One of Busby's most significant findings, according to himself, is the deviating sex ratio for the children born in the years after 2004, the year of the battle of Fallujah. The first study shows a decrease in the number of boys with respect to the number of girls, 18% below the normal level (860 boys to 1000 girls instead of the expected 1055 boys to 1000 girls). According to Busby this must be due to mutagenic stress induced by radioactivity from uranium. To support this theory he cites studies about lower sex ratios when the parents have been exposed to uranium in mines, medical radition treatment, and the Hiroshima bomb. So if we ignore the weaknesses of the study, we may agree with Busby that an 18% reduction in the number of boys born is interesting.

The problem is that he consistently ignores all other possibilities. The wikipedia page on human sex ratio gives a number of environmental and sociological reasons for deviations in the sex ratio. Busby does not mention a single one of them. Considering the heavy fighting in the city, there may also be further reasons for deviations, including stress and the simple fact that maybe people are not putting priority on making babies when their homes and a good fraction of the city (and the country) have been smashed into rubbles. The issue about if uranium based weapons were used at all in Fallujah is an open question, there are opposing views on this issue (it has surely been used in other parts of Iraq). If we assume that uranium based weapons were used, then we would expect Busby to at least mention the known chemical toxicity of uranium. Instead he puts all emphasis on the radioactivity from uranium, his theories about radioactivity is the only thing that matters for this self-proclaimed international expert on radiation.

Considering how many attempts Busby has made with epidemiological studies (and failed badly with some of them) it is quite remarkable that he still has not learnt to be cautious with the most important parameter: low statistics. Furthermore, with all the possible reasons that he excludes as potential causes, he never asks the question: Is a deviation in sex ratio always due to mutagenic stress from radioactivity? It is always due to mutagenic stress at all? Let's find out.

As noted in an earlier blog post, Busby is quite upset with the Swedish Health Authorities (Socialstyrelsen) for not letting him use their cancer statistics data base, apart from the data that are publically available and that he already mistreated last year. I have some good news for him, he can play with another data base, the one from Statistics Sweden (Statistiska Centralbyrån, SCB), which has a lot of interesting data on the Swedish population. Let us use this data base in order to check the sex ratio for a few cases. Let us start with checking the sex ratio for the entire population in Sweden, i.e. the number of born boys every year divided with the number of born girls every year. As in Busby's article we normalize to 1000 born girls and expect the sex ratio to be around 1055.

Sex ratio for Sweden during the time period 1968-2010. Source: www.scb.se

We see that the sex ratio is indeed very close to 1055, the average rate is 1058. And it fluctuates very little, it is always well within the span 1040-1070, with minor statistical deviations. But we have lots of statistics when we use the number of born children in entire Sweden. So let us look at the same situation for a medium sized city in Sweden, for instance Avesta, the city where I was born. We use a blue line for the sex ratio for each year, and a red line for the 5-year average:

Interesting fluctuations indeed! Busby has made a lot of fuss about the level 860 boys to 1000 girls. This in a total cohort of 4843 persons. The population of Avesta is more than 21 000, so we should have more than enough statistics in order to make a fair comparison and even err on the side of caution. We see that the sex ratio (blue line) fluctuates year by year around the expected value of 1055 boys to 1000 girls, though in some years the sex ratio is down to 800 boys to 1000 girls. But in the Fallujah study the data were shown as cohorts of 5-year averages. The red line shows the data for 5-year averages for Avesta. This curve does not fluctuate so drastically as the blue line, the extreme values cancel out. In spite of this we see a drastic decrease in the sex ratio for the last five years, going down to slightly less than 900. This is not as low as the value 860 in Fallujah. But it is based on better statistics, and from a trustworthy source that probably has the numbers correct down to each individual child. And to my knowledge Avesta has not been bombarded with uranium based weapons recently.

Now, can we find any city in Sweden where the 5-year average of the sex ratio at some time in the period 1972-2010 is lower than 860? In order to be fair we should set a constraint that the city should not be too small. The population pyramid in Sweden is very different from the one in Iraq, so in order to have enough children born for a fair comparison we set, arbitrarily, that we want to find a city with a population of at least 10 000, where the 5-year average of the sex ratio at some time has been below 860. Well, look:

Sex ratio for 8 Swedish cities with populations larger than 10 000 people. The Fallujah data are inserted as a thick grey line. Click on the picture for a link to a larger version.

The figure is a bit messy, but the main point is to look at the extreme values for each city. We find eight cities that fulfill the requirement of a 5-year average sex ratio that at some time is below 860. The cities are: Trosa (pop 11 492), Åtvidaberg (11 474), Mörbylånga (14 152), Burlöv (16 825), Strömstad (11 965), Filipstad (10 506), Nora (10 462) and Hedemora (15 141). The data from Fallujah are shown as a broad grey line.

Wait a minute, you may say. These cities are probably from the same region, and share some common environmental effect. Hardly, the map below show their locations in Sweden. Furthermore, the fluctuations for the different cities do not agree in time with each other. It is therefore very unlikely to find a common cause. Except low statistics, just as in the sample from  Fallujah. If we include Swedish cities with populations below 10 000 then we will find more than 30 with sex ratios below 860 in the 5-year average, some of them well below 750. The reason is, again, low statistics.

Map of Sweden, with the location of the 8 cities shown.

But what about the drastic decrease in the number of born children in Fallujah, the number of boys born went down with 50%? This must be due to an environmental effect, right? Well, not necessarily. There can be many different reasons for why there is a decrease in the number of born children, not the least after an intense battle occurring in the city. But let's take a look at the 8 Swedish cities again, now we look at the number of born boys:

The number of born boys in the 8 cities that we look at.

Once again we see that the dramatic variations in Fallujah are not extreme when comparing with some of the Swedish cities. Each Swedish city has its own behaviour, mostly depending on local variations in the population. But most of them share a common drop from a peak value around the year 1992. For Hedemora the number of born boys is reduced to almost 50% over a ten year period, with 35% decrease as the most dramatic drop over a 5-year period. But why is there such a decrease in most of the studied cities? Well, let's look at the number of born children for all of Sweden:

Number of born children in Sweden, 5-year averages, 1968-2010. Source: www.scb.se

We see that there was a peak around 1992 followed by a quite drastic decrease, in 1997 the 5-year average number of born boys was 26% lower than in 1992. Is it due to the bad economy of Sweden at the time? Or was it less "popular" to have children for a couple of years? There are surely studies available regarding likely causes. Whatever the reason, we can easily exclude uranium based weapons. This does not disprove any hypothesis about uranium being the cause in Fallujah. Furthermore, I have only looked at the sex ratio while the article deals with a number of health effects, but whoever argues for uranium being the cause has a lot to explain before talking about significant findings the way Chris Busby does.

A few conclusions:

• All these cities have drastic variations in the sex ratio, even for the 5-year averages, and reach values lower than 860 boys to 1000 girls.
• For several of the cities the 5-year averages varies dramatically, similar to in Fallujah.
• The cities are distributed in different parts of Sweden with different geographical/environmental conditions.
• The periods of low sex ratio for the 8 cities occur at different times, no common cause can be seen.
• None of the 8 cities have suffered from war during the last 200 years, and during the last 40 years Sweden has been among the top ranked countries in the world when it comes to health status of the population.
• The variations are as large, or larger, than in Fallujah, based on much more reliable data, and equal or better statistics.
• Chris Busby should give up all attempts of epidemiology. This is not the first time he fails in this discipline, he just can't do it right.
• We do not learn anything about the causes of the health effects in Fallujah by listening to self-proclaimed experts like Chris Busby.

There are indeed more things to say about Busby's studies on Fallujah. When time permits they will be brought up on this blog.

