George. Thank you.
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.
I mean, the Jemmy Savile fiasco, the launch of what's his name?
Armstrong Fiasco. If it sells newspapers, it doesn't have to be true.
And that can have some exceedingly serious consequences.
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,
I became very unhappy indeed about the public perceptions of radiation.
And so I wrote a book which has no equations in it.
It's for everybody to understand. It's not very hard.
And that was in 2009. And in fact, not in this lecture theatre.
I think in the Mt. Hood lecture theatre, four days before Fukushima,
I gave a lecture on about radiation and I wouldn't change a word what I said then today.
So I want to talk about Fukushima and Chernobyl and what we know and what we don't know that we know most everything.
Unfortunately, the story ends up rather like a Shakespearean tragedy.
When you go to Japan, it's all about suspicions, good intentions, complete misunderstandings, and unnecessary misery and suffering.
And as scientists, those of you who love scientists and mathematicians, we've really got to grab hold of this agenda.
So we need to lead on the science and the understanding to answer the questions.
Not, of course, that doing things just by authority, we want to know the actual facts for our selves.
Nevertheless,
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.
If you get yourself put on a banknote, I think that is a way of saying you have made a valuable contribution to mankind.
And the four people I want to watch are Marie Curie for obvious reasons.
But you will note, first of all, that she was a physicist and a chemist and a radiologist, exceedingly broad.
She got Nobel Prize in two subjects and she wrote, Nothing in life is to be feared.
It is to be understood. And that was Charles Darwin, who I will have a great deal to say about.
He, of course, was a student of divinity, what we call theology in Oxford at Cambridge.
He was a distinguished geologist. And of course, as we know, a naturalist and a biologist.
So there's nothing particularly narrow about him. Then there was Florence Nightingale, who wasn't an academic.
At least most of us don't think so. She was actually a rather distinguished statistician,
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
the Crimea and shove them under the noses of the politicians of the day and get them to respond to statistical information.
And we will have quite a lot to say about what she contributed.
How very little can be done under the spirit of fear, she wrote.
And then there was Adam Smith, the economist and philosopher.
Science is the great antidote, the poison of enthusiasm and superstition.
And he wasn't just thinking about the South Sea bubble and misperceptions about about Jemmy Savile,
but he could equally well have been talking about misperceptions about radiation.
I'm going to divide the talk into four parts. The first is what happened at Fukushima.
The second is why have there been no casualties?
The fact that there are no casualties is one thing. But why have them beaten on?
And then how dangerous is radiation? Because it certainly can be dangerous.
How dangerous is it? And finally, why are many frightened of nuclear power?
And that, of course, is a more sociological part of the talk.
So let's talk about let me talk about the this the science.
Some of you probably scientists and others aren't. Don't worry.
The first thing is the science of radiation and nuclear is not particularly hard.
It's just been supposed to be hard. So everybody switches off.
So let me give a little sketch. Most of the world that we deal with chemistry, burning, lasers, light,
all that sort of thing is associated with the outer part of the atom where the electrons are.
And right in the middle of the atom there is a nucleus, and the nucleus is a hundred thousand times smaller than the atom.
That means, for instance, sometimes it's drawn as if it was like the solar system.
It's much smaller than that. If you stood on the edge of the atom, you wouldn't be able to see the nucleus.
It's much, much smaller than the than the sun, relatively speaking.
And it's the nucleus is completely isolated.
In fact, it does, to a very good approximation, absolutely nothing.
The only thing it does is it rotates on its axis. And actually, that's what happens in MRI.
But that's a footnote. The only thing that a new case can do is to take.
It can't get anywhere near another nucleus because of the enormous electrical forces inside the atom.
It is quite impossible for nuclei to meet one another except once every few billion years.
At the centre of the sun. Because that is so incredibly hot.
But here doesn't happen. The only thing it can do, as I say, is to decay now before the earth was formed.
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.
They are all nuclear waste, if you like it. But a few billion years out.
And some of them are still decaying very rarely, but a few are.
And that is what we call radioactivity.
Although it has enormous energy. It happened so rarely that it wasn't even discovered until the end of the 19th 19th century.
But inside the earth, there is nothing.
There is radioactivity spread through the the body of the earth.
And that is why the Earth is hot.
