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George. Thank you.

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Anyone looking at the newspapers in the last few days may have noticed that public opinion is completely blind to fact, even if it's not scientific.

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I mean, the Jemmy Savile fiasco, the launch of what's his name?

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Armstrong Fiasco. If it sells newspapers, it doesn't have to be true.

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And that can have some exceedingly serious consequences.

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And I want to explore some of those today. In 2009, as a result of the some of the work that I'm teaching I've been doing in medical physics,

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I became very unhappy indeed about the public perceptions of radiation.

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And so I wrote a book which has no equations in it.

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It's for everybody to understand. It's not very hard.

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And that was in 2009. And in fact, not in this lecture theatre.

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I think in the Mt. Hood lecture theatre, four days before Fukushima,

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I gave a lecture on about radiation and I wouldn't change a word what I said then today.

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So I want to talk about Fukushima and Chernobyl and what we know and what we don't know that we know most everything.

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Unfortunately, the story ends up rather like a Shakespearean tragedy.

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When you go to Japan, it's all about suspicions, good intentions, complete misunderstandings, and unnecessary misery and suffering.

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And as scientists, those of you who love scientists and mathematicians, we've really got to grab hold of this agenda.

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So we need to lead on the science and the understanding to answer the questions.

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Not, of course, that doing things just by authority, we want to know the actual facts for our selves.

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Nevertheless,

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I think we should take some guidance from others who in their careers impressed the public to the point of getting themselves put on banknotes.

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If you get yourself put on a banknote, I think that is a way of saying you have made a valuable contribution to mankind.

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And the four people I want to watch are Marie Curie for obvious reasons.

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But you will note, first of all, that she was a physicist and a chemist and a radiologist, exceedingly broad.

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She got Nobel Prize in two subjects and she wrote, Nothing in life is to be feared.

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It is to be understood. And that was Charles Darwin, who I will have a great deal to say about.

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He, of course, was a student of divinity, what we call theology in Oxford at Cambridge.

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He was a distinguished geologist. And of course, as we know, a naturalist and a biologist.

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So there's nothing particularly narrow about him. Then there was Florence Nightingale, who wasn't an academic.

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At least most of us don't think so. She was actually a rather distinguished statistician,

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and she's one of the first people actually get to get statistics in that in that case of what happened to the soldiers in

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the Crimea and shove them under the noses of the politicians of the day and get them to respond to statistical information.

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And we will have quite a lot to say about what she contributed.

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How very little can be done under the spirit of fear, she wrote.

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And then there was Adam Smith, the economist and philosopher.

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Science is the great antidote, the poison of enthusiasm and superstition.

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And he wasn't just thinking about the South Sea bubble and misperceptions about about Jemmy Savile,

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but he could equally well have been talking about misperceptions about radiation.

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I'm going to divide the talk into four parts. The first is what happened at Fukushima.

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The second is why have there been no casualties?

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The fact that there are no casualties is one thing. But why have them beaten on?

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And then how dangerous is radiation? Because it certainly can be dangerous.

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How dangerous is it? And finally, why are many frightened of nuclear power?

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And that, of course, is a more sociological part of the talk.

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So let's talk about let me talk about the this the science.

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Some of you probably scientists and others aren't. Don't worry.

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The first thing is the science of radiation and nuclear is not particularly hard.

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It's just been supposed to be hard. So everybody switches off.

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So let me give a little sketch. Most of the world that we deal with chemistry, burning, lasers, light,

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all that sort of thing is associated with the outer part of the atom where the electrons are.

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And right in the middle of the atom there is a nucleus, and the nucleus is a hundred thousand times smaller than the atom.

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That means, for instance, sometimes it's drawn as if it was like the solar system.

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It's much smaller than that. If you stood on the edge of the atom, you wouldn't be able to see the nucleus.

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It's much, much smaller than the than the sun, relatively speaking.

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And it's the nucleus is completely isolated.

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In fact, it does, to a very good approximation, absolutely nothing.

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The only thing it does is it rotates on its axis. And actually, that's what happens in MRI.

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But that's a footnote. The only thing that a new case can do is to take.

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It can't get anywhere near another nucleus because of the enormous electrical forces inside the atom.

