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Fukushima Daiichi and Cancer Studies

By Eric McErlain
Yesterday, a pair of researchers from Stanford University released a study that projected 130 people, primarily in Japan, will die from cancer over the next 50 years as the result of the accident at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.Some observers have already started to weigh in on its merits.

This isn't the first study about cancer and Fukushima, and there will certainly be many others. While no one at NEI has had an opportunity to review the study released yesterday in detail, we would point interested parties to an article that was written for the Los Angeles Times by Dr. Robert Peter Gale of Imperial College, London. Dr. Gale has been closely involved in studying the aftermath of the accidents at both Chernobyl and Fukushima:
[E]xposures received by Fukushima workers and the public are quite low, including among the 20,000 or more workers decommissioning the facility and the approximately 100,000 evacuees. This doesn't mean there will be no future radiation-caused cancers, as some claim. But because there may be so few cancers, it is unlikely any epidemiological investigations will detect an increase in Japan or elsewhere that can be directly attributed to Fukushima.
Earlier this year, the Health Physics Society hosted a briefing on the radiological consequences of the Fukushima accident. Dr. Gale was among the participants. You can click here to read a transcript.

At the time, Dr. Gale recorded the following video concerning his opinion of the future health risks to workers at Fukushima Daiichi:



For more information concerning how the American nuclear energy industry is working to ensure the safety of our facilities here at home, please visit our Safety First microsite.
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Comments

Brian Mays said…
Mark Lynas pretty much called it 100%. He hit the nail on the head.

That fool Jacobson has been publishing nonsense like this for a long time now. That fact that this junk-science trash has been published in Energy & Environmental Science, "the #1 ranking journal in its ISI subject category" (according to its publishers), just shows how intellectually bankrupt the entire field is.

It's Cargo Cult Science at its worst.

Jacobson, along with Paul Ehrlich, are, or rather should be, embarrassments for Stanford University. I guess every school has to have its crackpots.
July 18, 2012 at 7:13 PM
jimwg said…
It’s vital that not only the proof and truth comes out here and the min rad dosage game gets straightened out, but that a very massive dose of perspective is issued to the public about this. There are activists groups sitting on skittish clueless politicians from Diablo Canyon to Indian Point who can’t wait for unofficial signs that a dozen random children from Fukushima will come down with any cancers as the excuse and pretext to shut down and curtail construction of reactors, even through they will blatantly overlook and even tolerate far far higher incidents of respiratory and blood aliments and diseases incurred by oil and coal emissions in addition to pollution, such is the fever of their blind anti-nuclear passions.

James Greenidge
Queens NY
July 19, 2012 at 6:39 AM
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