Alternative thoughts on radiation (Neil Alexander) Canada

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There is no safe level of radiation. A millionth of a gram of plutonium, can induce cancer. Is this true and if it is how worried should I be?

Alternative thoughts on avoiding emissions.

Neil Alexander February 14, 2018

Cancer is a horrible disease and these statements, frequently made by Dr Helen Caldicott, are clearly designed to induce a terror of radiation and even more so of plutonium. For many it does just that, inducing them into a lifetime of anti-nuclear activism.

The reference to plutonium isn't really necessary but it is a useful device because, they claim, plutonium does not occur in nature and therefore, by implication, is different to any other hazard we might manage.

Dr Caldicott is likely the most avid proponent of these messages but there are many others and they are regularly quoted as though they are some kid of definitive statement on the issue.

Since I have my handy 3Cs (Context, Calibration, Causation) microscope with me I thought it might be fun to have a look more closely at these “terrifying” statements so that we might understand them better and indeed determine how concerned we should really be.

As I place the statement into the microscope I spot the fact that it has been incorrectly prepared. Plutonium does actually exist in nature! Not a lot, I agree……. but a bit.

The greatest concentration on this planet is where nature got ahead of mankind and actually ran its own nuclear reactor at Oklo in the Gabon. It also arises in much smaller 1

quantities in uranium deposits that have never sustained criticality. Some even ends up on earth as a result of stellar activity. I am not sure if that is “nature” but mankind sure as hell has nothing to do with it.

Does this make a difference? Well in reality…no! The quantities are really really really small and are entirely overpowered by the plutonium that we put into the atmosphere through the detonation of atomic weapons.

But in the crazy world of perception it is of fundamental importance because it means that plutonium is no different to anything else that we deal with and it catches the antinukes in a clear deception.

With that issue sorted let’s start by putting the statement itself under our microscope and switching first to the causation function.

Here we can see that there is an argument for causation.

Any damage to a gene can cause cell mutation and any cell mutation can cause cancer.

Given that radiation can damage genes a potential mechanism for causation exists. And statistically one nuclear disintegration gives rise to one unit of risk of causing cancer so it should be linear with a line going through the origin at zero zero. This is the basis of the Linear No Threshold (LNT) model that is so routinely, but erroneously, used to tell us how many people are dying as a result of exposure to natural radiation from things like radon.

Unfortunately, this can lead people to form a perception that radiation is the only cause of genetic damage and that each disintegration will cause a mutation and that mutation will ultimately cause a cancer. This perception is totally incorrect. Many disintegrations do not cause cellular damage. Others will cause so much damage that the cell cannot reproduce and so cannot become cancerous. And since there are a vast number of ways in which genetic damage can occur other than from radiation our bodies have equipped themselves to deal with genetic damage and it is only when those mechanisms fail that cancer can arise. At the very least the situation is much more complex than it might at first seem.

Now generally, I rant about people assuming causation where there is none simply on the basis that they found a correlation. In fact, the full title for the third C is “causation not correlation”. If I remember correctly there is quite a strong correlation between people graduating with a mathematics degree from American universities and the number of used fuel rods removed from nuclear reactors in that same year. But I strongly suggest that if we restrict the graduate intake of mathematicians as a way of reducing used fuel production we will be as disappointed with the result as we would be if we increased the number of used fuel rods as a way of producing more mathematicians.

On this occasion though, despite the possible causation, it is the correlation that is very hard to find. We do know that very high levels of radiation cause cancer but the data at 2

low levels is, at best, unclear. In fact, many people point to data that suggests that exposure to a bit more radiation than the norm may actually lower our risk of cancer. The theory is called hormesis and while it might at first appear counterintuitive there are possible causes, for example, it may be that the body improves its immunity to genetic damage when it is slightly more challenged, much like in vaccination.

This though is a big debate that has been raging for some time and microscopes look at small area in great detail and so can reveal nothing about LNT that is not already known. Believe what you like about low levels of radiation, it won’t change the conclusion to this discussion.

Lets instead switch to the calibration function of the 3Cs microscope and look at not the absolute truth but rather the scale of the issue. Here a fundamental irrefutable and very important truth immediately reveals itself……..that as you move to vanishingly small quantities of radiation the risk also becomes vanishingly small.

So, the accuracy of Dr Caldicott’s statements might not be definitively decided by information about the LNT but could instead be resolved by consideration of the word "safe". Is something with a vanishingly small risk safe or unsafe?

Taken out of context you might say a vanishingly small risk that is imposed on you is still too great a risk. And that is why our microscope has a context function as well because context reveals very clearly just how vacuous Dr Caldicott’s statements really are. Using her own argument, any dose of any radiation is unsafe, and since radiation is all around us then the act of living is clearly unsafe and as (natural) radiation can concentrate in your house, living in your house is less safe than living outside it. This is clearly a theory proposed by people that do not have a Canadian winter to contend with and is a clear nonsense.

And that brings me to the outright stupidity of the extrapolation of Dr Caldicott’s idea voiced by Dr Alan Lockwood “Consuming food containing Radionuclides is particularly dangerous”.

Given that pretty much everything we eat has radionuclides in it I think he may have discovered a way of ensuring that he will never die of a radiation induced cancer by dying of starvation long before that could possibly happen. Yes, eating is a risk, but I honestly think not eating is a greater one.

And since I am on the subject of food let us remember that many other things that are not radioactive can also initiate cancer. Bacon for example. And for all we know that works on a LNT basis. That next rasher may literally (in the original meaning of the word) be the death of you, or that cup of coffee. And don’t get me on the subject of beer, wine or anything else with alcohol in it.

But the real issue of context, that is so often forgotten, is how likely the toxicity or otherwise of plutonium is likely to become an issue for us. If we ignore the broad distribution of plutonium that arose from the detonation of atomic weapons (and which 3

does not seem to be doing anyone any great harm proving my point about vanishingly small risks) then unless you happen to work with plutonium your chances of coming into contact with it are pretty slim and coming into contact with it in a form that might cause harm are even slimmer.

But here’s the real kicker, for all that has been written about the cancer-causing properties of plutonium, and allowing for all the people that have been launched into action by the fear created by Dr Caldicott’s statement, there has never actually been a cancer fatality attributed to plutonium. People have, of course, died as a result of events where plutonium was present but at Nagasaki and Hiroshima, they died from the other effects of the weapons and that sadly was the intention.

So let me say it again……no one has ever, so far as we are aware, died of a cancer caused by plutonium.

In fact, a group of 25 workers at Los Alamos nuclear lab, that were exposed to what was considered to be a lethal dose of inhaled plutonium went on to have a cancer rate substantially below the national average. Seeing this data, I did actually contemplate supplying plutonium supplements but gave up on this folly after a visit by some nice uniformed gentleman with guns who were responding to a call I made to a power station to see if I could secure a supply of pure plutonium.

So in the end Caldicott might be right or might be wrong. But I could equally say that there is no encounter with a Great White Shark that is safe and as I sit here in my office in Ontario that would be a statement of equal, if not greater, relevance (people have died from Great White attacks).

But I am not overly worried about being attacked by a Great White and I am certainly not jumping up to make a placard saying “Ban the Great White”.

Just as I am not overly worried by Dr Caldicott’s statements.

Plutonium is not nice stuff. We need to be very careful with it. But driving a personal agenda with fear inducing sound bites is not helpful.

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