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It is quite impossible for nuclei to meet one another except once every few billion years.

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At the centre of the sun. Because that is so incredibly hot.

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But here doesn't happen. The only thing it can do, as I say, is to decay now before the earth was formed.

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There was a lot of nuclear physics and all the atoms we see around us today, with the exception of hydrogen, are all the result of nuclear physics.

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They are all nuclear waste, if you like it. But a few billion years out.

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And some of them are still decaying very rarely, but a few are.

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And that is what we call radioactivity.

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Although it has enormous energy. It happened so rarely that it wasn't even discovered until the end of the 19th 19th century.

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But inside the earth, there is nothing.

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There is radioactivity spread through the the body of the earth.

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And that is why the Earth is hot.

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Otherwise, if the earth was just a matter of cooling down, Lord Kelvin showed it would cool down in about a million years.

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But it doesn't. It's taken at least a thousand times longer than that because it has been constantly heated by the radioactivity.

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And in fact, the radioactivity in the earth is responsible for the heat that created volcanic activity that makes earthquakes and tsunamis.

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All of that is nuclear energy from radioactive decay.

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In fact. In 1835.

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Charles Darwin, who's on the Beagle by then. You haven't got to the Galapagos by then.

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In 1835 he was in Chile when the time of the great Chilean earthquake of 1835, and he saw that earthquake and the tsunami that went in it with it.

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And he was very impressed indeed. He made a lot of observations about geology in his book, the the the the Voyage of the Beagle.

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And I can thoroughly recommend you to read it. It's quite hard work, but it's very rewarding.

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So what happened in Japan on the 11th of March 2011?

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Well, it's very interesting. The Japanese as a people are very well drilled as to what to do.

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And what happens when a an earthquake happens.

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And when a tsunami happened and although this is much bigger than they'd had before, they knew what to do.

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There were 500,000 people in the area that was inundated by the tsunami.

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And in between 26 and 45 minutes, they got all those people out of there, except 18,800 who were killed by the the the flood.

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Very impressive indeed. But when the radiation came, they didn't know about radiation.

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And so they panicked. And they're still panicking today. So what happened with the reactors?

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Well, as soon as the earthquake came, not the tsunami, but the earthquake came, the reactors were turned off.

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So the only heat that they were generating was the radioactivity of the, uh, of the radioactive atoms that had already been formed.

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That's a lot of heat to get rid of. It's rather like the problem when you have a a hydroelectric dam and there's a crack in it.

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There's a lot of stored energy there and you've got to do something about it.

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And it was that heat that had got to be rid of.

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There was no new radioactivity generated and that heat got to be lost.

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And the rest of the story actually is chemistry, not nuclear physics.

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Because the, uh, the reactors got very hot.

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And the zirconium, which is a metal which just holds the uranium in place,

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doesn't take part in the reactor, not meant to take part in the reaction at all,

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but that reacted with the water at over well over a thousand degrees and created hydrogen,

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rather like sodium does at room temperature in the lab if you put it in water.

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And this created an enormous pressure, as well as a high temperature inside the reactors.

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And, of course,

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the operators with a great deal of difficulty and a lot of bravery managed to release the pressure inside the reactor vessel and let it out.

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And this hydrogen. Hydrogen burns and can explode in air.

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And not surprisingly, it did. But by then it was nothing to do.

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It was just hydrogen and oxygen, however, that got onto the Internet as a an explosion at a nuclear power plant.

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And that sells newspapers like nothing else. And so it did sell newspapers like nothing else.

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And with 24 hour news, which has grown like topsy in recent years, stories that this was worse than Chernobyl, etc., etc., were propagated.

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Now the radioactivity was blown out when the hydrogen came out of the reactor vessels, and this did get spread around.

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But it was not nothing to do with the explosions.

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And it has caused no casualties, which is something that we're going to have to come back to.

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So there was no radiation disaster.

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I mean, a few nuclear reactors destroyed themselves.

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Well, that's very expensive for somebody. But there was no health consequences of that radiation at all.

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So a health consequences of the panic. And we're going to we'll come to that.

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Now, this was very obvious in the first few days and it's very difficult to get through to the press.

