Sizing Up Health Impacts a Year After Fukushima

[phantom power]

Health impacts from the radioactive materials released in the Fukushima Daiichi meltdowns will probably be too small to be easily measured, according to experts assembled by the Health Physics Society for a panel discussion on Thursday. And the area cordoned off by the Japanese government as uninhabitable is probably far too large, the experts said.

The panel discussion, at the National Press Club in Washington, is one in a series of events timed to the first anniversary of the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear accident at the nuclear plant in March 2011. While the quake and tsunami killed an estimated 20,000 people, radiation has not killed anyone so far, and members of the Health Physics Society, drawn from academia, medicine and the nuclear industry, suggested that the doses were too small to have much effect.

“There’s no opportunity for conducting epidemiological studies that have any chance of success,’’ said one of the panelists, John Boice Jr., a cancer epidemiologist and professor of medicine at the Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center. (Dr. Boice is in line to become president of the National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurements, a nonprofit organization chartered by Congress.)

...

Not that the additional radiation exposure won’t induce a few extra cases of cancer, the experts said, but these will be indistinguishable from the background rate of cancer, which will eventually strike about 41 out of every 100 people.

The overall theme of the discussion was that radiation is widely feared but poorly understood, and is a smaller problem than the vast destruction and loss of life caused by the earthquake and tsunami.

http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/01/sizing-up-health-impacts-a-year-after-fukushima/

[FBaggins]

1. The Health Physics Society???

What do they know about it?

Surely there's someone who was a pediatrician back in the 70s who would be a better source?

[PamW]

2. Eminent radiation epidemiologist Dr. John Boice testimony to Congress

When Congress wanted to know about the effects of Fukushima, who did they call to testify? Dr. John Boice.

From the testimony of the eminent radiation epidemiologist Dr. John Boice to Congress:

http://www.hps.org/documents/John_Boice_Testimony_13_May_2011.pdf

Dr. Boice testifies:

The health consequences for Japanese workers and public appear to be minor.

The health consequences for United States citizens are negligible to nonexistent

PamW

[DCKit]

3. In a country with one of the lowest cancer rates?

Surely they won't notice the "blip" in lung cancer, leukemia, thyroid cancer and every other damn thing the radioactive fuel and byproducts spewed out of Fukushima after the tsunami. After all, the damage and contamination are so widespread, it can't possibly be tracked back to a single source.

Easier to blame it on urban pollution and the degenerate habits of all those children who are going to live with various life threatening conditions for the rest of their lives.

[FBaggins]

4. Was that supposed to make sense?

The lower the existing cancer rate, the easier it would be to spot a statistically significant increase.

You should also note that the impact of radiation isn't homogeneous across all types of cancer. A statistically significant increase in thyroid cancer among children would be even easier to spot... and (given the program they have in place to study it), they're in a perfect position to catch it if it shows up.

Which, of course, is entirely different from nuts inventing such evidence (as with the recent BS about thyroid "lumps&quot .

[DCKit]

5. I have to admit, you're getting better at this.

If I didn't know your history, I'd probably be blustering right now.

Cute new trick BTW, saying another poster is either uninformed, insane, or willfully ignorant of facts (that's your territory), but you won't get any traction with that here.

Another thing, didn't anyone ever mention to you that calling attention to something just brings in more spectators? Your tactics have polarized this group against coal and nuclear more than you could ever imagine.

If you want something to go away, you make it go away, you don't call more attention to it. Stop viewing the threads on coal and nuclear and, especially, stop commenting on them. You're only creating more converts.

[FBaggins]

6. A simple "no" would have sufficed.

Another thing, didn't anyone ever mention to you that calling attention to something just brings in more spectators? Your tactics have polarized this group against coal and nuclear more than you could ever imagine.

I'm fine with "attention". You mistakenly assume that your position is correct and therefore any attention must be a good thing. In reality, you do yourself little favor (others will no doubt note, for example, that your post is merely a rant against your perception of me and entirely lacks any defense of your error?). I would expect the group would be polarized against coal (I would certainly hope so anyway). You don't actually buy Kris' spin that coal and nuclear have the same supporters, do you?

[DCKit]

7. Buy Kris' argument? I think I was among the first to put it together.

My mom lived in a solar/LP gas run house for about seven years before I came to DU, totally off the grid - no electric, no phone. Every time you said it couldn't work and I found your posts, I said it could, and it did. She died in her gigantic solar cottage, independent, the way she wanted it to be, just sooner than she thought.

You've never made a post about co-generation, tri-generation or using the excess heat off nuclear plants for anything useful... you only talk about nuclear electric energy. You have a one-track mind and we need multiple solutions if we're going to go down that road.

