The UK did the same in Australia [1] and there is still significant contamination in some parts of South Australia. Both governments showed total disregard for the safety of native people of course, including locals being blinded by the tests.
They also drifted fallout across Adelaide and dusted a future UK Prime Minister as a young boy.
My name is Yami Lester
I hear I talk I touch but I am blind
My story comes from darkness
Listen to my story now unwind
This is a rainy land
First we heard two big bangs
We thought it was the great snake digging holes
Then we saw the big cloud
Then the big black mist began to roll
This is a rainy land
To put this in context: I read a paper by someone British where they state that the lifetime risk of cancer is 39% for a male and 36% for a female, no radiation events needed. Cancers in areas influenced by radiation is a very sensible topic, as an assumption could be made for a direct causation between the two. That causation argument, though, needs to be proven first.
In the areas affected by Chernobyl disaster, that lifetime cancer risk went up to 41%/38% respectively. It's unclear even if that rise can be attributed to Chernobyl fallout, or to other factors.
Relevant: TIL that after the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear accident, an estimated 150,000 unnecessary abortions occurred worldwide from women afraid of radiation mutations. There is no evidence whatsoever of any increase in birth defects; not even in Belarus and Ukraine, the closest to Chernobyl. <https://np.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/6q3b2c/til_th...>
Lifetime statistics are not relevant here. An elderly man developing prostate cancer is not the same as an infant getting thyroid cancer. Live long enough and you get cancer - 70% of men over 70 already have cancerous prostate cells.
Specific cancers can absolutely be linked with exposure to radiation and certain chemicals.
I've done a short stint early in my career doing risk calculations for the health sector, and from what I remember it's impossible to have any meaningful progress appealing to the feelings, e.g. talking about "infants having cancer". If we want to make progress, we have to talk about "quality-adjusted life years" (QALY).
In your examples, "an elderly man developing prostate cancer" doesn't suffer big QALY impact, since elderly men sadly don't have many LY to begin with, and in addition prostate cancer survivorship rates are pretty high. On the other hand, speaking about thyroid cancer — and don't get me wrong, any cancer sucks — but thyroid cancer afair has well above 95% survivorship rate, where the patient has the thyroid removed and needs to rely on daily pill for the rest of their lives, which no doubt sucks but their life expectancy is otherwise not suffering big impact.
' it's impossible to have any meaningful progress appealing to the feelings, e.g. talking about "infants having cancer"'
Is also impossible to have any meaningful progress without appealing to feelings.
That is why politicians will often lead with a heartfelt story about a singular person to make us empathize and rarely use data or anecdata.
(I cannot remember the book that expose me to this observation. It's cited several studies that showed that a story such as "just before I came here, I ran into John. He has suffered from leukemia since he was a child in the beautiful islands of Tahiti, wherein he was dosed with radiation from nearby nuclear tests" fared much better in persuading people to do something then "there is a 76% greater likelihood of developing childhood leukemia in Tahiti then elsewhere in the world")
The question here is whether we are on a platform for politicians or are trying to get elected, or we are on a platform for tech people and trying to get any kind of a scientific discussion, especially with regards to the nuclear energy and its place in a global warming. For the former, personal examples are the way to go. For the latter, not so much.
Personal examples specifically don't work in a public funds allocation scenario, where one politician meets John (and his ailment) while another meets Mary (and her ailment) but the funds can be diverted either to treat the Johns or the Marys (but not both). At least QALYs have the right answer for that.
And yet those funds are allocated by politicians, probably with more concern about campaign donations, jobs in their district, and looking good for the camera...
Putting things in context is something that responsible journalists would do, and it never happens, because it would take more work and scare the shit out of people less, so what's the point? Thank you so much for sharing this.
[1] https://edition.cnn.com/2018/10/14/australia/australia-uk-nu...