With many pronukers clamoring that the Energy Bill need to include new nukes and the oil disaster being used as an argument that the President needs to include nukes in his energy program, I offer this sobering and frightening article by an eminently qualified professional in hopes that folks will get past the nuclear industry lies and see that any energy bill which includes nuclear power subsidies and support are extremely dangerous to Americans and the world just as the oil industry has proven to be with the BP disaster destroying the beautiful Gulf of Mexico and threatening to do tremendous damage to the US East Coast:
Nuclear Power Causes Cancer: What Industry Doesn't Want You To Know
Dr. Sam Epstein
Huffington Post, Tuesday, August 4, 2009
Nuclear power, frequently mentioned as one option for meeting future energy needs, would pose a health threat to Americans if a meltdown occurred. But despite meltdowns at Chernobyl and Three Mile Island, and many other near-miss accidents, there is another dirty little secret the nuclear industry doesn't want you to know. Cancer risk from nuclear plants aren't just potential risks, they are actual risks.
Every day, reactors must routinely release a portion of radioactive chemicals into local air and water -- the same chemicals found in atomic bomb tests. They enter human bodies through breathing and the food chain. Federal law obligates nuclear companies to measure these emissions and the amounts that end up in air, water, and food, and to report them to federal regulators. However, nuclear advocates consistently claim that these releases are below federally-permitted limits, and thus are harmless. But this thinking is a leap that ignores hard evidence from scientific studies. Now, after half a century of a large-scale experiment with nuclear power, the verdict is in: nuclear reactors cause cancer.
The claim that low doses of radiation are harmless has always been just a claim. It led to practices like routine diagnostic X-rays to the pelvis of pregnant women, until the work of the University of Oxford's Dr. Alice Stewart found that these X-rays doubled the chance that the fetus would die of cancer as a child. Many studies later, independent experts agreed that no dose is safe. A 2005 report by a blue-ribbon panel of the National Academy of Sciences reviewed hundreds of scientific articles, and concluded that there is no risk-free dose of radiation.
Federal health officials, who should be responsible for tracking cancer near nuclear reactors and analyzing their nuclear contaminants, have ignored the dangers. The only national analysis of the topic was a 1990 study mandated by Senator Edward Kennedy, and conducted by the National Cancer Institute. But this study was biased before it even got started. A January 28, 1988 letter to Senator Kennedy from National Institutes of Health Director Dr. James Wyngaarden brazenly declared "The most serious impact of the Three Mile Island accident that can be identified with certainty is mental stress to those living near the plant, particularly pregnant women and families with teenagers and young children." Not surprisingly, the study concluded there was no evidence of high cancer rates near reactors. No updated study has since been conducted by federal officials.
With government on the sidelines, it has been up to independent researchers -- publishing results in medical and scientific journals, to generate the needed evidence. Studies were limited until the 1990s, but the few publications consistently documented high local cancer rates near reactors. Dr. Richard Clapp of Boston University found high leukemia rates near the Pilgrim plant in Massachusetts. Colorado health official Dr. Carl Johnson documented high child cancer rates near the San Onofre plant in California.
More at link:
http://radiation.org/spotlight/090804_Huffingtonpost.ht... Samuel S. Epstein, M.D. is professor emeritus of Environmental and Occupational Medicine at the University of Illinois at Chicago School of Public Health; Chairman of the Cancer Prevention Coalition; and author of over 200 scientific articles and 15 books on cancer, including the groundbreaking 1979 The Politics of Cancer, and the 2009 Toxic Beauty.
(This is one of those folks whose articles are posted at www.radiation.org that the pronukers here claim are "junk science.
I guess they'd say this good Dr. has no credibility
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