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The Nuclear Power Industry After Chernobyl and Fukushima

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The Nuclear Power Industry After Chernobyl and Fukushima Claremont Colleges Scholarship @ Claremont Scripps Faculty Publications and Research Scripps Faculty Scholarship 12-25-2011 Science with a Skew: The ucleN ar Power Industry after Chernobyl and Fukushima Gayle Greene Scripps College Recommended Citation Greene, Gayle. "Science with a Skew: The ucleN ar Power Industry after Chernobyl and Fukushima,” The Asia-Pacific ourJ nal: Japan Focus Vol 10 Issue 1 (3), 2011. This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Scripps Faculty Scholarship at Scholarship @ Claremont. It has been accepted for inclusion in Scripps Faculty Publications and Research by an authorized administrator of Scholarship @ Claremont. For more information, please contact [email protected]. The Asia-Pacific Journal | Japan Focus Volume 10 | Issue 1 | Number 3 | Dec 25, 2011 Science with a Skew: The Nuclear Power Industry After Chernobyl and Fukushima ゆがんだ科学−−チェルノブイリ・フク シマの後の原子力発電産業 Japanese translation available http://peacephilosophy.blogspot.com/2012/03/gayle-greene-nu clear-power-industry.html Gayle Greene Science with a Skew: The Nuclear disinformation” and “wholly counterfactual Power Industry After Chernobyl and accounts…widely believed by otherwise sensible people,” states the 2010-2011 World Fukushima Japanese translation is Nuclear Industry Status Report by Worldwatch available Institute.3 What is less well understood is the (http://peacephilosophy.blogspot.co nature of the “evidence” that gives the nuclear m/2012/03/gayle-greene-nuclear- industry its mandate, Cold War science which, power-industry.html). with its reassurances about low-dose radiation risk, is being used to quiet alarms about Gayle Greene Fukushima and to stonewall new evidence that would call a halt to the industry. It is one of the marvels of our time that the nuclear industry managed to resurrect itself Consider these damage control pieces from from its ruins at the end of the last century, major media: when it crumbled under its costs, inefficiencies, and mega-accidents. Chernobyl released • The “miniscule quantities” of hundreds of times the radioactivity of the radiation in the radioactive plume Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs combined, spreading across the U.S. pose “no contaminating more than 40% of Europe and health hazard,” assures the 1 the entire Northern Hemisphere. But along Department of Energy (William came the nuclear lobby to breathe new life into Broad, “Radiation over U.S. is the industry, passing off as “clean” this energy Harmless, Officials Say,” NYT, source that polluted half the globe. The “fresh March 22, 2011). look at nuclear”—in the words of a New York Times makeover piece (May 13, 2006)2—paved • “The risk of cancer is quite low, the way to a “nuclear Renaissance” in the lower than what the public might United States that Fukushima has by no means expect,” explains Evan Douple, brought to a halt. head of the Radiation Effects Research Foundation (RERF), That mainstream media have been powerful which has studied the A-bomb advocates for nuclear power comes as no survivors and found that “at very surprise. “The media are saturated with a low doses, the risk was also very skilled, intensive, and effective advocacy low” (Denise Grady, “Radiation is campaign by the nuclear industry, resulting in everywhere, but how to rate 1 APJ | JF 10 | 1 | 3 harm?” NYT, April 5, 2011). the tides, seeps into earth and groundwater, and makes its way into the food chain and into • An NPR story a few days after us, adding to the sum total of cancers and birth the Daiichi reactors destabilized defects throughout the world. Its legacy is for quotes this same Evan Douple longer than civilization has existed; plutonium, saying that radiation levels around with its half life of 24,000 years, is, in human the plant “should be reassuring. At terms, forever. these levels so far I don’t think a study would be able to measure What is this Radiation Effects Research that there would be any health Foundation, and on what “science” does it base effects, even in the future.” (“Early its reassuring claims? radiation data from near plant ease health fears,” Richard Knox and Andrew Prince,” March 18, 2011) ******* The NPR story, like Grady’s piece (above), stresses that the Radiation The Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission Effects Research Foundation has (ABCC), as it was originally called, began its had six decades experience studies of the survivors five years after the studying the health effects of bombings. (It was renamed the Radiation radiation, so it ought to know. Effects Research Foundation in the mid • British journalist George seventies, to get the “atomic bomb” out, at Monbiot, environmentalist turned around the same time the Atomic Energy nuclear advocate, in a much Commission (AEC) was renamed the publicized debate with Helen Department of Energy (DOE). Japan, which has Caldicott on television and in the the distinction of