Bolt: Labor’s lies about nuclear are far deadlier than any reactor

Labor is now shamelessly lying about the risks of nuclear power claiming it will kill children living near stations – but fear of radiation has actually killed more people.

Labor is now shamelessly lying about nuclear power, spreading a scare that’s killed far more people than any radiation from power stations.

Last week Labor’s national headquarters made the extraordinary decision to post a video on its Instagram account of former Greens candidate Margaret Beavis claiming nuclear stations would kill nearby children.

It’s extraordinary because Beavis is wrong. She’s not even a nuclear scientist. She’s a GP from the manically antinuclear Medical Association for the Prevention of War, against even Labor’s plan for nuclear submarines.

But for Labor she’s suddenly an expert because she spreads fear about the federal Coalition’s plans for seven nuclear power stations.

Labor posted a video of former Greens candidate Margaret Beavis claiming that nuclear stations would kill nearby children.

For instance, Beavis in Labor’s video claims children living within 5km of a nuclear power station have “double” the risk of getting leukaemia, and nuclear industry workers could also be killed because “working with radiation has no safe lower limit”.

She adds: “It’s very clear from research, looking at over 300,000 workers, that there are significantly increased rates of cancer, heart attacks and strokes.”

Every claim there is either false, widely disputed or wildly exaggerated, yet Energy Minister Chris Bowen brazenly implied Beavis was correct even when confronted with evidence contradicting her.

“Well, it’s part of the debate,” he said glibly.

“The matter of health of the various forms of energy is a matter of public record.”

Really? Let me show how pathetic Bowen is to promote Beavis.

First, to her claim that children near nuclear stations get more leukaemia. In fact, a Canadian study in 2017 of people living within 25km of three nuclear plants in Ontario found “there is no evidence of childhood leukaemia clusters”.

A British study in 2011, published in Nature, found the same.

Second, Beavis’s claim that a study last month of 300,000 nuclear workers found “significantly increased rates of cancer” is grotesquely exaggerated.

Antinuclear hysterics still cling to the ‘no-safe-limit’ scare that’s a bigger killer than radiation from nuclear power stations. Picture: Romain Perrocheau

In fact, the study, concluded workers had a “low” risk of dying early from radiation-caused leukaemia, “given the relatively low doses typically accrued by workers in this study”.

How low a risk? Just “one excess death in 10,000 workers over a 35-year period”.

And that’s after including people who worked with radiation as far back as 1944. Technology and safety procedures have advanced.

Lastly, Beavis repeats a big scare long used by antinuclear hysterics: that any level of radiation could kill you.

That scare – that there’s no safe limit – is now fiercely disputed. A survey in 2007 of scientists at US national laboratories showed 70 per cent no longer believed it.

What’s more, the 2015 Nobel prize in chemistry went to three investigators who’d described how cells can repair their DNA from damage from low levels of radiation. Without that, we’d die from the background radiation we’re exposed to every day, especially when we fly.

Yet antinuclear hysterics still cling to this no-safe-limit scare, which is actually a bigger killer than radiation from nuclear power stations.

Take Chernobyl.

Singer Peter Garrett, later a Labor Environment Minister, claimed the death toll was “more than 30,000”, relying on claims that any radiation is dangerous.

In fact, the explosion killed just 56 people that we know of, and the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation concluded “there is no evidence of a major public health impact attributable to radiation exposure 20 years after the accident”, other than thyroid cancers, now treatable.

But the hysteria over Chernobyl was much deadlier.

Associate Professor David Wigg, in a paper for the Journal of Environmental Radioactivity, calculated that “widespread radiation phobia” caused “an estimated 1250 suicides and between 100,000 and 200,000 elective abortions in Western Europe”.

Same with Japan’s Fukushima nuclear incident in 2011.

Not one person died from the radiation, but 761 people in Fukushima prefecture died later in the panic, many from the stress of the forced evacuation and from having operations cancelled.

All this makes Labor’s stunt with Beavis not just dishonest but dangerous.

It’s also hypocritical: if Chris Bowen is so worried about children getting leukaemia near power facilities, he should scrap his plan to string 10,000km more transmission lines across the country to hook up all the new green power, given that a study in Environmental Research last year warned of “an excess risk for both overall leukaemia and acute lymphoblastic leukaemia among children with residential distances (up to) 100m from power lines”.

No, if Labor has good arguments against nuclear power, let’s hear them.

But these lies and scares tell me we cannot trust a word it says.

Originally published as Bolt: Labor’s lies about nuclear are far deadlier than any reactor