Well done and well presented, Geoff.

As you state it takes a lot of time and effort to build a creditable defense against those that are fast and loose with the facts. That is why scientific facts and data, for the most part, should only be relied upon if it comes from a reputable and peer reviewed scientific journal.

But most folks (including media reporters) would rather listen to the much more flamboyant, arm waving emotional rant given by a person hanging a few letters after their name. Any letters will do since most tabloid readers don't have a clue about their meaning but are quite impressed.

And anyway, those journals are so dry and complicated with all those charts and tables. Besides those journals are hard to find and much more expensive than the tabloid press.

Excellent article Geoff.

It interesting that your forensic analysis of the meta-study was far less compelling than your (perhaps more anecdotal) comparison of French and Australian experience with leukemia. The later is clearly more easy to understand but probably much less scientific.

Readers do give extra weight to the commentary of an expert. You can assert that "as a statistician, allow me to point out that the data is not significant enough to support the conclusion". The professional vigilance of fellow statisticians would ensure that you are not just pulling the wool.

At last, someone who can see through the inventing of crisis by the numerically incompetent Green Audit and LLRC.

The author's vituperative attack on nuclear expert, Helen Caldicott’s integrity and his obfuscation of the toxic impacts of the whole nuclear cycle is disgraceful.

Articles are constantly written by nuclear proponents on the emissions from a nuclear plant (their only line of dubious defence) while information on the environmental devastation caused by uranium mining, the military and the expansion of hazardous waste is suppressed or censored. The nuclear industry would rather people remain ignorant of the documented evidence, which is aptly demonstrated by Russell’s amateurish endeavours at wholesale creative accounting.

In the wake of wide scale allegations (and counter allegations from the nuclear industry) of proliferation of nuclear and radioactive materials and simmering discontent among the comity of nations, scientists are earnestly sounding alarm bells regarding the catastrophic implications of radiation pollution on human health, environmental sustainability and the rapid extinction of biodiversity.

The social costs of radioactive cleanup are staggering in terms of economic destruction. The majority of radiation cleanups require excavation, transport, and disposal of hazardous material. The process destroys plant life, removes topsoil, and displaces or kills wildlife. Further, there are incidents of accidental displacement of pollutants from contaminated sites to distant sites due to excess wind/water erosion afforded by the cleanup process. One example of this is the wind-aided dispersion of plutonium-contaminated soil at the US's Rocky Flats production plant.

Official documentation acknowledges the ongoing legacy of uranium mining of radioactive contamination of Australia's workers, soils, rivers and groundwater and in 2008, groundwater specialist Dr Gavin Mudd examined data from CSIRO and called for it to be “independently verified by people not subservient to the mining industry.”

While the nuclear industry, with its licence to kill, crows about the "return" of wildlife to the Chernobyl area, Professor Timothy Mousseau from the University of South Carolina, US, and Dr Anders Moller from the University of Paris-Sud’s team, who’ve worked for a decade in the exclusion zone, found a serious decline in insects and gross deformities in avian species.

Geoff Russell’s membership of Animal Liberation makes a mockery of AL’s brief to protect non-human species from human atrocities.

Protagoras,

What Geoff Russell has done is simply point out the deeply flawed nature of the "evidence" that Green Audit has manufactured and upon which Helen Caldicott and other nuke opponents rely.

If Helen had any integrity, she would have the honesty to review the BS that she is rehashing for the gullible public, who cannot grasp the fraudulent statistics used.

Unable to counter the factual nature of the post you resort to a personal attack, and an incoherent dummy spit. You again failed to provide any support or reference for your dummy spit and I seriously doubt you can.