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By Root 734 0

odd piece of science that seems to confound global warming theory—are pounced upon by campaigners. One highly publicized recent study first came to my attention when it was used by the British Liberal Democrat party as support for its antinuclear stance before the 2010 election. This piece of work, performed by German researchers and published in 2008, concluded that there had been a doubling of the incidence of childhood leukemias (though no other cancers) in young people living within 5 kilometers of a nuclear power plant.42 Specifically, over a 23-year period there were 37 cases of leukemia when statistically 17 would have been expected—not a very large absolute increase, totaling only one extra case in the entire country per year, but still worth investigating.

With an additional radiation exposure to residents living close to German nuclear power stations that is 10,000 to 100,000 times less than natural background levels, however, the nuclear plants can be safely ruled out as a causal factor in these leukemia cases—as the authors of the study acknowledge. Given that no additional incidences of any other types of cancer were found, the results were probably nothing more than a statistical accident. This is particularly the case given that natural background radiation levels in Germany vary by a factor of ten around the country, and yet there is no corresponding pattern in leukemia incidence. It is intriguing that cancer clusters have also been identified in areas where nuclear power stations are planned but never built, where they are built but before they are switched on, and around other large infrastructure projects that do not emit radiation at all.43 In other words, cancer clusters may be associated in some circumstances with nuclear power stations—but they are almost certainly nothing to do with radiation emissions from them.44

The mandate of this book, moreover, is to look at environmental hazards to other species than just humans, with a view to building up a picture of impacts that matter at an Earth-system scale. A new scientific discipline, radioecology, has sprung up to study the effects of radiation in the environment, and its conclusions, on the whole, are positive. Thousands of scientific papers have now been published examining the occurrence and impacts of radioactive isotopes—some natural, some artificial—on biota in a wide variety of different environments, from forests to sand dunes, but none that I have come across have found convincing evidence of harm. My tentative conclusion is that it does not seem at present that artificial radiation from either nuclear power, medical uses, or weapons tests is negatively affecting biodiversity anywhere in the world. I cannot think of any way that nuclear power significantly affects any of the other planetary boundaries other than in the area of toxic pollution, so this is indeed reassuring.

Before Fukushima, the one exception to this benign picture was of course Chernobyl. At 1:24 a.m. on April 26, 1986, Chernobyl’s Unit 4 reactor exploded after staff disabled safety systems and performed an ill-advised experiment to check—ironically enough—the reactor’s safety. The top was blown off the reactor building, and hot pieces of nuclear fuel and reactor core were scattered all over the site, including on the roofs of neighboring buildings. During the next ten days, dust and smoke from the site released a radioactive plume that spread over most of Europe, seriously contaminating large areas of what is now the Russian Federation, Belarus, and Ukraine. Hundreds of thousands of people were evacuated within hours from the surrounding areas, leaving whole villages and towns ghostlike as their inhabitants were moved elsewhere. To date, radiation from Chernobyl is still detectable all over Europe from the Swedish Arctic to the English Lake District, and the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone around the damaged reactor is almost entirely uninhabited.

Despite all this, Chernobyl was a long way from being, as some have claimed, “the world’s worst industrial disaster.” Nor was the