Mattias Lantz - member of the independent network Nuclear Power Yes Please

During the last few years there have been news reports about an alarming number of children born with deformities, and other serious health effects among the Fallujah population. In July 2010 a study by Chris Busby and coworkers was published in the International Journal on Environmental Research and Public health (here). The title of the article is the rather alarming Cancer, Infant Mortality and Birth Sex-Ratio in Fallujah, Iraq 2005–2009, and it reports on the results of a survey done in Fallujah that reveals drastic increases in various forms of cancer and birth defects.

The details of the study can be found directly in the paper (here), or from Busby's presentation about it in Stockholm in August 2010 that is available on Youtube (here). A transcript of what he says in the presentation and the discussion after is given here.

There are many things that can be said about the survey and the quality of it. Considering the difficulties of performing the survey, and the limitations of this kind of survey (knocking on doors and asking about the health status of the people living there), one has to be very careful and consider all the weaknesses before drawing any conclusions. Busby and coworkers cover much of these concerns in section 2.3 of the article; Strength and Weaknesses. It says, among other things:

One weaknesses of this type of study is population leakage due to migration. Although ten years is used on the questionnaire, from analysis in earlier studies of this kind [7] it has become clear that there is leakage of cases (due to deaths and subsequent population movements) and so the recent five year period is employed.

In other words, if the survey gives the result that 100 people in a population of 1000 suffer from a certain disease, giving a rate of 10%, it means that the actual rate can be different due to the fact that some of the people suffering from the disease may have died or moved away before the survey was done. This makes sense, but then there is a strange passage:

However, as a consequence of such a population leakage it is clear that the result will show the minimum cancer rates existing in the study group. In earlier studies this effect was especially found for lung cancer which has a high mortality to incidence ratio.

This part is not so obvious. Of course, if the people who died or moved away suffered from the same disease, the rate would be higher if they had still been alive and had participated in the survey. But it could also be the opposite, the people who died or moved away did not suffer from the same disease, and if they were still alive and participated in the survey the rate would be lower. So, if the disease we are looking at has a high mortality rate, as in the case with lung cancer, then the assumption may be reasonable, depending on how many people that have moved away or died of other causes. Clear it is certainly not.

Another interesting thing is that, while Busby and co-authors in the article are very careful about not stating that uranium is the cause of the health effects, Busby has no qualms about laying out the words in other places. For instance, in the Green Audit report where he claimed that 10 tonnes of enriched uranium had leaked from the Hinkley Point nuclear power plant, he puts them together without further explanation:

Most recently, alarming increases in breast cancer, leukaemia, childhood cancer and congenital malformation/infant mortality increases were found in Fallujah, Iraq, a city where uranium weapons were employed and uranium particles will have been inhaled (Busby et al 2010).

So even though the original paper does not show any connection between uranium and the health effects, he makes it sound like there is an obvious connection when he refers to the paper in other works.

Well, let's move on. In section 2.5 of the article the sex ratio is defined in one line as:

The population data in 5-year age groups was used to examine the sex ratio in 5-year birth cohorts.

In section 3, which covers the results of the survey, we read the following regarding the sex ratio:

The responses show that there is an anomalous sex ratio in the 0–4 age group. There are 860 males to 1000 females, a significant 18% reduction in the male births from the normal expected valueof 1,055 (267 boys expected, 234 observed; p < 0.01)

860 boys to 1000 girls after the 2004 battle, this does indeed sounds serious if the normal ratio is 1055. To use Busby's own words from the BSRRW meeting:

"It is absolutely standard, and very rarely diverse at all, that number, unless there is some problem."

Chris Busby explaining the significance of the results with deviating sex ratio in Fallujah, at the BSRRW meeting in Stockholm, 10 August 2010.

But what possible reasons could there be for it? Section 3 of the paper continues:

Perturbation of the sex ratio is a well known consequence of exposure of mutagenic stress and results from the sensitivity of the male sex chromosome complement to damage (the females have two X chromosomes whereas the males have only one).

So according to Busby and co-authors, mutagenic stress is the cause of why less boys than girls are born. The text continues with an explanation of what can cause mutagenic stress (emphasis is mine):

A number have studies have examined sex-ratio and radiation exposure of mothers and fathers. Of relevance is the study of Muller et al. [10] of the offspring of 716 exposed fathers who were Uranium miners. There was a significant reduction in the birth sex ratio (fewer boys). Lejeune et al. (1960) [11,12] examined the offspring of fathers who had been treated with pelvic irradiation; at high doses there was an increase in the sex-ratio, but this reversed in the low doses (around 200 mSv). Schull et al. 1966 [13] found a reduction in the sex ratio in A-Bomb survivor fathers (mothers “unexposed”) for children born 1956–1962 a reversal of an earlier finding by Schulland Neel 1958 [14] of a positive effect in the 1948–1955 births. It should be noted that there were external and internal irradiation effects in these groups, with the internal effects predominating in the later years. Yoshimoto et al. 1991 [15] found an overall reduction in the sex ratio for A-Bomb survivors for children born 1946–1984. Thus the evidence suggests that exposure to ionising radiation at low doses and specifically exposure to Uranium may cause a reduction in the sex ratio.

The quoted references deal with uranium miners, medical radiation treatment, and radiation from the Hiroshima bomb. So, exposure to radioactivity among the parents may cause mutagenic stress, which leads to a reduction in the number of boys born. At least there were scientific reports about it during the 1950's and 1960's, five of the six references are quite old. One would expect that such a world famous radiation expert as Chris Busby should be able to back his reasoning with references that covers the development of the field until present instead of what happened more than 45 years ago. There is nothing wrong with referring to old articles, but if you only do it and ignore later developments (if they exist) then your line of reasoning may be very weak.

Regarding the low sex ratio in the case of Fallujah, could there be other reasons than uranium-based weapons? Please note that Busby and co-authors do not mention any of the studies that show a connection between deviating sex ratio and exposure to chemicals, heavy metals, smoking and other environmental effects (see for instance the Wikipedia entry on sex ratio). Busby does not even acknowledge the chemical toxicity of uranium, instead it has to be the radioactivity of uranium, if it is the cause. The authors mention depleted uranium several times, but are very cautious about drawing any conclusion regarding what is the reason. That is a wise approach considering all the uncertainties related to a study like this, and the fact that there are a number of other possible causes.

It is less wise, however, to emphasize uranium as a likely cause, or to claim that the 18% reduction of the sex ratio is significant when you are not even sure about what you have measured. During the talk at the BSRRW meeting in Stockholm in August 2010, a person in the audience, Dr. Eckerman, wanted to have a clarification of what the data really showed. After some confusion it turned out to be that the sex ratio was not derived from the number of born children, but from the number of children available at the time of the survey.

So, to repeat the quote from Busby's presentation again:

"It is absolutely standard, and very rarely diverse at all, that number, unless there is some problem."

As it turned out during the BSRRW meeting, there was indeed a problem. Not only did Busby ignore the earlier so cautious approach when he claimed that the deviation was significant, he also based the sex ratio on the wrong assumptions about the group of children.

Somehow this classic picture seems appropriate...

You may wonder what's the big fuss about? Well, if the sex ratio is to be trusted it has to be derived from the number of born children in the study group. If you instead only have data on the number of living children at the time you make the survey, then you are missing the children who may have died or moved away. Busby disqualified the method himself when I asked about the age group 5-9 years old, which seem to deviate in sex ratio in the opposite direction, i.e. there are significantly (13%) more boys than expected. To be fair to Busby, for the age group 5-9 there are more children that may have died or moved away (or moved to the city) than for the age group 0-4 years, there have been 5 more years when things can happen. But even with that in mind, it is very irresponsible of Busby to claim that it is such a significant finding, when he ignores all the weak points in his reasoning.

So all the time Busby has known that the reported sex ratio is based not on the number of born children, but instead on the number of children available at the time of the survey. The message from Dr. Eckerman is quite clear; to speculate about the causes of the deviating sex ratio should not be done without keeping the limitations of the study in mind. And if you are honest in your approach, you make a clear statement about this the next time you present the study. In spite of this, when Busby a few weeks later has a presentation about his study at the Human Rights Council in Geneva (22 September 2010) he repeats the same thing without any caveats. In fact he says:

Then most important, we found the sex ratio... [...] This is the most important result that we had here.

