It Ain't Necessarily So: Nuclear Power

So let's look at nuclear power in a new series of excerpts. Actually I have no idea if this information will upset anyone. Most of it didn't seem like anything earth shattering to me. However, I honestly didn't realize this ...

In 1979, Columbia Pictures released The China Syndrome, starring activist actress Jane Fonda... Two weeks later, there was a real nuclear accident, at Three Mile Island outside Harrisburg, Pennsylvania...

Not surprisingly, fact and fiction became blurred in the public mind, and today, few people seem to realize that disaster was averted and no one in the plant or the Three Mile Island neighborhood was hurt. There was a small release of radioactivity, but the average dose received by a nearby resident was nine millirems — far less than received in a chest X-ray...

Seven years later a Soviet reactor in Chernobyl, Ukraine, exploded and about fifty people died. There were no confirmed deaths outside the plant itself. Radioactivity spread to the immediate area, and there were reports of thyroid cancer. But there was also an iodine deficiency — a risk factor for thyroid cancer — in the area. Today, the background level of radioactivity at Chernobyl is lower than that emitted by the granite of Grand Central Station...

[Theodore Rockwell summarizing the latest findings from the UN's Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation] :
"Some people died from the original explosion, some from fire, and I don't doubt some died from radiation. But they were all inside the plant. So it was an industrial accident, and we have seen far worse. As to the general public, they checked for iodine in the thyroid, and sure enough they found 1,800 children with thyroid nodules. But that part of the world is iodine-deficient — they were already having a serious public-health problem. Two kids with thyroid nodules were brought in and they died. But it turns out they were nowhere near the radiation. A third child died of something else entirely. As to the 1,800 people, they did not correlate with radiation dose at all. Some high-dose kids had no nodules, some low-dose did have. So it's not at all clear that they were ever related to the radiation, and the chairman of the original UN committee doesn't think they are related."

The Politically Incorrect Guide to Science