We Should Stop Running Away from Radiation

Abstract

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. Nuclear radiation at very high levels is dangerous, but the scale of concern that it evokes is misplaced. Nuclear technology cures countless cancer patients everyday—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 most recent UN report (http://www.unscear.org/docs/reports/2008/Advance_copy_Annex_D_Chernobyl_Report.pdf.28.February.2011) 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 people at Bhopal in 1984 who died as a result of a leak of chemicals from the Union Carbide pesticide plant.