It seems as if he has forgotten Eckerman's objections. To be fair, he does say that there are some structural problems with the study, and that those concerns are brought up in the paper. But he gives no details about these structural problems during the talk. Instead he goes on with all sorts of explanations about the causes (including some ludicrous speculation about cold fusion based weapons!), as if they were clearly established facts. A year later all concerns about weaknesses in the study seem to be forgotten. The new article about Fallujah (Alaani et al., Conflict and Health 5:15 (2011)) starts off with the following statement in the second sentence (emphasis is mine):

In addition to the increased cancer and rates and infant deaths, the epidemiological study [1] showed that there was a sudden significant drop in the sex ratio (an indicator of genetic stress) in the cohort born in 2005, one year after the battles which occurred in the city, suggesting that the cause of all these effectsis related to the time of the US led invasion of the city in 2004.

I could buy the argument if it was phrased something like "the epidemiological study [1] gave an indication, although with large uncertainties, of a reduction in the sex ratio..." But as we have seen before it is not in the interest of Chris Busby to be clear about the details, at least not when the details make the case weaker. Instead he never misses a chance to bring it up, for instance in the RT interview from 26 October:

http://rt.com/news/uranium-birth-defects-fallujah-729/

or in the LLRC press release:

http://llrc.org/du/subtopic/fallujah20oct2011.htm

Busby has to push the line that there has been a significant change in the sex ratio, and without stating it clearly he and his co-authors do everything but saying it straight out that it must be due to uranium.

So we now have seen how Busby in writing is very careful with stating too clearly that there is a clear connection between the deviating sex ratio and some sort of uranium based weapons. In talks and interviews however, he clearly gives a different message. And he consistently ignores all other possible explanations, just as if they wouldn't even exist.

Now the question is, is the deviating sex ratio in Fallujah even relevant? We will look at this issue in part 2. Stay tuned.

Mattias Lantz - member of the independent network Nuclear Power Yes Please

Here we go again...

On 25 June, 2011, Janette Sherman and Joe Mangano (from now I will refer to them as S&M) had a new article in San Francisco Bay View. We just noticed it, almost a month after it was written. It has the title: Question marks, the elephant in the room and the refusal of nuclear power defenders to consider what has happened to people and the environment since Fukushima and Chernobyl. After browsing it I scratch my eyes, think for a few minutes (ok, I try to think, head hurts so much...), and then I read it again. Let's take a closer look at what they write.

First a short introduction to set the stage:

By concentrating only on the CDC (Centers for Disease Control) data – incomplete at best – and ignoring the on-going radioactive releases from Fukushima, it is apparent that the pro-nuclear forces are alive and active.

Hey, wait a minute. It was not the pro-nuclear forces (whatever that is, but let's embrace the term with a jolly "Fooorward!") who started tampering with the CDC data in a way that would flunk any undergraduate student in Statistics 101, it was you, remember? This does not mean that we ignore the rest of the issue, but we do take offence when anti-nuclear forces fail to use the information from Fukushima to their advantage and have to cook up alarmistic results in order to make the situation look worse than it is. This is indeed very remarkable, aren't the actual events in Fukushima bad enough for you?!?

If I had the mindset of S&M, I would write

By mis-treating the CDC data - incomplete at best - and ignoring all knowledge about radiation effects, and actual radiation levels in the US due to Fukushima, it is apparent that the anti-nuclear scaremongers are alive and active.

This is clearly not a way forward, at least not if you hope for a dialogue and an improvement of the nuclear debate. Oh well, let's move on.

The second section explains that the titles of the previous articles (there are two versions, one in CounterPunch, and one in San Francisco Bay View) includes question marks in order to

stimulate interest and prompt demand for governments – Japan and the U. S. at least – to provide definitive and timely data about the levels of radioactivity in food, air and water.

Hm, Janette and Joe. May I kindly ask: Wouldn't it be better to try to stimulate this interest in a way that does not include cherry-picking, unfounded alarmism that scares the heck out of millions of parents to infants, and a way of throwing random pieces of data around that should reduce whatever credibility you might have had before to a new low point?

Next section:

We received many responses, some in support of our concerns and some critical about how we used CDC data, including outright ad hominid attacks accusing us of scaremongering and deliberate fraud.

Oh really? I guess that I personally have to plead guilty to this charge, but they link to the blog entry by Michael Moyer in Scientific American as an example of an ad hominid attack. I re-read Moyers scrutiny of the CounterPunch article, but fail to see any personal attacks there. Ok, he uses words like "scaremongering", "froth up", "data fixing", "critically flawed - if not deliberate mistruths". Still, Moyer attacks S&M's actions, not their personal traits.

Or do S&M really mean ad hominid attacks? My first assumption was that they mixed up "ad hominem" and "ad hominid", but maybe they do know the difference? I bring the rest of us up to date by quoting the text on this link: "The former [ad hominem] is a criticism of a particular person; the latter [ad hominid] is a commentary upon a species." So, have Moyer, myself, or anybody else involved in this issue, referred to S&M as neanderthals, platypus, or similar? Not that I can see, but it could be an interesting path to digress upon. Anyhow: Sensitive bunch, those scaremongers...

Now it becomes interesting:

Given the fallibility of humankind, we may have erred, and if so, will admit it. Given the delay in collecting data and the incompleteness of the collection, the criticism may be valid. MMWR (CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report) death reports have certain limits – representing only 30 percent of all U.S. deaths. They list deaths by place of occurrence, while final statistics are place of residence and deaths by the week the report is filed to the local health department, rather than date of death. Finally, some cities do not submit reports for all weeks. The CDC data are available at http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/mmwr_wk/wk_cvol.html.

So, they admit that they may have erred, or do they say that they may admit it if proven to be the case? Or...? I am not sure, but this is probably as close to admitting anything that they will ever be. It is of course not their fault, it is the limitations of the CDC data that we should put the blame on, not a second thought about their method.

My first interpretation from reading the section is that they admit to that the statement in the first articles about a statistically significant 35% increase in infant deaths may not be correct (no matter who to blame). Unfortunately, it turns out that I am severely mistaken in my interpretation:

Since the article was originally published, we have had the chance to further analyze the CDC data. Historically, the change in infant deaths for the previous six years in eight Pacific Northwest cities from weeks 8-11 (pre-Fukushima) to weeks 12-21 (post-Fukushima) is about 6 percent – never above 11 percent. But in 2011, the change was 35 percent, far above anything ever experienced.

The same eight cities, the same comparison – four weeks 8-11 vs. 10 weeks 12-21 infant deaths:

• 2005 +4.1 percent
• 2006 +10.0 percent
• 2007 +5.1 percent
• 2008 +5.5 percent
• 2009 +2.8 percent
• 2010 +10.9 percent

The average for 2005-2010 is + 6.1 percent for a total of 1,249 infant deaths.

• 2011 +35.1 percent (162 infant deaths)

Before 2005, there were missing data. But the years 2005 to 2010 are about 98 percent complete.

Argh! Now I really do want to turn ad hominid on these people, whatever species (sparsis timoris?) they may belong to! First they say that maybe they were wrong and if so they maybe will admit it. Then they go on and make more "analysis" from the CDC data base, using the same lousy way of handling the data!

There has been plenty of text here, so let's lighten up with a few plots, showing the CDC data S&M are mistreating. The plots from my previous posts about S&M should be enough for saying that this is rubbish, but one more round with the CDC data base will not hurt, in case that somebody still believes in S&M's fables. We start with plotting the change in infant deaths between weeks 8-11 and weeks 12-21 for the years 2005-2011, i.e. the ones that S&M now claim to have done a more careful analysis on.