Otherwise, if the earth was just a matter of cooling down, Lord Kelvin showed it would cool down in about a million years.
But it doesn't. It's taken at least a thousand times longer than that because it has been constantly heated by the radioactivity.
And in fact, the radioactivity in the earth is responsible for the heat that created volcanic activity that makes earthquakes and tsunamis.
All of that is nuclear energy from radioactive decay.
In fact. In 1835.
Charles Darwin, who's on the Beagle by then. You haven't got to the Galapagos by then.
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.
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.
And I can thoroughly recommend you to read it. It's quite hard work, but it's very rewarding.
So what happened in Japan on the 11th of March 2011?
Well, it's very interesting. The Japanese as a people are very well drilled as to what to do.
And what happens when a an earthquake happens.
And when a tsunami happened and although this is much bigger than they'd had before, they knew what to do.
There were 500,000 people in the area that was inundated by the tsunami.
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.
Very impressive indeed. But when the radiation came, they didn't know about radiation.
And so they panicked. And they're still panicking today. So what happened with the reactors?
Well, as soon as the earthquake came, not the tsunami, but the earthquake came, the reactors were turned off.
So the only heat that they were generating was the radioactivity of the, uh, of the radioactive atoms that had already been formed.
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.
There's a lot of stored energy there and you've got to do something about it.
And it was that heat that had got to be rid of.
There was no new radioactivity generated and that heat got to be lost.
And the rest of the story actually is chemistry, not nuclear physics.
Because the, uh, the reactors got very hot.
And the zirconium, which is a metal which just holds the uranium in place,
doesn't take part in the reactor, not meant to take part in the reaction at all,
but that reacted with the water at over well over a thousand degrees and created hydrogen,
rather like sodium does at room temperature in the lab if you put it in water.
And this created an enormous pressure, as well as a high temperature inside the reactors.
And, of course,
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.
And this hydrogen. Hydrogen burns and can explode in air.
And not surprisingly, it did. But by then it was nothing to do.
It was just hydrogen and oxygen, however, that got onto the Internet as a an explosion at a nuclear power plant.
And that sells newspapers like nothing else. And so it did sell newspapers like nothing else.
And with 24 hour news, which has grown like topsy in recent years, stories that this was worse than Chernobyl, etc., etc., were propagated.
Now the radioactivity was blown out when the hydrogen came out of the reactor vessels, and this did get spread around.
But it was not nothing to do with the explosions.
And it has caused no casualties, which is something that we're going to have to come back to.
So there was no radiation disaster.
I mean, a few nuclear reactors destroyed themselves.
Well, that's very expensive for somebody. But there was no health consequences of that radiation at all.
So a health consequences of the panic. And we're going to we'll come to that.
Now, this was very obvious in the first few days and it's very difficult to get through to the press.
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,
which I managed to do on the 26th of March,
which is therefore just a couple of weeks after the after the accident where I said no one has died and is unlikely to.
Well, we can say that even more emphatically now. Well.
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.
And so in October I went and spoke with schoolteachers and doctors and community leaders and so on,
and found out what was actually going on at ground level in this disaster.
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,
which were, in fact, the derricks at the nuclear power plant taken from a distance of about three kilometres.
It was very interesting talking to the community leaders.
They were given no guidance whatsoever from central government about what was going on.
They were left entirely on their own. And so they're extremely interested that we were able to come and talk to them.
I should say. We in this case was Professor Tuck, who here from Idaho University, was a nuclear engineer on the right up there.
And me and the other two are doctors at.
In Japan. So there was fear and panic and failure of leadership and the press not listening, running around,
finding experts, telling them who would tell them what they wanted to sell more newspapers.
And that wasn't very difficult.
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,
their businesses folded, there were bankruptcies, there were suicides, there were death of elderly people who were forcibly moved.
Alcoholism, family break up and bedwetting amongst young people.
All kinds of things that you'd expect from severe stress on the community.
I've seen figures of 700 deaths related to this.
Nothing to do with radiation. Nothing to do with the tsunami.
But I think these are just not very well substantiated numbers.
Let's look at some of the numbers and see what they actually mean.
No, I'm not going to do any terribly complicated.
These are just the result of multiplying and dividing a few numbers together and then checking with what other people see.
Let's look at what the food situation is.
The Japanese, particularly the mothers, got terrified that they were feeding their children radioactive food.
