user comment: "Dennis1988
It takes about 2 million times the 'natural ' radiation level in our bodies to assure death, yet it only takes twice the 'natural' level of carbon dioxide in our bodies to assure death.

We are now dumping CO2 into the environment at about 33 Billion Metric Tons per year. Those levels are expected to increase at a rate of 2.4% per year. At that rate of increase, we could be dumping 66 Billion metric tons of CO2 into the atmosphere by the year 2060. If we continue to dump CO2 into the environment at that increasing rate, we could double the 1960 atmospheric CO2 levels by the year 2060.


In the meantime, the madness of 40 years of atmospheric nuclear tests only increased the earth’s background radiation levels by less than 3%. A Chernobyl accident every few years for the next thousand years would not even double the overall background radiation levels of the earth, because the radionuclides released would still decay faster than those radionuclides would be released by those accidents.

We have a clear-cut set of circumstances. Our bodies, and the environment, are far more sensitive to increased levels of CO2 above the natural level than they are to increased levels of radiation above natural levels. Doubling the level of CO2 in the body is lethal within hours, yet it takes a one-time dose of almost 2 Million times the natural level of radiation in the body to be lethal within weeks.

In fact, if you were to receive a one-time dose of 1 MBq of Cs-137, it would increase your risk of dieing from cancer from 20% over your lifetime to 20.0675%. That 1 MBq dose of Cs-137 represents more than 100 times the natural level of radiation in your body. Another way to look at it is this. You could take a one-time dose of Cs-137 of 10 KBq, and then take an additional 5 KBq every 70 days for the rest of your life to maintain a radiation level inside your body that is a little more than twice the normal level of radiation in your body. At the end of 100 years, your risk of dieing from cancer would be 20.176% instead of 20% because of the Cs-137. In contrast, if you have a blood CO2 level that is twice normal for more than a couple hours…you are already dead.


We are now dumping CO2 at a rate that is well beyond the rate that we are releasing radionuclides, even when we go crazy by detonating hundreds of nuclear weapons in the atmosphere during decades of aboveground nuclear weapons tests.

Logic would dictate that we should be more concerned about the overall effects of CO2 on our environment than on the effects of radiation. Even when you consider the amount of CO2 emitted by Uranium mining and processing, Nuclear Power only produces about 7-10% of the CO2 per KWH as burning coal does. It makes sense to replace coal-fired generators with modern nuclear plants to provide a substantial reduction in CO2 emissions while the renewable sources (solar, wind, etc) are coming online.

There is no logic in dismantling nuclear power until we are able to replace the very high CO2 emitters with something that will produce less CO2 than Nuclear. Once we have cut our CO2 emissions back to a pre-20th century level, then it will make sense to replace those nuclear plants with renewable generators."

has a few interesting bits in comments

"Helen Caldicott contrasts a proper WHO report with the conclusions of a dubious book of which the New York Academy of Sciences itself says:

"In no sense did Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences or the New York Academy of Sciences commission this work; nor by its publication do we intend to independently validate the claims made in the translation or in the original publications cited in the work. The translated volume has not been peer reviewed by the New York Academy of Sciences, or by anyone else."

Misrepresenting this dodgy book as a "report published by the New York Academy of Sciences" merely proves Monbiot had a very good point to begin with."

"For 30 years, Microwave News has been reporting on the potential health and environmental impacts of electromagnetic fields and radiation. We are widely recognized as a fair and objective source of information on this controversial subject.

Microwave News covers the entire non-ionizing electromagnetic spectrum, with special emphasis on mobile phones and power lines, as well as radar and broadcast towers."

RT @librarythingtim: Radiation Dose Chart from xkcd (via @macrael) — fascinating

some good succinct answers in the comments:

"How can all these numerous, various radiation-type waves we're beaming everywhere NOT be doing some crinkly shit to all living things in proximity.

@JasonsRobot: Because they are weak compared to the dose of cosmic rays, Earth's natural radioactivity and UV radiation from the sun that most living things get every single day

@Arken: Yeah. But it's not like they're 'instead' of cosmic, natural, and uv stuffs. It's on top of. Plus, the man-made ones are all freaky. Our bodies evolved being bombarded by the natural stuff so that's old hat. How can we know if we can deal with the added onslaught of new stuff.

@JasonsRobot: We can know because we have studied the EM spectrum for a couple of hundred years know and we know a huge amount about it."