Change in infant deaths between weeks 8-11 and weeks 12-21 for the years 2005-2011

The blue squares show the data as given by S&M. Nothing wrong in the data, this is what you get when you do the same treatment as S&M, weeks 12-21 give a higher weekly infant mortality rate than weeks 8-11, with a few percent every year. Except for 2011 where the 35% increase looks really alarming. But we know from before that they have cherry picked the weeks by only using four weeks before Fukushima and 10 weeks after. If we also plot the ratio of weeks 12-21 over weeks 1-7, shown as red diamonds, we get the following trend:

Change in infant deaths, blue squares as in previous figure, red diamonds for weeks 1-7 and weeks 12-21

Quite interesting that there is a decreasing trend, and that the decrease is at its lowest level this year, a 20% reduction while it before usually was a slight increase (the 30% for 2005 is almost as much as the 35% that S&M have made so much noise about). In other words, if we compare the weeks after Fukushima with weeks 1-7, there seems to be a very beneficial effect on child mortality. Could it be that hot particles are beneficial for infants? This is rubbish, of course, but so is the question asked by S&M.

Still, why the drastic increase this year if they only used four weeks for the years 2005-2010 as well? And why does the results look completely opposite if we instead compare with weeks 1-7 instead of weeks 8-11. The answer is: statistical variations. We are watching random noise, not real trends due to a single cause that can be easily deduced. For this we need to look at longer time spans (for a start, we probably need to do a lot more as well, but let us not confuse the S&M-fans by introducing too much real scientific reasoning). But in order to understand the discepancy, we have to remember that they present the ratio between the two time periods, not the actual numbers. In the original articles S&M talks about increased infant mortality (you may remember that the articles start with "U.S. babies are dying at an increased rate." Let's take a look at this.

Number of infant deaths for weeks 8-11 and weeks 12-21

Now we see something interesting. Not only are the number of infant deaths for weeks 8-11 at an all time low during 2011, the number of infant deaths for weeks 12-21 are also at a very low level! U.S. babies are dying at an increased rate? I think not! S&M are shamelessly (if they really believe in their own conclusions then they are indeed very incompetent) showing results for relative numbers, not absolute numbers. Perfectly ok if you are honest with how you handle the data, can refrain from cherry picking the weeks and the areas, and do not suffer from an alarmistic version of Tourette's syndrome. But S&M prefers to show a relative increase of 35% for this year, while the absolute numbers show a decrease when comparing with earlier years.

Still not convinced? Let us include weeks 1-7, weeks 1-21, and weeks 1-52 for each year. Please note that the value for 2011 in the weeks 1-52 (black line) only include the data for weeks 1-25, so it can change somewhat depending on the number of infant deaths that will occur during weeks 26-52 (S&M would probably be able to predict the future, I will not make any such attempts).

Number of infant deaths for weeks 1-7, 8-11, 12-21, 1-21 and 1-52

If anybody wants to pursue the idea that there is a drastic increase of infant deaths in northwest U.S. after Fukushima, that person will have many things to explain, for instance the drastic increase in infant mortality this year for weeks 1-7. The data does not support the idea of increased infant mortality due to Fukushima, no matter what S&M say.

One more quote from the article by S&M:

We acknowledge that many factors can cause infant deaths, but the critics who ignore Japanese fallout as possible contributing factors are acting irresponsibly.

So, cheating with the CDC data is a more responsible way to act? Nobody is ignoring the fallout. We are just fed up with false claims wrapped in an alarmistic package. Therefore I will, like many others, once again ignore everything else that is written in the S&M article; a mixture of some valid concerns that are heavily diluted with half-truths, advertisement about the Chernobyl book (edited by Sherman) and other reports (written by Mangano), scaremongering, claims about lies and cover up, and some more nonsense claims. It would be interesting to discuss the valid concerns that are addressed, but if we every time have to filter it out from a sea of myths then we would rather spend our time elsewhere.

Janette Sherman and Joseph Mangano: We do care about the consequences from Fukushima, many of them will surely be serious. Many of us are also annoyed by the lack of interest from the media to write properly about the present status. But we do not subscribe to your way of portraying it, as long as you show yourself unable to stick to the truth. Concerned citizens have nothing to learn from you. We do see the elephant in the room while you try to make it into a mammoth. May your methods and your dishonest claims suffer the same fate as this extinct species.

One final quote. In the beginning of the article there is a picture of a pretty baby, with the following figure caption:

Not only is it unthinkable to put our babies at risk by continued use of nuclear power plants, but infant mortality is an indication of an entire population’s health. When an unusual number of babies are dying, we are all at risk and must take a stand.

S&M must have plotted all the data from 2005 until now. If not, here I have done it for you:

Number of infant deaths per week for the years 2005-2011

Ok, I plot all years over each other, a bit messy. A better alternative would be to plot the years after each other, as done in this figure by Alexey Goldin in his entertaining statistics analysis of the S&M hoax. One may also try to see seasonal trends by plotting mean values for a number of years. In whatever way, S&M still owes us an explanation for their claim of an unusual number of babies that are dying. Can we close this chapter now, please?

Ad hominem/hominid attacks

I start to ask myself, are there Cliffs Notes for epidemiology? Is this how Mangano passed his courses for the MPH degree? Since my first encounter with Cliffs Notes about 20 years ago as foreign exchange student in the U.S., the company seems to have expanded its activities substantially, and are also available on the internet. At that time I was only aware of Cliffs Notes that cover novels that you are expected to read in school. If you are too lazy to read the novel, the Cliffs Notes gives a summary of the book, typical issues and questions that are likely to be on the exam (or good to be aware of if you want to pretend that you read the book and do not want to get expelled from the book-reading club), and a few other short cuts for the illiterate who still wants to graduate from high school. I find no Cliffs Notes for epidemiology, but there are indeed Cliffs Notes on statistics! Well Joe, if this is how you made it through college, please go back and read the following part:

It is important to realize that statistical significance and substantive, or practical, significance are not the same thing. A small, but important, real-world difference may fail to reach significance in a statistical test. Conversely, a statistically significant finding may have no practical consequence.

In my first post on this subject the title was Shame on you, S&M! I should probably reconsider this title. If they had done this wilfully then I would stand my ground, but after reading their last article I get more and more convinced that it is just incompetence. They truly believe in what they are doing, and because they are victims of the Dunning-Kruger effect there is no way to make them understand that somewhere along the road they lost contact with reality. And just like Helen Caldicott, who in her debate with George Monbiot said "doctors can't lie", they are convinced that they speak from a higher moral ground.

So to tell somebody to be ashamed because they are incompetent in their field is about as useful as telling my 3-year old daughter to be ashamed for not knowing Bulgarian grammar. The difference is that my daughter may have a good chance to pick it up in a couple of years, if she would like to. For S&M, who have claimed expertise in their field for a long time, I see no hope at all. Maybe, just maybe, if they read Fooled by randomness by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, or some similar literature. They could really pick up some good lessons from a few chapters there. But it wouldn't work, as far as I know Taleb's books are not available in a Cliffs Notes format.

/Mattias Lantz - member of the independent network Nuclear Power Yes Please

Further comments

In the first post about S&M (here) I was criticized by a commenter for stating that Mangano has a track record of not handling data in an honest way, but I had not given any reference or link to back up this statement. That has been corrected and I have put two links in that post. But from now on it will be much easier. Three nonsense articles by Joe Mangano in slightly over two weeks, all three based on cherry picking. That is a track record as good (hrm, bad...) as any. To make it worse, good ol' Joe has proudly put them on the RPHP web page:

http://www.radiation.org/

http://www.radiation.org/press/pressrelease110607PacificNWdata.html

http://www.radiation.org/press/pressarticle110610CounterPunch.html

http://www.radiation.org/press/pressrelease110607PacificNWReport.html

http://www.radiation.org/press/pressrelease110603PhiladelphiaResults.html

And still no reaction from CounterPunch regarding their strange analysis

I have written twice to Alexander Cockburn, but have received no response. Instead there are a number of new articles that are critical of nuclear power of all kinds. Fine with me, but the lack of interest to get the strange re-analysis by Pierre Sprey corrected makes me wonder about the statement "Ours is muckraking with a radical attitude" . CounterPunch is certainly full of articles with a lot of attitude, but the muckraking seems to be missing.