So the government came in on July 2011, said that all food had got to have less than 500 becquerels per kilogram.
You don't need to know what that is because it's just going to compare with something else.
Now, I calculated what eating one kilogram of.
Food with that radioactivity would do and it would give you that dose 0.008 millisieverts per kilogram.
But again, don't worry, we're going to compare that with something else.
If you look at a CT scan, if you have a CT scan, you get eight of these millisieverts things.
That means that you could eat eight divided by 0.008 or 1000 kilograms,
otherwise known as a tonne of food, and get the same radiation dose as one CT scan done.
Some of the food very dangerous, does it? And certainly you can't eat a ton of food in three months.
Interesting enough, the numbers that I calculated here actually agree with what the Japanese government were saying.
But the mothers of Japan went ape and they protested and they marched.
So the government gave in. And in April 2012, they lowered the tolerance to 100 becquerels per kilogram,
which means that you'd have to eat five tons of radioactive food to get the same as one CT scan.
How about water? It's got some extraordinary things happen.
In April, 11,500 tonnes were released into the sea intentionally.
There were there were some leaks of smaller amounts of more radioactive water.
But this lot of water was released intentionally to make space in the limited, uh, tanks for storing more of the cooling water.
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.
Both of those statements are true, but they do stretch people's credibility a bit, don't they?
In fact, you if you it's not difficult to calculate that it's equivalent to CT scans.
If you were to drink a litre of that water every day for three months.
Uh, which is not recommended anyway. So everything is completely out of kilter and uninformed by the science.
I won't go into evacuation just to say that it could have been 60 times less stringent,
which would mean by the time I wrote that BBC article, everybody can and should have gone home in the first few weeks,
won't even know if you've got any readings,
but within a couple of weeks to start to be readings of exactly what the situation was, and then people could have gone home.
But no, there was more panic and people are still not going home.
Why? Nuclear radiation is extremely powerful at at the level of an individual molecule.
And nuclear radiation can knock a DNA molecule for six and do a great deal of damage so it can smash it.
So, incidentally, can oxygen and even random thermal collisions when molecules bang into one another.
So all molecules in our body are subject to being bashed around and suffering attacks of various kinds.
And radiation is just another one. So one wonders how life survives.
Given that DNA is really very delicate and.
And that's the point where one has to look at the role taken by evolutionary biology,
which is where why Mr. Darwin appears at this point on my slides.
In fact, if you think about it, it's the business of biology.
In fact, the only business of biology is to protect life from attack.
That's all it's there for. Everything in the design of biology is to stabilise life against attack.
That is why life is the way it is at all multiple levels.
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.
The effect of increasing the attack will give you no response until it's overpowered.
And the mechanism, the repair mechanism and the stabilising mechanism becomes overwhelmed and then you get a failure.
So you've got typically a curve like this in what you have a stabilised region and eventually the load,
the attack becomes too big and you get a failure.
And that's characterised by two things both electronically and mechanically and in biology and so on.
First of all, where does the threshold, where does the failure start to occur?
And the other is how long does it take for the stabilising mechanism to work in electronic as a feedback time,
but all the equivalent times in biology will which take how long the repairs and so on take.
So for instance when we look at. The design of biology.
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?
The answer is it's protection against the destruction of the system.
It's just making lots and lots of copies of everything. That obviously makes extremely good sense.
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.
Because when if radiation or oxygen or anything else breaks one of the strands, it's possible to put the other strand.
Put that mend that strand unambiguously.
And it's possible, as it turns out, even when you break two strands, to do this quite often as well.
Now, most of the mechanisms are much more complicated than that.
Some of them we don't know about yet. Every year we learn a bit more.
There was a very interesting paper from Berkeley this last summer, earlier this year, which advance the knowledge.
So we are learning all the time just how brilliant biology is at this business of stabilising life.
Of course, the whole business of birth,
life and death is another way of stabilising life because it's not the individual that biology is trying to preserve,
but the the line and the the family, if you like it.
Of course, biology's been doing this with plants and animals and things for hundreds of millions of years and getting the answer right.
But it doesn't tell the brain. People worry that they don't know about what's going on in radiation in their bodies.
It was never designed that the brain should be told.
The whole story has been devolved to the level of something that cells look after
and it is now known from experiments in the lab that cells talk to one another.
