Monbiot turns on the Anti-Nuclear lobby
Journalist and Green writer George Monbiot, who used to be an opponent of Nuclear Power himself, has a coruscating article in the Guardian today, "The unpalatable truth is that the anti-nuclear lobby has misled us all."
He describes how he realised after asking for supporting evidence for comments made by leading anti-nuclear campaigner Dr Helen Caldicott during a debate, that she was unable to provide any reputable scientific evidence to support many of her statements.
Monbiot has published his correspondence with Dr Caldicott on his website here.
He examines some of the myths and legends spread by the anti-nuclear lobby, such as the wild claim that radiation from the Chernobyl disaster killed 985,000 people.
A review by the journal Radiation Protection Dosimetry of the study cited by Dr Caldicott and others to support this claim points out that this figure is achieved by the remarkable method of assuming that all increased deaths from a wide range of diseases – including many which have no known association with radiation – were caused by the Chernobyl accident.
There is no basis for this assumption, not least because screening in many countries improved dramatically after the disaster and, since 1986, there have been massive changes in the former eastern bloc. The study makes no attempt to correlate exposure to radiation with the incidence of disease.
By contrast a report by The United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR) which you can read here, concludes that radiation killed 28 of the 134 workers who sustained serious doses of radiation while attempting to contain the disaster, and that failure by the Soviet authorities to prevent the population drinking milk contaminated with radioactive iodine resulted in 6.848 cases of thyriod cancer, mostly among children: of these cases 15 had proved fatal by by 2005.
Beyond this the UN concluded that "there has been no persuasive evidence of any other health effect in the general population that can be attributed to radiation exposure" and that the vast majority of the population of the countries affected "need not live in fear of serious health consequences from the Chernobyl accident".
The Chernobyl accident was extremely damaging and it is essential that all nuclear installations are managed far more safely so that no such incident happened again.
But taking a disaster in which radiation can be shown to have killed 43 people and making wild allegations that the death toll was nearly a million is not the best way to assess the true impact of the nuclear industry, or any other, on the environment.
Monbiot concludes:
"Failing to provide sources, refuting data with anecdote, cherry-picking studies, scorning the scientific consensus, invoking a cover-up to explain it: all this is horribly familiar. These are the habits of climate-change deniers, against which the green movement has struggled valiantly, calling science to its aid. It is distressing to discover that when the facts don't suit them, members of this movement resort to the follies they have denounced.
"We have a duty to base our judgments on the best available information. This is not only because we owe it to other people to represent the issues fairly, but also because we owe it to ourselves not to squander our lives on fairytales. A great wrong has been done by this movement. We must put it right."
He describes how he realised after asking for supporting evidence for comments made by leading anti-nuclear campaigner Dr Helen Caldicott during a debate, that she was unable to provide any reputable scientific evidence to support many of her statements.
Monbiot has published his correspondence with Dr Caldicott on his website here.
He examines some of the myths and legends spread by the anti-nuclear lobby, such as the wild claim that radiation from the Chernobyl disaster killed 985,000 people.
A review by the journal Radiation Protection Dosimetry of the study cited by Dr Caldicott and others to support this claim points out that this figure is achieved by the remarkable method of assuming that all increased deaths from a wide range of diseases – including many which have no known association with radiation – were caused by the Chernobyl accident.
There is no basis for this assumption, not least because screening in many countries improved dramatically after the disaster and, since 1986, there have been massive changes in the former eastern bloc. The study makes no attempt to correlate exposure to radiation with the incidence of disease.
By contrast a report by The United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR) which you can read here, concludes that radiation killed 28 of the 134 workers who sustained serious doses of radiation while attempting to contain the disaster, and that failure by the Soviet authorities to prevent the population drinking milk contaminated with radioactive iodine resulted in 6.848 cases of thyriod cancer, mostly among children: of these cases 15 had proved fatal by by 2005.
Beyond this the UN concluded that "there has been no persuasive evidence of any other health effect in the general population that can be attributed to radiation exposure" and that the vast majority of the population of the countries affected "need not live in fear of serious health consequences from the Chernobyl accident".
The Chernobyl accident was extremely damaging and it is essential that all nuclear installations are managed far more safely so that no such incident happened again.
But taking a disaster in which radiation can be shown to have killed 43 people and making wild allegations that the death toll was nearly a million is not the best way to assess the true impact of the nuclear industry, or any other, on the environment.
Monbiot concludes:
"Failing to provide sources, refuting data with anecdote, cherry-picking studies, scorning the scientific consensus, invoking a cover-up to explain it: all this is horribly familiar. These are the habits of climate-change deniers, against which the green movement has struggled valiantly, calling science to its aid. It is distressing to discover that when the facts don't suit them, members of this movement resort to the follies they have denounced.
"We have a duty to base our judgments on the best available information. This is not only because we owe it to other people to represent the issues fairly, but also because we owe it to ourselves not to squander our lives on fairytales. A great wrong has been done by this movement. We must put it right."
Comments
"We have a duty to base our judgments on the best available information. This is not only because we owe it to other people to represent the issues fairly, but also because we owe it to ourselves not to squander our lives on fairytales. A great wrong has been done by this movement. We must put it right."
Presumably this was his opinion last month, last year, five years ago ? What prevented him from seeing the light then ? Naked opportunism ?