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8 of 11 found the following review helpful:
 Devastating Expose of the Great St George Fallout Hoax Jul 05, 2009
By Christian F. Hansen
This book is critically important for anyone interested in the various nuclear contamination controversies. Unfortunately it is marred by being a self-published (Booksurge) item. Are the big publishers not interested in this message? The book is short, to the point, and full of numbers. I would have liked a load of maps, tables, and graphs, but it's hard enough to get the public to read books that have numbers in them.
The author is the heavy artillery. Daniel Miles is a physics professor who spent decades on Test Site issues. He has one incomparable advantage: He was there. In St. George. In 1953. He not only knows the science up and down - there are tons of studies on the subject - he also knows the people, and who of his neighbors are full of it (not radiation). He has read every local paper from the period, counted the tombstones, tracked the anecdotes to ground. I wonder about his safety, for his denouements inevitably humiliate many locals.
From 1950 to the 1958 moratorium, the Nevada Test Site conducted 100 relatively low-yield shots above ground. (The subsequent underground shots caused infinitesimally little fallout). By quirk of meteorology, St. George, Washington County, 150 miles away, received by far the most fallout, almost all of it in 1953. The total dosage was about 3.7 roentgen, or average 1.9 rad in the county; i.e. residents generally received more ionizing radiation from background during this period than from the tests.
Theoretically, this dose could produce an undetectable sliver (less than one percent) more cancer deaths than expected. This is per the worst-case linear/no threshold, immediate exposure theory. Scientific studies have not found elevated incidences in any of the affected communities.
The cancer rate in Washington County is far below national average (it's got something to do with Mormons). Many other Mormon counties that received no fallout have higher cancer rates. The cancer rate did rise fifty years ago, for previously most people died of infections. It rose more elsewhere.
We do know the effects of ionizing radiation from real victims (Japanese). Per Miles, that is an elevated cancer rate of 1.06, and most of that .06 is leukemia; some is thyroid cancer. Of course, hibakusha had exposures far, far greater. Also, there is no evidence from Japan of second/third generation genetic damage, another common myth. And, incidentally, the Japanese data supports the threshold theory, as does radium-painter and high-background residents data.
All this has not prevented an orgy of fallout hysteria from taking root in the area. Miles recounts how this phenomenon started, was nourished, and rose to political prominence and compensation. He is superb in popping the anecdote balloons, for example, the lurid stories of children eating fallout dirt thinking it was snow, or getting radiation burns, or dying like flies after a test. He was there and demonstrates that this stuff occurred to no one for about thirty years after the fact. This appears to be another case where mythogenesis occurred about a generation later, instigated by outsiders.
To get the chain reaction started took a volatile mix of journalists, lawyers, and politicians - precisely the types you don't want to be downwind of. Senator Hatch commissioned a study, which came to the "down in the noise level" conclusion - so he canned it and rammed through compensation for almost everyone with cancer.
Here's the problem. 42% of Americans get cancer. 25% die of it. Of 1000 people, 420 are expected to get cancer. With even the most alarmist modeling, maybe one more would get leukemia with the exposure involved. The trouble is, if they live in St. George, all 421 will be dead certain that they are victims of fallout, and that they are owed compensation. And how do you tell a person dying of cancer that no, it doesn't have anything to do with the tests, you're just out of luck?
The public clearly finds the sloppy brown mix of sob stories, hearsay, and out-of-context data, spiced with tissues of lies, to be highly persuasive. I heard a BBC reporter pour out a bucketful of this about St. George, and this is particularly interesting because the BBC recently broadcast similar rubbish about the 1968 Thule incident, with which I happen to be familiar. Don't believe a word they say.
"Did Dirty Harry kill John Wayne?" is the book's funniest chapter. The story is repeated everywhere that Wayne and many of his film crew died of cancer due to exposure when making a film in the area. Shot Harry was in 1953, the filming over a year later. The author then cooked at the favorite restaurant and noted the extreme lifestyle of the crew, not least Mr. Wayne's four-pack a day habit. These dudes received fallout exposure thousands of times less than what they gave themselves. Oh, the restaurant workers didn't get cancer.