They know when they're being attacked.
They provide resources to one another through their chemical messaging systems, which they organise together, how they're going to repair.
And the last thing they do is to tell head office because just comes and tries to micromanage the thing.
And that, of course, is what we're seeing today.
So. But it's not all roses.
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?
And what should we do about it? Uh, and in addition to that, it's not just a scientific question,
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.
At the moment, people think that there's green radiation, which is what comes out of rocks is natural and so on,
as I told you, that actually is responsible for creating the entire earthquake and tsunami in Japan.
But nevertheless, that's what people think of us as green radiation.
It's natural. That must be okay. Then there's amber radiation, which is what you get from the hospital.
At the hospital, from in medicine and clinical medicine.
Because the doctor gives you and you don't choose to have that.
But if he advises you to have it, it's probably a good thing. And most people say thank you for it.
And then there's the red stuff that comes out of out of nuclear reactions.
Of course, all of these kinds of radiation are exactly the same.
And it's not even clear in some cases, which is the biggest of which is the smallest.
The only question, looking at the sociology of it, the only question is how dangerous is radiation to life?
That's represented symbolically by that green sphere.
All the questions that occur at a sociological level like the risk assessment,
the public acceptance of radiation, the safety regulation, what is safe and what isn't?
What should be in law? What should? What the working practices of people working on nuclear power stations,
what the effects of radioactive waste is concerned, and how we should treat it.
And all the questions associated with costs of nuclear technology.
They come as a result of the answer to the question whether radiation is dangerous or not.
And then there's an international that's at a national level. Then there's an international level.
Of course, all [INAUDIBLE] broke loose because politicians and terrorists and so on are playing nasty games,
which they would anyway with with biological weapons or something else, but dirty bombs, threats, nuclear blackmail and all the rest of it.
Iran and so on. So the only question for us is whether how dangerous is radiation to life?
There's another important thing because of this stabilising mechanism,
it's very important to distinguish between radiation, which comes as a flash all at once,
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.
And the latter is obviously for the same amount of radiation is much, much less harmful.
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,
you know, it's very unnerving to think that there's radiation radioactivity inside you,
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.
And at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which we're looking at later they're going to have at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
It was a flash of radiation, which is the worst kind at Fukushima.
It was radioactivity which is absorbed into the body and it's spread out over months and years following.
I think I'm going to have to skip a bit because I'm certainly not keeping up to time.
There's a picture of inviting Japanese people to have very high doses of radiation for their own health.
And if you look in the bottom left hand corner, paying a lot of money for it,
about the same amount of radiation as the countrymen are being turfed out of their houses for the other end of Japan.
And of course, the these kinds of uses of radiation are extremely good for imaging cancers and so on in the in the body.
But let's get back to. Looking at the background.
So this is the green the green radiation, if you like, the natural stuff and.
Here in Oxford, we probably get about 2.4 millisieverts per year.
And that comes from rocks and internal because there is natural radioactivity in potassium in our blood and it's always been there.
So it can't be a problem with cosmetics that come from outer space.
And that's the medical devices that we have.
All that is assumed to be okay. And the most cautious application of radiation safety can't get down below that level.
That's unreasonable. So in fact, would do it.
Radiation could do two things to you. One is that it can overload the cell cycle, and if it overloads the cell cycle,
then biology stops and it stops in about the time of the cell cycle, which is at most a few days or weeks.
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,
eventually some serious growth gets out of hand, which is what we know as cancer.
So we've got four kinds of situation to worry about.
One is radiation, which comes in a flash.
How often does that cause acute radiation syndrome and how often they cause cancer?
And then we've got radiation, which is that all the time, chronic radiation.
How often does that called acute cause, acute radiation syndrome, and how often does it cause cancer?
Let's look at acute radiation syndrome from a flash of radiation.
And here's some of the most obvious data.
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,
20 were 42 of them.
And 27 of them died within a few weeks from acute radiation syndrome, despite attempts to get them blood transfusions and and so on.
But below 2000 millisieverts, none of them died.
So there's a definite threshold there, and that is widely acknowledged.
I should say that at Fukushima, nobody got more than a few hundred millisieverts.
So nobody got with anywhere near that threshold of acute radiation syndrome.
The other source of information we have, which everybody knows about, is radiotherapy.