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But they were so gobsmacked by what was happening in Japan that for one brief moment it was possible to get in and actually get the truth published,

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which I managed to do on the 26th of March,

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which is therefore just a couple of weeks after the after the accident where I said no one has died and is unlikely to.

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Well, we can say that even more emphatically now. Well.

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Of course, it is very essential in order to understand what people think and why they think it and so on, to actually go to places and talk to people.

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And so in October I went and spoke with schoolteachers and doctors and community leaders and so on,

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and found out what was actually going on at ground level in this disaster.

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And there are a few pictures you can see there, a picture of the detritus from the tsunami and a few derricks on the horizon,

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which were, in fact, the derricks at the nuclear power plant taken from a distance of about three kilometres.

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It was very interesting talking to the community leaders.

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They were given no guidance whatsoever from central government about what was going on.

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They were left entirely on their own. And so they're extremely interested that we were able to come and talk to them.

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I should say. We in this case was Professor Tuck, who here from Idaho University, was a nuclear engineer on the right up there.

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And me and the other two are doctors at.

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In Japan. So there was fear and panic and failure of leadership and the press not listening, running around,

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finding experts, telling them who would tell them what they wanted to sell more newspapers.

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And that wasn't very difficult.

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And as a result of all this, at a personal family level in the communities in Japan where people were told they've got to move out of their homes,

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their businesses folded, there were bankruptcies, there were suicides, there were death of elderly people who were forcibly moved.

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Alcoholism, family break up and bedwetting amongst young people.

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All kinds of things that you'd expect from severe stress on the community.

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I've seen figures of 700 deaths related to this.

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Nothing to do with radiation. Nothing to do with the tsunami.

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But I think these are just not very well substantiated numbers.

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Let's look at some of the numbers and see what they actually mean.

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No, I'm not going to do any terribly complicated.

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These are just the result of multiplying and dividing a few numbers together and then checking with what other people see.

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Let's look at what the food situation is.

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The Japanese, particularly the mothers, got terrified that they were feeding their children radioactive food.

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So the government came in on July 2011, said that all food had got to have less than 500 becquerels per kilogram.

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You don't need to know what that is because it's just going to compare with something else.

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Now, I calculated what eating one kilogram of.

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Food with that radioactivity would do and it would give you that dose 0.008 millisieverts per kilogram.

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But again, don't worry, we're going to compare that with something else.

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If you look at a CT scan, if you have a CT scan, you get eight of these millisieverts things.

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That means that you could eat eight divided by 0.008 or 1000 kilograms,

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otherwise known as a tonne of food, and get the same radiation dose as one CT scan done.

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Some of the food very dangerous, does it? And certainly you can't eat a ton of food in three months.

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Interesting enough, the numbers that I calculated here actually agree with what the Japanese government were saying.

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But the mothers of Japan went ape and they protested and they marched.

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So the government gave in. And in April 2012, they lowered the tolerance to 100 becquerels per kilogram,

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which means that you'd have to eat five tons of radioactive food to get the same as one CT scan.

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How about water? It's got some extraordinary things happen.

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In April, 11,500 tonnes were released into the sea intentionally.

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There were there were some leaks of smaller amounts of more radioactive water.

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But this lot of water was released intentionally to make space in the limited, uh, tanks for storing more of the cooling water.

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And the release of this 11,500 tonnes was stated to be 100 times the regulation limit and they were also stated to be absolutely safe.

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Both of those statements are true, but they do stretch people's credibility a bit, don't they?

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In fact, you if you it's not difficult to calculate that it's equivalent to CT scans.

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If you were to drink a litre of that water every day for three months.

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Uh, which is not recommended anyway. So everything is completely out of kilter and uninformed by the science.

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I won't go into evacuation just to say that it could have been 60 times less stringent,

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which would mean by the time I wrote that BBC article, everybody can and should have gone home in the first few weeks,

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won't even know if you've got any readings,

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but within a couple of weeks to start to be readings of exactly what the situation was, and then people could have gone home.

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But no, there was more panic and people are still not going home.

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Why? Nuclear radiation is extremely powerful at at the level of an individual molecule.

