Radiation Exposure and Risk
Ionizing radiation damages living things and contaminates the environment, sometimes permanently. Studies have shown increases in cancer around nuclear facilities and uranium mines. Radiation mutates genes which can cause genetic damage across generations.
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Radioactive contamination from Soviet atomic bomb testing still contaminates the Kazakh steppes. Sixty years on, the cancerous legacy is still being felt. Read the inquiry by the U.K.'s Independent newspaper.
Sellafield company will be sentenced on Friday, August 21, 2009 for two worker exposures to which they admitted guilt in 2007. One worker, who was jailed for two years as a whistleblower, died of radiation related illness in July before receiving any compensation. Citizens' groups will be attending the sentencing and are asking that the compensation sheme, started by British Nuclear Fuels (BNFL) in the 1970's, be expanded to the wider public, claiming that worker exposures are just the "tip of a whole flotilla of icebergs."
Writing in The Guardian (UK), Oliver Tickell describes how the "toxic link" between the International Atomic Energy Agency and the World Health Organization has effectively "gagged the WHO from telling the truth about the health risks of radiation." See a paper exploring the inherent conflict of interest between these two agencies.
April 28, 2009: Pennsylvania residents who lived near a former nuclear fuel processing plant in the community of Apollo won their lawsuit to secure compensation for the health impacts they suffered due to pollution from the plant. Residents were awarded $52.5 million in a settlement to the 14-year law suit, to be paid by Babcock and Wilcox.
After the discovery that France had installed more than 500 sets of radioactive elevator buttons contaminated with metals imported from India, Bloomberg News took an in-depth look at the widespread dispersal of radioactive metals - considered "low-level" nuclear waste - in public use across the world.
September 15, 2009