OLD SCARES AND NEW

But who cares any more? The latest test was not even reported in most of the press, for the hysteria fanners have moved on to nuclear wastes and radiation scares. They couldn't care less about safety: What they want is not the safety, but the total abolition, of centralized large-scale energy conversion. And toward that end, they will use any fraud and any masquerade.

The various "studies" purporting to show a higher incidence of cancer or leukemia for nuclear workers or in the neighborhood of nuclear facilities rest on bad statistics; most often their control population (which is not subject to the factors under investigation) is either absent or badly chosen.

For example, cancer is a disease that strikes predominantly older people. (It is a "new" disease in the sense that one or two centuries ago, people did not have the luxury of dying of cancer - they usually died of tuberculosis, smallpox and other diseases long before they had a chance to contract cancer.)

Now it is a fact that the average age of nuclear workers is higher than in other industries; if, then, the control population is chosen in a community with a low average age, the nuclear workers, not surprisingly, will have a higher incidence of cancer. Using the same charlatan method, one can use Saudi Arabia as the control population to "demonstrate" that the cold climate in Canada Siberia and Scandinavia is highly correlated with the pork consumption in those countries. In reality, all that follows from this clever "demonstration" is that the Saudis live in a warm climate and don't eat pork.