Longtime Nuclear Fallout and Bioaccumulation
This is Dr Helen Caldicott presenting a 2009 Study of the longterm effects of nuclear fallout on the example of the Chernobyl desaster:
(you will find the mentioned report below)
So, who is Dr Helen Caldicott?
[She] has been awarded 20 honorary doctoral degrees and was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by Nobel Laureate Linus Pauling. She was awarded the Lannan Foundation Prize for Cultural Freedom in 2003, and in 2006, the Peace Organisation of Australia presented her with the inaugural Australian Peace Prize “for her longstanding commitment to raising awareness about the medical and environmental hazards of the nuclear age”. The Smithsonian Institution has named Caldicott as one of the most influential women of the 20th century.
Her on bioaccumulation:
Radioactive waste must be isolated from the ecosphere for half a million years or longer, a physical and scientific impossibility, and as it leaks it will concentrate in food chains, inducing epidemics of genetic diseases, leukemia and cancer in all future generations, the greatest public health hazard the world will ever see.
Dr. Brian Moench on bioaccumulation:
To put lipstick on the pig of radioactive fallout, we hear from nuclear cheerleaders that common activities like watching TV and airline travel also expose us to radiation. True enough, although they never mention that airline pilots and flight attendants do have higher rates of breast and skin cancer.
Bioaccumulation is one reason why it is dishonest to equate the danger to humans living 5,000 miles away from Japan with the minute concentrations measured in our air. If we tried, we would now likely be able to measure radioactive iodine, cesium, and strontium bioaccumulating in human embryos in this country. Pregnant mothers, are you okay with that?
And this is the report:
The 327-page volume is an English translation of a 2007 publication by the same authors [..] including more than 1,000 titles and more than 5,000 printed and Internet publications mainly in Slavic languages, on the consequences of the Chernobyl disaster.
Release notes on ‘Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment’
And here is a local backup of the PDF. You can also find it via google.
Enviroment News Service writes upon release:
Drawing upon extensive data, the authors estimate the number of deaths worldwide due to Chernobyl fallout from 1986 through 2004 was 985,000, a number that has since increased.
By contrast, WHO and the IAEA estimated 9,000 deaths and some 200,000 people sickened in 2005.
The book has been heavily criticized by the defenders of the nuclear Status Quo. For example:
The list of cited references in the translation (Yablokov et al. 2009) indicates that the authors avoided the most respectable papers of Russian-language authors, which received serious international peer review and were published in respected journals. These hundreds of journal articles by authors from Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine were analyzed in detail by teams of independent international experts and became the basis for generalizations of the UN Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR 1988, 2000, 2008) and the UN Chernobyl Forum (IAEA 2006, WHO 2006, UNDP 2002, Forum 2006).
If you wonder about the integrity of organizations like the IAEA and the WHO please see this.