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And nuclear radiation can knock a DNA molecule for six and do a great deal of damage so it can smash it.

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So, incidentally, can oxygen and even random thermal collisions when molecules bang into one another.

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So all molecules in our body are subject to being bashed around and suffering attacks of various kinds.

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And radiation is just another one. So one wonders how life survives.

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Given that DNA is really very delicate and.

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And that's the point where one has to look at the role taken by evolutionary biology,

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which is where why Mr. Darwin appears at this point on my slides.

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In fact, if you think about it, it's the business of biology.

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In fact, the only business of biology is to protect life from attack.

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That's all it's there for. Everything in the design of biology is to stabilise life against attack.

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That is why life is the way it is at all multiple levels.

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And just like an electronic circuit which is stabilised up to a point or a call suspension system, which is stabilised up to a point.

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The effect of increasing the attack will give you no response until it's overpowered.

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And the mechanism, the repair mechanism and the stabilising mechanism becomes overwhelmed and then you get a failure.

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So you've got typically a curve like this in what you have a stabilised region and eventually the load,

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the attack becomes too big and you get a failure.

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And that's characterised by two things both electronically and mechanically and in biology and so on.

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First of all, where does the threshold, where does the failure start to occur?

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And the other is how long does it take for the stabilising mechanism to work in electronic as a feedback time,

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but all the equivalent times in biology will which take how long the repairs and so on take.

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So for instance when we look at. The design of biology.

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Why does every single cell in your body have a complete copy of all the DNA, not just for that cell, but for all the other cells as well?

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The answer is it's protection against the destruction of the system.

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It's just making lots and lots of copies of everything. That obviously makes extremely good sense.

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Why does DNA have a double helix? It's not only so that it can be copied, that it can copy itself, but also because it can be repaired.

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Because when if radiation or oxygen or anything else breaks one of the strands, it's possible to put the other strand.

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Put that mend that strand unambiguously.

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And it's possible, as it turns out, even when you break two strands, to do this quite often as well.

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Now, most of the mechanisms are much more complicated than that.

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Some of them we don't know about yet. Every year we learn a bit more.

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There was a very interesting paper from Berkeley this last summer, earlier this year, which advance the knowledge.

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So we are learning all the time just how brilliant biology is at this business of stabilising life.

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Of course, the whole business of birth,

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life and death is another way of stabilising life because it's not the individual that biology is trying to preserve,

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but the the line and the the family, if you like it.

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Of course, biology's been doing this with plants and animals and things for hundreds of millions of years and getting the answer right.

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But it doesn't tell the brain. People worry that they don't know about what's going on in radiation in their bodies.

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It was never designed that the brain should be told.

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The whole story has been devolved to the level of something that cells look after

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and it is now known from experiments in the lab that cells talk to one another.

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They know when they're being attacked.

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They provide resources to one another through their chemical messaging systems, which they organise together, how they're going to repair.

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And the last thing they do is to tell head office because just comes and tries to micromanage the thing.

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And that, of course, is what we're seeing today.

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So. But it's not all roses.

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There is a point at which radiation is dangerous, and what we need to know is where is that point and when does it come, come, become dangerous?

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And what should we do about it? Uh, and in addition to that, it's not just a scientific question,

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but we've got to look at the social side of it and how we manage people's perceptions of radiation dangers and keep that under control.

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At the moment, people think that there's green radiation, which is what comes out of rocks is natural and so on,

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as I told you, that actually is responsible for creating the entire earthquake and tsunami in Japan.

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But nevertheless, that's what people think of us as green radiation.

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It's natural. That must be okay. Then there's amber radiation, which is what you get from the hospital.

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At the hospital, from in medicine and clinical medicine.

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Because the doctor gives you and you don't choose to have that.

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But if he advises you to have it, it's probably a good thing. And most people say thank you for it.

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And then there's the red stuff that comes out of out of nuclear reactions.

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Of course, all of these kinds of radiation are exactly the same.

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And it's not even clear in some cases, which is the biggest of which is the smallest.

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The only question, looking at the sociology of it, the only question is how dangerous is radiation to life?

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That's represented symbolically by that green sphere.

