TODAY. The cover-up of the danger of nuclear radiation and health, but who is speaking for our grandchildren?
From the earliest days of Marie and Pierre Curie, the harm from ionising radiation was observed, but not fully acknowledged. And before long, it was enthusiastically used in medicine, as x-rays, and in the general world, in various forms, as an aid to health and beauty. When the “radium girls” who painted watch dials with the glow-in-the-dark, radium-based paint, became ill, they were diagnosed by company doctors as having poor diet, neuroses or even syphilis.
Accidents during the Manhattan Project showed the horror effects of high doses of radiation, – but with some military propaganda sleight-of-hand this seemed to be taken to show that “low level” radiation is fine.
Doctors and scientists of integrity, who researched the harm of nuclear radiation were harassed, ridiculed, and sidelined. Integrity was a career killer for DrJohn Gofman, Arthur Tamblin, Harold Knapp, Linus Pauling, Alice Stewart, Ernest Sternglass and Hermann Muller.
Despite the scientific report in 2007 – Biological Effects of Ionizing Radiation (BEIR) stating the danger, the nuclear lobby has been successful in obscuring the truth, and putting across a general acceptance that low dose radiation is well, OK, really.
Dr. Alice Stewart and , Dr. Rosalie Bertell showed the link between x-rays in the mothers and leukemia in their children – their results were similarly rubbished, (but medical authorities quietly curtailed the widespread use of x-rays)
Epidemiology and Statistics are boring stuff, I know. But population statistics of infant deaths and child cancers have shown the increased danger to embryos, infants and children living near nuclear facilities.
Sadly, health authorities have colluded in this cover-up. Public anxiety about ionising radiation is a threat to the thriving nuclear medicine industry. How much of nuclear medicine is absolutely necessary? How many CT scans and other radiological examinations are not really called for? It’s easier for medical professionals to just go along with the view that low level radiation is OK.
After all, amongst many thousands, if only a few thousand children die as a result of exposure to low level radiation – from nuclear reactors and other nuclear facilities, that’s OK isn’t it?
As world leaders enthuse over more nuclear power, and more nuclear “deterrents” , Dr. Gordon Edwards asks the question “Who is speaking for our grandchildren?”
(My inspiration for this short article came from Dr Dale Dewar’s Ionizing Radiation and Human Health .)
Nuclear industry workers face significant, inevitable and unavoidable radiation health risks
By Tony Webb, 24 June 24, https://johnmenadue.com/nuclear-industry-workers-face-significant-inevitable-and-unavoidable-radiation-health-risks/
Nuclear industry workers face significant, inevitable and largely unavoidable radiation health risks which have so far not been addressed in the debate about Australia possibly buying into this industry.
In addition to the important arguments against the coalition policy that currently proposes building seven nuclear power plants to replace closing coal fired generators, notably that such:
will be likely cost about twice that of firmed renewable generation and take at least 15 years to build – and this in the context where most nuclear plant construction worldwide appears to routinely involve a doubling of both cost and time to build
– and so are dangerously irrelevant to meeting the existential challenge to reduce carbon and methane emissions that are driving climate change;
will require legislative changes at state and federal levels that are to say the least unlikely to be achieved;ignores the challenge of developing workforce skills to manage this technology;
ignores the as yet intractable if not insoluble problem of managing long lived nuclear wastes;
and poses significant risks to the public in the event of nuclear accidents as witnessed in the USA, Ukraine/former USSR, and Japan;
There is also an inevitable and unavoidable risk to workers in the industry and public ‘downwind’ from such reactors from routine exposure to ionising radiation.
This last has to date received little attention and whenever raised results in dismissive but misleading arguments from the nuclear industry advocates, notably that any such exposures to individuals are small and pose little, indeed ‘acceptable’ health risks compared to other risks faced in day to day living and working. Tackling this misinformation as part of the campaign has much to offer in convincing the nuclear target communities and the workers in these that might be seduced by prospects of employment in these facilities that the risks they face are far from insignificant – that, as a community they will face an increase in the incidence of fatal and ‘treatable / curable’ cancers, an increase in other, notably cardio vascular diseases and increased risk of genetic damage affecting children and future generations.
