Radiation & Health
Exposing misleading claims by nuclear proponents
Friends of the Earth, Australia
Anti-Nuclear and Clean Energy Campaign
Last updated Deember 2011
Introduction
Linear no-threshold risk model
Committee on the Biological Effects of Ionising Radiation
Misinformation arising from methodological problems
References
Updates, excerpts, articles etc.
Introduction
The weight of scientific opinion holds that there is no threshold below which ionising radiation poses no risk.
Radiation protection agencies establish dose limits for radiation exposure from nuclear facilities but there is no pretence (from radiation protection agencies, at least), that radiation doses below these levels are without risk.
Moreover, as scientific understanding of the effects of ionising radiation has advanced, permitted dose limits have been dramatically reduced. For workers, the permitted dose has decreased by no less than 2500%:
* 500 millisieverts (mSv) p.a. in 1934
* 150 mSv in 1950
* 50 mSv in 1956
* 20 mSv (averaged over five years) in 1991.
In Australia, the maximum permitted dose is 1 mSv for members of the public (in addition to background radiation which is typically of the order of 2 mSv p.a.)
Linear no-threshold risk model
Radiation protection agencies around the world, including the Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Agency (ARPANSA), all base regulations on the linear no-threshold model which assumes that there is no threshold below which radiation exposure is safe.
Notwithstanding growing scientific confidence in the linear no-threshold model, uncertainties will always persist. In circumstances where people are exposed to low-level radiation, epidemiological studies are unlikely to be able to demonstrate increased cancer rates because of the 'statistical noise' in the form of widespread cancer incidence from many causes, as well as other methodological difficulties.
A report from the Committee on the Biological Effects of Ionising Radiation (BEIR 2005) illustrates the difficulty. It estimated that one out of 100 people exposed to 100 mSv of radiation over a lifetime would probably develop cancer as a result of that exposure, but that 42 cancers can be expected in the same group from causes other than radiation exposure. A 2.4% (1/42) increase would not register as a statistically-significant increase. Radiation exposure from nuclear facilities is typically far less than 100 mSv which makes it far less likely that a statistically-significant effect will be demonstrated.
The methodological difficulties are addressed by Dr Sue Wareham (2007):
"Firstly, health effects such as cancer due to radiation exposure often take decades to develop. Secondly, cancers due to radiation exposure are indistinguishable from any other cancer. Thirdly, radioisotopes can travel great distances. Therefore epidemiological studies investigating the effects of a particular radiation exposure are necessarily very long, they may involve many countries if not continents, and they are extraordinarily complex.
"Add to this the fact that cancer is a common disease in any event, and the result is that a small percentage increase in cancer rates due to radiation exposure can readily be overlooked, even when the absolute number of cancers caused by radiation exposure may be very large.
"A further source of misleading research results is the mixing, inadvertently or knowingly, of data for populations exposed to quite different levels of radiation, for example after a nuclear accident. The results for heavily exposed populations may then be 'diluted' by results for much less exposed populations and the results overall will appear reassuringly low."
Numerous studies have demonstrated a statistically-significant increase in cancer incidence around nuclear plants, but they are generally dismissed by the nuclear industry, often on spurious, methodological grounds.
An important issue is the onus of proof -a difficult issue at the best of times, all the more so given the difficulty of demonstrating statistically-significant effects from low-level radiation exposure.
Committee on the Biological Effects of Ionising Radiation
Notwithstanding the methodological problems, there is growing scientific confidence in the linear no-threshold model. An important recent study was the 2005 report of the Committee on the Biological Effects of Ionising Radiation of the US National Academy of Sciences (BEIR 2005). The BEIR report comprehensively reviewed available data and supports the linear no-threshold risk model.
The BEIR Committee stated:
"The Committee judges that the balance of evidence from epidemiologic, animal and mechanistic studies tend to favor a simple proportionate relationship at low doses between radiation dose and cancer risk."
"... the risk of cancer proceeds in a linear fashion at lower doses without a threshold and ... the smallest dose has the potential to cause a small increase in risk to humans."
