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Comment by roenxi | Hacker News Reader

I write this with a fairly pro-nuclear-energy bias.

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.

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Ideally, if you have a pro-nuclear-energy bias, you don't think nuclear energy production has anything to do with tests of nuclear weapons in the atmosphere.

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.

What do you mean tested in areas that were wilting? They were not, of course, conducted directly on arable land. Generally the above-ground tests occurred in Nevada and the Pacific. According to Wikipedia "Ten other tests took place at various locations in the United States, including Alaska, Nevada other than the NNSS/NTS, Colorado, Mississippi, and New Mexico."

see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_weapons_tests_...

I, too, am pro-nuclear-energy, but that's quite a bit different from being in favor of testing bombs. The kind of nuclear power that does not blow up is much safer.

The kind of nuclear power that does not blow up has not yet been invented, sorry.

The article is about weapons rather than power. Weapons dont attempt to contain anything. Power plants do so pretty well.

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.

The burden of proof should go the other way - is there any proof that these nuclear tests were safe, and wouldnt give millions of people cancer?

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

There is no question that nuclear weapons testing produced deadly pollution. Atmospheric tests (of which there were hundreds) produce fallout in fairly large quantities. There are cases of people being killed or injured by this fallout in pretty obvious ways. The spread of fallout is pretty easy to track since it emits radiation, so less obvious cases can be discovered as well.

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