Earlier blog entries about S&M

17 June 2011: http://nuclearpoweryesplease.org/blog/2011/06/17/shame-on-you-janette-sherman-and-joseph-mangano/

19 June 2011: http://nuclearpoweryesplease.org/blog/2011/06/19/more-bullshit-from-joseph-mangano-take-2/

21 June 2011: http://nuclearpoweryesplease.org/blog/2011/06/21/counterpunch-verifies-infant-mortality-fraud-but-seems-to-create-one-themselves/

Ours is muckraking with a radical attitude and nothing makes us happier than when CounterPunch readers write in to say how useful they've found our newsletter in their battles against the war machine, big business and the rapers of nature.

In a follow-up editorial on the Sherman-Mangano study (link to the original article here), CounterPunch editor Alexander Cockburn explains that they have received plenty of critique after publishing the article, several readers suspected cherry-picking. So they had their "statistical consultant", Pierre Sprey, go through the data. And indeed, he found that there was no ground for the claims by Janette Sherman and Joe Mangano, when one includes a longer time span for the period before Fukushima. By increasing the time from the four weeks, that happen to be in the dip, to ten weeks, the relative increase in infant mortality after Fukushima disappears. So far so good, their control of the data verifies the conclusion that I and others independently of each other made (my version here). Now the interesting part comes. Cockburn says it the best himself:

But then Sprey went further and looked at the Sherman/Mangano selection of eight cities from the 122 reporting to CDC: the eight were Berkeley, Portland, Sacramento, San Francisco, San Jose, Santa Cruz, Seattle and Boisie. Apparently, they selected Pacific Coast cities that were more or less within 500 miles of the coast and north of Santa Cruz. However their selection did not include all CDC cities within this categorization, because they left out Tacoma and Spokane, thus leaving themselves open to suspicions of cherry-picking cities. So Sprey included Tacoma and Spokane in the data set he reviewed in order to be geographically complete. When Sherman and Mangano's overall selection of cities failed to produce a significant result for ten weeks before and ten weeks after March 11, 2011 (as well for the ten equivalent weeks in 2010 as compared with the same weeks in 2011) Sprey elected to look at smaller, geographically consistent groupings of cities. The results were striking. Simply by moving the boundary line northward from Santa Cruz Sprey found that the four northernmost Pacific Northwest cities in the CDC sample – Portland, Tacoma, Seattle and Spokane – show remarkably significant results – a larger infant mortality increase than the original Sherman-Mangano results. During the ten weeks before March 11 those four cities suffered 55 deaths among infants less than one year old. In the ten weeks after Fukushima 78 infants died – a 42 per cent increase and one that is statistically significant. To confirm once again that these results were not due to seasonality Sprey compared these infant deaths in the ten weeks after Fukushima to the deaths in the equivalent ten weeks a year earlier. The results were almost identical with the ten weeks before Fukushima in 2011. Within the equivalent ten weeks of 2010 53 infants died in these four cities.

Imagine my surprise. I had been playing with the data a bit, and also checked what happens if you include Spokane and Tacoma (see the forum post for details). My conclusion was that Spokane and Tacoma did not matter, while Sprey's re-analysis shows a 42% increase! I must have done some error, or? There were several steps when I copied the information into a spreadsheet, quite tedious to get it into the format that I wanted, so there were many possibilities for mistakes. So I made a few random double checks and could not find any error, but it would be very time consuming to go through the data for every week again. I also checked the published erratas on the CDC pages in order to see if I had missed some vital correction. But then I found a quicker way on the CDC web pages, it turns out that one also can download the data for individual cities or regions directly for the entire year (here). So I extracted the data for the four cities from this link, in this way I would do an independent check of my earlier results. Anyone can check it themselves on the link above. Here is my table:

The table includes weeks 1-23 for 2011. If I understand what Cockburn writes correctly, Sprey have used weeks 2-11 for the time period before Fukushima (compared with the four weeks used by Sherman and Mangano) and weeks 12-21 for the time period after Fukushima (i.e. the same as Sherman and Mangano). So, with the use of a very complicated mathematical operation, called addition, I get 59 for the period before Fukushima, and 53 for the period after. This is identical with my earlier count. As a final check I asked another member of NPYP to make an independent extraction of the data from the CDC data base and then perform the mathematical operation mentioned above. Once again identical results. Sprey got 55 and 78, close enough on the first one, but the second...

Unless I am missing something vital, the numbers in the table above speak for themselves; There is no dramatic increase for these four cities, so something must have gone seriously wrong in Sprey's re-analysis. Actually there are more strange things, Cockburn writes that for the 8 cities the new analysis gave "an increase of infant deaths of only 2.4 per cent" after Fukushima, while my analysis gave a 14% decrease (it is not statistically significant, but if I was pro-nuclear in the same way that Sherman and Mangano are anti-nuclear, I would of course argue for that Fukushima has caused a reduction in the infant deaths in northwestern U.S., and that I had the numbers to show it). Could it be the addition part that failed, or does wishful thinking of the style "there must be an increase in infant mortality somewhere due to Fukushima" play a part? Whatever the cause, Cockburn is explaining the significance of some details in the data from Sprey:

Looking a little more closely at the time trend of the infant deaths after Fukushima, Sprey found that the most dramatic increases in deaths were in the two weeks right after the March 11 disaster. Those two weeks saw a near tripling of weekly deaths, followed by a period of somewhat elevated weekly deaths lasting for about five weeks – roughly 25 per over the pre-March 11 rate, then settling down close to the average pre-Fukushima death rate for the last three weeks of the ten week period post-disaster. These results are necessarily approximate because the weekly sample of deaths is too small for precise statistical conclusions.

This part if of course nonsense when we look at the numbers. Let's plot it as well:

Well, as Cockburn says, there is a "dramatic" increase immediately after Fukushima, by a factor of 3. Now that we have the numbers ourselves we can conclude that a factor of 3 means a jump from 3 on week 11 to 9 on week 12. We have a similar increase in numbers between weeks 5 and 6, but Cockburn does not indicate that as being dramatic, in fact he does not mention it at all. To his defense, the numbers he is looking at are not the same as mine, but where do they come from? Whatever the cause of the error, the dramatic 42% increase now looks more like a...decrease, the mean values are shown as horizontal lines (blue before Fukushima, orange after) in the plot above. Let's plot the data again to make sure, we can do it in the same way as Mangano does, to make it clear for everyone:

This is, of course, a very dishonest way of plotting things if you want to show the whole picture, but if Joseph Mangano can do it, they why shouldn't we? The main point is anyhow clear, there is no increase in infant mortality in the United States of America due to Fukushima. Got it? And if there is, we will no find out through sloppy analysis by charlatans like Sherman and Mangano. And, as it seems, not through the statistics consultants that muck-raking journal CounterPunch is using. It will take careful analysis by serious researchers to find out if there is any real effect. If they would bother to start looking. But Mangano said in the Fox News interview

:

this is a red flag to raise for more studies to be done

Actually, he is right. It is a red flag to raise for careful scrutiny of all the earlier work by Sherman, Mangano, and their alarmistic friends. Some of their earlier studies have become "common knowledge" in anti-nuclear groups. Last year we had a member of the green party in Sweden standing in the parliament during a debate about nuclear power, where he referred to studies of increased childhood leukemia, authored by Sherman and Mangano, and of course the Chernobyl book edited by Sherman. Maybe we all can move on with life and more pressing issues now, ok? Those who want to hang on to all bad things with Fukushima still have plenty of material to work on. But stick to the facts, please. Ok? Two questions remain:

1. Why is Alexander Cockburn's editorial so forgiving towards Sherman and Mangano? If I had been the editor of a journal, I would be furious if it turns out that some authors make fools of themselves, and of me as an editor, by cheating with data, and I would make sure that they were never to publish anything more in my journal. Ever. Especially when it comes to such an important issue that worries millions of people, not the least parents of small children. But Cockburn is so happy to have, through Sprey's re-analysis, found that there was indeed an increase, so Sherman and Mangano was right even if they cheated, no shadow should fall upon them. After all, CounterPunch is a muck-raking newsletter with a radical attitude, so there must be some muck to find, and indeed they found it. But when it now turns out that not even this was right, what will he write in the next editorial? "We follow proudly in the sensationalist footsteps of William Randolph Hearst!" or what? We have already established that Janette Sherman and Joseph Mangano should be very ashamed of themselves. If I was Alexander Cockburn I would at least be quite embarrassed.
2. What went wrong in Sprey's re-analysis?