Richard Monson, Chair of the BEIR Committee and professor of epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health, said: "The scientific research base shows that there is no threshold of exposure below which low levels of ionizing radiation can be demonstrated to be harmless or beneficial. The health risks - particularly the development of solid cancers in organs - rise proportionally with exposure. At low doses of radiation, the risk of inducing solid cancers is very small. As the overall lifetime exposure increases, so does the risk."
The 2005 BEIR report noted that uncertainty remains because of the unavoidable methodological difficulties:
"It should be noted however, that even with the increased sensitivity the combined analyses are compatible with a range of possibilities, from a reduction of risk at low doses to risks twice those upon which current radiation protection recommendations are based."
Misinformation arising from methodological problems
The difficulty of demonstrating health impacts from low-level radiation exposure is used by nuclear proponents as the basis for an endless stream of self-serving, disingenuous and scientifically-indefensible statements.
For example, ANSTO states:
"Radiation effects may appear following exposure to large amounts of radiation ... it would take a very large dose to kill sufficient numbers of your cells to cause your death ... typically several thousand times as large as the radiation dose you receive normally each year from the environment. Note also that to cause your death, you would need to be exposed more or less in one hit, not spread out over a year. (Compare with sunlight: spread out over a year it gives you a suntan, but in one day of sunbaking it could cause your death by sunstroke.)" (ANSTO, 'Ionising Radiation' pamphlet.)"
The following Q&A illustrates a variation in which ANSTO wants to have its yellowcake and eat it too, claiming that low-level radiation is both hazardous and safe at one and the same time:
Question. You state that radiation levels from low-level waste are "minimal and safe", implying that there is no risk from low-level radiation. Is that ANSTO's view? If so, how does ANSTO reconcile that view with the weight of contrary scientific opinion, e.g. as expressed clearly in the 2005 BEIR report?
ANSTO: The statement made was that radiation levels from low-level waste are minimal and safe. That does not imply there is no risk, it implies the risk is minimal and below the level that would be of any safety concern. Radiation levels are set by regulatory bodies based on recommendations from ICRP, to which groups such as BEIR contribute, to ensure that both workers and the public can be assured of a safe environment. (ANSTO Chief of Operations, 20/6/07).
The industry-funded Uranium Information Centre (UIC-1) ignores predicted deaths from low-level radiation to claim that nuclear power is far safer than alternative energy sources including hydro. Yet the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (1994) estimated the collective effective dose to the world population over a 50-year period of operation of nuclear power reactors and associated nuclear facilities to be two million person-Sieverts. Applying the standard risk estimate to that level of radiation exposure gives an alarming total of 80,000 fatal cancers. Of course, applying risk estimates (with their uncertainties) to dose estimates (with their margin of error) is less than precise. But the nuclear industry's solution - to pretend that its emissions have no impact whatsoever - is dishonest.
Likewise, the UIC ignores cancer deaths from routine nuclear fuel cycle emissions to state that: "The risks from any conceivable nuclear plant (advanced reactor type) in Australia would be even less than those from other Western plants operating worldwide since the 1960s, which have not caused any loss of life in almost 12,000 reactor years of operation." (UIC-2)
Likewise, the UIC states: "Low levels of radiation comparable to those received naturally in some places (up to 50 mSv/yr) are not harmful." (UIC-3)
And to give one further example, the UIC states: "According to authoritative UN figures, the Chernobyl death toll is 56 (31 workers at the time, more since and 9 from thyroid cancer)." (UIC-3)
However, detailed UN reports in 2005-06 estimated up to 9,000 excess cancer deaths due to Chernobyl among the people who worked on the clean-up operations, evacuees and residents of the highly and lower-contaminated regions in Belarus, the Russian Federation and Ukraine (Chernobyl Forum, 2005; WHO, 2006.)
