The Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine (pdf), Direct Estimates of Low-Level Radiation Risks of Lung Cancer at Two NRC-Compliant Nuclear Installations: Why Are the New Risk Estimates 20 to 200 Times the Old Official Estimates?, Dr. Irwin Bross, Director of Biostatistics at Roswell Park Memorial Institute, 1981 (emphasis added):
- Nuclear submarine workers at the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard (PNS), who were exposed to low-level ionizing radiation [face] serious hazards.
- The new risk estimates have been found to be much higher than the official estimates.
- CDC/NIOSH refused to retract or correct the conclusion [that] “we found no positive dosage response relationships between ionizing radiation dose and mortality for any cause reported.” [They used] an incompetent way to examine this data.
- [Our analysis] gives 189 lung cancer deaths per year per million persons per rem. This is over 100 times the official estimates and completely changes the picture.
- PNS workers received much less than the 5 rem per year currently permitted… about 0.5 rem per year. Yet this was enough to greatly increase their risk of lung cancer.
- Why does… data for the [Hanford] workers… show no lung cancer relationship? [When experts] analyzed the Hanford data they did find excess lung cancer and a doubling dose… similar to the corresponding estimate for the shipyard workers.
- Estimates of risk to nuclear workers are two logarithmic orders of magnitude greater than the official risks. When the actual risks are 100 times greater, the cost-benefit calculations or permissible levels or environmental impact statements based on the official estimates cannot protect the health and safety of workers or the public.
- Indeed, there are now more than 30 studies where the data show positive relationships in human populations exposed to low-level ionizing radiation.
- Scientific evaluation of radiation risks [should] replace the obsolete older estimates by the newer ones. That this did not happen in the latest BEIR report suggests that official estimates are no longer a scientific product but rather a political one.
- Radiation [studies] become bogged down in real or manufactured “controversies”… There is now much more than a prima facie case that NRC permits doses of radiation that are dangerous – a dose that doubles the risk of a fatal disease is a serious public health hazard.
Jay Mullen, former CIA agent and professor at Southern Oregon Univ., Oct 2013 (15:30 in):
- When I was 19 years old, I was… a University athlete. I woke up one night and couldn’t move, it paralyzed me… it just baffled doctors… the Univ. of California Medical Center… determined it was the thyroid disorder that was paralyzing me… I had a thyroidectomy and as a consequence I wear what we call the Hanford necklace.
- There’s a good reason if you are an investor in the nuclear community to cover up the pernicious effects of radiation, because there’s profits in nuclear operations… There are strong ‘balance sheet’ reasons to continue the nuclear community, and therefore there’s a reason to discount the possible adverse effects of radiation.
- I was in the government, but I was in the government clandestinely. I was an undercover agent for the Central Intelligence Agency in Africa in the 1970s… I understand very well that the government covers up things that might in fact be embarrassing to the government. What could be more embarrassing to the government than the fact that they hazarded their own people by their operations in the atomic community?
- I would hope the American public becomes more aware of the effects that radiation can have on the public’s health.
- The thing I find most distressing is the dissembling and… the contempt that the government and its contractors have had for the people who they’ve in fact affected.