Radioactive Boars (Due to Chernobyl?)

[Admin]

Apparently hunters in Germany are finding a large proportion of the wild boars they hunt contaminated with radioactivity, and are placing the blame on the legacy of Chernobyl.

Interesting article and video here -- http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100819/ap_on_re_eu/eu_germany_radioactive_boars

- Dan

[Sculpto]

hard to watch

[youtube=425,350]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rvAJ_u3Q0Hw[/youtube]

[kbluck]

There is a strong tendency to blame pretty much any adverse health event on Chernobyl. But in fact, the long-term effects are controversial, which indicates if nothing else that the effects are relatively subtle. If there really was a statistically significant increase in birth defects and illnesses, it wouldn't be controversial. Most studies today talk about "extra" deaths and disabilities, by which is meant that people who would have died or become disabled later or by some other cause if not for Chernobyl. But we're talking about people who die maybe 10 years sooner than they "should have", Effects this subtle are very hard to quantify, since it's very difficult to predict when people "should have" fallen ill or died. There's a lot of assumptions to be made. Reasonably supportable estimates range from 4,000 to 500,000 such "extra deaths" among people who were alive at the time of the accident; that vast disparity indicates to me pretty clearly that there are no obvious effects everybody can agree on, and we're dealing in very subtle effects that are open to much interpretation.

The prompt, short-term effects of Chernobyl are fairly well-understood and were indeed severe. But the only statistically well-established long-term effect is an increase in thyroid cancer on the order of a few thousand extra cases resulting in a few dozen deaths, mainly among people who were children at the time. There is no statistically supportable evidence of increased congenital defects or miscarriages, despite widespread popular belief that this is the case. Miscarriages are actually quite common in any population, March of Dimes estimates 1/4 of all pregnancies worldwide end in miscarriage; some reputable sources put the number as high as 1/3, most of them before the woman even knows she's pregnant. But in Ukraine, Belarus, and western Russia, all of these "natural" miscarriages tend to get blamed on Chernobyl. Ditto for birth defects and cognitive disabilities; they are surprisingly common and can be attributed to a variety of reasons, not least poor nutrition, alcohol, and smoking all of which are quite common in the Former Soviet Union. But again, any noticeable defect tends to get blamed on Chernobyl. And again for any sort of chronic illness or disability; cancer, autoimmune problems, rheumatic, respiratory, and cardiac diseases, not to mention various "mystery" ailments are fairly common in any population, but in that region regardless of the real cause they are generally blamed on Chernobyl.

In short, the whole question is considerably clouded by a strong "placebo effect", where what people believe influences what they perceive and how they feel. But given the difficulty in establishing any statistically significant findings, it would seem that the long-term effects of Chernobyl, while undoubtedly real, are nowhere near as bad as most people believe. In particular, most of the images of deformed and disabled children in Sculpto's video, while horrific, probably weren't actually caused by Chernobyl.

-- Kevin

[Sculpto]

Kevin.. can you show us some studies or verifiable research done by impartial experts to back up your well written dismissal of the worst nuclear accident in the history of the world.

[ECOCKS]

Kevin:

The cancer rate is up bud.

As for defects, we have no real idea. You spend some time in Ukraine and you will get this idea that there are no children confined to wheelchairs, few blind people and nary a Mongolian syndrome baby ever born. The truth is quite different.

Drop into the Chernobyl museum in Kyiv, it's interesting to tour it then walk around a bit and notice what you don't see.

[kbluck]

Sorry, double post.

[kbluck]

Kevin.. can you show us some studies or verifiable research done by impartial experts to back up your well written dismissal of the worst nuclear accident in the history of the world.

Certainly.

IAEA

TORCH

IJC

Notice the considerable variation in conclusions between these various credible studies. There are obviously various political axes being ground here. But the very fact that the conclusions are so malleable without any obviously incorrect math points to the effects being rather subtle for the most part. If there really was a vast increase in birth defects as is popularly believed, for example, all studies would agree on that point, just as they agree that thyroid cancer rates really have increased.

I wish to make clear that my position is not that Chernobyl was not a terrible catastrophe with wide-ranging effects. My point is that there exists much popular hysteria regarding the long-term effects of the disaster which are not supportable by any statistical evidence. Blaming every cleft-palate baby born in Belarus on Chernobyl is just plain wrong.

The cancer rate is up bud.