Allow me to introduce myself. I have been an active campaigner on the health effects of ionising radiation since the late 1970s. With two colleagues in 1978 I founded the UK based Radiation and Health Information Service that highlighted the evidence showing the risk estimates from radiation exposure, on which the national and international occupational and public exposure limits were based, grossly under-represented the actual risk.
This radiation-health argument was developed as part of a national campaign that resulted in a significant change of the, until then, pro-nuclear policies of UK unions with members in the industry and a review of Trade Union Congress policy in 1979. It was also an integral part of the union-led national Anti-Nuclear Campaign opposing the Thatcher government’s nuclear expansion – revealed in leaked cabinet minutes as part of the government strategy for undermining the power of the unions, particularly the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), the Transport and General Workers Union, (T&GWU) and the General and Municipal, Boilermakers’ and Allied Trades union (GMBATU). In late 1980 I took this work on Occupational Radiation risks to the USA establishing the US Radiation and Health Labor Project, auspiced by the Foundation for National Progress / Mother Jones Magazine, that built union support across the country for AFL-CIO policy calling for a reduction in the occupational exposure limit.
Subsequently I worked as a consultant to the Canadian union (CPSU – local 2000) representing workers in the nuclear power industry and built a Canadian coalition of five Unions representing workers exposed to radiation on the job. Linking these North American union demands with those of UK and European unions (also similar concerns from unions in Australia following a 1988 organising tour) reinforced pressures from within the scientific community – notably the US Biological Effects of Ionising Radiation (BEIR) committee.
These sustained pressures led eventually to the International Commission on Radiological Protection (ICRP) reducing the recommended limits for permissible occupational (and public) exposures in 1991. Despite evidence that would have justified a ten-fold reduction (from the 50 mSv annual occupational limit to a limit of 5 mSv) the ICRP limit was only reduced by 40% (to 20 mSv a year but with individual exposures still permitted to 50 mSv in any year so long as the average over 5 years was no higher than 20 mSv).
Since then, a large-scale study of UK, EU, and US nuclear industry workers has shown radiation-induced cancer risks to be on average 2.6 times higher than the estimates used to set the ICRP limits. To put it in simple if statistical terms, the lifetime cancer risk for a worker exposed to the permissible annual dose of radiation over say a 25-year career would be of the order of 6.5% higher than normal. To this should be added the significant health effects of non-fatal cancers, an approximate doubling of the normal rate of cardio-vascular disease and a not insignificant increase in genetic damage to workers children and future generations. Nuclear industry workers face significant, inevitable and largely unavoidable radiation health risks which have so far not been addressed in the debate about Australia possibly buying into this industry.
What needs to be more clearly understood however is that the concern is not just in relation to risks faced by individuals exposed on the job, or from relatively small amounts of radiation released from routine operations of nuclear plants. What is of far greater public concern is the impact of the collective exposure. What is not fully appreciated is that there is simply no safe level of exposure – any dose however small may be the one that causes damage at cellular level in the human body that may show up years later as cancer, genetic damage or some other health effect. it is the total/collective dose that will determine the number of such health effects. Spreading the dose over a larger population will reduce the risk to any individual but not the total health effects. Indeed, it may increase it. An individual affected by cancer can only die once.
These arguments carry weight. They formed a significant part if the discussions within the 2016 South Australian government’s ‘Citizens Jury’ convened to consider proposals to import and store around a third of the world’s nuclear wastes. The concern about radiation and health received special note in the report of this jury to the SA Premier that a two-thirds majority said ‘no – under any circumstances’ to the radioactive waste proposal. The issues can also form the basis for increased collaboration between the trade union, environment, medical reform and public health movements as was the case in the mid 1990s when UK, Labour MP Frank Cook convened a Radiation Roundtable that brought together representatives of these constituencies.
