radiation

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It's important we learn the "right" lessons from Fukushima. This will lead to improving the response following accidents, and then ultimately starting a meaningful dialogue to reduce the public fear of nuclear energy.[read more]

Edward Calabrese has published a fascinating and terribly important paper in the University of Chicago Law Review titled US Risk Assessment Policy: A History of Deception that needs to be widely distributed and discussed. Here is the quoted introduction:Strategies to limit the  general  public’s  exposure  to toxic...[read more]

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Dr. Wade Allison, author of Radiation and Reason, recently shared a short paper titled A revolution in radiation protection that would lead to safer and cheaper nuclear power. He described it as “reference light”, explaining that his intended audience for this work is not the journal-reading academic community but the kind of people who...[read more]

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A friend shared a link to a prize winning essay titled The path to reconstruction in Fukushima as seen through fieldwork in Eastern Japan. It was written by Jun Takada, Doctor of Science Professor, Sapporo Medical University. Here is a sample quote:Following the nuclear accident in Fukushima that occurred as a result of the Great East...[read more]

Last week, the influential weekly news and international affairs publication, The Economist, ran an essay on the future of nuclear energy – The dream that failed: Nuclear power will not go away, but its role may never be more than marginal.[read more]

One year after Fukushima, independent scientists working for the UN say bluntly that irrational fears of radiation poisoning will cause far more harm than the radiation itself. Not a single individual from the Japanese public received a dangerous dose, according to the early and informal analyses by the scientists. (Conspiracy theories...[read more]

As is often the case, the passage of time yields clarity about events, and the nuclear power plant accident at Fukushima is no different.  It has become clear that the misinformation and hysterics by anti-nuclear groups and individuals were mostly wrong.  Their doomsday prophesizing actually worsened human suffering and...[read more]

The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory issued a press release on December 20, 2011 titled New Take on Impacts of Low Dose Radiation: Berkeley Lab Researchers Find Evidence Suggesting Risk May Not Be Proportional to Dose at Low Dose Levels.The press release summarizes the results of a paper that has been published in the Proceedings of...[read more]

I received a link from the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) to a fascinating video about their recent efforts to develop CoSecTM, a new resin technology that is more effective at capturing cobalt-60. Most of the radiation doses that nuclear workers receive come from this single isotope.  One possible cost savings aspect...[read more]

This began as an answer to one letter writer in Friends Journal, and grew. The information that surprised me most is the answer to this question: How does the danger from the Fukushima Daiichi reactors compare to other health dangers, such as Tokyo pollution? ************** There were a number of responses to Earthquake, Tsunami, and...[read more]

Dr. Wade Allison, the author of Radiation and Reason, was interviewed following a recent visit to Japan. He has a rational recommendation for the international radiation protection community – instead of setting radiation dose limits based on keeping them as close to zero as possible, why not choose levels that are based on keeping the hazard to human beings within reasonable levels.[read more]

On Friday, October 7, I attended a Jones Seminar at the Thayer School of Engineering at Dartmouth College. The Jones Seminars are open to the public, but mostly attended by engineering students.This seminar, but Harold Swartz of Dartmouth Medical School, had the provocative title: If Vermont Yankee had an incident like Fukushima, What...[read more]

The French nuclear safety authority Autorité de Sûreté Nucléaire (ASN) said in a statement that one person has died and four workers have been injured, one seriously, after an explosion about noon local time on September 12 at the Marcoule nuclear site in southern France. One of the four injured workers is reported to have severe burns.[read more]

Image via Wikipedia Greenpeace provided an update for August 26th-29th on the Fukushima Nuclear Crisis and this blog extracted the section of the report on contamination (including human exposure). Japan’s Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency (NISA) said that the amount of radioactive cesium-137 released into the air as a result of the...[read more]

Guest Post by Craig Schumacher. Craig has been commenting on nuclear power themed websites for about five years and has published his own blog, Channelling the Strong Force, since 2008. He formed the nuclear power advocacy organisation, Nucleus 92 Inc., in 2009. He is a regular commenter on this and other pro-nuclear sites under the nom...[read more]