Other, credible scientific studies estimate a far greater death toll. Using a standard risk estimate from the International Commission on Radiological Protection (0.04 cancer deaths per person-Sievert of low-dose exposure to ionising radiation) and the International Atomic Energy Agency's (1996) estimate of total exposure (600,000 person-Sieverts) gives an estimated 24,000 cancer deaths from Chernobyl.
Dr John Gofman provides a useful rebuttal of pro-nuclear arguments concerning radiation at: www.ratical.org/radiation/CNR/top10args.html. It is also copied at this web archive.
References
BEIR 2005 - National Research Council (of the US National Academy of Sciences), 2005, “Health Risks from Exposure to Low Levels of Ionizing Radiation (BEIR VII - Phase 2)”, written by the NRC’s Board on Radiation Research Effects, <www.nap.edu/books/030909156X/html>, <www.nap.edu/catalog/6230.html>)
Chernobyl Forum, 2005, Chernobyl’s Legacy, second revised version, <www.iaea.org/Publications/Booklets/Chernobyl/chernobyl.pdf>
International Atomic Energy Agency, 1996, "Long-term Committed Doses from Man-made Sources," IAEA Bulletin, Vol.38, No.1.
United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR), 1994, "Ionising Radiation: Sources and Biological Effects", New York: UNSCEAR.
Note - the UIC is now defunct and so is its website. You could probably find these papers via www.archive.org/web/web.php
UIC-1 <www.uic.com.au/nip14.htm>
UIC-2 <www.uic.com.au/nip44.htm>
UIC-3 <www.uic.com.au/nip43.htm>
Wareham, Sue, 2007, EnergyScience Coalition Briefing Paper #20, <www.energyscience.org.au>.
World Health Organization, 2006, <www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2006/pr20/en/index.html>
Updates / More Info
Useful PowerPoint presentation on uranium mining, radiation and health by Clive Rosewarne from the Public Health Association of Australia (NT)
or direct URL:
http://www.phaa.net.au/documents/UraniumHealthPHAANTfeb2010.zip.ppt
Snippet from
Reasonable Doubt
April 24th, 2008
Source Link: New Scientist
<www.rachel.org/en/node/6958>
Studies in the 1980s revealed increased incidences of childhood leukaemia near nuclear installations at Windscale (now Sellafield), Burghfield and Dounreay in the UK. Later studies near German nuclear facilities found a similar effect. The official response was that the radiation doses from the nearby plants were too low to explain the increased leukaemia. The Committee on Medical Aspects of Radiation in the Environment, which is responsible for advising the UK government, finally concluded that the explanation remained unknown but was not likely to be radiation.
There the issue rested, until a recent flurry of epidemiological studies appeared. Last year, researchers at the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston carried out a meta-analysis of 17 research papers covering 136 nuclear sites in the UK, Canada, France, the US, Germany, Japan and Spain. The incidence of leukaemia in children under 9 living close to the sites showed an increase of 14 to 21 per cent, while death rates from the disease were raised by 5 to 24 per cent, depending on their proximity to the nuclear facilities (European Journal of Cancer Care, vol 16, p 355).
This was followed by a German study which found 14 cases of leukaemia compared to an expected four cases between 1990 and 2005 in children living within 5 kilometres of the Krummel nuclear plant near Hamburg, making it the largest leukaemia cluster near a nuclear power plant anywhere in the world (Environmental Health Perspectives, vol 115, p 941).
This was upstaged by the yet more surprising KiKK studies (a German acronym for Childhood Cancer in the Vicinity of Nuclear Power Plants), whose results were published this year in the International Journal of Cancer (vol 122, p 721) and the European Journal of Cancer (vol 44, p 275). These found higher incidences of cancers and a stronger association with nuclear installations than all previous reports. The main findings were a 60 per cent increase in solid cancers and a 117 per cent increase in leukaemia among young children living near all 16 large German nuclear facilities between 1980 and 2003. The most striking finding was that those who developed cancer lived closer to nuclear power plants than randomly selected controls. Children living within 5 kilometres of the plants were more than twice as likely to contract cancer as those living further away, a finding that has been accepted by the German government.