So, within the current debate about a possible Australian Nuclear Power program – alongside the arguments already made about its excessive cost, extended construction time frame, ill-fit within an essential decentralised renewable energy program, risks of major accidents, and the intractable problems of multi-generation waste management, can we please add this concern over health effects that will inevitably result from occupational and public exposures to radiation. Can we particularly focus the attention of trade unions and their members in the seven former coal-fired generation-dependent communities on the effect of these exposures on health of workers who might seek to be employed in operating these facilities and on the health of their families, neighbours, and future generations.
A key demand from unions should be that the occupational limit for annual radiation exposures cbe reduced from the current ICRP level of 20 mSv to a maximum of 5 mSv a year with a lifetime limit of 50 mSV. This revision of standards would put real pressure on the nuclear industry – the current uranium mining and any future enrichment, fuel fabrication, nuclear generation, fuel reprocessing, and waste management – to keep such exposures as low as possible. In the unlikely event of any of the reactor proposals getting the go-ahead there should be baseline monitoring of the health of the community and any workers employed so that any detrimental increase in health effects can be detected early and possibly remediated in the future.
New Book – The Scientists Who Alerted Us to the Dangers of Radiation.
Jim Green, 2 May 24, A new book on radiation risks recently published by The Ethics Press International “The Scientists Who Alerted us to Radiation’s Dangers”. The book was written by myself and a US campaigner Cindy Folkers.
Recent epidemiology evidence clearly shows that radiation risks have increased and that previous denials on radiation risks by successive governments and their nuclear establishment on both sides of the Atlantic were and are wrong. Radiation is considerably more dangerous than official reports indicate, both in terms of the numerical magnitudes of cancer risks, and also in terms of new diseases, apart from cancer, ow shown to be radiogenic.
This is an up-to-date reference book for academics on the dangers and risks of radiation and radioactivity. The book also serves to help journalists and students counter the misrepresentations, incorrect assertions, wrong assumptions, and untruths about radiation risks often disseminated by the nuclear (power and weapons) establishments on both sides of the Atlantic. All scientific statements are backed by evidence via hundreds of references, 14 Appendices, 6 Annexes, a glossary and an extensive bibliography.
At present the book is only available in hardback from the Ethics Press. This is expensive but a 33% discount is available at
In addition, a paperback (~£30) version will be available in November 2024.https://www.amazon.co.uk/Scientists-Who-Alerted-Dangers-Radiation/dp/1804414468
In the meantime, the book’s first three chapters may be sampled at
Man blames nuclear meltdown for deformities in city more radioactive than Chernobyl
Ozersk – code named City 40 – was the birthplace of the Soviet nuclear weapons programme, now it’s one of the most contaminated places on the planet with residents exposed to high radiation levels.
By Kelly Williams, Assistant News Editor (Live) https://www.dailystar.co.uk/news/world-news/man-blames-nuclear-meltdown-deformities-32405120
A man living in a secret city five times more radioactive than Chernobyl has been left with facial deformities he blames on huge nuclear meltdowns.
Vakil Batirshin has massively swollen lymph nodes said to be caused by radiation-related illness. He lives in Ozersk – code named City 40 in Russia – which was built in total secrecy around the huge Mayak nuclear power plant by the Soviets in 1946.
For the first eight years after City 40 was built, Ozersk residents were forbidden from communicating with the outside world. Like Chernobyl, it was designed as a place to house the scientists working at the plant who – unbeknownst to the world – were leading the Soviet Union’s nuclear weapons programme during the Cold War era.
Locals were told they were “the nuclear shield and saviours of the world,” and everyone on the outside was an enemy.
They also kept it a secret that the extreme exposure to radiation was affecting the health of the city’s inhabitants. They started to get sick and die and the authorities were clandestine about the mortality rate.
