By Mike Reynolds

From Winter 2015-2016 Forum

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) decided, in mid-September, to cancel a study that has been ongoing since 2010 to find out why so many more people who live near nuclear power plants have come down with or die from cancer. The group, Beyond Nuclear, did not mince words in their 9/12 announcement that said, “Vital cancer study canceled: NRC will hide the truth about nuclear reactor risks.” The study was examining if there was any connection to nuclear power facilities and the huge rise in childhood leukemias in children who live near a nuclear plant. The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) was working with the government and had already completed the first phase of the two phase study.

The excuse used by the NRC to stop the study was the “significant amount of time and resources needed and the agency’s current budget constraints” but the study was estimated to cost $8 million which really was a mere drop in the bucket for the NRC since their agency has an operating budget of $1 billion annually! There have been numerous studies done in Europe that has proven that a rise in childhood leukemia around nuclear power plants are definitively linked but the NRC decided to continue to hide this information in the United States.

The second phase was to complete a pilot study of seven plants. A spokeswoman for the National Academy of Sciences, Lauren Ruganin, explained that the study would demonstrate if the method of data-gathering would be applicable to a nationwide study, “But it never got off the ground.” One critic of our country’s nuclear industry is Senator Edward J. Markey. He called the canceling of the study’s cancellation a “don’t ask, don’t tell approach to this public health concern by ceasing work on what could be a life-saving cancer risk research study.”

Indeed, our NRC would like to completely eliminate their now existing low threshold of radiation that they call safe and actually change it to the unproven theory that low doses of radiation are good for people! A professor of journalism at the State University of New York and the author of the book entitled The Wrong Stuff: The Space’s Program’s Nuclear Threat to Our Planet wrote that the NRC’s claim that radiation is helpful and not harmful to people are “tall tales.” The president of the Nuclear Information and Resource Service (NIRS), Michael Mariotte, said of the NRC’s plans to adopt low level radiation as good for people, “If implemented, the hormesis model would result in needless death and misery.” Indeed, CFIDS/ME would be in that category. Low levels of radiation don’t cause people to get immediately sick and, as so many have said for decades, there is NO safe level of radiation.

The National Academies of Science puts out a report called the BEIR report which stands for the Biological Effects of Ionizing Radiation. The chairman of their present BEIR VII committee, Dr. Richard Monson, is also an associate dean of the Harvard School of Public Health. He said, when the most recent BEIR report was released, “The scientific research base shows that there is no threshold of exposure below which low levels of ionizing radiation can be demonstrated to be harmless or beneficial.” An official in the British government who has worked on radiation risks and who is considered a radiation expert in Europe, Dr. Ian Fairlie, said of those that propose low-levels of radiation are good for people, “My conclusion is that they do not merit serious consideration” and that those who feel otherwise “do not merit serious consideration” since they “appear to be based on preconception or even ideology, rather than evidence which points in the opposite direction.”

By refusing to accept scientific proof or to continue with a study that would, once again, prove the harm of nuclear plants and their small leaks that our government calls “harmless”, the NRC acts like all other government agencies that hide the truth. Our own CDC ignores all the scientific evidence that has been proven for CFIDS/ME such as the slow decimation of Stat-1 that takes place (fully replicated work by Drs. Carrigan and Knox) or even that the illness is an autoimmune disease (fully replicated work by Dr. Hokama). They even refuse to mention that the “fatigue” is cancer-related fatigue which was found by a team of research from our government’s own National Institutes of Health! By pretending that “post-exertional malaise” (fatigue) is the hallmark of the disease is like comparing our impending cancer to a hangnail.