RADIOACTIVITY CAN BE VERY GOOD FOR YOU

Another confirmation of hormesis:

"Radiation: it may be good for us. That is the conclusion of Taiwanese scientists who surveyed thousands of people exposed for years to radiation after recycled steel, contaminated with cobalt-60, was used to build hundreds of apartment blocks in the country. The scientists say their findings suggest radiation could be used to prevent illness and help elderly people build their natural defences against cancer.

The "serendipitous contamination" began in the early 1980s when the steel was used to build 1700 apartments. About 10,000 people lived in them for between nine and 20 years, unaware they were receiving, on average, 200 times the radiation an Australian would expect to receive in a year. But the scientists, including several employees past and present of Taiwan's Atomic Energy Council - criticised over the contamination scandal - say the residents were not harmed. "On the contrary," they claimed in a report last month to an international nuclear conference in Honolulu, "the incidence of cancer deaths in this population was greatly reduced - to about 3 per cent of the incidence of spontaneous cancer death in the general Taiwan population. "In addition, the incidence of congenital malformation was also reduced - to about 7 per cent of the incidence in the general public."

The radiation-haters have a few quibbles about the study but only 3% of the normal cancer incidence makes the quibbles look pretty desperate -- particularly where they would have predicted more like 300% of the incidence. And the desperation of the quibbles grows when we know that there is roughtly a century of evidence for the beneficial effects of mild ionising radiation. An example perhaps even more dramatic than the Taiwanese one is that people on the outskirts of the Hiroshima and Nagaski blasts had exceptionally healthy subsequent lives.

So why do the panic merchants hate the very idea of radiation hormesis? Because it means that the Three Mile Island and Chernobyl events probably did more good than harm -- which deprives the Greenies of an excuse to inflict great costs on us all. And it shows that limitless energy from nuclear power is safely available to us -- thus derailing all their prophecies of economic doom.

There is a heap of scientific links on the subject here but a Google search using just the term "hormesis" will turn up many more. Note also that there have been three big US government research projects that showed LOWER death rates among people exposed to plutonium: The studies are in the report: "Toxicological Profile for Plutonium," prepared for and issued by Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, Centers for Disease Control, Atlanta, Georgia, in collaboration with U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, December 1990. See also my post of 4th. below.


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ALASKA AGAIN

Sowell: Many people who are for stricter government-imposed "fuel efficiency" standards for cars are adamantly against drilling for oil in Alaska. This means that avoiding inconvenience to some caribou trumps the loss of human lives when people are forced to drive flimsier cars, so that the lighter weight will lead to more miles per gallon.






SHAFTING IRRIGATORS

Australian Greenies are determined to reverse the use by irrigators (farmers) of Australia's largest river -- The Murray. They have managed to divert some water that used to flow into the Murray (from the Snowy river) by virtue of their influence on Australia's most Leftist State government (Victoria) and now they want Murray water simply to flow out to sea rather than being used to irrigate crops. They have produced an allegedly scientific report designed to show that the "health" of the Murray depends on taking huge amounts of irrigation water away from the farmers who normally use it and simply wasting the water. When an independent expert had a close look at the Greenie "report", however, he found that "There was such statistical uncertainty in the calculations on the benefits of increased environmental flows as to make "the vast majority" of the discussion on the benefits of additional environmental flows "invalid and therefore redundant". The Greenie "scientists" just made up some numbers to suit themselves, in other words.

There is some more background on the issue here which shows that human intervention has in fact stabilized flows in the Murray rather than reducing flows. Before the various dams on it were built, most Murray water used to flow out to sea in one big rush during the wet season and leave the river little more than a chain of waterholes in the dry season. Now the river flows all the year around even in drought periods.



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ATTABOY!

Alaska shows 'em

Citing frustration with what he calls "America's extreme environmental community," Gov. Frank Murkowski said Wednesday that he will open state waters offshore of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska to oil wells. "While the U.S. House and Senate remain gridlocked over opening ANWR for oil development, I am not burdened by that process," said Murkowski, who spent 22 years in the Senate before becoming governor in 2002.

The oil and gas lease sales are planned for October. State waters extend three miles into the Arctic Ocean and Beaufort Sea.
It is unclear how much of the area will be leased, but the two areas amount to about 1.2 million acres. About 670,000 acres of submerged lands lie off the coast of NPR-A and 350,000 acres are off the coast of ANWR.

The lease sales, scheduled for October, could lead to oil production wells to offset the nation's dependance on foreign oil, Murkowski said. In addition, environmental risks associated with offshore drilling could force opposition groups to soften their intractable position against drilling in ANWR, Murkowski said.






