I have finished watching Arnie Gundersen's latest video. Ian Goddard uses data from the United States National Academy of Sciences to explore the cancer risk of low dose exposure to radiation. Ian's results are not in agreement with many of the pro-nuclear folks. And certainly 20 mSv is not safe.
As a side note Arnie Gundersen is still making the claim that hot particles are an added risk. This apparently makes sense. If the radiator of a car sucks up hot particles which lodge in the radiator, why can't the human lung suck up hot particles which would then be lodged in the lungs?
Cancer Risk To Young Children Near Fukushima Daiichi Underestimated from Fairewinds Energy Education on Vimeo.
Cancer Risk To Young Children Near Fukushima Daiichi Underestimated from Fairewinds Energy Education on Vimeo.
Here is the transcript according to Energy News:
Transcript Excerpts [Emphasis Added]
[...] That gets me to the issue of BIER, Biological Effects of Ionizing Radiation. [...]
Now in Japan, the Japanese government is allowing people to go back into these radiation zones, when the radiation exposure is 2 rem. What that means is that they are willing to say that your chances of getting cancer are 1 in 500 if you go back into these areas that are presently off limits, and the exposure levels are 2 rem or 20 milisieverts in a year.
But it is worse than that. The number that we are using in the BIER Report is for the entire population, old people and young. And old people are going to die of something else before a cancer gets to them, whereas young people have rapidly dividing cells and they live a longer time, so they are more likely to get cancer. So if you go into the BIER Report and you look at Table 12-D, you will see that young women have a 5 times that number chance of getting cancer than the population as a whole. So young girls in the Fukushima Prefecture are going to get 5 times the exposure they would get from 2 rem. That means that about one in 100 young girls is going to get cancer as a result of the exposure in Fukushima Prefecture. And that is for every year they are in that radiation zone [at 20 milliSv/y]. If you are in there for 5 years, it is 5 out of 100 young girls will get cancer.
Now the BIER Report only addresses cancer, and of course, there are other effects of radiation that are not included in BIER, so it is actually worse than that.
Two more items: The first is that the BIER Report does not address hot particles. Now we have been over that extensively on the site, and you will see that imbibing it (a kid gets radioactive cesium on their hands and they swallow it, or breathing it in), is not included in the BIER Report.
And the last piece brings us over to Ian Goddard’s video, and that is this assumption by the Japanese and International Atomic Energy Agency, that at some point, this radiation is really so hard to measure that it does not count anymore. Well, the data indicates that just the opposite is happening. And that brings me to Ian Goddard’s video. I will be back at the end of the video to try to summarize everything we have talked about today. [...]
Well, I would like to thank Ian Goddard for that excellent analysis and sum up what all of this means. According to the National Academy of Sciences, the BIER Report, Biological Effects of Ionizing Radiation, the chance of someone in Fukushima receiving a cancer is about 1 in 500 at the threshold that the Japanese have set. But it is worse than that: Young girls are 5 times more radio-sensitive than the data indicates. So what that means is that at least 1 in 100 young girls is likely to get cancer if they go back in under those radiation limits. And that does not include hot particles and it does not include what Mr. Goddard has clearly shown is a problem of low-level exposures perhaps being worse than linear.