From Hiroshima to Fukushima to You

This is the title of a book that is about to be published.

In writing this book, I didn’t want to come across as a know-it-all because I’m not.  I consider myself an expert in rural family medicine – I’m a jack/jill of all trades and master of some.

As I was growing up, I was always encouraged to “look things up” in our tiny behind-the-living room door set of shelves that was our library – it had a very fat short green dictionary that seemed to have almost every word that I looked up, a small encyclopedia set bought from Reader’s Digest on a book a month deal, and several atlases.

For some time I felt that there should be a book that linked the uses and abuses of ionizing radiation; I kept hoping that someone would write it.  It certainly sounded like a good project for Physicians for Global Survival. However, if PGS were going to write it, we needed assistance from someone who could “look things up”. Florian came to the Physicians for Global Survival’s office as part of a Master’s student community placement at a time that I needed help with some research.  He quickly produced material to satisfy the small project that I was working on and together we hatched up the idea of doing a sort of “ionizing radiation for dummies” book.

This became a scholarly thesis as he and I watched the framework evolve.  Florian did not have a scientific background; he was completing his Masters thesis in International Studies. What started as a student placement continued as the work grew. We were able to offer him a better salary than minimum wages at Canadian Tire. Flo fit into the PGS office; he drank tea, rode the bus and joined conversations. The framework of the book is entirely Flo’s with consultation. He was also the perfect skeptic – we didn’t argue but we did have lively discussions about topics or ways to present material that only served to improve the project. Flo was initially engaged as a research assistant but so much of the book was written by him that it is fully coauthored. I think that it is safe to say that he and I learned far more about this topic than we ever expected – in fact, I don’t think that we knew how much information was available about the field of ionizing radiation. We realized that we couldn’t write the “ionizing radiation for dummies” book – at least not before writing a book that explained the topic for ourselves!

What we discovered in our work was that we can not speak of the topic without defining it, its history, its science, how is it measured, what it does, how harmful is it, what can we do with it, its abuses, politics around its use and more.  We found that we were writing a history book, a social studies and political science book and a science and health care text.

Neither Flo nor I could have done this without the other.

Galileo and Nuclear Power: fact and fiction

In 1610, Galileo Galilei joined Copernicus in describing the sun as centre of the solar system. By 1616, he was called to the Inquisition and was forced to recant. Fortunately for us, his denial did not change the facts.

Today the same situation exists between the nuclear industry and the facts of its radioactive legacy.

The nuclear industry insists that low levels of radiation are not harmful to human health. Physicians know better. And so does most of the public. Background natural radiation is dangerous – eg. radon in basements and cosmic rays from the sun.

The US National Research Council came to the conclusion in 2008, after five previous reports, that “current scientific evidence is consistent with the hypothesis that there is a linear, no-threshold dose-response relationship between exposure to ionizing radiation and the development of cancer in humans.(1)” In lay terms, this means that there is no dose that is completely safe, just different levels of risk.

There has been more than enough evidence linking radiation and effects on health.

In 1954, the US dropped a bomb on the Bikini Atoll irradiating some of the Marshall Islanders and more than 7000 square miles of Pacific ocean. The United States funded a Nuclear Claims Tribunal which recognizes thirty-six conditions for which citizens can be compensated. Most of the conditions are cancer but mental retardation is included(2).

In 1985, the UK government established the Committee on Medical Aspects of Radiation in the Environment (COMARE) to respond to anecdotal reports of higher rates of childhood leukemia near the nuclear installation at Sellafield. The authors note a “serious excess of childhood cancer might be related to radioactive emissions from the nuclear facilities” but concluded that the emissions measured at the facilities were too small to explain this finding(3).

In 2008, the Germans concluded a study that provided compelling evidence of an unequivocal positive relationship between a child’s risk of leukemia, and residential proximity to a nuclear power plant. The authors state that these findings are compelling, that the elevated risk does indeed exist and that it is related to the nuclear facilities. Then they concluded that “the reason for the elevated risk is unexplained, as the levels of radioactive emissions from these facilities are considered too low to explain the increase in childhood leukemia”(4).

It should be noted that in neither the COMARE study nor the German study did the researchers claim that there was no connection between the power plants and the effect upon health.

Closer to home, the Port Hope Synopsis report by the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission includes a study(5) which makes the following statements: “there was an excess of childhood cancer deaths”, "lung cancer mortality was of interest because of the increased incidence observed amongst women" and "increased mortality from circulatory disease, including ischaemic heart disease, cerebrovascular disease and disease of arteries". None of the increases were statistically significant. The Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission states that there was no ill effects of the radioactivity in Port Hope. Researchers would conclude that “more research is needed”.

Where are the voices of physicians? In December 1998, International Physicians for Prevention of Nuclear War adopted a Swiss proposal in opposition to nuclear power(6). Their affiliates, Physicians for Global Survival (Canada), and Physicians for Social Responsibility (US) eventually followed. In 1982, reconfirmed in 2004, the Canadian Medical Association's position is that: “there is at present no conclusive evidence of a measurable increase, in the long or short term, of adverse effects due specifically to radiation in populations thus exposed”.


Just as the Church defended its long held belief that the sun circled the earth against scientific evidence, so the nuclear industry defends the myth that it is clean green and safe for human consumption. It's time for the CMA to reconsider. Or keep defending fiction.

Radiation exposure: comparing apples and oranges

No danger to health.....

The latest group to join the chorus reassuring the public that the amount of radiation reaching North America from Fukushima are aviation organizations. They claim that inincreased amount of radiation is no greater than the amount that a person would receive when flying across the continent! This is like comparing apples to oranges!

The average Canadian is regularly exposed to 1.7 to 3.0 mSv of radiation per year and mostly doesn't get cancer. However, some people do get cancer from "normal" exposure to radiation. Roughly 20% of lung cancer is caused by entirely natural exposure to radioactive radon and an estimated 20% of leukemias are from "normal" background radiation. Certainly almost everyone knows that increasing exposure to cosmic rays from the sun also increases the incidence of skin cancers. Still, the number of people who get cancer is low compared to the hundreds of thousands who don't.

Through studies done on airline pilots, there is evidence that the greater the number of air miles traveled, the greater the chances of developing cancer!

The difference, which is egregious, is that the traveler or the sunbather makes a choice to expose him- or herself to greater risks; his exposure doesn't affect his neighbour who doesn't travel or sunbathe. In the case of radioactivity released from a nuclear power plant accidentally or intentionally (as Pickering does regularly), the population has both no knowledge of the risk and no choice in the matter of exposure.

The other difference is that exposure to cosmic rays is limited to the actual time that the traveler is in the air. The effects may linger but the radiation does not. The radioactive particle of iodine, cesium or any of the 48 other potential emissions absorbed through eating or breathing is not limited to the moment of exposure. The particle is the "gift that keeps on giving" releasing radioactivity until all its atoms have decayed to their stable non-radioactive end product.

Certainly aviation organizations know the difference between apples and oranges! It is ingenious if not a little dishonest.