Not to any statistically significant degree, with the sole exception of thyroid cancers, which have pretty low mortality rates (about 1%) as cancer goes. It is likely that there will be several tens of thousands of 'extra' cancers over the next century or so, especially of the thyroid. But we must put that in perspective of the several hundreds of millions of cancers that will occur during that same interval in the same population which will be completely unrelated to Chernobyl.

-- Kevin

[Gator]

Apparently hunters in Germany are finding a large proportion of the wild boars they hunt contaminated with radioactivity, and are placing the blame on the legacy of Chernobyl.

It could be. 

-  Boars eat what grows on the soil surface or just under it.  They dig the soil voraciously in search of worms, tubers, mushrooms, etc.  I see them and feral hogs occasionally around my home and they make a mess.  Lately, the problem is less, the same as with the deer (clue: a panther has been sighted a few times.  I have seen only the tracks.)

-  A relatively long life would support bioaccumulation.

My question:  If this is from Chernobyl, I would expect higher concentrations in boars killed in Poland, Czech and Slovakia (but maybe those countries don't analyze boar meat).

[Gylden]

Here is a 12 day fallout video from radar.

[youtube=425,350]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMKUnOWY3ZQ[/youtube]

[Sculpto]

Well I read the reports and the information presented does back up what you said..

However.. this would in my view be a perfect case to err in the side of caution.  There are far too many opportunities for Murphy's Law to affect things.

[kbluck]

The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.

I frequently go out of my way to argue with people about the residual effects of Chernobyl, even though it usually results in heated arguments. It seems to me that the *fear* of Chernobyl radiation is doing far more damage to the people of Ukraine and Belarus than the actual radiation. The psychological stress on the population has been enormous. Even worse, it has greatly aggravated the pervasive sense of fatalism in the people, a quality which they already possessed in abundance after decades of Communism and centuries of despotism. This unfortunately  leads to unnecessarily self-destructive behavior.

I have heard variations on "Why bother, Chernobyl will kill me anyway" I don't know how many times. This from people living in central Ukraine, which was not seriously affected. This sentiment is most often used in reference to some unhealthy personal habit such as smoking or drinking to excess as a sort of self-absolution. This behavior is common enough right here in the US, where self-excusal of risky lifestyle choices is routine. It's already hard enough to convince people they should quit smoking without a one-size-fits-all excuse like Chernobyl. But the fact remains that tobacco smoking is literally thousands of times more likely to kill you than Chernobyl, even if you live inside the hot zone. For that matter, cigarettes are far more likely to give you a deformed baby as well. But smoking, unlike Chernobyl, is something that individuals can actually control. Perversely, worrying about uncontrollable (but relatively tiny) risks like Chernobyl radiation is more psychologically comforting than worrying about self-inflicted risks like smoking that are entirely controllable.

In effect, the people of Ukraine and Belarus are suffering from a massive, nation-scale anxiety attack induced by a traumatic event in their past. They are suffering from the very common syndrome of  worrying about the wrong things as a result.

In general, people are terrible at estimating relative risks. Chernobyl aside, that human trait is prominently on display on this very board every single day. Foreign-wife-seeking is an admittedly risky behavior. As such, any man contemplating that course should strive to be better than average at evaluating and rationally mitigating risks.

-- Kevin

[XMan]

"The only thing we have to fear is fear itself."

Of course, FDR said that prior to the development of nuclear weapons and power. 

Your line of reasoning, interestingly enough, was taken by the tobacco companies that produce the very cigarettes that you apparently believe are more dangerous than radiation.  Their key argument was that plenty of things cause cancer, so how can you point to cigarettes as the reason why person "A" got lung cancer?  Well, you can't.  You only know that it increases the risk, and it took several decades to get agreement upon that because the tobacco companies had serious lobbying money.  Additionally, because someone else smoked for 50 years and never got cancer, that was then sited empirical evidence that cigarettes weren't bad for you.  Flawed logic.  And that same argument is used by pesticide and herbicide companies, by those who promote the injection of growth hormones into cattle, and many others.  Only when something clearly dire happens on a large scale (such as toddler age puberty in China from dairy products highly contaminated with hormones, or immediate deaths from harmful chemicals, again in milk formula several years ago in China) do those who doubt the impact of such substances actually believe it's harmful.  A number of people fall into the "if it didn't kill me today, it must be safe" line of reasoning. 

Two members of my family died from lung cancer, both nearly assuredly from cigarette smoking. 
Were I forced to choose, I'd still select some occasional second hand smoke to 24x7 radiation exposure. 

