Oh, think of the poor children!
Yes, indeed. Think of the young people who, on this man’s recommendation, who will be denied the opportunity to make the decision for themselves whether they want to study in Japan. They will be denied the opportunity of a lifetime – the chance to try to make it in a world entirely different from their own, simply because one man is afraid of the aftereffects of Fukushima. Regardless of how Mr. Victoria feels, I’m quite certain that the students at his university are intelligent enough to consider those effects on their own and let that play into their decision.
Frankly, if I were at that university, I’d be filing transfer papers right away, to an institution with staff that would respect my own opinions on what is safe for myself.

I love how a 2012 summer student says that they have headaches and nosebleeds, so this teriary teacher with no medical training diagnosed this student as having an illness from radiation exposure.

JS, I did not say that all radiation is the same. The key questions are: (a) how contaminated is it and (b) what is the risk to human health? So, with respect to the fish caught in Hokkaido and Kagoshima, please let us know your thoughts on both (a) and (b). It sounds like it was “higher than normal amounts”, which I wouldn’t find surprising, but is that worth worrying about? The problem is that all of the food you eat, the water you drink and the air you breathe is contaminated with some pretty bad stuff. How worried should I be about the PM 2.5 I breathe everyday? How about the residual pesticides that I eat on vegetables? The mercury I consume in fish? The list goes on and on and the answers aren’t easy…

The contaminants are actually heavier than air and having been driven to the ground by rain, which means they get washed into rivers or pile up in corners, in drains. They get washed into the ocean where they get dispersed so that the real problem is when they are present in large amounts.

Brian,

Permit me to divide this reply into two halves. You should keep reading to the second part, as it’s directly about you.

part one – who to trust?

You say about me:

it appears that you dismiss everyone, whatever level of expertise they may have, if they disagree with your position.

No, that’s not only wrong, it’s the exact opposite of what I said. I read what you write carefully. Please do the same for me. To be clear: I check the reliability of the source (qualifications, publication track record, reception by the scientific community, and where possible, evidence or otherwise of blatant falsehoods) and then listen to their conclusions.

My reasons for rejecting Helen Caldicott is that she is not a recognised or qualified radiation or health physics specialist, and has no proper peer-reveiwed publication record; she says things without proper evidence or sourcing; she has a history of making statements which are palpably false; and she’s also clearly considered a crank by experts if they bother to pay her any attention.

I know Caldicott’s a friend of yours and has flattered you with an interview, but as Monbiot shows, she is evasive when challenged, and when her paper trail of “sources” is tracked down to their origins, one fins that she has misread, misinterpreted or simply made things up. To be vulgar, she talks b****cks.

Of course, if Caldicott had a history of published, well-received research into health and radiation, I would listen to her. But she doesn’t.

Similarly, I reject Mangano’s research because his and Sherman’s methods have been shown to be so foully corrupt it’s truly breathtaking (do you know anything about stats? Even a little knowledge should leave you shocked at how deceitful their Fukushima study was). When I describe this pseudoscience movement that you’ve got involved in as a “cult”, it’s partly the scientology-like manipulation of reality of Mangano and Sherman that I have in mind. The movement doesn’t kick them out; it defends and embraces them.

I reject Yablokov because the methods are so surreally bad and so clearly set up to produce the result he wants, the book is utterly meaningless.

I also reject all three because against this minority viewpoint they present that a single drop of radiation is fit to kill half the planet, there is the overwhelming consensus of scientific research, involving thousands and thousands of researchers, that radiation is, despite Hollywood conceits, a relatively weak carcinogen, and that the levels of radiation outside the exclusion zone (which is nowhere near Kyoto, Brian, you professor of Japanese studies, you) will have no meaningful impact on health whatsoever.

You ask who I do trust? The World Health Organisation. The United Nations Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation. Why? For two simple reasons. The people writing reports for WHO and UNSCEAR are recognised in their field as supremely competent, and if you read the scientific literature on radiation and health, the work of these two bodies is taken as fully mainstream if not simply definitive. Like you, I don’t have a degree in radiology or health physics. Unlike you, I don’t pretend to know better than the proper experts. I have no other conscionable choice, but to trust them.

You, on the other hand, appear to have looked for whoever will confirm your prejudices about the disaster. That is, you seek out your “experts” to justify your prejudices. Their validity in your eyes stems not from their established expertise, but because you like what they say. There is no other rational reason for supporting the work of someone like Caldicott. The science simply does not support what she claims.

part two – can we trust Brian Victoria?

Brian, you’re a serious academic.　People who read your work, or who study under you, or who pay your university for you to teach their children, trust you to care about accuracy and reliability.

