nuclear power plants: Three
Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima. In each of these,
radiation fears proved to cause much more harm than the
effects of the radiation itself.
Announcing that no amount of radiation is small enough to be
harmless has certainly been effective in creating and
nurturing a phobic fear of radiation when none is justified
by the facts.
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