A message for George Monbiot
When nuclear apologists speak the language of dose they speak the language of deceit.
If you speak it too, you become one of the liars you say you despise.

Dear George,
In your column in the Guardian newspaper 22nd March 2011, you announced that the Fukushima disaster has made you stop worrying and love nuclear power. But you say you still hate the liars who run the industry. Unfortunately, ignorance (or maybe laziness) has led you to parrot the nukes' favourite lie.

The basis of your argument is that as far as we know, no-one has yet received a lethal dose of radiation and you go on to reproduce an explanation of the range of radiation doses we are exposed to. It's a simplistic classroom treatment which you found on the internet.

Like many simple explanations it is attractive, since it gives the impression that the ideas involved can actually be grasped, for once. This version is all the more attractive because its scope is large - it offers the reassurance that you have all the bases covered, like a dictionary, or a biblical concordance, or any kind of compendium. We have become used to comparisons between man-made radioactivity and natural and medical exposures; we have heard many dismissive statements like our pollution gives you a smaller dose than eating a banana or flying to Tenerife. Now, all of them are rolled up in one picture. How satisfying. And so, George, you picked out a few snippets to make us all feel stupid for being concerned about a few wrecked reactors.

The problem is that the concept of "dose" here is another simplification. For some kinds of radiation exposure it is even a fiction. This is because radiation "dose" is always an average, even for those kinds of radioactivity which only irradiate the DNA of a single cell, or which affect a few hundreds of cells very intensely but do not expose any of all the other trillions we have in our bodies.
The English king Edward II offers an analogy. His wife and her lover deposed him in 1327. They imprisoned him in Berkeley Castle and there he was, supposedly, murdered in the same year. I say supposedly because there is an academic dispute about even this - never mind radiation! Either way, the method his assassins allegedy used made his death the most famous in English royal history; a group of men pinned him beneath a mattress; they pushed a horn into his anus; through it they inserted a red-hot poker. In our analogy with the official view of radiation the King could have ignored the burning poker up his bum, reasoning to himself that the heat it was transferring into his body was, on average, far less than he'd absorbed in his nice warm bath earlier that evening. No-one supposes he did ignore it, but radiation risk practitioners ignore this issue of local exposure and localised damage. The fact that all competent scientific authorities now recognise that it is a challenge creates a paradox.

The Chernobyl disaster shows how big the challenge and the paradox are. Chernobyl contamination was global, but outside the areas nearest to the power station itself doses as calculated on the average dose model were about the same as natural background - say 2 - 3 milliSieverts. At this level there should be no observable increase in disease if the risk model is right. This dogma is repeated endlessly by apologists for nuclear power - After Chernobyl there was no increase in disease that could be attributed to the radiation. Spot the qualifier? They mean no increase that could be attributed to radiation on the bogus average dose model. In fact all are agreed there has been a massive breakdown in health.

The problem faced by radiation protection officials is that reactors create a massive cocktail of radionuclides with widely differing characteristics and different biochemistry. Some concentrate in muscle, some in bone, teeth and DNA, some in lymph nodes. Some don't concentrate anywhere. Some cause localised damage, others don't. Radioactivity is like poison - there are many different kinds and they operate by myriad biological mechanisms. Accurate modelling of the biological effects of either radioactivity or poison involves understanding the specific variations, but that makes regulation very complex. For convenience in the 1940s and early '50s nuclear officials decided to treat the energy of the radioactive decays from all kinds of radionuclide as if they were a uniformly distributed dose. Then they quantified the expected disease, dose for dose, by reference to studies of the Japanese survivors of Hiroshima. These people in fact were exposed to a uniformly distributed dose - the flash of the bomb itself - and the effects of unevenly distributed internal radioactivity were excluded from the study by the clever trick of comparing the "exposed" bomb survivors with "unexposed" people ("controls") who lived in the city but had been shielded when the bomb exploded. Thus the controls and the study group had equal amounts of radioactive fallout inside them.

It's a plot so fiendish it is scarcely credible. But George, according to the Guardian, you are one of the UK's foremost thinkers and environmentalists so you should be able and anxious to check it out. Will you? Consider; if someone asked you what dose of poison is safe wouldn't you want to know what poison they had in mind - aspirin or arsenic, alcohol or aflatoxin? Wouldn't you ask a toxicologist about the precise dangers of the particular substance? Don't we deserve the same scientific specificity?
When you have checked it out, please tell us what you think the future holds for the people of Honshu.

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Click here to see more about how and why early radiation officials skewed the science.

Click here for more about scientific reservations about the average dose model.

Click here to see more about the true effects of Chernobyl.

Click here to view full screen the classroom aid George cited in his article. The full page on which it appears is here, including explanations according to the official view of risk.

Paul Mobbs deconstructs George