"400" people (as claimed by the author) gathered to listen to 20 anti nuke activists, with no one actually involved in the industry.

This is as balanced as a baptist revival is on evolution, and apparently less well attended.

So far the toll from the Tsunami is about 20 000 none of whom have died from radiation

Worrying about nuclear accidents is the job of nuclear engineers. For everybody else, the concerns pale into insignificance beside the impacts of climate change and the normal causes of cancer.

E.g., over the past 25 years, Ukraine+Russia+Belarus have had about 14 million cancers, with about 6000 thyroid cancers due to Chernobyl with very few deaths. If these countries had had Australian cancer rates, they'd have had 20 million cancers. They might have Chernobyl radiation to worry about but we have sunshine and BBQs and buckets of red meat which are far, far more dangerous.

But all these pale beside the starvation of millions together with weather disasters from a changing climate. The French have been generating electricity for 80 gm-CO2/kwh for two decades while we generate 850 gm-co2/kwh and the Germans (with all their wind and solar) are still stuck at 450 gm-CO2/kwh. Put simply the anti-nuclear movement has made our climate problem far far worse than it would otherwise be because they have foisted their obsession with trivia onto the general population.

The anti-nuclear movement, in stopping the nuclear roll out of the 1970s and 80s has done huge damage to the climate and their continued preference for fossil fuels to nuclear (as seen currently in Germany and Japan) has accelerated our problems.

Shadow minister is correct a totally unbalanced article. Direct evidence of adverse effects at low dose or low dose exposure rates, if any are well below the level of detectability by current epidemiological methodology and statistical theory.

The “Linear No Threshold hypothesis as used by ICRP is of course simple to understand and over the decades has provided a satisfactory model for regulation worldwide. It is however, important to realise that there is no empirical evidence whatsoever to support LNTH.

In spite of authoritative advice that the LNTH should not be used in a predictive sense, people still do so and make the most exaggerated claims of death and/or disease on the basis of an unproven and unprovable theory. It is even possible that some anti-nuclear groups have their own idiosyncratic way of going through the entrails to make alarmist predictions.

Regrettably, the only discernible result of anti-nuclear hysteria is a community burden of psychological disorder such as depression or anxiety states.

Regardless of the contents of this essay the one thing that you can be absolutely sure of is is that the relevant government and industry "authorities" via their public relations spin machines will not be telling the truth about the situation.
Google Fukushima Fallout Awareness Network.

One name sticks out in the list of conference participants, Dr David Brenner. He's an expert's expert with serious credentials. My first thought was: "What the hell is he doing at this symposium?"

Here's a New York Times piece which features Brenner trying to inject
some rationality into the fear mongering during the immediate aftermath of the Fukushima failures:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/29/science/earth/29brenner.html

I emailed Brenner asking him whether he agreed with various of the positions of Caldicott on Fukushima. His reply was prompt and clear: "Participating in a symposium does not imply agreeing with the other speakers there, or the organizer."

and you will note from the NYT article that he does support "safe nuclear power" ... so should we all.

For people wanting to understand how it can be that experts can predict increased cancer risks while simultaneously saying that the increases will be too small to detect, here's my best efforts at explaining the apparent contradiction:

http://www.businessspectator.com.au/article/2013/3/22/energy-markets/exploding-australias-nuclear-delusion

Geoff Russell,

I thank you for your references and I would like to develop your analogy of dropping a rock further. In this I will be referring to papers by Professor Otto Raabe. Two quotes from your paper are a good place to start.

“Imagine you drop a rock in a nice flat pond. If your physics is good, you can calculate the maximum height of the ripple as it expands across the water.”

“But the Fukushima radiation wasn't like that. It wasn't one burst, one rock, it was more like a handful of gravel and the ripple calculations were done as if it was a rock.”

The first quote is a reasonable approximation to the situation at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A burst of radioactive exposure at a high dose rate (1mSv delivered in less than a second is a high dose rate). Current regulations and LNTH are based on this data. According to Raabe this is cancer promoting. An initial developing cancer is given a nudge on to the next stage carcinogenesis by the burst. By and large the types of cancer in the bomb exposed population was similar to the distribution in the general population, but of course manifesting at a younger age.

The second quote illustrates chronic exposure. Otto Raabe studied beagle dogs. Evans completed his work on the “radium painters” in the 1970s. In the radium workers increased incidence of bone cancer was noted only after a cumulative skeletal dose of Ra-226 exceeding 10 Gy (ten Gray). This demonstrates that cancer induction is not a linear function. There is sharp threshold at 10Gy. The time period for cancer induction may well exceed the natural life span of
the subject.

Raabe OG. Health Phy 2011; 101: 84-93.