An email has been sent to Alexander Cockburn, requesting that they do a muck-raking investigation of the skills of their statistical consultant. Furthermore, CounterPunch now has a great opportunity to recover their lost credibility; How about a couple of articles with in depth investigations of the earlier works of Janette Sherman and Joseph Mangano? This could be the starting point in a long series of muck-raking articles where all the controversial statements from the anti-nuclear icons are carefully scrutinized, could it be that there are more "common truths" out there that are based on the same weak evidence (i.e. none) as in the present case? Alexander Cockburn, are you up to the task?

Mattias Lantz - member of the independent network Nuclear Power Yes Please

P.S. What about Seattle? Some observant persons may have noticed from the table above that Seattle does have an increase in infant mortality by a factor 3 between week 11 (2 deaths) and week 12 (6 cases). At least Seattle has an effect due to Fukushima, pretty please? Well, I'll give you the plot for Seattle:

Infant mortality for Seattle, spring 2011, for stubborn people who wants to find increased infant mortality after Fukushima

6 cases the week that the radioactivity reached Seattle, compared to 2 the week before, that must be significant! If you still insist on this kind of reasoning, it means that you somehow have ignored the plots I show here and here. Still not convinced? Then go to the CDC data base and pick out the numbers for yourself, and please do not forget to check the pattern for Seattle week by week for earlier years. Here are the links to the CDC data base, instructions for some of them are found if you place the pointer over the link. I recommend to start with the last one, it is the easiest to handle:

http://www.cdc.gov/

http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/mmwr_wk/wk_cvol.html

http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm6010md.htm?s_cid=mm6010md_w#tab3

http://wonder.cdc.gov/mmwr/mmwrmort.asp

The article, published on 10 June 2011, is authored by Janette D. Sherman and Joseph Mangano, both renowned persons in the anti-nuclear movement. In the text the authors claim a statistically significant increase of infant mortality deaths with 35% after the Fukushima accident in eight selected cities on the U.S. west coast.

They write

The recent CDC Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report indicates that eight cities in the northwest U.S. (Boise ID, Seattle WA, Portland OR, plus the northern California cities of Santa Cruz, Sacramento, San Francisco, San Jose, and Berkeley) reported the following data on deaths among those younger than one year of age:

4 weeks ending March 19, 2011 - 37 deaths (avg. 9.25 per week)

10 weeks ending May 28, 2011  - 125 deaths (avg.12.50 per week)

This amounts to an increase of 35% (the total for the entire U.S. rose about 2.3%), and is statistically significant.   Of further significance is that those dates include the four weeks before and the ten weeks after the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant disaster.

Furthermore, they try to link the releases of radioactivity from Fukushima and Chernobyl to the relatively high infant mortality rate in the U.S. A look at the data used by Sherman and Mangano does indeed seem to indicate an increase in the number of infant deaths in northwest U.S. after Fukushima, see the plot below:

Infant mortality for 8 northwest U.S. cities, as reported by Sherman and Mangano

The Fukushima events started on March 11, i.e. by the end of week 10. Then it took slightly more than a week for the first release of radioactivity to reach the nortwest part of the U.S. The data do show an increased infant mortality rate after Fukushima. The black line shows the average value for the 4 weeks before March 19, and the orange line shows the average value for the 10 weeks after that. The error bars on each data point indicate the statistical uncertainties.

But why are the 10 weeks after Fukushima compared with only 4 weeks before? There seems to be a reason for it, commonly referred to as cherry-picking, i.e. you select the data that supports your theory without showing the full picture. To show the full data set may falsify what you want to show. This is quite common in politics and by people who have an agenda that is more important than the truth.  But here we have two persons in medicine, one Medical Doctor and one Master of Public Health, they should be trustworthy professionals who are keen on giving people honest information, right? Let's check their deck of cards closer.

So, if we include data for, say, the first 7 weeks of 2011, we get a very different idea about the situation:

Infant mortality for 8 northwest U.S. cities, less biased version

Very interesting, the first seven weeks of 2011 actually has higher infant mortality than the weeks after Fukushima, quite different from what Sherman and Mangano wants us to believe. There is no spike after Fukushima, instead there is a dip during the 4 weeks before! A more detailed report on the closer scrutiny of Sherman and Mangano's article is found in our Deep Repository.

So, why does a Medical Doctor mistreat official data in this way? It is quite remarkable, and embarrasing, especially since Janette Sherman writes about herself on her web page (http://janettesherman.com/about/):

Dr. Sherman’s primary interest is the prevention of illness through public education and patient awareness.

She seems to have forgotten about her primary interest in this case, I fail to see how cherry-picking data can be part of public education and public awareness. And if anybody can see how you can prevent illness through scaring people with false statistics, then please explain it to me. Embarrasing, Janette Sherman...

Joseph Mangano already has a track record of handling data in not so honest ways, we may come back to that in other blog entries (a few links to examples, as requested by a commenter: http://neinuclearnotes.blogspot.com/2005/08/joseph-mangano-and-art-of-deception.html and http://www.nei.org/resourcesandstats/documentlibrary/safetyandsecurity/factsheet/scienceonradiationhealtheffectsdispelstoothfairyproject/).

What baffles me the most is that he and Sherman try to get away with this alarmistic claim by such a lousy handling of official data. Anybody can easily check it for themselves and see that Sherman and Mangano are wilfully interpreting data so that they agree with their already decided view on things. What is worse, they are scaring a lot of people with their claims, for no reason at all. Therefore: Shame on you!

/Mattias Lantz - member of the network Nuclear Power Yes Please

Follow-up blog entries on the same subject

19 June 2011: More bullshit from Joseph Mangano, take 2

21 June 2011: CounterPunch verifies infant mortality was alarmism but seems keen to create more of it

27 July 2011: Sherman & Mangano admits errors – or do they?

Update 24 June 2011

Several other people have scrutinized the Sherman-Mangano joke (by now I do not want to mis-use the word "study" in connection with these people), most notably in Scientific American. Here is a list:

• Scientific American, "Observations" blog, by Michael Moyer, 21 June 2011: "Are Babies Dying in the Pacific Northwest Due to Fukushima? A Look at the Numbers"

• The sei-uno-zero-nove (6109) blog, by Antonio Rinaldi, 21 June 2011: "e-nucleare disinformazione" (in Italian)
• The xkcd forum, user signatures ++$_ and endolith, 16 June, under the post "8.8 Earthquake hits 250 miles from Tokyo"
• The Cliff Mass Weather Blog, 17 June 2011: "Fukushima Radiation and Infant Mortality in the NW? No way" (borrowing our plots)
• Chris Mooney on the Discover Magazine blog, 17 June 2011: "Nuke Scaremongering and the Left"
• U.C. Berkeley, Department of Nuclear Engineering, Berkeley Radiological Air and Water Monitoring Forum (comments in all directions, but a couple of people are checking the data for themselves):  "Fukushima fallout caused significant increase in baby deaths?" and "Post-Fukushima Infant Deaths in the Pacific Northwest Update."
• My colleague Andrea Mattera have translated this post into Italian and it has been posted as a comment on the Come don Chisciotte web page, 18 June 2011: "PICCO DEL 35% DI MORTALITÀ INFANTILE DOPO L'INCIDENTE DI FUKUSHIMA" (in Italian)
• Mike, a physics student from Victoria (Canada?) have checked the data for himself, they are available here.  (Mike linked to his data from the discussion on the Unsilent Generation blog post: "Infant Mortality on Pacific Coast Jumped after Fukushima"

• The Buzz Blog on Physics Central comments on the scrutiny done in Scientific American and asks the question why Sherman and Mangano is doing this nonsense: "Beware the Evil Scientists"
• The uvdiv blog has a guest post by Alexey Goldin that hopefully is enjoyable also for non-statistics nerds, and he shows data for several years back: A curious case of cherry-picking data for the greater good. I can only agree with his final statement: "At this point it is worthwhile to question either the scientific integrity or statistical competence of Sherman and Mangano. They might be decent people and believe in what they say, but allow themselves to say "small lies" in a service of "Greater Truth". This never ends up well. Because they are likely to kill some unstable people with their small lies."