Regardless, considering the near total lack of any environmental controls in the FSU, heavy metals and a wide variety of other toxins combined with other risks could be just as likely to cause cancer or defects.  But downplaying the risks of the worlds worst radioactive disaster (thus far) doesn't really benefit anyone, other than those who want to build more nuclear reactors without any safe way to store waste for 5,000-10,000 years.   

That, more than any other reason, is why I disagree with folks who take your stance on Chernobyl.

[kbluck]

Your line of reasoning, interestingly enough, was taken by the tobacco companies that produce the very cigarettes that you apparently believe are more dangerous than radiation.

There's no question cigarettes are far more dangerous than radiation. Tobacco kills every year in the US alone more people than died in the atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki put together.

But also, there's an important difference here in the question of who is lying about what.

Tobacco companies were openly lying about the effects of tobacco. Their own documents prove it. There was no "creative interpretation" going on, they were flat out lying. But here's the thing; we the people were lying to ourselves about tobacco, too. For that matter, millions are still lying to themselves about tobacco, warning labels be damned. Any disinterested third party that did the study and the math back in the day could clearly demonstrate that tobacco smoking was a huge cause of cancer, beyond a shadow of any statistical doubt. Many groups did exactly that, and published their results. They were roundly ignored for decades. Tobacco companies got away with their ludicrous lies for so long because, frankly, individual smokers didn't really want to believe that tobacco was dangerous. They *liked* smoking tobacco, and any nonsense that allowed them to justify continuing their pleasurable habit was OK by them.

This is exactly what the article I referenced was talking about. People are very willing to wave away clear evidence of serious, risk if the risk is caused by a behavior that makes them feel good when they're doing it. This is the root cause of widespread obesity, for example. People *like* eating. This is how people get into financial trouble. They *like* buying stuff they don't need. And so on. They *like* driving fast. They *like* drinking. This next cigarette isn't going to give me cancer. This next brownie won't make me fat. Nothing will happen if I drive drunk this one time.

Until it does.

Radioactive contamination, on the other hand, is the exact opposite. Nobody likes radiation. Nobody likes radioactive residue in their boar meat. Nobody likes fallout in their potato patch. Nobody likes living near a nuclear power plant, even a safe one. When we're talking about things that people *don't* like, people tend to *overestimate* the risk, often massively. We have the same issue with Chernobyl. People don't like radiation, they don't understand radiation. As a result, they're willing to believe any bad thing they hear.

America experienced a very similar national anxiety syndrome after 9/11. Americans everywhere grossly overestimated their risk of being victims of terrorist action. Inculcating fear is, of course, the whole point of terrorism, and the 9/11 terrorists were very successful in that regard. One credible study estimates that a net 1,200 "extra" people died from fear of 9/11-type terrorism. Why? Because their fear of terrorists made them decide to drive instead of fly. This is a perfect example of incorrect, emotion-driven risk analysis. It's well-known that flying is far safer per mile than driving. People were accepting much greater risk by driving long distances than they were avoiding by not flying. They were grossly overestimating the risk of a scary worst-case scenario, and 1,200 of them lost the biggest bet possible.

There's no tobacco-company conspiracy to hide the effects of Chernobyl. Everybody, most importantly the public, feels the disaster was a very bad thing, and wants to believe it was really bad. There's no money to be made selling people heaping helpings of cesium 137. Third-parties, many of them very anti-nuclear, are scouring the statistics looking for proof about how bad it will get. But even the most pessimistic of these groups can show only a minor increase in cancers (except for thyroid) over the next century, so small that if we didn't know it was there nobody would notice it just looking at the cancer rates. So far, nobody has been able to demonstrate any noticeable increase in congenital defects at all. This is most definitely not the same situation as tobacco, where the numbers were clear for anybody who wanted to see, but most people just didn't want to see them. Quite the contrary; everybody wants to believe the worst here, but 24 years later the numbers just don't back up the doomsaying.

-- Kevin

[Sculpto]

So are we to assume you work in the Nuclear Power industry? 

[Admin]

There's no question cigarettes are far more dangerous than radiation.

I might suggest some refinement in this position. Dangerous in terms of the numbers of people harmed each year - absolutely. I see use of the term danger as a euphemism for risk. Risk has at least a couple of dimensions - one being probability of occurrence and the other being a measure of the consequence of occurrence. Nuclear power versus cigarettes offers a good example of the differences in these considerations.

