The Health Costs of
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The Committee for Nuclear Responsibility The non-profit, public interest association founded in 1971 by Dr. John Gofman M.D., Ph.D., who has a great deal to share about the biological effects of low-level ionizing radiation: . . . ionizing radiation is not like a poison out of a bottle where you can dilute it and dilute it. The lowest dose of ionizing radiation is one nuclear track through one cell. You can't have a fraction of a dose of that sort. Either a track goes through the nucleus and affects it, or it doesn't. So I said "What evidence do we have concerning one, or two or three or four or six or 10 tracks?" And I came up with nine studies of cancer being produced where we're dealing with up to maybe eight or 10 tracks per cell. Four involved breast cancer. With those studies, as far as I'm concerned, it's not a question of "We don't know." The DOE has never refuted this evidence. They just ignore it, because it's inconvenient. We can now say, there cannot be a safe dose of radiation. There is no safe threshold. If this truth is known, then any permitted radiation is a permit to commit murder. Works currently included: BOOKS : Nuclear Radiation and its Biological Effects This essential lay-person's primer provides a wealth of details about radiation and its effects on living systems. From No Immediate Danger, Prognosis for a Radioactive Earth, 1985, by Dr. Rosalie Bertell, "Part One, The Problem", pp. 15-63. This section is reprinted here in its entirety with permission of the publisher: The Book Publishing Company -- Summertown, Tennessee, 38483. Entry point to multiple formats/versions of this document.
Sections discussed:
Chernobyl: Understanding Some of the True Costs of Nuclear Technology Contains a collection of works articulating some of the actual costs of Nuclear Technology which have begun to manifest from the worst industrial catastrophe ever created by man. The legacy of poisonous contamination of our Earth will remain present and ongoing for thousands of generations of human existence and will continue to negatively impact the health of all life for millenia. Is there anything that can possibly justify paying such a terrible price?
Some of the titles included:
Poison Fire, Sacred Earth, Testimonies, Lectures, Conclusions, World Uranium Hearing, Salzburg, 1992, excerpts Approximately half of this book is included here, providing a wealth of information and powerful story-telling by those who are painfully familiar with the costs of nuclear technology from their first-hand experience of the mining, processing, and dumping of uranium and its "offspring". To the ratitor time feels like living inside an Invasion Of The Body-Snatchers script where many of people one talks with say, "but there's nothing wrong," "we don't know for sure if radiation is the cause of these cancers," "you're out of your element," "you just don't know what you're talking about". But this isn't fiction, and it isn't "O.K." The challenge is nothing less than "growing up" as a species and seeing the response-ability each one of us has to participate in ending this man-made nuclear chamber of horrors. A collection of quotations with links to their respective sections of the book.
7 Lectures are included --
Radiotoxic and Chemotoxic Properties of Depleted Uranium (DU) A collection of documents on the health effects of Depleted Uranium as well as links to other sources. Permission by the Laka Foundation and Vladimir S. Zajic to mirror their works is gratefully acknowledged and appreciated. (Please send us your recommendations for other words to include here.) Comments On Nuclear Power, 1998 This is the complete Second Edition of Stan Thompson's monograph on his career in nuclear power and goes into great detail for why "in 1963, because of safety and economic concerns about nuclear power, I quit the development of nuclear power. Now, in 1997, after over fifty years of observation, I am convinced that human beings lack the capacity to protect life on our planet from the perils of man-made nuclear devices. My common sense feelings, supported by my engineering analyses, recommend that no more reactors be built and that presently operating reactors be terminated as soon as possible." NUCLEAR GUARDIANSHIP FORUM, On The Responsible Care of Radioactive Materials
This was a newspaper created by the Nuclear Guardianship
Project. A selection of 39 articles are included from three
issues published in the Spring of 1992, 1993, and
1994. The ground-breaking exploration of the practice
of nuclear guardianship was richly articulated
in these pages to make a space for discussion of
the complex moral as well political and technical
issues raised by the presense of manufactured nuclear
materials.
