Almost everyone agrees that radioactive material in the atmosphere is extremely dangerous, and almost everyone agrees that a properly functioning nuclear power plant releases very little radioactive material into the atmosphere.
The mainstream arguments about nuclear energy production involve the probabilities of malfunctions, and whether there is an under-siege mentality among designers that leads them to understate risks to the public, and also to be less skeptical of their own work compared to say civil engineers.
see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_weapons_tests_...
I wanna see what effect Nuclear Power has on the health of the average French citizen.
If we're going to examine power, the US is hardly the place. Only around 20% is from nuclear.
France, on the otherhand - home country to Areva, (Westinghouse's main competition for fuel supplier here in the US) gets ~75% OF Their power from nuclear reactors.
There's a couple upstarts each from Britian and East Asia, but they're not working with our 1950s-70s standards within boiling water reactors. I dont know about much with them and their fuels.
So, here in the States, we have the same companies (Westinghouse and Areva,) operating in a similar regulatory environments with similar technologies...
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4267445/ Here's a link where our NIH disputes previous findings about French Lukemia. Confounding factors were later discovered in the initial study which caused the panic; this study also used a terribly small sample size.
Spain is in a similar Nuclear "envelope" of the industry. Both Westinghouse and Areva operate there. http://www.foronuclear.org/es/ask-the-expert/121594-epidemio... no risk found in the Spanish study.
It’s incredible how many things humans do without considering long term consequences: nuclear testing, adding millions of synthetic chemicals to household products, pesticides (read toxins) sprayed on our food, pesticides produced by GMO crops, etc
Is it even possible to reliably measure this? Sure, the statistical test says 'significant', but the number of potential confounding geographic variables must be enormous. How can this study have possibly ruled out other pollutants, economic conditions, or suchlike correlating with how weapons test sites are chosen?
It seems very plausible that nuclear weapons testing caused pollution, but it also seems plausible that the weapons were being tested in areas that were wilting. I don't know, but I am very cautious about using this data to conclude what specific effect radiation pollution has. The 'Robustness' section looks fairly cursory.