Customer Reviews

The Enemy Within: The High Cost of Living Near Nuclear Reactors

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

Notice the writer (singular, because I'm sure it's all the same person) of the three preceding one-star review opuses does not even identify himself. Does this person work hands-on in the nuke industry? We must have compassion for those who have been suckered into this cytogenic time-bomb of a career. They may be just as hilarious as Homer Simpson. For more information about how low-level radiation has likely affected myself and others who merely made the mistake of living near Los Alamos, see my review of 'Deadly Deceit' by J. Gould.

I had no idea why I got my breast cancer at age 48, only 11 months after my mother died of breast cancer. She got hers at age 68. My tumor was not genetic. I spoke to the authors of this book and felt I had found the answer. This book documents that women who live within 100 miles of a nuclear plant have the greatest risk of dying of breast cancer. The government breast cancer mortality map lines up with the government nuclear map, all across the country. Now the CDC says the northeast has the highest incidence of pediatric cancer in the country. We have the greatest number of nuclear plants. Now we have 14 year old girls with breast cancer states the CT Tumor Registry. They also state that the 6 towns closest to the CT nuclear plant, Millstone, have the highest of 12 different cancers in the state. Have you noticed the increase in childhood cancers? This book is terribly important to help you realize the danger to our younger generations. This never happened to the older generations. Author Dr.Jay Gould did work for the Queen of England, as a statistician and Dr. Ernest Sternglass, as a medical physicist met with Einstein. Joseph Mangano is the epidemiologist that heads up the national baby tooth study, documenting the levels of Strontium-90 radioactive nuclear emsissions in baby teeth and the link to cancer. Stunning evidence in this book, to help you begin to protect your family.

After reading this book, I became a committed opponent of Nuclear Power. The authors perform an excellent service in alerting everyone to the hazards we are all faced by any amount of nuclear radiation. When this book is read along with Ralph Graeub's The Petkau Effect: Nuclear Radiation, People and Trees, the astonishing realization will strike the reader-there is no such thing as a 'safe level' of contamination from any radioactive material. A basic level of chemistry and statistics is also required in understanding this subject. Unless the reader has some basic knowledge of how matter is constructed-an understanding gleaned from Chemistry 101-then this topic can be mysterious and easily misunderstood. Although the authors do a good job on the statistics, they never approach the subject of the number of atoms that are contained in a given volume of material.

The basic idea in the background to this topic is from physical chemistry; one needs to grasp what is contained in the idea behind Avogadro's number: 6 x 10 to the 23rd power number of atoms are in one mole of a material. What this means is that counting downward to even millionths or billionths of a mole would still leave huge numbers of radioactive material: subtract 10 to the sixth for a million and that leaves 6 x 10 to 17th power! While this idea is explored by Gould, he probably did not have space from his editors to explain it fully. What the book does do is to give an excellent overview of the statistics-living near (within 100 miles) a nuclear power plant places women and children at great risk. The author conclusively proves that the high incidence of breast cancers in women and thyroid cancers in young children in these areas is linked to the fallout from these leaky devices that we call nuclear power plants.

This is a fascinating statistical analysis of cancer-clusters and other immune deficiency problems linked to low-level radiation exposure from nuclear power plants and the testing of nuclear weapons. It raises important questions regarding public health which are all too seldom addressed anywhere. The authors' conclusions are a wake-up call for concerned citizens to begin challenging corporate and governmental silence surrounding the real/potential dangers of the nuclear power/weapons industries. A controversial, but important read!

The author twists scientific data to draw the ludicrous conclusion that simply living within 50-100 miles of a commercial nuclear facility "may" cause the following: AIDS, low birthweight babies, low intelligence, blood poisoning, crime, and violent deaths. It is interesting to note the authors repeated use of the word "may" instead of "are". Irresponsible conclusions based on hyperbolic distortions of data to scare the public into supporting the authors anti-nuclear position, this book is not worth the time to read. Sorry I took the time to read it.

I spent good money on this book and several hours reading it. Better I had done anything else. The author claims that very low levels of radiation cause almost anything bad. If it is bad, then radiation caused it. Natural radiation that nature exposes us to all the time? Why no. Every bad thing is caused by radiation from bomb testing and reactors. The author claims that these evil technologies cause a long laundry list of evils.

His statistics could have just as easily shown that the various problems supposed to be caused by radiation in the past 50 years (WW 2 to now) could have been caused by the increased used of home air conditioners, fast food joints, TV dinners or any host of other things that have entered society in the last 50 years.

This book is bogus science. It seems designed to continue our current plague of radiophobia.

The author is ignorant of the facts and distorts information in order to convince the reader that they should be living in a lead building to protect themselves from natural radiation. A waste of money.

In a followup to his 1991 book _Deadly Deceit_, Gould issues a devestating indictment of the nuclear power industry. Using his irreproachable statistical expertise (in over 30 years, he never lost a court case in which he appeared as an expert statistical witness), Gould shows the direct correlation between deadly diseases and living downwind from nuclear reactors. Why does the U.S. government no longer release the data showing the amount of radiation released from Nukes? Because they don't want you to know that Nukes never have been and never will be safe. Instead, they are exposing U.S. citizens to deadly toxins that kill them or make them more susceptible to cancers and autoimmune diseases. For anyone who wants the irrefutable evidence supporting these claims, this is a book you must read.

This book is a joke. It's replete with elementary statistical errors, obvious misrepresentations of data, selective use of data, and other egregious errors.

The book is written by a notorious quack who appears to be incompetent and confused. He's apparently unaware that correlation does not imply causation. He's also unaware of the need to correct for confouding factors. He commits statistical mistakes which would be easily avoided by almost anyone who has taken a few undergraduate courses about the topic.

The data found in the appendices do not support the claims of this book. The data provided do not support the claim that living within 100 miles of a reactor causes cancer.

This book reaches conclusions which are incompatible with well-established, serious science. Serious scientists of radiation epidemiology have investigated this topic, and have reached conclusions which are very different from those found in this book. This book doesn't mention the findings of real science, nor why its conclusions are discrepant with those findings.

The most frightening claim of this book is in the introduction. There, the author claims that he's served as an expert witness in civil court cases. If so, that fact is truly disturbing.

This guy had a conclusion in mind and looked for the "statistics" to prove it. Sadly, real science is the other way around.
Here's a better idea: watch what you eat, don't smoke, and wear your seatbelt. The stress books like these try to create kills innumerably more than the radiation ever will.