Industry views prevail on radiation risks

by Steve Rendall and Patrick Morrison

U.S. media coverage of the nuclear disaster in Japan contains vanishingly little serious discussion of the human health risks posed by the radiation escaping from the Fukushima nuclear facility.

In place of a discussion informed by experts on these risks, journalism largely conveys vague, industry-friendly reassurances, frequently including no sources with expertise on the health effects of radiation on humans.

New York Times reporter William Broad reported (3/22/11) that “health experts” deemed a radiation plume that had reached the U.S. from Japan to be harmless:

Health experts said that the plume’s radiation had been diluted enormously in its journey of thousands of miles and that—at least for now, with concentrations so low—its presence will have no health consequences in the United States. In a similar way, faint radiation from the Chernobyl disaster spread around the globe and reached the West Coast in 10 days, its levels detectable but minuscule.

Who were Broad’s “health experts”? He didn’t name any, unless you count the Department of Energy, which is better known for promoting nuclear energy than for its medical expertise. Broad wrote that the DOE said that the radiation plumes, in his words, “posed no health hazard.”

There is scientific disagreement about the risks of ionizing radiation. Some scientists hold that there’s no evidence that low-level radiation is harmful (e.g., Health Physics Society, 7/10), or insist, for instance, that the accidental radiation release at Three Mile Island caused little or no harm to humans (NRC Backgrounder, 8/09). But the prevailing scientific view is that there’s no threshold below which radiation exposure is safe—in other words, that all radiation, including the ever-present background radiation, is a potential health risk—and that the risk decreases linearly, so that even decreasing a radiation dose by 99 percent still leaves 1 percent of the risk. According to this “linear, no-threshold” model of radiation risk, a given amount of human radiation exposure will produce the same number of cancers, no matter how many people it is distributed among.

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