Wade Allison - United Kingdom

Wade Allison - United Kingdom

Emeritus Professor of Physics at the University of Oxford and Fellow of Keble College, Oxford Author of "Radiation and Reason: The Impact of Science on a Culture of Fear" (200 Fellow by Special Election in Physics Formerly University Lecturer (Professor) in Physics I work, teach and play with physics in many ways and these often feed on one another.

The play is usually on my boat where the problems of waves, wind and navigation surround me on the open sea.

I still teach and lecture in the University (in spite of my 'retirement'). This includes 12 undergraduate lectures on Medical Physics and 2 graduate lectures as part of the new MSc in Radiation Biology. I arrange projects in clinical medicine for 4th year physics undergraduates in collaboration with the Cancer Centre at the Churchill Hospital. I run the physics academic programme of the annual residential outreach week of the Sutton Trust Summer School.

Research Interests My background is in experimental Particle Physics. In earlier years I developed new experimental methods and their theory, and applied these in experiments on quarks at CERN and on neutrinos in the USA. I have made special studies on the fields of page 1

relativistic charged particles in matter. As a result of initiating some years ago an optional course on applications of nuclear physics, my interests moved sideways into medical physics, in particular safety, therapy and imaging across the full spectrum: ionising radiation, ultrasound and magnetic resonance. I spent 3 years writing a book Fundamental Physics for Probing and Imaging (2006) as a result of which I learnt a lot.

I have been researching the reasons for the extraordinary fear of nuclear power and radiation which is taken as given throughout society. I have found that this is quite unjustifiable, scientifically. Explaining this in accessible but scientifically robust terms has been a long task. The result, Radiation and Reason, The Impact of Science on a Culture of Fear, is published in October 2009.

More than 10,000 people have died in the Japanese tsunami and the survivors are cold and hungry. But the media concentrate on nuclear radiation from which no-one has died - and is unlikely to. tomorrow's may be better still Nuclear radiation at very high levels is dangerous, but the scale of concern that it evokes is misplaced. Nuclear technology cures countless cancer patients every day - and a radiation dose given for radiotherapy in hospital is no different in principle to a similar dose received in the environment.

What of Three Mile Island? There were no known deaths there. And Chernobyl? The latest UN report published on 28 February confirms the known death toll - 28 fatalities among emergency workers, plus 15 fatal cases of child thyroid cancer - which would have been avoided if iodine tablets had been taken (as they have now in Japan). And in each case the numbers are minute compared with the 3,800 at Bhopal in 1984, who died as a result of a leak of chemicals from the Union Carbide pesticide plant.

Becquerels and Sieverts 

A becquerel (Bq), named after French physicist Henri Becquerel, is a measure of radioactivity



A quantity of radioactive material has an activity of 1Bq if one nucleus decays per second - and 1kBq if 1,000 nuclei decay per second



A sievert (Sv) is a measure of radiation absorbed by a person, named after Swedish medical physicist Rolf Sievert



A milli-sievert (mSv) is a 1,000th of a Sievert

page 2

So what of the radioactivity released at Fukushima? How does it compare with that at Chernobyl? Let's look at the measured count rates. The highest rate reported, at 1900 on 22 March, 2011, for any Japanese prefecture was 12 kBq per sq m (for the radioactive isotope of caesium, caesium-137).

A map of Chernobyl in the UN report shows regions shaded according to rate, up to 3,700 kBq per sq m - areas with less than 37 kBq per sq m are not shaded at all. In round terms, this suggests that the radioactive fallout at Fukushima is less than 1% of that at Chernobyl.

The other important radioisotope in fallout is iodine, which can cause child thyroid cancer. This is only produced when the reactor is on and quickly decays once the reactor shuts down (it has a half life of eight days). The old fuel rods in storage at Fukushima, though radioactive, contain no iodine.

But at Chernobyl the full inventory of iodine and caesium was released in the initial explosion, so that at Fukushima any release of iodine should be much less than 1% of that at Chernobyl - with an effect reduced still further by iodine tablets.

Unfortunately, public authorities react by providing over-cautious guidance - and this simply escalates public concern.

Conclusions 1.Radiation is a modest local danger, not a global threat like: political & economic instability, air, water and land pollution, over population, water and food shortage.

2. Relax safety levels by ~1000 times, AHARS As High As Relatively Safe No extra risk, major cost reduction, less bureaucracy, ditch LNT Say 100mGy single acute dose, and 100mGy/month chronic/protracted dose rate, and 5000mGy whole-oflife.

3. Education to remove stigma of nuclear, to spread trust in science and trust in society and to explain radiation in simple terms.

4. Nuclear technology for individual health, for power, for fresh water, for food preservation, for the health of the planet.

Books and articles/lecture/interviews (free download) www.radiationandreason.com page 3

Cartoons

The final confrontation with the Environmental Anti Fire Party 125,000 BC, perhaps 10 April 2014

IChemE Conference - Wade Allison

1

As Aesop's Fable of the Tortoise and the Hare illustrates The natural protection of life, eg from ionising radiation, provided by slow evolution wins easily against regulation determined by committee 10 April 2014

IChemE Conference - Wade Allison

2

page 4

Bankers need public trust even more!

Marie Sklodowska-Curie 1867-1934 Physicist, chemist, radiologist = “Nothing in life is to be feared. It is to be understood.”

Charles Darwin 1809-1882 student of divinity, naturalist, biologist, geologist,

Florence Nightingale 1820-1910 Nurse and pioneering statistician = “How very little can be done under the spirit of fear” Adam Smith 1723-1790 Economist and philosopher = “Science is the great antidote to the poison of enthusiasm and superstition” 1 July 2013

Video Presentation for Go Nuclear

10

A comparison of monthly doses shown as areas RED 40,000mSv per month fatal dose to tumour cells in radiotherapy YELLOW 20,000mSv per month non-fatal dose to healthy tissue in radiotherapy with few % chance of cancer GREEN 100mSv per month conservative safe dose limit in any circumstances (AHARS) BLACK dot in green 0.08mSv per month (1mSv/yr) public limit recommended

by ALARA/LNT

10 April 2014

IChemE Conference - Wade Allison

1

page 5