Professor Wade has written the seminal work on radiation and safety. Prof. Wade taught and researched particle physics at Oxford for 40 years. He was not an English major or a sociology professor. In 2005 he developed a course and textbook on the use of radiation in medicine for imaging and cancer radiotherapy.
The book describes how the current fear of radiation developed. The safety standards set up in 1950 were based upon very little scientific knowledge or experience. They were designed to be very conservative and based upon the Linear No Threshold (LNT) theory. By 1990 these standards were tightened by a factor of 150. Prof Wade recommends that the safety standards be reduced by a factor of 6 from 1950 or 1000 from 1990.
Prof Wade relies upon empirical evidence to support his conclusion: medical history of survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, medical history of workers exposed to radiation, radiobiology, cancer radiotherapy, medical experiments on laboratory animals, and background radiation levels.
The nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki exposed hundreds of thousands of people to very high levels of single dose full body radiation. 280,000 survivors were tracked from 1950 to 1990 relative to a control group of 25,000 not exposed to radiation. 7.9% of the survivors died of cancer, 7.5% of natural causes and .4% from radiation induced cancer. Statistically significant radiation effects are seen for cancers but not for other causes of death or effects upon pregnancy. The level of cancer risk below 100 milli sieverts is so low that it can not be detected in a 50 year study involving 100,000 people. This contradicts the no threshold assumption of the LNT theory.
The average additional cancer rate per 1000 people over 50 years was 5 which corresponds to a 10 week reduction in life expectancy. But this number varied from 8 per thousand at 100-200 millisieverts to 90 per thousand above 2000 millisieverts.
The UK Ministry of Defense did a study of 170,000 workers exposed to an average of 25 millisievert of radiation above background radiation levels over their careers. These workers were tracked to age 85 or 2002 whichever came first. These workers suffered about 20% less cancers than the general population. This result is consistent with a threshold level at which radiation poses no danger and is suggestive of a positive effect resulting from low radiation doses.
Denver, at a high altitude, has radiation levels that are three times the safety standard set by the International Commission for Radiological Protection but a lower cancer rate than the US on average. This result is consistent with a threshold level at which radiation poses no danger and is suggestive of a positive effect resulting from low radiation doses.
Anti nuclear Greens will say that setting the radiation safety standards 1000 times lower than required is just erring on the side of safety. The problem is the effect that this standard has upon the lives of people living near a nuclear accident. No one died from radiation in Fukushima, 1600 people have died from the effects of the evacuation of Fukushima (suicides and people hospitalized at the time of the evacuation). Hundreds of thousands of people's lives have been turned completely upside down because the government will not allow them to return to their homes, their community, their businesses, and their jobs.
Green activists who whipped up the irrational fear of radiation during the Fukushima crisis have blood on their hands.
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