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All the questions that occur at a sociological level like the risk assessment,

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the public acceptance of radiation, the safety regulation, what is safe and what isn't?

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What should be in law? What should? What the working practices of people working on nuclear power stations,

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what the effects of radioactive waste is concerned, and how we should treat it.

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And all the questions associated with costs of nuclear technology.

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They come as a result of the answer to the question whether radiation is dangerous or not.

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And then there's an international that's at a national level. Then there's an international level.

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Of course, all [INAUDIBLE] broke loose because politicians and terrorists and so on are playing nasty games,

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which they would anyway with with biological weapons or something else, but dirty bombs, threats, nuclear blackmail and all the rest of it.

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Iran and so on. So the only question for us is whether how dangerous is radiation to life?

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There's another important thing because of this stabilising mechanism,

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it's very important to distinguish between radiation, which comes as a flash all at once,

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where repair doesn't have time to do very much and radiation, which is spread out over a long period and for which repair is going on all the time.

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And the latter is obviously for the same amount of radiation is much, much less harmful.

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We will have to look at that. And this is relevant to when people look at the effects of radiation shown on you from the outside organs inside,

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you know, it's very unnerving to think that there's radiation radioactivity inside you,

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but in fact, that is necessarily much more spread out in time and is actually less harmful for the same dose than something which is shown on you.

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And at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which we're looking at later they're going to have at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

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It was a flash of radiation, which is the worst kind at Fukushima.

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It was radioactivity which is absorbed into the body and it's spread out over months and years following.

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I think I'm going to have to skip a bit because I'm certainly not keeping up to time.

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There's a picture of inviting Japanese people to have very high doses of radiation for their own health.

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And if you look in the bottom left hand corner, paying a lot of money for it,

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about the same amount of radiation as the countrymen are being turfed out of their houses for the other end of Japan.

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And of course, the these kinds of uses of radiation are extremely good for imaging cancers and so on in the in the body.

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But let's get back to. Looking at the background.

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So this is the green the green radiation, if you like, the natural stuff and.

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Here in Oxford, we probably get about 2.4 millisieverts per year.

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And that comes from rocks and internal because there is natural radioactivity in potassium in our blood and it's always been there.

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So it can't be a problem with cosmetics that come from outer space.

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And that's the medical devices that we have.

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All that is assumed to be okay. And the most cautious application of radiation safety can't get down below that level.

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That's unreasonable. So in fact, would do it.

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Radiation could do two things to you. One is that it can overload the cell cycle, and if it overloads the cell cycle,

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then biology stops and it stops in about the time of the cell cycle, which is at most a few days or weeks.

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And this is called acute radiation syndrome. The other thing that can go wrong is that the copying of the DNA goes wrong and that over a period,

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eventually some serious growth gets out of hand, which is what we know as cancer.

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So we've got four kinds of situation to worry about.

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One is radiation, which comes in a flash.

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How often does that cause acute radiation syndrome and how often they cause cancer?

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And then we've got radiation, which is that all the time, chronic radiation.

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How often does that called acute cause, acute radiation syndrome, and how often does it cause cancer?

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Let's look at acute radiation syndrome from a flash of radiation.

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And here's some of the most obvious data.

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These is this is for the firefighters who went in at Chernobyl and all of the firefighters who got more than 4000 millisieverts in a day or so,

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20 were 42 of them.

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And 27 of them died within a few weeks from acute radiation syndrome, despite attempts to get them blood transfusions and and so on.

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But below 2000 millisieverts, none of them died.

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So there's a definite threshold there, and that is widely acknowledged.

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I should say that at Fukushima, nobody got more than a few hundred millisieverts.

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So nobody got with anywhere near that threshold of acute radiation syndrome.

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The other source of information we have, which everybody knows about, is radiotherapy.

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Now radiation is being used to kill cancer to actually stop the cell cycle for cancer cells for over 100 years.

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And there are probably people in this there may even be people in this room.

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Certainly, there will be more of my generation in the audience who have benefited from that.

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It's not unusual, but probably and probably members of your family have received that.

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So this is not something handed out by governments and it's something that people have firsthand knowledge of.

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If you have radiotherapy, you don't get it all at once.