However, the city’s graveyard with all its young victims tells the story.
Ozersk, nicknamed “The graveyard of the Earth,” was surrounded by guarded gates and barbed wire fences and did not appear on any maps.
Its inhabitants’ identities were also erased from the Soviet census to guard their secret.
The Mayak nuclear plant went through Russia’s biggest nuclear disaster when the facility allegedly dumped 200million curies worth of radioactive material into the environment around Ozersk.
The residents also suffered the Kyshtym disaster in 1957, the worst nuclear disaster the world had seen before Chernobyl.
Radiation bathed the city when a cooling system exploded at Mayak with the force of 100 tons of dynamite.
One of the nearby lakes has been so heavily contaminated by plutonium that locals have renamed it the “Lake of Death” or “Plutonium Lake”.
In an interview which resurfaced earlier this week on X (formerly Twitter), Vakil Batirshin struggles to speak, his neck is painfully swollen from lymph nodes that have grown to triple their normal size.
His exact diagnosis remains steeped in mystery as doctors say it can be hard to trace any one condition to radiation.
But asked if he has any doubt his symptoms are related to radioactivity, he said: “Well, when I lived in my home village, I didn’t have anything. Everything was great.
“When I came here, it all started.”
Another resident, Gilani Dambaev is riddled with diseases doctors think are linked to a lifetime’s exposure to excessive radiation. He and his family have government-issued cards identifying them as residents of radiation-tainted territory.
He said: “Sometimes they would put up signs warning us not to swim in the river, but they never said why. After work, we would go swimming in the river. The kids would too.”
Although the secret is now out and Ozyorsk resembles “a suburban 1950s American town” according to The Guardian, residents know their water is contaminated, their crops are poisoned, and their children may be sick.
Half a million people in Ozersk and its surrounding area are said to have been exposed to five times as much radiation as those living in the areas of Ukraine affected by the Chernobyl nuclear accident.
But most refused to leave, because while the Soviet population were suffering from famine and living in extreme poverty, the city was regarded as a paradise as authorities gave them private apartments, plenty of food, good schools and healthcare, and a plethora of entertainment and cultural activities.
Even still, residents opt against leaving. The Guardian reported that “it is prestigious to live in Ozersk.”
Residents describe it as a town of “intellectuals”, where they are used to getting “the best of everything for free”.
Living in Mayak’s nuclear shadow and resigned to her fate, one said: “I don’t hope for anything anymore. If we get sick, we get sick.”
Some locals, however, claim that long term dumping by the nuclear plant’s management continues today.
The government has started resettling residents to new homes away from the river, but the process only began in 2008.
Secret history of Maralinga nuclear bomb tests
The half-life of plutonium is 24,000 years. At this rate of decay, the Maralinga 
lands would be contaminated for the next half-million years.…..A variety of factors underlay the harm to public health, Aboriginal culture and the natural environment which the British tests entailed. Perhaps most significant was the secrecy surrounding the testing program….There seems little doubt that the secrecy in which the entire testing program was cloaked served British rather than Australian interests…..Information passed to Australian officials was kept to the minimum necessary to facilitate their assistance in the conduct of the testing program. The use of plutonium in the minor trials was not disclosed……
A toxic legacy : British nuclear weapons testing in Australia, Australian Institute of Criminology. “…… Three days after the conclusion of the Totem trials, the Australian government was formally advised of British desires to establish a permanent testing site in Australia. In August 1954, the Australian Cabinet agreed to the establishment of a permanent testing ground at a site that became named Maralinga, Continue reading
Australian govt in a dilemma over radiation airport scanning
Canberra-based Civil Liberties Australia spokesman Tim Vines said the authority was behaving like a ”government agency mad with power”……
Govt promises X-rays won’t be naked scanners, The Canberra Times, JULIEANNE STRACHAN, 28 Nov, 2010 New X-Ray body scanners could be rolled out at Australian airports in just a few months, but the Federal Government has promised they will not be the same as the ”naked scanners” which have caused outrage in the US. Continue reading
Skin cancer- special risk for Australians
The skin cancer time bomb, Sydney Morning Herald, November 26, 2010 – “……………..Skin cancer doctors say the key time frame between sun damage and skin cancer is 10 to 15 years.They urge young people to have yearly skin check ups and consider what impact skin cancer could have on their futures and life long dreams.
