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"So, apart from Chernobyl, what fatalities ..."C

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Fledermaus Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sat May-22-10 11:56 AM
Original message
"So, apart from Chernobyl, what fatalities ..."C
Radioactive iodine experiments
In 1953, the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) ran several studies on the health effects of radioactive iodine in newborns and pregnant women at the University of Iowa. In one study, researchers gave pregnant women from 100 to 200 microcuries of iodine-131, in order to study the women's aborted embryos in an attempt to discover at what stage, and to what extent, radioactive iodine crosses the placental barrier. In another study, they gave 25 newborn babies (who were under 36 hours old and weighed from 5.5 to 8.5 lbs) iodine-131, either by oral administration or through an injection, so that they could measure the amount of iodine in their thyroid glands.<25>

Between 1953 and 1957, at the Massachusetts General Hospital, Dr. William Sweet injected eleven patients with uranium as part of research funded by the Manhattan Project.<28> In exchange for uranium-235 for his experiments, he would send tissue from the dead bodies of his patients, so that researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory could analyze it to analyze the potential health effects of uranium exposure for atomic bomb factory workers.<29>

In 1963, University of Washington researchers irradiated the testes of 232 prisoners to determine the effects of radiation on testicular function. When these inmates later left prison and had children, at least four of them had offspring born with birth defects. The exact number is unknown because researchers never followed up on the status of the subjects.<52>

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_radiation_experiments_in_the_United_States#Human_radiation_experiments

The ethical, professional, and legal implications of this in the United States medical and scientific community were quite significant, and led to many institutions and policies which attempted to ensure that future human subject research in the United States would be ethical and legal. Public outcry over the discovery of government experiments on human subjects led to numerous congressional investigations and hearings, including the Church Committee, Rockefeller Commission, and Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments, amongst others. However, as of 2010, not a single U.S. government researcher has been prosecuted for human experimentation, and many of the victims of U.S. government experiments have not received retribution, or in many cases, even acknowledgement of what was done to them.

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leveymg Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun May-23-10 01:59 AM
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1. 200,000 out of 410,000 American troops, the "atomic veterans", died early.
http://www.petitiononline.com/Sep2345/petition.html
"Two hundred thousand, 200,000, out of the 410,000 died an early death at an average age of 57. The others of us have suffered every second of our lives along with family members who cared for us. Our Doctors made wrong diagnoses by not knowing that we were exposed to excessive amounts of ionizing radiation further compounding our severe radiation sickness."

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wtmusic Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun May-23-10 09:44 AM
Response to Original message
2. Don't forget about the Great Plutonium Spill of 1889
Why, back in the day, we used to sprinkle a little 235U on our eggs in the morning, didn't think nothin' of it...
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NNadir Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun May-23-10 11:45 AM
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3. Apart from the gulf on Mexico, what ecosystems have the anti-nuke industry funders destroyed?
Karachi Harbor, Prince William Sound, oh and an entire planetary atmosphere.

Predictably, the anti-nuke industry, a wholly owned subsidiary of the dangerous fossil fuel industry couldn't care less.

Nuclear energy need not be risk free even in the stupid, uneducated, fanciful imagination of the anti-nuke industry, which, like the creationist industry, hates sciences it is incompetent to understand and about which it knows nothing.

Have a nice oil, gas and coal greenwashing red herring day.
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invader zim Donating Member (39 posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun May-23-10 12:17 PM
Response to Reply #3
4. +1,000 n/t
+1,000 n/t
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Heywood J Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun May-23-10 05:02 PM
Response to Original message
5. While the things in your quoted excerpt are tragic and horrific,
the things listed in your quote and that article were caused by people with moral and ethical deficiencies. They're no more caused by nuclear power plants than medicine was caused by Josef Mengele. If you're going to use the actions of a deranged few researchers, then modern medicine should be condemned as a whole and put away to be forgotten because of the Tuskegee experiments.

Human radiation experiments say more about the researchers themselves and the government that ran them, allowed these things to happen, and didn't prosecute them.
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Confusious Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun May-23-10 05:14 PM
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6. And that would relate to commercial nuclear power how?

I know you guys are hard pressed to understand that you don't need a reactor to build a bomb.

I know you're doubly hard pressed to understand that Chernobyl type reactors are illegal in the United States.

But you keep trying to jump the grand canyon on your tricycles, don't you.

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