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Nuclear radiation is relatively harmless

By Wade Allison - posted Wednesday, 8 January 2014


In Japan the entire scale of the evacuation, the condemnation of food and water, the clean up of the soil, the instruction of the population and the safety of the power plants should be reconsidered. The same paradigm shift should be considered world wide, for the same misunderstanding has occurred everywhere and it caused unnecessary social suffering following the accidents at Chernobyl and Goiania too.

Overcoming the current widespread primitive fear of nuclear ought to be easier than overcoming such a fear of fire in prehistoric times – and it is no less important for the future of civilisation. The environmental effect of the use of fossil fuels continues to escalate and time may be short. If another Fukushima accident should occur, like last time it would be less serious than the frequent disasters that follow the pursuit of fossil fuels with their significant loss of life. It is unlikely that climate change can be limited without a major switch to nuclear energy, and accepting nuclear, in a democracy at least, requires a radically new appreciation of science in society, not only by politicians and the media, but by scientists too.

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This is the second in a two part series on the risks and benefits of nuclear power. You can read the first here.

The author is a member of the SARI group, Scientists for Accurate Radiation Information http://radiationeffects.org/ This article is based on an invited lecture given at the Second AGORA Conference, Tokyo. and at the British Chamber of Commerce in Japan, 8 and 9 Dec. 2013. A more extended discussion with references may be found in the book Radiation and Reason available from http://www.radiationandreason.com together with other recent articles in Kindle, ePub, Japanese and Chinese editions, also available from Amazon.



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About the Author

Professor Wade Allison MA DPhil is an Emeritus Fellow of Keble College, Oxford and the author of Radiation and Reason, Fundamental Physics for Probing and Imaging and Nuclear is for life.

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Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

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