The fact that you've never gone into those other benefits has created suspicion, and I don't think I'm alone. Your arguments are one-dimensional when you could be talking about using the waste heat from the plants to grow fresh produce and heat (and cool) entire towns, for free. Instead, the plants have cooling towers.

You never went there, so now I'll hope you'll understand why I don't trust you. You just don't have a case to present, it's all about nuclear electricity... no imagination.

There may be several rabid anti-nukers here, but you're just feeding them, and I can't help but agree with their POV. You've got one answer for everything, but that doesn't work for the rest of us.

[PamW]

13. How many want to live like that...

My mom lived in a solar/LP gas run house for about seven years before I came to DU, totally off the grid - no electric, no phone.
===========================

Good for your mother. If she didn't mind living that way; more power to her.

However, most people don't want to live that way. They want to have phones, and internet connections, and central air conditioning.....

Also people get too "residential centric" concerning the electric power needs. What about the needs of businesses and industry? Before you say; "I don't care about their concerns", be mindful that most people are employed by businesses and industry.

We have a big enough problem in the USA in seeking to retain employers. Don't make it worse by saying to those employers that you don't care about their power needs, we just care about homes. That will drive employers away too.

You think the current unemployment is bad; just see what happens if you turn away employers.

PamW

[Yo_Mama]

8. Huh?

Here's a link to a pretty recent study. It estimates that 50% of Japanese will be diagnosed with cancer during their lifespans:
http://ganjoho.jp/data/public/statistics/backnumber/2010/files/fig09.pdf

Their overall incidence of cancer is lower than that of many developed societies, but they are in the group of countries that have very high rates of gastric cancers.

Except for specific types of cancers, such as thyroid cancer, it's impossible to pick up a very small additional rate of cancer statistically. They're long-lived, and cancer incidence increases sharply with age:
http://ganjoho.jp/data/public/statistics/backnumber/2010/files/fig17.pdf

They could pick up early incidence of cancers, but very few of the population seem likely to have been exposed at rates that would produce such cancers. So it isn't going to show up statistically.

They have established a sort of registry of people from Fukushima and they are supposed to follow those people over their lifetimes.

The thyroid screening program they set up for kids will catch any cancers there. But remember, the Japanese have extensive data on disease and radiation-induced illnesses, because they were bombed. They did follow those populations and they have a pretty good guess on what will happen. From studies like these, it is clear that it is hard to pick up excess cancers in populations with low exposure to radiation:
http://www.oasisllc.com/abgx/effects.htm#faq2

They did get these results studying populations with average doses of about 200 milliSieverts from the Hiroshima/Nagasaki explosions.
http://www.oasisllc.com/abgx/effects.htm#faq11

In the discussion of cancer risks presented here, attention is focused on survivors with estimated doses greater than 5 millisieverts (mSv; 0.005 Sv). While no excess risks of cancer or other diseases are detectable among survivors with doses at the low end of this range, a dose of 5 mSv is several times higher than the typical annual background radiation level to which people are exposed in daily life (1-2 mSv), or about one-fourth of the currently accepted maximum annual dose allowed for radiation workers (20 mSv). Survivors with doses of 5 mSv or more were typically within about 2.4 km of the hypocenter in Hiroshima and within 2.6 km of the hypocenter in Nagasaki. The average dose received by the group of survivors considered here is about 200 mSv. The radiation dose decreases by about one-half for every 200-meter increase in distance from the hypocenter.

Only a very few of the Fukushima exposures are in that risk group, and they are all workers at the nuclear plants. There is a very solid scientific basis for the conclusion discussed in the OP.

Here's another article on that data:
http://www.eenews.net/public/Greenwire/2011/04/11/1

The cancer data from these survivors now underpins every radiation protection system in the world. For example, the National Academy of Sciences periodically publishes a report on the biological effects of radiation. Before it could entertain completing its most recent study, earlier this decade, it needed RERF's updated evidence. U.N. standards follow a similar tack.

There are some very clear signals from the A-bomb survivors. Starting at acute doses around 150 mSv, there is statistically significant evidence that radiation exposure causes a tiny uptick in the risk of contracting cancer. This risk becomes far more evident at higher doses: At 1,000 mSv, four times the limit for Fukushima's workers, it increases the risk of cancer by about 1.5 times.

Other data on populations exposed to relatively high rates of radiation seem to confirm those dose rates. Nuclear workers, uranium miners, medical workers - all those don't seem to show higher rates of cancer from low-dose radiation exposure.

[DCKit]

9. You had me until this....

"Nuclear workers, uranium miners, medical workers - all those don't seem to show higher rates of cancer from low-dose radiation exposure. "

REALLY? Guess they all (all, not some) died from something else.