• The newspaper Hawaii Reporter has an article about it by guest writer Michael R. Fox, 5 July 2011: Anti-Nuclear Fictions Continue
• British Columbia Centre for Disease Control have issued a comment both on the S&M joke, and the increase of infant mortality in British Columbia this spring. The latter effect is real, and was a great concern for the authorities (although media reported it in a bit scandalous manner by comparing only with last year when the infant mortality for the region was unusually low). It turns out that the unusually high level is the same for the time period before Fukushima as in the time period after, so any alarmist should better look for other things to scare with: http://www.bccdc.ca/NR/rdonlyres/5B6E918D-F306-4842-8EC9-32EBD4149715/0/infant_mortality_response.pdf
• ...(to be updated)

Update 25 June 2011

Several persons have asked about how to get access to the raw data. I put a summary of the links I have used on the follow-up post regarding the strange results from the CounterPunch re-analysis of the data (here), but I will now put them here as well. The last link on the list is the one that is the easiest one to use. Some information will appear if you hold the pointer over each link:

http://www.cdc.gov/

http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/mmwr_wk/wk_cvol.html

http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm6010md.htm?s_cid=mm6010md_w#tab3

http://wonder.cdc.gov/mmwr/mmwrmort.asp

There are now a few scientific articles available from the arXiv preprint server. We may put some more detailed comments on them as soon as we have had the time to look at them closer ourselves, but they may be of interest to a broader audience.

The articles are (click on the link for each article in order to reach the arXiv page, then download the article as pdf or other format from the box in the upper right corner):

• 30 March 2011: Observations of Fallout from the Fukushima Reactor Accident in San Francisco Bay Area Rainwater, by Eric B. Norman, Christopher T. Angell, Perry A. Chodash, Department of Nuclear Engineering, University of California, Berkeley, USA.
• 15 April 2011: Arrival time and magnitude of airborne fission products from the Fukushima, Japan,reactor incident as measured in Seattle, WA, USA, by J. Diaz Leon, D. A. Jaffe, J. Kaspar, A. Knecht, M. L. Miller, R. G. H. Robertson, A. G. Schubert, Department of Physics and Center for Experimental Nuclear Physics and Astrophysics, University of Washington, Seattle, USA, and Department of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences, University of Washington, Bothell, USA.
• 19 April 2011: Measurement of airborne radioactivity from the Fukushima reactoraccident in Tokushima, Japan, by  K. Fushimi,  S. Nakayama, M. Sakama, Y. Sakaguchi, Institute of Socio Arts and Sciences, The University of Tokushima, Japan, Department of Radiological Science, Division of Biomedical Sciences, Institute of Health Biosciences, The University of Tokushima, Japan, and Faculty of Integrated Arts and Sciences, The University of Tokushima, Japan.

In an earlier blog post there were discussions in the comments regarding the difficulties in correctly identifying which isotopes that are found in the releases. These articles show some nice examples of pulse-height spectra from gamma spectroscopy measurements (incidentally, it is Figure 1 in all three papers). Figure 1 in the paper about analysis of rainwater in the San Franciso Bay area (page 6) clearly illustrates how difficult it can be to correctly identify relatively small peaks on a large background. The samples taken in the water pools at the Fukushima power plant have an even more complicated mix of radioactive nuclides, so this is part of the explanation to why there have been some strange reports regarding identified isotopes.

The last paper surprised me first due to the low levels of Iodine-131 detected, there was a peak value of 2.5 milli-Becquerel per cubic meter of air observed on 6 April, only slightly higher than the peak value observed in Stockholm on 30-31 March (2.15 milli-Becquerel per cubic meter, a tiny amount as explained here (in Swedish only)) and the other data are much lower, around 0.1-0.2 milli-Becquerel per cubic meter. The reason is due to the geography, Tokushima is located on the island Shikoku far to the south-west of Fukushima. Due to the dominating wind pattern, the detected radioactive nuclides have mainly traveled around the entire planet before reaching Tokushima, and therefore have much lower activity. However, the peak around 6 April is due to a temporary change in the wind pattern. Calculations from the Central Institute for Meteorology and Geodynamics (ZAMG) in Austria show examples of the wind patterns. Here is an example from 6-7 April for Iodine-131.

If anybody has any questions related to the articles, you are welcome to post them here and we will try to answer.

/Lantzelot

In the case of The Tall Tale Of Ten Tons Uranium Gone Missing, Busby and his colleague Cecily Collingridge have issued a report where they claim that there has been a leak of enriched uranium from the British nuclear power plants at Hinkley Point in the order of about 10 000 kg. We analyzed the data which he used to make his claim, and took the same steps as he did, following his chain of reasoning from data to conclusion. The result is hardly flattering for the Busby and Collingridge, because the claims they make hinge on...

- Unsupported postulates

- Sparse and highly uncertain data

- Graph fitting done on this data, while ingoring uncertainties

- Low resolution geological surveys

- Misreading of said surveys

- Ignoring local variations in said surveys

- Ignoring missing indicators that must be present if their claim was true

When you can fit any random graph of the data, in this case an elipsoid, something is not right.

The full analysis can be found in our forum. But I'll just cut right to the chase and ask the obvious question: how would 10 tonnes(!) of uranium go missing without anyone noticing? And more important: why didn't anything else go missing? The data that Busby uses to make his claim shows barely detectable levels of fission products, such as Cobalt-60 or Cesium-137. Considering that uranium is a lot less mobile than these products, if uranium goes missing but not the fission products, there cannot be a leak in the reactors because any such leak would have seen more fission products escape than uranium.

This leaves only one path as to how 10 tonnes of uranium could escape into the environment: when reactor fuel arrived fresh at the plants, someone took some fuel elements aside, stripped them of their cladding, ground them to dust and blew them out over the surrounding areas. Alternatively someone made a bonfire with them. And all of it happened without anyone noticing.

Since this is clearly not a reasonable explanation, we must conclude that Busby and Collingridge are wrong: there has not been a leak of 10 tonnes of uranium from Hinkley Point. The data they rely on does not support the claim, and it is only through their frivolous interpretation of the data, misreading some of it, and making unsupported assumptions that they arrive at the claim.

This begs a final question: claims have been made that there are numerous health problems around Hinkley Point, such as an increased incidence of childhood leukaemia. If there are no leaks from Hinkley Point, how would this be explained? Well... to find that answer, maybe you should go ask the one person making the claims: a certain professor Chris Busby.

/Michael Karnerfors and Mattias Lantz - members of Nuclear Power Yes Please

In July 2009, the three top ranked countries were Germany, the United Kingdom and France. As you are probably aware, Germany and the UK rely heavilly on coal (24% and 28% of total respectively) and gas (23% and 35% respectively) for their energy production while France only gets 5% from coal and 14% from gas. That is 1/5 the amount of coal and about 1/2 to 1/3 the amount of gas. France's emissions per produced kilowatthour of electricity is 86 grams carbon dioxide, while Germany outputs 495 grams per kilowatthour and the UK a whooping 572 grams per kilowatthour.