Now radiation is being used to kill cancer to actually stop the cell cycle for cancer cells for over 100 years.
And there are probably people in this there may even be people in this room.
Certainly, there will be more of my generation in the audience who have benefited from that.
It's not unusual, but probably and probably members of your family have received that.
So this is not something handed out by governments and it's something that people have firsthand knowledge of.
If you have radiotherapy, you don't get it all at once.
As most of you probably know, it's very unpleasant, really.
You have to go back to the hospital again and again and again.
And over about six or eight weeks, you get some radiation every day.
And what is happening is that that repair, the repair mechanism, the feedback,
the stabilisation is being used to so that the tumour gets about 2000 millisieverts every day and just fails to repair itself every day,
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.
Maybe you have folds out or something or do a burns on the skin, but you survive.
Here's actually a picture taken from the hospital here of a treatment plan for somebody with prostate cancer.
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.
It's a it's a horizontal section to the lower abdomen.
The the the rest of the section of the patient is getting a pretty high dose.
That heavy control is a 50% control.
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.
Otherwise, they would have a very nasty time for the rest of their lives.
So we can survive very high levels of radiation.
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.
And then the question is about causing cancer.
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.
Most of the people.
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.
But two thirds of them survived and were findable in 1950.
And those people, after five years, those people, their health has been followed and studied very carefully for 50 years.
And the question is, how many extra of those people died from cancer compared with other Japanese cities where they had not been bombed?
And that analysis has been done.
And the extra people there of that very thin purple area, which shows that most people who died of cancer would have died anyway.
Now, I don't find this argument quite good enough. It has to be more than that,
because what they what has been done in three different ways is to measure what the radiation dose of individual people were.
And by looking at how the cancer rates depend on the individual radiation doses.
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.
And by the time you get down to the near the bottom of the table, you're getting extra risk per thousand.
Well, that that 7.2 to 10.8% extra increase of of of cancer.
So that's substantial. And of course, we're talking about a very large number of people here.
So the statistical errors are small. However, if you go down to the lowest doses below 100 millisieverts, what's shown now in green,
the chances of getting extra cancers are statistically not significant compared with different compared with what they were in other Japanese cities,
even in this horrifically large experiment, if we may call it that,
in which two Japanese cities have been bombed with nuclear weapons and their health followed for 50 years.
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.
And in fact, it is the chance of dying for people who lived in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
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.
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.
So those green that green entry suggests that 100 millisieverts is a reasonable tolerance for.
A flash of radiation. But what about radiation you get all the time?
Here's another. Story.
That sounds rather horrendous. It's rather horrendous.
In the time between 1915 and 1950.
People used to paint the luminous dials of watches and instruments with radioactive paint, so they glowed in the dark.
And this was very important, not only in the war effort, but in civil life as well.
And the application of luminous paint was quite tricky and it involved painting very fine detail.
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.
And the radium that that they ingested went into their bones.
And having got into their bones, it stayed there more or less for the rest of their lives.
And gradually it's got a very long half life. So it's not difficult.
Not that difficult, anyway, to calculate exactly what dose those people had, even when you have to exhume them from their graves.
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.
So there isn't a large, uh, country wide from, which has nothing to do with radiation.
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.
Now I won't go into the details of of of that had a very substantial we don't have
to place statistics here 46 cases of bone cancer where less than one was expected.
So no statistics just. Clear facts and.
Here is a scatterplot. Which shows they.
Activity, radioactivity that they absorbed against the year that they went into the industry because
in 1926 it was realised what was going on and it said Stop licking your paintbrushes.
And the net result was that the radiation dose fell dramatically and the people who died
of bone cancer were given by little pluses here and everybody else with little zeros.
And those was threshold given by that dotted line running across a 3.7 million becquerels.
You hear a lot about thousands of because in the newspaper this is millions of because all their lives.
But at three points below 3.7 million becquerels, there were no cases of bone cancer.
Now we've got a weave which is gives us a threshold, but we've got a problem of getting across to the public.
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.
She got the data and then she drew diagrams.
Now, I don't know. I don't think I taught any viewers undergraduates, because I've been retired a year or two.
But if I had in your first year, I would have been on again and again and again every week.
Draw a diagram because you've got to use diagrams to get across to people, especially in the people who are not scientists.