a machine for the conversion of public assets into private profits, and a big machine for the conversion of private liabilities into public liabilities. Arjun Makhijan, president of
the Institute For Energy and
Environmental Research
Killing Our Own, Chronicling the Disaster of America's Experience with Atomic Radiation, 1945-1982
Contained herein is HTML, ASCII, and Postscript formated copy of the
complete book by Harvey Wasserman & Norman Solomon with Robert
Alvarez & Eleanor Walters. This book provides a great deal of
information about how U.S. federal authorities consistently conducted all
fundamental deliberations about the development of nuclear technology in
secret, allowing no public debate or education about the costs to human
health, as well as denying what the facts of what people personally
experienced in terms of their own health being compromised, ruined,
and in many cases, life cut short. The authors compiled a
great deal of documentation from interviews with people, both military
and civilian, who suffered from effects of exposure to ionizing radiation
created by bomb blasts and tests, with workers who handled radioactive
isotopes and materials as part of their jobs, with people who had the
misfortune of living downwind of nuclear bomb test sites, reactors,
uranium mining, milling, enrichment plants and nuclear waste sites. They
also obtained documents of government hearings and minutes from meetings
behind closed doors held by the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), and, when
it was scandalized out of existence in 1974, by it's successors--the
Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) and the Energy Research and
Development Agency (ERDA) later to be transformed into the Department of
Energy (DOE)--which continue to employ the same game of denial and
unaccountability for the adverse health effects caused by the
government's pursuit of nuclear technology development.
All of this has long since convinced me that we cannot trust these people [US officials] and, more important still, that nuclear power is too dangerous to have around. But it is clear that our government is so deeply committed to nuclear weapons and nuclear power that it will ignore damning evidence, deny the truth, mislead our people, jeopardize health and even life itself, and try to blacken the reputation of scientists who disagree with its policies. . . . Secret Fallout, Low-Level Radiation from Hiroshima to Three Mile Island, 1982
Contained herein is HTML, ASCII, and Postscript formated copy of the
complete book by Dr. Ernest
Sternglass. There is a great deal
discussed and examined in this book to substantiate the author's conclusion
reached by Dr. Sternglass that low-level ionizing radiation created by
the fallout from nuclear bomb testing and from nuclear power
plants--both publicly acknowledged accidents like Three Mile Island as
well as the routine, legal radioactive emissions in liquid and
gaseous form--has exacted a very high toll on the quality of public
health in the United States and around the world. With a great deal
of supporting evidence and numerous examples, Sternglass presents the
case that toxicity of low-level radioactive fallout is responsible for
distinct and consistent increases in mortality rates as well as in
cancers, leukemia, birth defects, rises in chronic diseases.
It was not our physics and technology that had been inadequate, but our knowledge of biological systems and their enormous ability to concentrate toxic agents. Just as in the case of DDT, it was not the amount distributed throughout the environment that was so serious. It was the selective concentration in the food chain and then in the newly forming organs of the rapidly developing young embryo. Since all higher animals, including man, must pass through this critically sensitive phase, it was clear that, unless the problem was widely recognized and acted upon, man could extinguish himself and all other animals, not through the effect of radiation on the adult, but through the effect on the weakest link in the chain of life--the unborn and the very young. Nuclear Technology: The Inappropriate Exercise of Human Intelligence
For over half a century the false assumptions about nuclear technology have been as deceitfully treacherous as they are lethal to all life exploring itself on Earth. In order to exercise our own best innate powers of response ability, we must see through these pernicious fallacies and acknowledge the true nature of nuclear technology. By so doing, we can then deal with its poisonous legacy created over the past fifty-plus years which will now be with us for millenia to come. This crisis has been created by humans and can be successfully addressed if we are willing to see the facts and respond with our infinitely creative abilities. An essay the ratitor has wanted to write for a long time, this essay is a publication of rat haus reality press. It is a living document that will change with time. Ideas and suggestions are welcome. Version 1.0, June 16, 1996 Entry point to multiple formats/versions of this document. Health Costs of Nuclear Technology series posted to the internet in 1992-93
A collection of complete out-of-print books, select chapters
from others, articles, speech transcripts, and oral testimony,
by physicians, health-care professionals, physicists, and
statisticians. Includes:
Upcoming Events / Resistance is Life Affirming further recommended reading: information-rich jumpdoors / addresses |
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"Rethinking Basic Assumptions..." The Madness of Nuclear Energy, 11/99
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I earnestly believe that as soon as there is a definite suspicion of
harm from any source as malignant as radiation, it is time to make
every effort to eliminate it. I feel particularly strongly about
radiation because children are much more vulnerable than adults--not
only in regard to the likelihood of developing leukemia and cancer,
but also of being born with physical or mental defects. And once
mutations have been produced in genes, they will be passed down
forever.