Some notes from WA Greens MLC Robin Chapple
I’ve read with interest many of the comments below and find the debate complicated with simplicity and a lack of understanding of the known radiation impacts or regulations.
Firstly the materials mined, uranium, pitchblend and produced yellow cake are all radioactive and they emit in varying degrees alpha, and beta ionizing radiation with the attendant production of radon gas.
There are two types of ionising radiation. One consists of particles (alpha, beta, neutrons) and the other consists of electromagnetic (x-rays, gamma rays) radiation.
It is recognized that all of the above elements are harmful to life as they either affect our genetic markers or through ingestion and inhalation lodgement create internal lesions that produce over time a cohort of cancers above the normal statistical level.
Radiation impacts from ionizing radioactive elements as far as we are concerned do not diminish over time, industry has stated that the 200,000 years for radiation to decay is a not a very long time in the life of a rock.
Any waste material of host rock is almost as radioactive as the uranium being mined and has the same lifetime radioactive impacts as the uranium ore.
Research has confirmed that there is no safe, threshold dose of radiation below which no damage is done. One decay trail through one cell can cause cancer.
The average annual background dose of radiation to people in Australia is around 1,5 – 2 millisievert/year.
Regulation
The International Committee on Radiological Protection (ICRP) recommends an allowance of 1 millisievert (100 millirems) annual maximum exposure dose above background radiation for the general public, this generates a risk of 3.5 fatal cancers in 1000 people exposed annually over a lifetime of 70 years.
The uranium mining industry cannot operate within the ICRP guidelines due to the point source radiation at a minesite is some 70-90 times higher than normal background radiation and has consistently protested the ICRP guidelines.
To facilitate the existence of uranium mine’s around the world and in Australia special regulations of exceedence for the mining industry had to be established to allow workers to be exposed to 50 millisievert/year or 50 times the general public’s safe dose level. Pregnant workers are not permitted this exceedence. [ARPANSA’s recommendations for limiting exposure to ionizing radiation (2002) – Dose Limits]
Robin Chapple MLC
Former member of the Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Agency (ARPANSA), Radiation Health Committee representing the interests of the general public.
No safe dose
By Bill Williams
Tuesday, 12 December 2006
http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=5249&page=0
The recent zeal among conservative politicians for expanding Australia’s nuclear industry should raise questions about its potential impact on the health of humans and their habitat. Unfortunately, the recently released Switkowski Report (pdf 3.63MB) on Uranium Mining Processing and Nuclear Energy brings little serious critical analysis to bear on the subject.
We exist in a naturally radioactive environment: the rocks and mountains, the sun in particular, produce a “background” level. Average exposure to “background” ionizing radiation worldwide is measured at 2.4 millisievert (mSv) a year. About half of this is from radon gas and its decay products.
However, human activities in the past century have greatly increased our exposure to ionizing radiation, through atomic weapons development, testing and use, as well as uranium-mining and nuclear electricity generation. The ongoing atmospheric fallout from the nuclear weapons testing in the 50s and 60s adds an average extra dose to us all of 0.02mSv per year.
These doses are estimated to have already resulted in 430,000 additional fatal cancers worldwide by the year 2000, and a total of 2.4 million extra cancer deaths long-term.
Unfortunately there is no level of radiation exposure below which we are at zero risk: even low-level medical exposures such as chest X-rays (0.04mSv per test) carry a quantifiable risk of harm. While high doses of ionizing radiation will cause greater health damage, even low doses are associated with adverse environmental and human consequences.
Using the “linear no-threshold” risk model, the 2005 US National Academy of Sciences Committee on the Biological Effects of Ionizing Radiation (BEIR VII) estimated:
* over a lifetime, a dose of 1mSv creates an excess risk of cancer of approximately 1 in 10,000. Higher doses are associated with proportionately higher risk, for example a dose of 100mSv would cause 1 in 100 people to develop cancer;
* approximately 1 individual in 100 persons would be expected to develop cancer from a lifetime (70 years) exposure just to background x and gamma rays (excluding radon and other high LET radiations)
It should be noted that while these are average risks, the risks in vulnerable groups of the population may be considerably higher. BEIR VII assessed women as having about twice the radiation risk for solid cancer incidence as men, and 38 per cent higher cancer mortality risk than men.