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.
And I think that was brilliant. So she drew diagrams.
We've got to draw a diagram. So here's my my diagram.
Let's look at monthly doses as areas that big red rectangle is a monthly dose that kills.
Tumours. So that's red, right.
That's, that's fatal for those, for those cells.
But half that 20,000 millisieverts per month is what cells of your body get parts of your body organs get,
which do manage to survive, but actually they get about a 5% chance of getting secondary cancers.
It's not it's not completely safe, but it's life saving.
But then the secondary cancer may have to be. But anyway, that's like 20,000 millisieverts.
So what I'm being. Campaigning for is a conservative safe dose.
Which is 100 millisieverts per month, which comes out of the dial painter's thing, which is 200 times less.
And 200 times less than than half a percent is is something incredibly, incredibly small.
But what's interesting is that 100 millisieverts per month.
Which is as high as it's relatively safe because that's what a safety level should be.
It should be what you can tolerate. It won't get any higher, but it's okay up to that.
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,
that is one millisieverts per year, point one millisieverts per month.
And oh, yes, you can just see a little dot.
The area of that little dot at the end of the ago, that is point one millisieverts per month,
which is a thousand times smaller than my green rectangle.
And that's what I'm talking about. So.
Radiation protection levels could be a thousand times looser than what is.
I'm going to have to jump ahead. So.
We've got to sell that. We've got to look at why are people frightened of nuclear power?
Answer Because that's what people learnt in the Cold War and that was all propaganda, if you like it.
Does the fact that we can't feel radiation which unnerves people.
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.
And they do a fantastic job.
And finally, the other reason for being frightened of radiation is these stupid regulations which tell you that it is very dangerous.
But those were designed just as a way of reassuring everybody.
And in the time of the Cold War and saying, there they are, we promise you you will not have to tolerate any radiation,
which is significantly more than you get in the background out of the rocks and so on anyway.
And that was a stupid thing to do because that's not a safety level.
That's a level of political reassurance. And that is called a lager as low as reasonably achievable.
That is the acronym that they use for establishing these very low levels and saying that's what the safety level should should be.
And well, who's to blame?
There is a cycle that you can go round and round and round where the public panic
at the bottom and demand of their politicians that everything is tightened up.
And then it's the it's tightened up. More international committees come along and lay their hands on and approve some ridiculous level.
And that comes down to the government again, which is making things more and more expensive, by the way.
And then the press says, look. This could exceed the new regulation levels.
Of course it could, because it shouldn't have been like that in the first place.
So who's to blame? Whose fault is all this?
The answer is our fault. At least two people of my generation who marched and sat in and jumped up and
down and voted and protested to get these punitive levels of radiation safety.
And now what should we do? Well, it's education, you know.
We've got to educate people and reassure them as to what they.
What the situation really is. Well, I haven't got time to talk about nuclear waste, but if somebody wants to ask.
There it is. Uh. Radiation is not a world stopping danger.
We all know what the real dangers are. Political and economic stability, jobs, food, water and the like.
Well, yes, she just doesn't appear in that list. We need education.
We need trust in science and trust in society.
One of the awful things of going to Japan is to find that nobody trusts anybody.
I mean, I'm not talking just in a scientific context. They don't trust one another.
I'm glad to say in this country, if you are, it seems to me, are better.
But trust in science and trusting in society go pretty closely together as I think Adam Smith would have appreciated.
We need to explain radiation in simple terms and remove the stigma.
Were you quite happy to use radiation for personal health?
It's about time we started using it for the health of the planet in the same sort of way.
No, sir, by book. But let me finish on a slightly different note.
As anybody, as a scientist will realise, ultraviolet radiation of the kind you get in sunshine is just as dangerous as nuclear radiation.
In fact, it's on the edge of nuclear radiation.
It can break up DNA molecules.
It can cause cell death. It can cause cancer. Skin cancer.
And in fact, as well, a serious source of that.
But we don't bring the whole of our economy to a halt because of this.
What we do is things like, I picked up this plastic bag in the in the in the summer.
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,
as we usually are about sunshine when we go on holiday.
And so that people and the children don't get cancer and so on.
And that's full of the joy of life. And it's positive.
And that's the way we should be looking at nuclear radiation.
In my view, what a breath of fresh air. Anyway, I think I should stop there.