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As most of you probably know, it's very unpleasant, really.

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You have to go back to the hospital again and again and again.

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And over about six or eight weeks, you get some radiation every day.

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And what is happening is that that repair, the repair mechanism, the feedback,

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the stabilisation is being used to so that the tumour gets about 2000 millisieverts every day and just fails to repair itself every day,

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whereas the, the tissue round in the rest of the body gets up to a thousand millisieverts every day and just manages to repair itself.

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Maybe you have folds out or something or do a burns on the skin, but you survive.

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Here's actually a picture taken from the hospital here of a treatment plan for somebody with prostate cancer.

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And you can see that the inner control, which is 97% control, which is the the area of the prostate that's being treated, that the regions around it.

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It's a it's a horizontal section to the lower abdomen.

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The the the rest of the section of the patient is getting a pretty high dose.

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That heavy control is a 50% control.

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So there's quite a lot of the patient is getting quite a high dose and they need to survive that and they do survive that.

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Otherwise, they would have a very nasty time for the rest of their lives.

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So we can survive very high levels of radiation.

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And most of us know somebody who's has. Well, then there's Hiroshima and Nagasaki and Mushroom, and Nagasaki is a flash of radiation.

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And then the question is about causing cancer.

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I'm aware that I'm running a bit short of time, although I think I started a bit I started a bit bit late.

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Most of the people.

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Well, a third of the people who are from Nagasaki were blown away by the blast or burnt to death by the firestorm that went with it.

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But two thirds of them survived and were findable in 1950.

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And those people, after five years, those people, their health has been followed and studied very carefully for 50 years.

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And the question is, how many extra of those people died from cancer compared with other Japanese cities where they had not been bombed?

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And that analysis has been done.

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And the extra people there of that very thin purple area, which shows that most people who died of cancer would have died anyway.

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Now, I don't find this argument quite good enough. It has to be more than that,

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because what they what has been done in three different ways is to measure what the radiation dose of individual people were.

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And by looking at how the cancer rates depend on the individual radiation doses.

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The argument becomes a lot more convincing. So this is a table in which each line of the table represents increasing bands of radiation dose.

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And by the time you get down to the near the bottom of the table, you're getting extra risk per thousand.

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Well, that that 7.2 to 10.8% extra increase of of of cancer.

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So that's substantial. And of course, we're talking about a very large number of people here.

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So the statistical errors are small. However, if you go down to the lowest doses below 100 millisieverts, what's shown now in green,

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the chances of getting extra cancers are statistically not significant compared with different compared with what they were in other Japanese cities,

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even in this horrifically large experiment, if we may call it that,

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in which two Japanese cities have been bombed with nuclear weapons and their health followed for 50 years.

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Now, if you don't see an effect in an in a data set like that, it must be a pretty it must be pretty small.

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And in fact, it is the chance of dying for people who lived in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

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The chance of dying of radiation induced cancer in the next 50 years is less than the chance of being killed on the road in 50 years.

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That's not negligible. But we face that kind of of and it's certainly not what most of us were brought up to believe.

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So those green that green entry suggests that 100 millisieverts is a reasonable tolerance for.

331
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A flash of radiation. But what about radiation you get all the time?

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Here's another. Story.

333
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That sounds rather horrendous. It's rather horrendous.

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In the time between 1915 and 1950.

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People used to paint the luminous dials of watches and instruments with radioactive paint, so they glowed in the dark.

336
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And this was very important, not only in the war effort, but in civil life as well.

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And the application of luminous paint was quite tricky and it involved painting very fine detail.

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And those who did it found they could get a much better point on their paintbrush if they licked the end of the paint with.

339
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And the radium that that they ingested went into their bones.

340
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And having got into their bones, it stayed there more or less for the rest of their lives.

341
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And gradually it's got a very long half life. So it's not difficult.

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Not that difficult, anyway, to calculate exactly what dose those people had, even when you have to exhume them from their graves.

343
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And. Because it goes to their bone is predominantly bone cancer and bone cancer, not like lung cancer is a relatively unusual form of cancer.

344
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So there isn't a large, uh, country wide from, which has nothing to do with radiation.