Children are at even greater risk - radiation during infancy for boys results in three to four times the cancer risk as between 20 to 50 years of age, and female infants have double the risk of boys.
Ionizing radiation causes damage to the DNA in living cells. Atoms and molecules become ionized or excited, which can produce free radicals, break chemical bonds, produce new chemical bonds and cross-linkage between macromolecules and damage molecules that regulate vital cell processes such as DNA, RNA and proteins.
In recent years biologists have identified specific radiation-induced damage at the molecular level to nucleotide sequences on chromosomal DNA, including double-strand breaks, large deletions and sister chromatid exchange.
The cell can repair certain levels of damage in its chromosomal DNA: at low doses cellular damage is usually repaired. However, faulty repairs may lead to cell death or to proliferation of abnormal cells which form a cancer.
At higher levels, cell death results. At extremely high doses, cells cannot be replaced quickly enough, and tissues fail to function; this can result in massive cell death, organ (particularly bone marrow and gut) damage and death to the individual.
Radiation effects are often categorised by when they appear.
The prompt effects include radiation sickness and radiation burns. High doses delivered to the whole body within short periods of time can produce effects such as blood component changes, fatigue, diarrhoea, nausea and death. These effects will develop within hours, days or weeks, depending on the size of the dose. The larger the dose, the sooner a given effect will occur.
When radiation effects are delayed, DNA abnormalities are passed on to subsequent generations of cells, where the abnormal coding can lead to tissue abnormalities, including cancers.
Cancer development is a multistage process, and is similar for radiation-associated cancers as for spontaneous cancers or those associated with exposure to other carcinogens.
Low dose radiation appears to act principally on the early stages of cancer initiation, whereas for higher doses, effects on later stages of cancer promotion and progression are also likely. Genetic disorders associated with deficiencies in the ability to repair DNA damage and in tumour-suppressor type genes (which normally suppress cancer development) increase the radiation cancer risk.
Mutational events at key points such as “proto-oncogene” or “suppressor gene” sites provide a credible mechanism for radiation-induced malignant (cancerous) transformation.
Such cancers will take many cell generations to develop, so it may be several decades before they are detected.
The delay enables polluters to avoid responsibility for the disease-promoting properties of radiation. This avoidance is amplified by the fact that leukemia and other cancers induced by radiation are indistinguishable from those that result from other causes.
Ionising radiation is also responsible for serious reproductive effects through prenatal exposure. Rapidly proliferating and differentiating tissues are most sensitive to radiation damage, so radiation exposure can produce developmental problems, particularly in the developing brain, when the fetus is exposed in the womb.
The developmental conditions most commonly associated with prenatal radiation exposure include low birth weight, microcephaly, mental retardation, and other neurological problems.
Long-term, inter-generational genetic effects are also possible if the damage to the DNA code occurs in a reproductive cell (egg or sperm) whereby the coding error may be passed on to offspring … resulting potentially in birth defects and cancers in the children.
While many plant and animal experiments leave no doubt that radiation exposure can alter genetic material and cause disease, and human data also show DNA and chromosomal damage associated with exposure to ionizing radiation, a resultant effect on genetic diseases has not yet been observed in the case of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki survivors.
This does not mean that there is no such effect in humans. It may be that there were genetic abnormalities produced that were incompatible with life and those pregnancies therefore ended in miscarriage. It may also be that an increased rate of genetic abnormalities will be found in future generations, that is, the changes will skip one or more generations. Radiation-induced genetic damage is likely to manifest mainly as multi-system developmental abnormalities.
