Ex-Antinuke Activist: Renewables Have "Not a Hope in Hell" of Solving Warming Problem Alone

[caraher]

5. Interesting

Heard does seem to be an opportunist; I just spent 10 minutes searching the web, in vain, for evidence that he ever took a public stand against nuclear before he found religion and started his pro-nuclear consulting company.

I don't think "pro-nuclear environmentalist" is an oxymoron, but Heard in particular seems not be acting in good faith. This is particularly clear when he misuses a UNSCEAR report to set the cancer death toll from Chernobyl at 15. Friends of the Earth- Australia does a nice job pointing out what's wrong with that interpretation of UNSCEAR's refusal to make an estimate of cancer deaths overall:

The UNSCEAR report (PDF) argues that the long-term cancer death toll from Chernobyl cannot be meaningfully estimated because of "unacceptable uncertainties in the predictions", i.e. the limitations of epidemiological studies, and the uncertainties of applying a risk estimate (e.g. based on the linear no-threshold theory) to the collective radiation dose estimate (e.g. the IAEA's collective dose estimate of 600,000 person-Sieverts).

Mr Heard conflates UNSCEAR's unknown long-term cancer death toll with a long-term cancer death toll of zero. Obviously they are two very different propositions yet the distinction is lost on Mr Heard. An obvious question for Mr Heard − how could UNSCEAR arrive at a long-term cancer death toll of zero at the same time as it argues that the death toll cannot be estimated because of "unacceptable uncertainties in the predictions"? In truth, UNSCEAR doesn't estimate a long-term cancer death toll of zero − it simply declines to provide any estimate whatsoever.

UNSCEAR participated in the Chernobyl Forum study which estimates a death toll of 4,000 among the highest-exposed populations (with a follow-up World Health Organisation study estimating an additional 5,000 deaths among populations exposed to lower doses in Belarus, the Russian Federation and Ukraine.) On the broader issue of the cancer risks of exposure to low-level ionising radiation, UNSCEAR's view (PDF) is that "the current balance of available evidence tends to favour a non-threshold response for the mutational component of radiation-associated cancer induction at low doses and low dose rates."