A report on cancer and radiation has stifled dissenting views
Michael Meacher
Friday October 22, 2004
The Guardian
The publication this week of the report of the Cerrie committee - the committee examining radiation risks from internal emitters - is a public scandal. It deletes the arguments put forward by a minority on the committee, which suggest that the numbers of people who die each year from cancer caused by nuclear radiation may be at least 100 to 300 times more than official estimates.
The point at issue is that the standard model used by the nuclear industry to calculate the effects of radiation on human health is based on estimates of the external blast impact from the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bomb explosions in 1945. But the model largely excludes the impact of radiation from a wholly different source, when radionuclides are inadvertently inhaled from, say, a nearby nuclear reactor.
The impact of radiation from an external bomb blast is assumed in the standard model to be averaged out across the whole body. But when a radionuclide is swallowed, it attaches itself to particular tissue within the body which it then continually bombards with radioactivity as it gradually decays. To illustrate the point, there is a big difference, when one is cold on a winter's night, between warming oneself in front of a coal fire and popping a red-hot coal into one's mouth.
There is already strong evidence that the standard model is flawed because it cannot explain the facts which have been uncovered in the past two decades. It assumes, for example, that cancer risk is strictly proportional to dose. But the mounting evidence from studies in Germany, Belgium, Greece, Scotland and Wales, and from dozens of studies in Russia, which have examined the sharp increase in leukaemia among babies in Europe in the two years after Chernobyl, indicates that this is wrong.
The nuclear industry explains that the increase would be expected on the basis of the radiation those babies received while their mothers were pregnant, and they take as the benchmark an increase in risk of up to 40% where the dose from obstetric x-rays is 10,000 microsieverts. However, babies in Greece received only 200 microsieverts from the Chernobyl fallout, yet infant leukaemia there jumped by 160%. Babies in Germany received only 100 microsieverts, yet the increase was 48%. Clearly the standard model used by the nuclear industry and regulators is faulty.
I therefore set up Cerrie, with balanced representation from all sides of the argument, to examine how the model should be modified to take account of this new evidence and how precautionary action needs to be tightened to safeguard the nation's health.
I insisted that the final conclusions must fairly include the views of all sides to the committee, preferably within a single report, but if that was still not possible then in the form of majority and minority reports. The chairman had already given an undertaking that minority reports would be allowed, and indeed in May this year in the final stages of drawing up the report the committee agreed on a 10-1 vote to admit minority reports if that should prove necessary.
However, just one month later, it was suddenly proposed at the end of the final meeting by some members of the committee, without prior notice and without any discussion being allowed, that no dissenting statement from the mainreport would be allowed, and it was passed on a 5-2 vote.
Why have these shenanigans been used to gag a critical debate about public health? Maybe it is because if these arguments suggesting far higher fatalities than officially admitted from radiation-induced leukaemias and other cancers were included in a government report, it could well lead to a legal challenge to the regulatory approvals granted to nuclear power stations - without which the nuclear industry could not function. But whatever the reason, any data of critical relevance to the nation's health should under no circumstances be suppressed.
� Michael Meacher is Labour MP for Oldham West and Royton; he was environment minister 1997-2003
Guardian Unlimited � Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004
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