Evidence has emerged recently that the cell may also exhibit the phenomenon of “genomic instability”, where the progeny of an irradiated cell may unexpectedly become highly susceptible to general mutation and damage is detected only after several cell divisions. This may also occur in the progeny of cells close to the cell which is traversed by the radiation track but which themselves are not directly hit (“bystander effect”).
This phenomenon has been reproduced several times in laboratory studies of human cells but has not been confirmed in living humans. Such studies would necessarily need to be extraordinarily long. However if the theory of induced genetic instability is correct, then the human gene pool could be permanently altered.
Radiation health authorities use scientific modelling to calculate and set “permissible limits” for ionizing radiation exposure. As the scientific techniques have become more sophisticated, the recommended exposures for the public and the workforce have steadily been reduced: levels once regarded as “safe” are now known to be associated with cancers, bone marrow malignancies and genetic effects.
The dose limits recommended in 1991 by the International Commission on Radiological Protection (ICRP) which are most widely used internationally are more than 12 times lower that those recommended in the early 1950s at the time of the first British nuclear test explosions in Australia.
The growing scientific literature refining our understanding of the pathogenic properties of ionising radiation has dramatically increased pressure on the nuclear industry to reduce radiation exposures.
However, in their rush to give the thumbs-up to nukes, the Prime Minister’s team of “experts”, led by former Telstra chief and ex-nuclear physicist Ziggy Switkowski, make light of the health burden attributable to the nuclear industry.
They are silent on the recent study published in the British Medical Journal which revealed that a cumulative exposure for adult workers in the nuclear industry of 100mSv - the current recommended five-year occupational dose limit - would lead to a 10 per cent increase in mortality from all cancers, and a 19 per cent increased mortality from leukemia (of types other than chronic lymphatic leukemia).
They are silent on multiple reported and controversial clusters of childhood cancers and congenital malformations in the vicinity of nuclear reactors and other nuclear facilities.
They frequently assert a record of “good management” in the Australian nuclear industry to date: a clear misrepresentation in view of hundreds of instances of mismanagement (leaks, spills, contamination, regulatory breaches) at Ranger, Olympic Dam and Beverly and the total failure of either industry or regulators to monitor health impacts in local populations despite known distribution of radio-toxins into habitat and food chain.
The Switkowski Report does not provide either “a factual base” or “an analytical framework” for discussion: it gives a whitewash to a complex and controversial subject. Not only is it likely to exacerbate Australia’s greenhouse emissions by vociferously promoting the nuclear non-solution, but it endangers Australians long-term by threatening to expand an industry whose toxic legacy will continue for many generations.
Dr Bill Williams is a GP in rural Victoria. He is the Vice President of the Medical Association of the Prevention of War and Board Member of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons.
Radiation & Health
In 2008, the KiKK study in Germany reported a 1.6-fold increase in solid cancers and a 2.2-fold increase in leukemias among children living within 5 km of all German nuclear power stations. The study has triggered debates as to the cause(s) of these increased cancers. This article, by Dr Ian Fairlie, reports on the findings of the KiKK study; discusses past and more recent epidemiological studies of leukemias near nuclear installations around the world, and outlines a possible biological mechanism to explain the increased cancers.
Environmental Health Journal 23rd September 2009
http://www.ehjournal.net/content/pdf/1476-069X-8-43.pdf
Introduction
Increased incidences of childhood leukemias were first reported near UK nuclear facilities in the late 1980s. Various explanations were offered for these increases; however the UK Government Committee on the Medical Aspects of Radiation in the Environment (COMARE) concluded in a series of reports [1-4] that the causes remained unknown but were unlikely to involve radiation exposures. This was mainly because the radiation exposures from these facilities were estimated to be too low, by two to three orders of magnitude, to explain the increased leukemias.