One would imagine that this should give France a great advantage over Germany and the UK and easily beat them at the top. Right?

Wrong!

The WWF ranks both Germany and the UK higher than France. Why? Because the WWF changed the figures. In the climate scorecard for France, we find the following footnote:

 1 WWF does not consider nuclear power to be a viable policy option. The indicators “emissions per capita”, “emissions per GDP” and “CO2 per kWh electricity” for all countries have therefore been adjusted as if the generation of electricity from nuclear power had produced 350 g CO2/kWh (emission factor for natural gas). Without the adjustment, the original indicators for France would have been much lower, e.g. 86 g CO2/kWh.

There it is, in plain writing. They changed the numbers, simply because they don't like nuclear power, thus down-ranking France despite being the lowest emitter of carbon dioxide by far of the G8 countries. They cheated on the scorecard by tweaking the numbers.

And it's not some small tweak either. From 86 grams to 362 grams... that is upping the numbers to 400% of their actual value! What is their reasoning for this? "[The] WWF does not consider nuclear power to be a viable policy option". In short: they don't like it. So they quadrupled the number, just like that.

The WWF also ranked Sweden, there boosting of the numbers even more. For Sweden they change the number from 47 grams per kilowatthour to 212 grams. That is 450% of its original value.

UPDATE: At the Energy From Thorium forum, a person got in touch with Allianz Insurance and asked them what was the meaning of this obvious manipulation of number. The reply was this:

Re measurement in the report: We received criticism last year for not acknowledging the fact that some countries (i.e. France) have lower CO2 emissions thanks to nuclear power. But neither WWF nor Allianz wants to encourage nuclear power as the power source for the future. The fact that there is no solution for ultimate storage is a particular concern. And we think that this world needs a different strategy for its energy needs (renewables, efficiency) - which also leads to different investments in grids and other infrastructure.

They don't want to "encourage" the use of nuclear power. But why would anyone be enouraged? Because it is environmentally friendly of course! And here I foolishly assumed that WWF was in it for the environment... but apparently not, because they don't want people to be "enouraged" by the fact that nuclear power has extremely low emissions. So they changed that number outright.

Not only that but they are dead wrong when they say there are no viable solutions. KBS-3 is in the final stages of development. The work to grant the method environmental approval starts next year.

This is quite simply outtrageous. It is neither scientific, nor honest. This kind of smearing and badmouthing of nuclear power is what made us start this website, because even though one would hope that this is simply an isolated incident, it is not. This kind of deception is taking place constantly. The only thing unique about this particular case is the gall they have in admitting that they actually did it.

How are we meant to trust bodies like WWF when they do this sort of thing? Had this kind of behaviour taken place at a nuclear plant, their permit would have been rescinded and the people in charge would most likely be facing criminal charges for falsifying information! But the WWF gets away with it. Why? Why should they be allowed to cheat on the numbers just to make them fit the policy, rather than fitting the policy after the numbers? Science gets ripped to shreds because the truth is too unpalatable for the nuclear opponents to swallow. What gave them the right to do so? 

And maybe the most important question of all: how is the climate, the environment and the population of this planet benefiting by bodies like the WWF lying to us? What gave them the right to defend their policy first rather than the environment? What becomes better from this?

If we do not allow uranium to be mined in Sweden, we cannot have nuclear power since it would be immoral to let people in other nations take the devastating environmental impact of the uranium mining.

This argument is flawed in many ways, which will take some time to get to the bottom with, so let me first summarize where the argument goes wrong:

1. Unlike what is being hinted, we do not have a ban against mining uranium in Sweden.
2. Uranium mining does not have a higher environmental impact other mining other minerals.
3. We import other produce, products and commodities to Sweden as well, most of which like uranium are not locally produced.

First I should say that this argument is not actually used against nuclear power per se but rather being thrown in the face of proponents of nuclear power trying to mark them as hypocrites. This is a type of ad hominem attack, that is to say you're not attacking a person's arguments but instead the person itself in order to try to win the debate by default. This is, of course, a very dishonest and cheap way of doing debate.

Anyway... on to the flawed reasoning behind the argument.

Like I said, we do not have a ban on uranium mining in Sweden. What we have is a right for municipal councils to veto uranium extraction in that municipality. We do not have a general ban on uranium mining in Sweden.  This means that unless the target of the argument has said that we should have a general ban on uranium mining in Sweden, the argument is dead in the water right there.

The second fault of the argument is to assume that uranium mining has a severe impact which causes unacceptable damage to people and the environment, and that uranium mining is worse than everything else. This too is wrong. All mining, no matter what you are extracting, can have quite a hefty impact and be very detrimental to both worker health and the surrounding environment if it is not done with care and caution. Indeed historical mining all the way up to the 70's and 80's have had severe problems with this.

Current mining in the early 2000's however is different, and has all the protection and monitoring techniques needed to live up to any modern worker-, population- and environment protection standard out there. This includes uranium mining.

To illustrate by example: a Swedish miner in the LKAB iron mines in the 70's received an accumulated yearly dose of radiation that was approximately 2000% higher than what an Australian uranium miner receives today.

It is simply just not true that we cannot do uranium mining without protecting people and the environment. We have all the tools that are needed. This still means that we have to ensure that they are used, of course, but they do exist.

The final leg of the flawed argument is the general notion that we cannot consume or use anything which we ourselves are not producing domestically, lest someone will call us hypocrites. This one is just plain stupid, because all I need to do is lift my eyes and look around me where I'm sitting to realize that not much of what I have in my room or indeed in my life, is produced domestically.

Take for instance metal, since that is produced in a nearly identical manner to uranium, which is to say: first you mine it from the ground, then you refine it. Metal is an integral part of our lives. Metal is all around us: in our computers, our furniture, appliances, jewelry, buildings, eating utensils, cars, keys, phones, power lines, wind turbines, water dams... there is metal just about everywhere.

Now I ask you, who use immense amounts of metal: are you prepared to have an iron mine in your back yard, with all the pollution and environmental hazards this implies? Are you prepared to have a steel mill as your next door neighbour with all the coal being burned in the furnaces to refine iron to steel?

You're not? Well how can you be using all this metal then! Doesn't that make you a hypocrite, just dumping all these environmental problems on someone else so you can sit there and read this very article on your metal-laden computer and its screen?

Of course you're not a hypocrite. Or... maybe you are! How do you know you're not? When was the last time you took the time to check that all the goods you're using has been produced in a way that does not affect some other person or persons in an unacceptable manner? All this metal around you was once extracted from the ground in a mine. How do you know no-one suffered ill effects from this? How do you know that your lifestyle has not caused an environmental disaster somewhere?

With this you realize that you cannot go around and worry like that or you'd have to give up living altogether. There has to be a better way to deal with this issue than just saying no to everything that potentially caused problems when it was produced. And there is.

The ethics of importing goods, or indeed simply using goods produced by anyone other than myself, is a universal issue and it does not apply only to uranium. Uranium is not a special case and is subject to the same considerations as everything else (and then some more, since it is a controlled substance). And unsurprisingly, the Swedish nuclear companies does indeed have strict rules to abide by when it comes to seeing to that the uranium used in Swedish nuclear reactors have been produced in a sound manner that does not harm people or the environment in an unacceptable manner.

So in the end, does the argument turn those that do not want to have a uranium mine in their back yard but still want nuclear power into hypocrites? Does the argument successfully render their stance for nuclear power null and void? Must we produce uranium domestically just to have nuclear power?

No, we do not. It is a narrow-minded, simplistic and silly argument. The issue of assuring that the things which we use and consume in our lives are produced in an ethical manner is very important, and it is not being done any favours by the anti-nuclear lobby trying to dumb it down to fit their agenda. They are abusing the issue just to try to add some fuel to their waning struggle.

So don't fall for it. Treat the issue with the respect it demands. And don't let anyone try to abuse it just to push their point across unless it's actually relevant.