One way of looking at the two is that both have the same potential consequence on an individual level in that a nuclear accident has the possibility of causing death to an individual just as cigarette smoking. Taken more broadly by evaluating catastrophic potential to a nearby community, an individual smoking a cigarette has almost zero potential to cause catastrophic community damage whereas a nuclear accident has distinct potential. The magnitude of the consequence of a nuclear accident is vastly greater than smoking cigarettes.

Next consider the probability of occurrence. The probability of cigarette smoking causing physical harm is quite significant, whereas the probability of a nuclear accident is infinitesimal.

The two are at polar opposites of the metrics being considered.

So are we to assume you work in the Nuclear Power industry? 

I don't recall if Kevin works in the nuclear power industry, but not so long ago I was a member of a small committee that prepared a comprehensive report on ALWR (Advanced Light Water Reactors) with passive safety designs versus a variety of advanced fossil fuel technologies.

The advantages of nuclear power over just about any other commercially viable energy source are innumerable.

When people start flipping light switches and the lights don't go on - the prevailing political sentiment will swing in a heartbeat to favoring nuclear power.

Just my $.02 worth.

- Dan

[Sculpto]

Actually Dan if i thought we could deal with Nuclear power safely I have nothing against it.. problem is.. I don't think we can.  Anyway.. France has done it and I think it makes a big difference in their country.

[Admin]

Actually Dan if i thought we could deal with Nuclear power safely I have nothing against it.. problem is.. I don't think we can.  Anyway.. France has done it and I think it makes a big difference in their country.

Cite your evidence of a lack of safety.

TMI was a relative non-event and it was, by far, the most significant nuclear power event in US history. The design of TMI is decades old and the advances in safety are light-years away from the old TMI designs.

The substantiated facts are that nuclear power *is* safe - and the US has several decades of experience in evidence.

- Dan

[ECOCKS]

The US Navy operates dozens of reactors with a perfect record of community safety. Individual exposures ahve happened but nothing remotely catastrophic.

[Sculpto]

http://www.lutins.org/nukes.html

http://www.johnstonsarchive.net/nuclear/radevents/1983MEX1.html

[Sculpto]

reply to Ed

http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~nuclear/preview/nodes/environment/1.html

[ECOCKS]

reply to Ed

http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~nuclear/preview/nodes/environment/1.html

Nothing to do with operating nuclear reactors which is what we are talking about.

[Admin]

http://www.lutins.org/nukes.html

http://www.johnstonsarchive.net/nuclear/radevents/1983MEX1.html

Eric,

Count the number of fatalities from nuclear power in those references you cited. There were a couple of fatalities due to steam exposure that had nothing to do with radiation. Every year there are fatalities in fossil-fired plants due to high pressure steam leaks. In certain sections of coal-fired plants they provide you with a stick with a small flag on the end that you wave up and down as you slowly walk along those sections. Reason being - a pinhole steam leak has such pressure that a person can easily not see the leak yet it will cut them in half if they are walking along and run into the leak.

There was the one dubious study by the guy claiming infant mortality due to TMI - but that is highly suspect.

Bottom line is - there is no credible evidence to support the irrational fears the NIMBY's have been cultivating for decades.

- Dan

[Sculpto]

Nothing to do with operating nuclear reactors which is what we are talking about.

I thought we are talking about radioactive contamination.

[Sculpto]

The fears are irrational right up until the worst happens.. for example.. the gulf of mexico.

Murphy's law...

Eric,

Count the number of fatalities from nuclear power in those references you cited. There were a couple of fatalities due to steam exposure that had nothing to do with radiation. Every year there are fatalities in fossil-fired plants due to high pressure steam leaks. In certain sections of coal-fired plants they provide you with a stick with a small flag on the end that you wave up and down as you slowly walk along those sections. Reason being - a pinhole steam leak has such pressure that a person can easily not see the leak yet it will cut them in half if they are walking along and run into the leak.

There was the one dubious study by the guy claiming infant mortality due to TMI - but that is highly suspect.

Bottom line is - there is no credible evidence to support the irrational fears the NIMBY's have been cultivating for decades.

- Dan

[Admin]

I thought we are talking about radioactive contamination.

Well - you mentioned "safety." That is normally in the arena of operations and the conduct of safe operation of facilities.

Contamination takes on an entirely different set of considerations - and it depends on what you describe as your concern.

So long as the concern is safety, that is a discussion around safe operations.

Be careful with the contamination argument as you may find that one is equally weak.

- Dan