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The Effect of Atmospheric Nuclear Testing on American Mortality Patterns [pdf]
- QAPereo 9y agoWhich exposure model is being used here? LNT? Hormesis? Threshold?
- jostmey 9y agoI don't think that's how the author arrived at his conclusions. I think he directly analyzed mortality vs fallout
- QAPereo 9y agoCancers occur naturally so you need an exposure model to give you an idea of what to expect, and then compare that to the background of normal cancer. Even assuming that he checked mortality records which I assume he must have, he still had to apply statistical filter to make it meaningful.
- delackner 9y agoActually no you don’t need any such model. Given the map of exposure areas, one can simply compare with other non exposure areas with similar variables for all other major risks
- Gibbon1 9y agoReading the paper, he specifically doesn't care about cause of death, just excess. Interesting tidbits. Most discussion about dangers of radiation is about cancer. But some stuff I've heard centered around Chernobyl is other types of mortality increase.
- otxtodoydyld 9y agocheck out the epa blue book. the conclusions of beir vii point towards linear no threshold for solid cancers and a slightly different curve for leukemia.
- andybak 9y agoInteresting. My view as a dilettante on the sidelines was that LNT was on it's way to being discredited. i.e. along the lines of the last paragraph here: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Linear_no-threshold https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Linear_no-threshold I'd be interested to know more about the current balance of thinking on the topic. The optimist in me obviously would prefer a less awful relationship between exposure and mortality but sadly I can't impose my wishes on reality.
- michaelbuckbee 9y agoFrom the paper's conclusion: "The empirical results of this paper suggest that nuclear testing contributed to hundreds of thousands of premature deaths in the United States between 1951 and 1972. The social costs of these deaths range between $473 billion to over $6.1 trillion dollars in 2016$. These losses dwarf the $2 billion in payments the Federal Government has made to domestic victims of nuclear testing through the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act and are substantial relative to the financial cost of the United States’ nuclear weapons program. It is likely that the values of both the testing moratorium enacted in 1958 and the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty are understated. These political compromises likely saved hundreds of thousands of additional lives at a minimum."
- kowdermeister 9y agoWow, 25,804 claims https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_Exposure_Compensation_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_Exposure_Compensatio...
- downandout 9y agoThe number of claims was likely mitigated by the narrow eligibility crtieria. My father grew up in Ely, NV during this period. He wound up dying of kidney cancer, which first showed up when he was quite young (resulting in removal of a kidney) and then later returned to kill him. Kidney cancer (renal cell) was included in the fund, but only for people that worked as uranium miners. As a result, our family was denied compensation, even though his presence there was the likely cause of the cancer.
- bhouston 9y agoHhow premature? How many years lost of life?
- agumonkey 9y agolook at page 17
- pjvandehaar 9y ago
- nateburke 9y agoI remember reading a post on HN a while back that alluded to this effect in the context of Kodak film, packed in corn husks from the Midwest, being ruined during the shipping process on account of fallout on the corn husks prematurely exposing the film. This paper claims a lot—I cant wait to dig in.
- beebmam 9y agoNuclear weapons, like chemical and biological, should be abolished and never be legal again. It's quite absurd to me that nuclear weapons are legal to possess, but not legal to use, even in self defense of a nuclear attack. [1] What a contradiction that is. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Court_of_Justice_advisory_opinion_on_the_Legality_of_the_Threat_or_Use_of_Nuclear_Weapons#The_legality_of_the_possession_of_nuclear_weapons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Court_of_Justice...
- QAPereo 9y agoHow do you enforce that law against nuclear powers?
- lxmorj 9y agoPowerful entities that aren't geographically concentrated like traditional nation-states. Not sure what that looks like...
- SerLava 9y agoYou know, that illegality really makes logical sense. It's a crime to throw a billion people into gas chambers, and it doesn't become A-OK just because someone else threw a billion people into gas chambers too.
- johndevor 9y agoNuclear weapons are the only things that stop countries from going to war. They're why we don't have world wars any more. I think that's a big plus for nukes!
- roenxi 9y agoI write this with a fairly pro-nuclear-energy bias. Is it even possible to reliably measure this? Sure, the statistical test says 'significant', but the number of potential confounding geographic variables must be enormous. How can this study have possibly ruled out other pollutants, economic conditions, or suchlike correlating with how weapons test sites are chosen? It seems very plausible that nuclear weapons testing caused pollution, but it also seems plausible that the weapons were being tested in areas that were wilting. I don't know, but I am very cautious about using this data to conclude what specific effect radiation pollution has. The 'Robustness' section looks fairly cursory.
- code_duck 9y agoWhat do you mean tested in areas that were wilting? They were not, of course, conducted directly on arable land. Generally the above-ground tests occurred in Nevada and the Pacific. According to Wikipedia "Ten other tests took place at various locations in the United States, including Alaska, Nevada other than the NNSS/NTS, Colorado, Mississippi, and New Mexico." see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_weapons_tests_of_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_weapons_tests_...
- mikeash 9y agoThere is no question that nuclear weapons testing produced deadly pollution. Atmospheric tests (of which there were hundreds) produce fallout in fairly large quantities. There are cases of people being killed or injured by this fallout in pretty obvious ways. The spread of fallout is pretty easy to track since it emits radiation, so less obvious cases can be discovered as well.
- johnny99 9y agoI, too, am pro-nuclear-energy, but that's quite a bit different from being in favor of testing bombs. The kind of nuclear power that does not blow up is much safer.
- ifdefdebug 9y agoThe kind of nuclear power that does not blow up has not yet been invented, sorry.
- afomi 9y agoWalter and Lao Russell write about the threats of exposed nuclear waste in the book, Atomic Suicide, in 1957.
- Spooky23 9y agoIt would be interesting to read the secret research no doubt done to estimate impact of nuclear exchanges. Hopefully it is released someday.
- tpowell 9y agoI just watched this on Amazon Prime—it was better than I thought it would be. They restored a lot of old footage. https://www.amazon.com/Bomb/dp/B013HOZG36 https://www.amazon.com/Bomb/dp/B013HOZG36
- peter303 9y agoMy boomer bones are radioactive - strontium 90. We'll be a dating keystone for future paleoantropologists.
- YeGoblynQueenne 9y agoThat's a very long paper that I'd like to read a bit more carefully. Is there a shroter version, or a summary, somewhere?
- frankydp 9y agoI assume this paper is specifically referring to the effects of Strontium-90. While this is a monster paper and I did not read it in its entirety, I am confused by how they statistically separated its effects from surface test originated radionuclides. Also, the effects of Strontium-90 are pretty well known, so just going off mortality seems iffy at best. It would be very challenging to separate that causality out because of the significantly higher radionuclide creation for surface burst. Keep in mind "fallout" from an atmospheric test is very different than a surface test. Mostly in that it is not fallout in the traditional/popular definition, but radionuclide creation of air and h2o irradiation and not particulates at the same scale as a surface burst. That is important because half-lifes. Most(99%) of the radionuclides from an atmospheric burst are gone(halved) in 8 days. Also interesting is that Chernobyl is estimated to have introduced 5% of the global Strontium-90 population.