People who publish your books and articles, and people who employ you, have to take substantially on trust that you are scrupulous in how you marshal evidence and sources.

Beyond all of that, you have a vocation: what you owe to yourself. It’s best typified by this idealised sitution: when faced with a choice between evidence that contradicts your favored theory, and the theory itself, as an academic you are duty bound to choose the evidence. Of course the temptation is to ignore the evidence, but it’s your professional duty to go with the evidence.

I hope you can find nothing controversial in the previous three paragraphs.

Yet here’s the thing. When faced with very clear evidence that the sources and “experts” upon which you have based your attempt to disrupt the lives of the students in your care are variously unreliable, deceitful, inexpert or just wacky, you don’t bat an eyelid. You try to change the subject; you try to put the burden of proof onto everyone else.

Brian, this is cult-like behaviour. It is certainly not the behaviour of a university educator. Remember that as an academic you do have the right to change your mind in public.

Cesium is actually eliminated from the body after about 13 days.

To be honest, I think you’re mixing up two things here – the feelings and concerns of those in the areas affected, and the science of radiation and health. I absolutely agree that those near Fukushima need to be heard out, they need to have their fears listened to and not belittled at all. A strident tone of “there’s nothing to fear!” would be insensitive. Instead, a sensitive, science-based exploration of the various aspects of the leaks at Fukushima and how they might impact on health and the environment would be appropriate. No matter what the science is, we have been bombarded with the message that radiation kills, perverts and destroys through entertainment media, and such ideas cannot be dismissed simply by waving a scientific paper in front of someone’s nose. Openness and honesty and a willingness to listen are essential. There are some small populations where there is going to be a raised risk of rare cancers. This may affect only a few individuals, but we shouldn’t lie about the risks either.

However, we’re not dealing with people living close to the plant. We’re primarily dealing with a highly educated man in Ohio sending his students to Kyoto and telling the world they’re coming back with radiation sickness – which is a scientific term. We also have people using words like “radianucleides” to spout scientific nonsense, attempts to cover a bunch of quacks with the gloss of “top notch scientists”, claims that the food in Hokkaido and Kyushu are unsafe to eat because of “contamination” – it’s not true that those who say there is little risk to human health now are the only ones throwing around scientific terminology.

The main reason why you might find some of the more scientifically detailed explanations a bit alienating, as I sense you do, is that they’re genuine science, rather than PR. The trick of the quack is to use just enough sciencey words to (a) convince you they know what they’re talking about and (b) make you think you understand what they’re talking about. This is how quack medicine generates support, for example. It returns to people a sense of control over the modern world.

“Go live there and tell me again” sounds like a tempting formula. But it’s not good science. I don’t mean to patronise you here, but this is how it works. Science tests hypotheses: for example, is there a link between radiation exposure and cancer. To do this in medical science, we require large samples. We cannot ethically run trials exposing people to levels of radiation that may injure them, so instead we have to find populations that have that exposure anyway – nuclear plant workers, radiology workers, populations exposed to frequent medical scans, flight crews, and, of course, survivors of the atom bombs and Chernobyl – and compare them to similar groups who were not exposed. We examine the hypothesis that there is a relationship between the level of exposure and subsequent illness. We need large samples in particular because other things such as income level, education, age and gender can make the stats a problem. (For example, some nuclear enthusiasts like to claim that nuclear workers get less cancer than the average population, so therefore a little radiation is good for you. Actually, nuclear workers tend to be more educated than the average, and so are less likely to get diseases like cancer, which are affected by lifestyle. It has nothing to do with radiation.)

The results of all these studies, performed by well-respected scientists around the world, tend towards the same conclusion quite clearly. The levels of exposure from Fukushima do not pose a meaningful risk even to those who were living in the exclusion zone at the time of the explosions, with the exception of two villages where there has been a rise in the chance of some very rare cancers – meaning where possibly none out 30,000 would get a cancer, now one or two might. And, apart from the workers at the plant, that’s pretty much it.

That this is the case is not affected by where you or I or anyone lives.

These people like Brian Victoria who spread the message that lots of people are going to die – an idea based not on science but on political (and in some cases financial) opportunism in the anti-nuclear movement – are not helping. They don’t help people suffering psychologically from fear both close to and further from the plant. They don’t help confidence in the local economy. They’re doing more harm than good by a pretty country mile.

And as you can see from Brian Victoria’s total non-reaction to being shown evidence that his experts are cranks, it’s not clear that he cares very much at all for the people in Fukushima. He doesn’t seem interested in whether he’s right or not. If people seem angry with or dismissive of him, it’s probably because they do care.