THE JAPAN SYNDROME: Shame on you, Cal Thomas!

Cal Thomas posted an editorial, The Japan Syndrome, on worldmag.com recently. I am not even going to link you to it--I'm afraid you might believe something in it is based on fact. Here's the comment I left at the end of it:

Dear Cal Thomas,

     I am SO disappointed in your article! I have respected what you have written in the past but this article is so uninformed and so egregiously inaccurate I don't know where to start pointing out errors. Scholarly books and articles published in medical and scientific journals (see www.radiation.org for lists) document that there were deaths at Three Mile Island, not to mention statistically significant increases in thyroid and other cancers among those living in the area.

     Radiation does not discriminate between military use and peacetime use. There is evidence that just living near a nuclear plant is dangerous to your health.

     As for Chernobyl, the definitive documentary on the subject, including actual footage before, during, and after the accident, interviews with everyone from President Gorbachev to survivors, makes clear that 40,000 people died as a result--the government, which tried to cover up the accident, admitted 4,000 deaths. Twenty-five years later, the entire area is still 100 times too radioactive to be inhabitable (although people live there!). Chernobyl, the real story, is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yiCXb1Nhd1o I seriously don't think anyone has the right to speak to the subject of nuclear energy unless and until they have watched this documentary.

     On my blog His Scribbler I have linked to massive amounts of documentation on all aspects of these subjects. I grew up in Hiroshima where my father, Earle Reynolds, was assigned by our government to do a 3-year study on the effects of radiation on Japanese children. This research led our family to sail (in a yacht my father designed) in protest against American nuclear testing in the Pacific (1958) and in the USSR (1960). This has been our life.

     Cal, you know me as Jessica Shaver. I wrote Gianna: Aborted and Lived to Tell About It. (Focus on the Family, 1995 and 2011). I am anti-nuke for the same reason I am pro-life. Radiation--from bombs or nuclear reactors--kills innocent people. 

Blessings, 
Jessica

NOTE to HisScribbler readers: I didn't have the following information until a day or two later but  EnviroVideo has released an important new video, "Chernobyl: A Million Casualties." This 29-minute program is based on the book recently published by the New York Academy of Sciences that concludes that, based on now available medical data, 985,000 people died as a result of the Chernobyl disaster, as of 2004.