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Almost all of it is to do with radiation. And here are the figures which show that that only for those who had more than 10,000 milligrams.

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Now I won't go into the details of of of that had a very substantial we don't have

347
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to place statistics here 46 cases of bone cancer where less than one was expected.

348
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So no statistics just. Clear facts and.

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Here is a scatterplot. Which shows they.

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Activity, radioactivity that they absorbed against the year that they went into the industry because

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in 1926 it was realised what was going on and it said Stop licking your paintbrushes.

352
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And the net result was that the radiation dose fell dramatically and the people who died

353
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of bone cancer were given by little pluses here and everybody else with little zeros.

354
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And those was threshold given by that dotted line running across a 3.7 million becquerels.

355
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You hear a lot about thousands of because in the newspaper this is millions of because all their lives.

356
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But at three points below 3.7 million becquerels, there were no cases of bone cancer.

357
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Now we've got a weave which is gives us a threshold, but we've got a problem of getting across to the public.

358
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How are we going to get across to the public? And here, as I say, I think we should take a note of how Florence Nightingale went about it.

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She got the data and then she drew diagrams.

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Now, I don't know. I don't think I taught any viewers undergraduates, because I've been retired a year or two.

361
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But if I had in your first year, I would have been on again and again and again every week.

362
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Draw a diagram because you've got to use diagrams to get across to people, especially in the people who are not scientists.

363
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And Florence Nightingale managed to do that and get the powers that be in the in the war office and so and take some notice.

364
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And I think that was brilliant. So she drew diagrams.

365
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We've got to draw a diagram. So here's my my diagram.

366
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Let's look at monthly doses as areas that big red rectangle is a monthly dose that kills.

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Tumours. So that's red, right.

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That's, that's fatal for those, for those cells.

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But half that 20,000 millisieverts per month is what cells of your body get parts of your body organs get,

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which do manage to survive, but actually they get about a 5% chance of getting secondary cancers.

371
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It's not it's not completely safe, but it's life saving.

372
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But then the secondary cancer may have to be. But anyway, that's like 20,000 millisieverts.

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So what I'm being. Campaigning for is a conservative safe dose.

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Which is 100 millisieverts per month, which comes out of the dial painter's thing, which is 200 times less.

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And 200 times less than than half a percent is is something incredibly, incredibly small.

376
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But what's interesting is that 100 millisieverts per month.

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Which is as high as it's relatively safe because that's what a safety level should be.

378
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It should be what you can tolerate. It won't get any higher, but it's okay up to that.

379
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If you look at what is handed down by the international authorities, by those to those Japanese who are saying about the water and so on,

380
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that is one millisieverts per year, point one millisieverts per month.

381
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And oh, yes, you can just see a little dot.

382
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The area of that little dot at the end of the ago, that is point one millisieverts per month,

383
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which is a thousand times smaller than my green rectangle.

384
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And that's what I'm talking about. So.

385
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Radiation protection levels could be a thousand times looser than what is.

386
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I'm going to have to jump ahead. So.

387
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We've got to sell that. We've got to look at why are people frightened of nuclear power?

388
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Answer Because that's what people learnt in the Cold War and that was all propaganda, if you like it.

389
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Does the fact that we can't feel radiation which unnerves people.

390
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But as I say, we know why. We've already covered why. That is because biology has taken it to task away from the the brain and given it to the cells.

391
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And they do a fantastic job.

392
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And finally, the other reason for being frightened of radiation is these stupid regulations which tell you that it is very dangerous.

393
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But those were designed just as a way of reassuring everybody.

394
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And in the time of the Cold War and saying, there they are, we promise you you will not have to tolerate any radiation,

395
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which is significantly more than you get in the background out of the rocks and so on anyway.

396
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And that was a stupid thing to do because that's not a safety level.

397
00:52:28,060 --> 00:52:36,700
That's a level of political reassurance. And that is called a lager as low as reasonably achievable.

398
00:52:37,570 --> 00:52:46,720
That is the acronym that they use for establishing these very low levels and saying that's what the safety level should should be.

399
00:52:49,580 --> 00:52:52,610
And well, who's to blame?

