The Top 10 ProNuclear Arguments... Answered

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ARGUMENT 3: A chest X-ray exposes a person to 50 millirems of radiation, and a coast-to-coast jet flight gives one a dose of 5 millirems. But the spokespersons of the antinuclear "movement" don't complain about those hazards.

GOFMAN: An individual has the right to choose to accept the radiation received by flying coast to coast or by having a chest X-ray ... in exchange for a perceived benefit for him- or herself. (The dose received from a variety of medical X-rays is high enough, though, that I would not recommend undergoing such examinations unless the procedures are required in order to make an accurate diagnosis of a potentially fatal disease.)

But nuclear power does not offer a voluntary choice. . . the radiation released by nuclear power is imposed upon people. Indeed, atomic power represents the use of an entire population as involuntary guinea pigs in a gigantic game of Russian roulette . . . the results of which could be an epidemic of cancer, leukemia, and genetic disease. And there would be no justification for such an involuntary imposition of risk even if the majority of the people in a country voted in favor of nuclear power . . . because the majority has no right to risk committing genocide against the minority.

ARGUMENT 4: The genetic dangers often cited by antinuclear activists are obviously exaggerated, because not even the atomic bombs dropped on Japan in World War II produced any harmful genetic effects.

GOFMAN: I've often heard the statement that the Hiroshima/Nagasaki data show that no genetic damage results from radiation, so I went out of my way to analyze, very carefully, those particular scientific papers ... and I was astounded to discover that the findings in that study were exactly the opposite of what is being claimed! The often quoted Neel-Kato-Schull study examined dominant genetic diseases that are expected to cause death in early life among children under 17 years of age, and definitely indicated that ionizing radiation increased the incidence of such diseases.

The Neel-Kato-Schull findings were significant at what is called the "5% level", which means there's one chance in 20 that the findings were the result of chance . . . and 19 chances out of 20 that the findings were correct. Now the scientists who did this work decided that—considering the delicacy of the matter—they didn't want to trumpet their results around . . . so they concluded in their paper that they found "no clear effects" (my italics).

Well, they had indeed found that radiation has an effect on the incidence of genetic damage, at the 5% level of significance. But—by twisting the words in their summary—they provided pronuclear advocates with the opportunity to grab at the statement that "no effect was clearly observed" and then to jump to the fraudulent conclusion that "no effect exists ".

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