NOTHING EVER SUITS THE GREENIES -- EVEN GETTING THEIR OWN WAY

Wind farms blow up a storm "They introduced the world to "environmentally friendly" energy, but now some of Europe's "greenest" countries are under pressure to backtrack on wind farms as public anger grows over their impact on the countryside. Voters are outraged by the unsightly turbines, the loud, low-frequency humming noise that they create and the stroboscopic effects of blades rotating in sunshine. Opponents are dismayed at the proliferation of the turbines in some of the most beautiful areas of the continent. Conservationists complain that hundreds of birds are killed each month by the rotating blades"




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PRECAUTION BUT NOT PRE-EMPTION?


A distinction without a difference


Green/Left pre-emption OK: "Yet organs like The Times insist over the last year or so ... that preemptive wars are wrong, even criminal, without ever confessing that they have all along been the strongest supporters of political ideas that unabashedly and unapologetically endorse preemptive and precautionary public policies. Take the long and eagerly championed precautionary approach in the field of environmental public policies. The argument here is that some things are just so horrible to contemplate about the future ecology of the planet that action needs to be taken even in the absence of concrete evidence demonstrating the need."





FREE MARKET ELECTRICITY: HORRORS!

Energy delivery needs to move beyond central planning to a market or internet like system: "More and bigger blackouts lie ahead, unless today's dumb electricity grid can be transformed into a smart, responsive and self-healing digital network-in short, an "energy internet""

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QUEEN VICTORIA A GREENIE?

The following news item appeared on p. 17 of the Brisbane (Australia) "Courier Mail" on Saturday April 3, 2004 but does not appear to be otherwise online. It is just one example showing that nature conservancy goes right back to the 19th century -- long, long before the Greenie religion was invented. Many huge national parks were of course crteated in the late 19th century -- both in Australia and the USA -- but this example shows that even small areas were deemed worthy of official attention. We have never needed Greenies in order to have conservation.

Giving a fig about green space

By Brian Williams

The landmark fig trees on a traffic island at the junction of Eagle, Elizabeth and Creek streets in the centre of Brisbane are to be heritage-listed. The three form one of the few patches of green in the Petrie Bight end of the City.

Known as the Plantation Reserve or Fig Tree Reserve, the patch is a remnant of the 1880s when sailing ships brought goods to city reaches. The reserve was granted to the North Brisbane Municipal Council by Queen Victoria on May 16, 1889. Its gazettal reads: "Reserve for plantation, urinal etc only and for no other purpose whatsoever ... Rent: One peppercorn per year if demanded by the Queen Victoria and her heirs forever."

Heritage Council member and landscape architect Catherine Brouwer said the two white figs and one banyan were typical of Victorian-era plantings. The tiny 255sq m reserve nominated by the Brisbane City Council for heritage listing has one other curiosity - Queen Victoria reserved mineral rights for the Crown.

A GREENIE PARADISE?

The USA in 1904: "Average life expectancy was 47. Only 14 percent of homes had a bathtub. Only 8 percent of the homes had a telephone. There were 8,000 cars and just 144 miles of paved roads. More than 95% of all births took place at home. 90% of all physicians had no college education."

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Hormesis: A Greenie's worst nightmare ""There is no safe level of blood lead", said Dr. Bruce Lanphear, lead author of the lead study presented Monday at the Pediatric Academic Societies annual meeting. Edward Calabrese would not agree. Calabrese is a toxicologist at UMass-Amherst and a leading scholar of hormesis, the phenomenon that most if not all toxins are actually good for you at sufficiently low doses"

The Scientific American on Hormesis: "If dioxin and ionizing radiation cause cancer, then it stands to reason that less exposure to them should improve public health. If mercury, lead and PCBs impair intellectual development, then less should be more. But a growing body of data suggests that environmental contaminants may not always be poisonous--they may actually be good for you at low levels. ... Over the past decade, Calabrese has compiled thousands of examples of hormesis from published scientific literature... biologist Ronald Mitchel of Atomic Energy of Canada has shown that a single low dose of ionizing radiation stimulates DNA repair, delaying the onset of cancer in mice.. Prolonged exposure to extreme temperatures is also harmful, but Rattan has found that heating up human skin cells to 41 degrees Celsius (106 degrees Fahrenheit) twice a week for an hour slows aging in the cells. Even well-established environmental headaches display some hormesis. The definitive rat study that linked high doses of dioxin to cancer, published in 1978 by Richard Kociba of Dow Chemical and his colleagues, also found that low doses reduced the incidence of tumors".

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