Recently, the KiKK (Kinderkrebs in der Umgebung von KernKraftwerken = Childhood Cancer in the Vicinity of Nuclear Power Plants) study [5,6] has rekindled the childhood leukemia debate. The KiKK study had been established partly as a result of an earlier study by Körblein and Hoffmann [7] which had found statistically significant increases in solid cancers (54%), and in leukemia (76%) in children aged < 5 within 5 km of 15 German NPP sites. It reported a 2.2-fold increase in leukemias and a 1.6-fold increase in solid (mainly embryonal) cancers among children living within 5 km of all German nuclear power stations. The web publication [8] of the study in December 2007 resulted in a public outcry and media debate in Germany which has received little attention elsewhere.
The KiKK case control study commands attention for a number of reasons. The first is its large size: it examined all cancers at all 16 nuclear reactor locations in Germany between 1980 and 2003, including 1,592 under-fives with cancer and 4,735 controls, with 593 under-fives with leukemia and 1,766 controls. This means that the study is statistically strong and its findings statistically significant. Small numbers and weak statistical significance often limit the usefulness of many smaller epidemiological studies.
Second is its authority: it was commissioned in 2003 by the German Government's Bundesamt für Strahlenschutz (BfS, the German Federal Office for Radiation Protection, approximately equivalent to the United States EPA's Office of Air and Radiation) after requests by German citizen groups. The study was carried out by epidemiology teams from the University of Mainz which could not be accused of being opposed to nuclear power.
Third is the validity of its results, as vouchsafed for by the German Government's Bundesamt für Strahlenschutz. It officially accepted that children living near nuclear power plants develop cancer and leukemia more frequently than those living further away. It stated [9:
"The present study confirms that in Germany there is a correlation between the distance of the home from the nearest NPP [nuclear power plant] at the time of diagnosis and the risk of developing cancer (particularly leukemia) before the 5th birthday. This study is not able to state which biological risk factors could explain this relationship. Exposure to ionising radiation was neither measured nor modelled. Although previous results could be reproduced by the current study, the present status of radiobiological and epidemiological knowledge does not allow the conclusion that the ionising radiation emitted by German nuclear power stations during normal operation is the cause. This study cannot conclusively clarify whether confounders, selection or randomness play a role in the distance trend observed."
(The rest of this paper is worth reading for its survey of previous studies and its discussion on methodological issues and limitations.)
Infant leukaemias near nuclear power stations
Dr Ian Fairlie
January 2010
CND briefing paper
http://www.cnduk.org/images/stories/briefings/nuclear_power/ian_fairlie_...
Excerpt ...
Have the German [KiKK] findings been supported by other studies? In one word, yes. In 2008, French scientists carried out a literature review of 26 multi-site studies of childhood cancer near nuclear facilities throughout the world. This followed an earlier study in 1999 which listed another 50 studies (36 single-site and 14 multisite).
In other words, over 60 studies have examined this matter and over 70% of them revealed pronounced cancer increases. I can think of no other instance – with chemical or biological toxins for example – where such a large number of studies have investigated a specific health effect near establishments emitting a specific hazard – in this case radionuclides.
In addition, researchers in South Carolina in 2007carried out a large meta-analysis (ie a combined study which improves statistical strength) of 136 nuclear sites in the UK, Canada, France, US, Germany, Japan and Spain. The study strongly supported the KiKK results, finding increased incidences of child leukaemia and raised child cancer death rates, depending on the proximity to nuclear facilities.
Most independent scientists consider the above to be convincing, if not overwhelming, evidence of an association between nuclear power plants and infant cancers, but unfortunately many nuclear scientists remain in denial and disagree with this conclusion.
As scientists discuss the likely reasons, this new powerful KiKK evidence of a direct link between child cancer and proximity to nuclear facilities raises difficult questions. Should pregnant women and women with young babies be advised to move away from existing nuclear power stations? Should local residents be advised not to eat fruit or vegetables from their gardens? But most important, shouldn’t the UK government be rethinking its nuclear policies?
Dr Ian Fairlie is an independent consultant on radioactivity in the environment. Between 2000 and 2004 he was Scientific Secretary to the government’s Committee Examining Radiation Risks of Internal Emitters (CERRIE).