SOME SKIN CANCER FACTS…………..read more at Skin cancer facts
Airport radiation scanning – skin cancer risk
unlike other scanners, the radiation from these devices is delivered at low energy beam levels, with most of the dose concentrated in the skin and underlying tissue. “While the dose would be safe if it were distributed throughout the volume of the entire body, the dose to the skin may be dangerously high,”
Full-body airport scanners ‘as likely to kill you as terrorist bombs’ By Kate Schneider news.com.au *November 26, 2010 CONTROVERSIAL full-body airport scanners are just as likely to kill you as a terrorist’s bomb exploding on your plane, a leading scientist says. Continue reading
A legal setback, but British nuclear veterans will fight on
“I’m convinced that if we took this to the European Court of Human Rights, we would win our case…..We are fighting for justice – not money.
A-bomb vets vow to continue fight Shields Gazette, John Taylor witnessed atomic tests in 1957. 23 November 2010 By Terry Kelly DISAPPOINTED nuclear test veterans in South Tyneside are set to fight on for justice Continue reading
Australian soldiers exposed to depleted uranium at Maralinga
An Australian royal commission first discovered the use of depleted uranium in atomic tests at Maralinga some 14 years ago, but the government failed to take any action at the time.
Depleted uranium used at Maralinga, Paul Langley’s Nuclear History Blog, 23 Nov 10, Australian Government Confirms Depleted Uranium Used in 1950s The Australian Federal Government announced that it will conduct a health study of Australian volunteers who worked at Maralinga, a British nuclear test site. Continue reading
UK legal case – nuclear veterans’ claim is far from over
the fact that Mrs Sinfield’s case concerning her late husband
Bert can take place in a full court hearing where all the scientific evidence held on ionising radiation damage to health will be revealed is good news .
British govt has partial legal win against nuclear veterans
Radiation sexism – pilots exempt from scanning, flight attendants not
Australia’s stupidity over skin cancer and radiation
Ain’t it great! Australia is the skin cancer capital of the world! You can see how stupid we are, at any beach, with bodies determinedly exposing themselves to ultra-violet radiation and skin cancer.
Well, the Australian government is either just as stupid as the public, or perhaps banks on the apathy of Australians. Australia is to compund our skin cancer risk by installing the radiation “back scatter’ scanning security at airports. bad luck for airline crews and frequent flyers. We won’t even get thge choice of a pat-down (that might be a bit embarrassing, but its not cancerous). If you keep up with news on the radiation scanners – their biggest risk is that of skin cancer.
But never mind – Australia can keep on winning in the world skin cancer stakes! – Christina Macpherson
Australia and ionising radiation – National Skin Cancer Action Week
National Skin Cancer Action Week 21 – 27 November With summer on the doorstep, National Skin Cancer Action Week (21 to 27 November) aims to raise awareness of skin cancer in Australia.“Australia has one of the highest rates of skin cancer in the world, with more than 430,000 new cases each year,” said Cancer Council Australia CEO, Professor Ian Olver. “Sun protection needs to be part of our everyday routines and the Cancer Council range of products has been carefully designed to make looking after ourselves in the sun easy, practical and fashionable.”The major cause of skin cancer is too much exposure to ultraviolet (UV) radiation from the sun. Skin can burn in as little as 15 minutes in summer sun so it is important to protect skin from UV radiation. Press Release: National Skin Cancer Action Week 21 – 27 November
1 This month
of the week – Disrupting War & Militarism in Oceania. Active solidarity. Radical practice.
Antinuclear 