Myths have real consequences. The political idiocy surrounding the Yucca Mountain repository, or the new conventional tests, or the vast expenditures on cleanup of infinitesimal contamination, just to start. We all pay for the silliness.
Almost all the book's paragraphs are quotable. A sample: "Pardon me, but medical statistics show that Washington County cancer rates have been among the lowest in the country all through the post-fallout period. The virtually unexposed Mormon towns of Stafford, Thatcher, and Pima in Graham County, AZ, had cancer rates higher than Washington County ... a reporter could find more individual, heart-wrenching stories of people battling illnesses or watching loved ones die in these towns than in St. George, despite the absences of significant fallout exposure. Again, the probability that any of the St. George cancers were caused by fallout radiation is probably less than one percent."
It is amusing that Professor Miles quotes the redoubtably Skeptic, Dr. Michael Shermer, at length about the psychology behind people believing weird things. Shermer, of course, holds that humans are cognitively defective animals, incapable of accurately comparing risks and probabilities. Emotion trumps reason every time.
Buy this book and read it. Also visit the Atomic Testing Museum in Las Vegas. Then stop by in St. George and see if you glow in the dark.
5 of 8 found the following review helpful:
 Evidence of what happens without peer-review Jan 25, 2011
By Dynette Reynolds
This author uses **anecdotal evidence** and spurious studies sponsored by the nuclear industry to deny that any radiation damage occurred from atomic fallout during the years of aboveground testing. Example: He denies that there was any fallout in southern Utah that looked "like snow" because he never saw it. However, government archives contain film of fallout being brushed off cars like snow as they drove through checkpoints in Utah. Another example: He claims that no one from his graduating class died of leukemia (at least none that he can locate). However, multiple demographic studies performed by medical researchers have shown that southern Utahns developed leukemia at 7x the rate of northern Utahns. (Joseph L. Lyon et al., "Childhood Leukemias Associated with Fallout from Nuclear Testing," New England Journal of Medicine 300 (February 22, 1979), pp. 397-402.) Are we to believe Miles' supposed eyewitness account, or the data from actual medical research?
Miles also claims that Hiroshima survivors contracted cancer at only a 5% higher rate than normal. This is disingenuous, at best. Independent medical research (i.e., research NOT sponsored by the nuclear industry) shows that, even with leukemia rates removed (the cancer most closely connected to fallout), the cancer rate among Hiroshima survivors is somewhere between 10% and 50%, depending on factors such as age at time of exposure, proximity to fallout, sex, and type of cancer involved. (Preston D. L., Ron E., et al., "Solid Cancer Incidence in Atomic Bomb Survivors: 1958-1998," Radiation Research 168 (2007):1-64.)
Furthermore, the author's name appears on a list of Global Warming Deniers, which makes nearly anything he says completely untrustworthy as far as the scientific community is concerned: [...]
There's a lot of corporate money being tossed to people who are willing to contradict well-established medical and scientific research. Beware whom you trust.
2 of 5 found the following review helpful:
A factual look at radiation - debunking the hype of the down-winders. Aug 12, 2010
By Toquer-villan
Daniel Miles has put into print a review of all the facts about radiation exposure resulting from the Nevada tests. His review identifies how the down-winders have developed a delusional but lucrative blame game to get compensation for being around when testing was done in Nevada in the 50's.
Having grown up in the area and lived "down-wind" of the tests myself, but also having studied physics and engineering, I had become skeptical about the majority of the "down-winders" claims. I heard that more of my youthful associates were clambering for down-winder status, I began reading up on the subject. Other information I found did not analyze the problem scientifically. Mr Miles documents with care and thoroughness what actually happened, identifies the known results, references the scientific knowledge behind the results and separates myth and anecdote from fact and reality. He identified how slanted and incomplete information in news reports were hyped, how data was spun and how unverified rumors became the measuring stick to extort money from the government, thoroughly duping our legislators and the general public in the process.
His book helps us understand that radiation is part of life, that some radiation is normal and that the majority of down-winders experienced no more radiation exposure than any other normal American.
His approach;, in looking at all the data, all the facts and all the results, removing the bias of fear, discounting sensationalizsm; provides a clear message that Southwest Utah was and is as safe as anywhere else in the US.
Toquer-villan
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