being twice nuked, first as Guardian, refers to the RERF data our wartime enemy then in 2011 as our ally and as “scientific consensus,” citing, the recipient of our GE reactors, has also been again, their reassurances that low the population most closely studied for dose radiation incurs low cancer radiation-related effects, for the Hiroshima and risk.4 Nagasaki bombings created a large, ready- made population of radiation-exposed humans. “Ah, but the Americans—they are wonderful,” Everyone knows that radiation at high dose is exclaimed Japan’s radiation expert Tsuzuki harmful, but the Hiroshima studies reassure Masao, who lamented that he’d had only that risk diminishes as dose diminishes until it rabbits to work on: “It has remained for them becomes negligible. This is a necessary belief if to conduct the human experiment!”5 the nuclear industry is to exist, because reactors release radioactive emissions not only The ABCC studied but did not treat radiation in accidents, but in their routine, day-to-day effects, and many survivors were reluctant to operations and in the waste they produce. If identify themselves as survivors, having no low-dose radiation is not negligible, workers in wish to bare their health problems to US the industry are at risk, as are people who live investigators and become mired in bureaucracy in the vicinity of reactors or accidents—as is all and social stigma. But sufficient numbers did life on this planet . The waste produced by voluntarily come forth to make this the reactors does not “dilute and disperse” and largest—and longest—study of radiation-related disappear, as industry advocates would have us health effects ever. No medical study has had believe, but is blown by the winds, carried by such resources lavished on it, teams of 2 APJ | JF 10 | 1 | 3 scientists, state of the art equipment: this was propaganda.7 Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) funding. Since it is assumed in epidemiology that the The issue of radiation poisoning was larger the sample, the greater the statistical particularly sensitive, since it carried a taint of accuracy, there has been a tendency to accept banned weaponry, like poison gas. The A-bomb these data as the gold standard of radiation was not “an inhumane weapon,” declared risk. General Leslie Groves, who had headed the Manhattan project.8 The first western scientists allowed in to the devastated cities were under military escort, ordered in by Groves. The first western journalists allowed in were similarly under military escort. Australian journalist Wilfred Burchett, who managed to get in to Hiroshima on his own, got a story out to a British paper, describing people who were dying “mysteriously and horribly” from “an unknown something which I can only describe as the atomic plague… dying at the rate of 100 a day,” General MacArthur ordered him out of Japan; his camera, with film shot in Hiroshima, mysteriously disappeared.9 “No Radioactivity in Hiroshima Ruin,” ABCC examination of Hiroshima victim proclaimed a New York Times headline, Sept 13, 1945. “Survey Rules out Nagasaki The Japanese physicians and scientists who’d Dangers,” stated another headline: th been on the scene told horrific stories of people “Radioactivity after atomic bomb is only 1000 who’d seemed unharmed, but then began of that from luminous dial watch,” Oct 7, bleeding from ears, nose, and throat, hair 1945.10 There were powerful political incentives falling out by the handful, bluish spotsto downplay radiation risk. As State appearing on the skin, muscles contracting, Department Attorney William H. Taft asserted, leaving limbs and hands deformed. When they the “mistaken impression” that low-level tried to publish their observations, they were radiation is hazardous has the “potential to be ordered to hand over their reports to US seriously damaging to every aspect of the authorities. Throughout the occupation years Department of Defense’s nuclear weapons and (1945-52) Japanese medical journals were nuclear propulsion programs…it could impact heavily censored on nuclear matters. In late the civilian nuclear industry… and it could raise 1945, US Army surgeons issued a statement questions regarding the use of radioactive that all people expected to die from the substances in medical diagnosis and radiation effects of the bomb had already died treatment.”11 A pamphlet issued by the Atomic and no further physiological effects due to Energy Commission in 1953 “insisted that low- radiation were expected.6 When Tokyo radio level exposure to radiation ‘can be continued announced that even people who entered the indefinitely without any detectable bodily cities after the bombings were dying ofchange.’”12 The AEC was paying the salaries of mysterious causes and decried the weapons as the ABCC scientists and monitoring them “illegal” and “inhumane,” American officials “closely—some felt too closely,” writes Susan dismissed these allegations as JapaneseLindee in Suffering Made Real,which 3 APJ | JF 10 | 1 | 3 documents the political pressures that shaped atom.” Stewart was defunded and defamed.
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