400
00:52:53,000 --> 00:52:59,510
There is a cycle that you can go round and round and round where the public panic

401
00:52:59,630 --> 00:53:04,490
at the bottom and demand of their politicians that everything is tightened up.

402
00:53:05,030 --> 00:53:17,030
And then it's the it's tightened up. More international committees come along and lay their hands on and approve some ridiculous level.

403
00:53:17,150 --> 00:53:24,110
And that comes down to the government again, which is making things more and more expensive, by the way.

404
00:53:25,790 --> 00:53:33,250
And then the press says, look. This could exceed the new regulation levels.

405
00:53:33,400 --> 00:53:36,790
Of course it could, because it shouldn't have been like that in the first place.

406
00:53:37,810 --> 00:53:41,260
So who's to blame? Whose fault is all this?

407
00:53:41,590 --> 00:53:49,719
The answer is our fault. At least two people of my generation who marched and sat in and jumped up and

408
00:53:49,720 --> 00:53:58,690
down and voted and protested to get these punitive levels of radiation safety.

409
00:54:01,230 --> 00:54:07,440
And now what should we do? Well, it's education, you know.

410
00:54:08,100 --> 00:54:15,660
We've got to educate people and reassure them as to what they.

411
00:54:20,060 --> 00:54:26,630
What the situation really is. Well, I haven't got time to talk about nuclear waste, but if somebody wants to ask.

412
00:54:26,960 --> 00:54:35,750
There it is. Uh. Radiation is not a world stopping danger.

413
00:54:36,080 --> 00:54:45,920
We all know what the real dangers are. Political and economic stability, jobs, food, water and the like.

414
00:54:46,550 --> 00:54:53,810
Well, yes, she just doesn't appear in that list. We need education.

415
00:54:54,470 --> 00:54:58,520
We need trust in science and trust in society.

416
00:54:59,000 --> 00:55:04,760
One of the awful things of going to Japan is to find that nobody trusts anybody.

417
00:55:04,850 --> 00:55:09,860
I mean, I'm not talking just in a scientific context. They don't trust one another.

418
00:55:10,490 --> 00:55:14,780
I'm glad to say in this country, if you are, it seems to me, are better.

419
00:55:15,110 --> 00:55:25,760
But trust in science and trusting in society go pretty closely together as I think Adam Smith would have appreciated.

420
00:55:27,430 --> 00:55:34,720
We need to explain radiation in simple terms and remove the stigma.

421
00:55:38,270 --> 00:55:42,320
Were you quite happy to use radiation for personal health?

422
00:55:42,590 --> 00:55:48,260
It's about time we started using it for the health of the planet in the same sort of way.

423
00:55:51,140 --> 00:55:56,930
No, sir, by book. But let me finish on a slightly different note.

424
00:55:57,290 --> 00:56:10,690
As anybody, as a scientist will realise, ultraviolet radiation of the kind you get in sunshine is just as dangerous as nuclear radiation.

425
00:56:10,700 --> 00:56:14,000
In fact, it's on the edge of nuclear radiation.

426
00:56:14,540 --> 00:56:17,630
It can break up DNA molecules.

427
00:56:18,320 --> 00:56:22,070
It can cause cell death. It can cause cancer. Skin cancer.

428
00:56:22,670 --> 00:56:25,670
And in fact, as well, a serious source of that.

429
00:56:26,090 --> 00:56:31,220
But we don't bring the whole of our economy to a halt because of this.

430
00:56:31,460 --> 00:56:36,680
What we do is things like, I picked up this plastic bag in the in the in the summer.

431
00:56:36,680 --> 00:56:50,870
I thought, how lovely. That says it's from a high street chemist telling mum and dad in simple terms how to look after and be sensible,

432
00:56:50,960 --> 00:56:55,490
as we usually are about sunshine when we go on holiday.

433
00:56:55,610 --> 00:56:59,120
And so that people and the children don't get cancer and so on.

434
00:56:59,390 --> 00:57:02,450
And that's full of the joy of life. And it's positive.

435
00:57:02,630 --> 00:57:06,020
And that's the way we should be looking at nuclear radiation.

436
00:57:06,620 --> 00:57:14,240
In my view, what a breath of fresh air. Anyway, I think I should stop there.