[Yo_Mama]

10. Low dose? Two words, very important

http://nuclearsafety.gc.ca/eng/readingroom/healthstudies/eldorado/

There are a lot of studies on uranium mine workers. The results depend on exposure rates.

Any miners exposed to a lot of radon gas get lung cancer. That includes coal miners, btw. Also miners in any situation in which the air isn't filtered and circulated properly will have high rates of respiratory disease.

http://www.wise-uranium.org/uhm.html#LEUKCZ

During the 50s and 60s, the risks weren't understood and most the harmful exposures occurred in uranium mines. After that in most places things were cleaned up - most especially atmosphere. One suspects that some of the workers in the old Soviet Union received higher exposures later. The industry in the west is now down to stuff like this:
http://www.wise-uranium.org/uhm.html#NUSINOVICI10
Note the no excess risk finding.

The best studies on low chronic exposures come from nuclear workers. Most of the observed cancer effect of nuclear workers seems related to the early days in the industry. This is a population that has been studied with some dedication. The first thing to know is that nuclear workers, as a population, show up in study after study with lower rates of mortality compared to the overall population.

This is important, because there is a paradoxical effect. The longer a population lives, the higher its lifetime cancer diagnosis rate. So if you don't kill yourself young from smoking and/or eating too much fat (heart disease), you are very likely to be diagnosed with cancer later.
This is one very comprehensive such study:
http://iopscience.iop.org/0952-4746/29/1/E02/pdf/jrp9_1_E02.pdf

The leukemia excess risk rate is small, but does seem dose-related.

When you look at these things country by country, workers in the "modern" nuclear industry don't show increases in cancers at all. Time after time, their risks pop up as less than that of the average individual in the population:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17053302

Oddly enough the Chernobyl emergency workers (the ones not exposed to high levels initially, like the firemen) have confirmed that finding.
http://phys4.harvard.edu/~wilson/radiation/rr11-12/chapter7.pdf

You'd kind of guess that since many of these were military, they had high rates of smoking and drinking, so the risk from that "drowned out" the risk from their Chernobyl exposures.

Nuclear workers in the modern industry tend to spend their time in very clean and controlled environments, so perhaps that accounts for their observed lower than normal death rates overall. Nonetheless it is a confounding factor that shows how difficult it can be to pick up statistical evidence for risks from low radiation exposure.

Alternatively, studies of populations that live in natural high annual dose areas tend to indicate some positive effect. Perhaps it really is true that there is an immunological primer effect from low chronic dosage. It does seem to be the case that children exposed to mildly dirtier environments in the West have slightly better health as adults, and lower rates of immunological rates of disease. When I first read that theory a few years ago I cussed a blue streak over the idiocy, but it does seem to pop up as a potential unifying factor.

Our basic biology evolved at a time when the world was more radioactive than it is now. So maybe. I think that is a long way from proved and I am still skeptical, but it is hard to utterly reject the hypothesis.

[DCKit]

11. Yeah, I get you. My grandfather (b.1894) worked in the coal mines as a child...

then died in 1980 of black lung.

Guess he just didn't dust enough around the house.

[PamW]

12. An "immune like" response was found about a decade ago

Perhaps it really is true that there is an immunological primer effect from low chronic dosage. It does seem to be the case that children exposed to mildly dirtier environments in the West have slightly better health as adults, and lower rates of immunological rates of disease.
============================

Dr. Andrew Wyrobeck of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory found an "immune like" response of living cells in response to radiation:

https://www.llnl.gov/str/JulAug03/Wyrobek.html

Low-Dose Exposure Can Protect
The team also discovered that the human lymphoblastoid cells exhibit what is called an adaptive response to ionizing radiation. An extremely low dose (also called a priming dose) appears to offer protection to the cell from a subsequent high dose (2 grays) of ionizing radiation. The degree of protection was measured by the amount of reduced chromosomal damage. A priming dose of 0.05 gray, administered about 6 hours before the high dose, can reduce chromosomal damage by 20 to 50 percent, compared with damage to cells that were not exposed to the priming dose.

Recent work on low-dose exposure done at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has been published in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Science:

http://lowdose.energy.gov/

http://www.examiner.com/science-in-south-bend/dna-repair-centers-fix-low-dose-radiation-damage

“Our data show that at lower doses of ionizing radiation, DNA repair mechanisms work much better than at higher doses,” says Mina Bissell, breast cancer researcher with the Life Sciences Division. “This non-linear DNA damage response casts doubt on the general assumption that any amount of ionizing radiation is harmful and additive.”

PamW