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On 26/08/2013 0:31, Louis Proyect wrote:
It is one thing to connect an incident such as Chernobyl to deaths through radiation sickness but it will be virtually impossible to do so for long-term occurrences of cancer. How in the world will you be able to "prove" that radioactive waste in the water or air was related to an accident at a nuclear power plant?
You can't prove a single exemplar, but you can use epidemiological techniques to calculate excess deaths. If epidemiological techniques aren't sensitive enough, then this pretty much shows it is a non-problem.
That essentially was the ploy used by tobacco companies all those years when they paid for "scientists" to make the case that there was no link between smoking and cancer.
I believe the tobacco companies went considerably further than that: they made data up, they hid data they had, they generally perverted science, insisted that correlation was insufficient to establish likelihood of harm, etc. Very different case.
> This is also the basic talking point of
Spiked online, an outfit whose views on atomic power David shares even though he is not that much into fox-hunting or the rest of their bullshit.
Dear LP, with all my regard, as you have written things I've found very useful in the past and will doubtless do so again, why do you even have to bring Spiked into it? Just to discredit a position you dislike? It seems a really unproductive means of debating something to look for people you dislike who also support the position. Nazis grew food and used thermodynamics, which doesn't say anything about growing food or using thermodynamics nor about Nazis. (Not suggesting here that Spiked are equivalent to Nazis, but the argument will hopefully be seen.)
--David. ________________________________________________ Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
