Reply To: Where are Japan and China in funding Focus?

[TimS]

jamesr wrote: I was thinking more on the lines that there are many areas of the world with much higher natural levels of radiation than would be permitted in the US or most countries if from man-made sources. There is no evidence that people living in these area are affected adversely in any way (such as higher cancer rates). Some studies even show beneficial effects.

See for example http://hein.org/HOL/Page?handle=hein.journals/risk13&div=6&g_sent=1&collection=journals

I have recently seen the reporting of beneficial effects misconstrued by popular TV commentators to be that scientists generally consider radiation exposure below radiation sickness levels to be beneficial; and that radiation risks are scare tactics used by politically motivated nuclear protesters. It is unfortunate that talk of these beneficial effects leads to people ignoring risks that are accepted by an overwhelming scientific consensus to occur at some exposure level.

Have people actually been exposed to unsafe levels of radiation from nuclear power? There are reports of radiation exposure hotspots outside of the Fukushima evacuation perimeter, including this one that amounts to hundreds of millisieverts a year:
http://mobile.france24.com/en/20110330-greenpeace-says-japan-evacuation-zone-small
Perhaps greenpeace is not the most acceptable source for this type of report, but the government reports exposure of many people to over tens of millisieverts a year; some exposures would be more concentrated than that. The permitted level is only 1mSv/year, which does not seem very relevant in this case.

I guess all this is off-topic from the NIF. However, it seems to me real risk of significant unsafe radiation exposure, as well as pollution from other sources such as coal power plants, is not acceptable and the world really needs something like aneutronic fusion.