Wings of Death: Nuclear Pollution and Human Health
By Chris Busby
Green Audit Books, Green Audit (Wales) Ltd, 1995
340pp., £10.99
Reviewed by Dot Tumney
This book provides valuable ammunition for attacking the nuclear apologist on several fronts. Busby outlines how the nuclear industry cooks its books, what researchers ought to be doing and enough radiation physics and developmental biology for the non-specialist reader to understand just why all that assurance from the nuclear merchants has never been comforting.
As a bonus, Busby is also a competent writer as fluent with words as with statistics and possessed of a sniping wit that particularly appeals, especially in the context of such paralysingly overwhelming subject matter.
"The anomalies which exist in radiobiology and the arguments over leukemia clusters near nuclear installations can all be resolved once it is conceded that each radioisotope is unique in its propensity for inducing genetic damage, since isotopes vary in chemical affinity and in the way they distribute their energy in space and time. Natural Background Radiation and nuclear fission-product radiation are not equivalent, nor are externally delivered radiation and radiation delivered internally from ingested and incorporated isotopes. This is what I argue and this is what I hope to demonstrate."
Busby demonstrated it to me. I was already familiar with advances in developmental biology over the last 10 years, but the descriptions of ionising radiation and statistical methods, which were new territory, are equally well done. For example calcium and iodine are both basic to human biology and interchangeable with particular radioisotopes; this provides a means by which radiation emitting particles can be ingested and incorporated into body tissue. The effect of radiations depend on what they can hit, when the hits occur in terms of cell development and how energetic the pulses are.
The nuclear industry book cooking relates to the art of meaningless comparison. Total energy absorption doesn't tell you a lot. Neither does focusing all the research on rapidly dividing cells or the myriad statistics on Hiroshima survivors, large one-off doses and mortality figures.
Atmospheric testing might have stopped, but epidemiologists will be able to follow peaks and troughs decades and generations on. We had better have more Busbys than apologists crunching the numbers. n