[Coral-List] Distressing News for the Whole Pacific

[Wood, Steven]

"Certainly the
waters had been highly contaminated by the events but had drifted off
the atoll and was diluted in the surrounding depths. Most of the
radioactivity had gone up into the atmosphere.  I know this is not the
same as release of radioactive cooling water but shows that corals were
not noticeably affected by the intense radiation they must have received
when the devises were exploded. I might add that none of us involved in
this research were affected that we know of. Maybe that's why I am
forced to write these reports. However, remember there is a lot of water
between Japan, the coral atolls, and the US west coast. Not to worry. Gene"


I am not confident that subjective experiences of surviving close
encounters with bomb craters is comforting at all to the somewhere between
11,000 and 212,000 Americans who developed thyroid cancer as a result of
atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons (cite:
http://www.americanscientist.org/issues/issue.aspx?id=982&y=2006&no=1&content=true&page=5&css=print.)


We can see from the wide range of just over ten thousand to two hundred
thousand excess thyroid cancers developed from late 20th century exposures
to atmospheric radiation that it's not easy to measure the effects of
radiation exposure. Aside from thyroid cancer, the other forms of cancer
that may have been caused by exposure to radioactive material created by
the bomb tests produce even less specific measurements of their impact on
human populations. It behooves us neither to panic nor to blithely dismiss
risks we know are there as non-existent.


Rather, we should demand that politicians, businesspeople, and engineers
who are responsible for decisions on the Fukushima cleanup level with the
public they are charged to protect. If they make a claim about safety, we
should demand they back it up with empirical data. We should demand that
they acknowledge when they have no idea what the impact of their actions
are. They have not earned our trust, and the benefit of the doubt is not
worth the risk of illness and potential death to other humans or the harm
to ecosystems.

- Steve Wood