This news changes nothing. It is the same assurance that the nuclear industry has depended on all along. Cancers develop over long periods of time and are therefore difficult to pin on any given source. The nuclear industry is not the only industry depending on time to mask the ills they cause.
The article doesn't make me one bit more comfortable with nuclear power than I was before.
I see this as a desperate last attempt of an expensive and dangerous source of power to revive an interest in nukes. The energy created by these nukes will never equal the cost of storing the spent fuel rods. They are a blight on the planet and need to be closed and cleaned up.

iemitsu,

NO - this is different. The results here are not "statistical surveys".

Recent science has been able to detect the actual mechanisms of radiation damage, AND the natural mechanism that our cells have to REPAIR any damage.

The USA's national labs like Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory; have been working on this for some time.

About a year ago, Lawrence Berkeley published a report in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Science:

http://newscenter.lbl.gov/news-releases/2011/12/20/low-dose-radiation/

“Our data show that at lower doses of ionizing radiation, DNA repair mechanisms work much better than at higher doses,” says Mina Bissell, a world-renowned breast cancer researcher with Berkeley Lab’s Life Sciences Division. “This non-linear DNA damage response casts doubt on the general assumption that any amount of ionizing radiation is harmful and additive.”

Mina Bissel and her colleagues have developed techniques to observe the molecular damage caused by radiation, and they can watch the cell's repair mechanism fix the damage.

The cell's radiation damage repair mechanism is analogous to your immune system. You are surrounded by pathogens ( germs ) all the time. Those germs are NOT benign. Ever see someone that is dying of AIDS? The body is ravished by the disease; it's not pretty. However, it's NOT the AIDS virus that does that damage. The AIDS virus just takes out the immune system. It's the everyday germs that continually surround us that do the damage.

However, we are normally not affected by these germs; at least those of us with healthy immune systems. That's because our immune systems will kill off these everyday pathogens should they attempt to take up residence in our bodies.

Likewise, when radiation causes damage to our DNA, the cell's DNA damage repair mechanism puts the damaged DNA molecule back together; good as new.

This new research means that scientists have ACTUALLY OBSERVED the repair being done. We no longer have to guess and say that we "think", or hypothesize, or hope that a repair was done. NO - now we can ACTUALLY SEE the repair being done, so we can say that there is NO lasting damage if the dose is low enough so that the repair is 100%.

This isn't some "desperate last attempt"; this is GROUNDBREAKING SCIENCE.

If you deny the science; then you are no better than those that deny the climate science. Your choice - be enlightened and embrace the science; or you can be just as bad as the climate deniers.

PamW

Thank you for sharing it.

The new soon too be established background levels you will be exposed to from nuclear testing and repeated accidents will have no affect upon you, now move along nothing to see here, well not for a decade or two. Then they will publish a new report stating there was no way they could have known. Wash rinse repeat. There were quite a few people who said this type of report would be forth coming almost two years ago. Nostradamus had nothing on them.

and assures us it is too diluted to matter. Fuck them.

of the millions of tons of depleted-uranium ammo thats been sprayed around the middle east for 20+ years.

UNSCEAR dealt with that nonsense years ago.

Depleted uranium is incredibly dangerous when traveling at up to 2,000 fps...

... but it poses no radiological risk.

BTW - it's actually in the low thousands of tons... not millions of tons.

that only looks at external radiation dose, and does not attempt to measure the affects of internal/inhaled radiations doses.

Also, this statement indicates what utter bullshit they are dishing:
"UNSCEAR also found no observable health effects from last year’s nuclear accident in Fukushima. No effects."

I don't know how anyone could claim that with a straight face.

The study does not "only look at external radiation dose" - Where did you get that idea?

Also, this statement indicates what utter bullshit they are dishing:

Wrong again. It's the same conclusion that the WHO came to as well as the University of Tokyo. In fact it's exactly what scientists have been expecting since reasonably valid measurements have been coming out of Japan... the measured doses simply don't rise to the level that has ever been associated with a measurable increase risk.

At the time of the accident, there were a few of us who thought that there could be enough of a thyroid dose to a large enough population that a statistically significant (though small) increase in thyroid cancers might occur in a few years, but now even that appears questionable. A combination of fortune/planning with prevailing winds, evacuations, and iodine therapy seem to have limited thyroid doses... but we won't know for certain for a few more years.

Citing activity and/or exposure levels with effective dose units just confuses things.

Best of luck.

It's simply their 2012 annual report to the UN General Assembly (A/67/46). There's no earth-shattering new science in there, just an assessment of recent research and some recommendations.

While UNSCEAR does caution against estimating risks by multiplying low doses by the exposed population, in most instances where this is done the result does provide an upper limit on the likely harm and usually predicts negligible effects anyway. Authors like Richard Muller use this kind of estimate routinely to give a sense of the scale of risk, and I don't think there's much harm in doing so provided one is clear that there are enormous uncertainties involved, and that such rough-and-ready calculations ultimately cannot substitute for serious epidemiological analysis.