Now to the nitty gritty as they say. My father died at age 65 from lukemia. My mother died at 67 of lung and pancreatic cancer. All of those friends passed well before they did. Mostly in their 50s, and all of cancers. The last passed about 10 years ago of lukemia, the same variety my dad had.
There are many articles regarding the total elimination of a town and surrounding area. The government has been quietly paying some of the complainers off, I believe. This stuff is nothing to play around with.
Plant safety is very good now but accidents do and have happened. Some we don't know about, Like the fallout that dropped over central Wisconsin from a test in the early 60s. I think I was 1960. The grade school I was attending fed us iodine tablets every day for months.
Ok, so let's say nuke plants are run by highly trained people and they don't fail very often. 25 years ago I was saying that nuclear power was not a good idea from a national security standpoint and today we finally hear that they've been targeted (we didn't hear about all the times prior to now that they were threatened and nothing happened for whatever reason). Are we going to station a slew of marines inside sandbag walls with anti-aircraft missiles and shoot-to-kill authority around every nuke plant? Well, that's essentially what they do at the plant that decommissions chemical weapons that I worked at in the south pacific. This place is 750 miles south west of Hawaii in what has to be one of the most remote places on earth. A crappy (literally, it was mined for the phosphates in bird s**t) little bump in the middle of an authentic nowhere and they surrounded it with multiple layers of barbed wire, vicious guard dogs on the loose, 20mm cannons on APC's, military dudes with M16's and no sense of humor - signs all over the place that said "KEEP OUT - Use of Deadly Force Authorized" - and they meant it. Shoot first, ask questions later. They were perfectly prepared to waste the 737 full of people that I rode in on the instant anything deviated the plan.
On the other hand, we have nuclear power plants around the corner from major population centers all across the U.S. and they're protected by a few fat-a$$ed, Wackybutt Rent-A-Cops? That sounds like a good idea. Let's build more of them and maybe put them upwind of Disneyland.
It never ceases to amaze me how people can have a blind faith in an entity (a corporation) whose SOLE motivation is spending the least amount of money to make the most amount of profit and where individual initiative, caution, and the health of employees and the public are very often viewed as nothing but profit sinks.
If your father worked as a contractor are there dosimetry records available upon which to estimate a lifetime cumulative dose, which show exposures in ranges that might be considered excessive, both acute and long-term? Are other health records available which could to used to establish or at least infer a causal link, such as bioassays, or whole-body scans? Did your mother also work at the plant, or the friends you mentioned? If not, is offsite dosimetry or air sampling information available that could be used as input to a reliable dispersion model? Lacking that, is onsite dosimetry or sampling data available which could be used in a simulation of cumulative offsite doses, both internal and external, using a reliable meteorological model? If not, we are then reduced to stringing together anecdotal data and attempting to find causation where it may not exist.
There is a logical fallacy called post hoc ergo propter hoc (after this therefore because of this) that is based upon the mistaken notion that simply because one thing happens after another, the first event was a cause of the second event. Post hoc reasoning is the basis for many superstitions and erroneous beliefs and conclusions. It is an easy trap to fall into.
But often, events follow sequential patterns without being causally related. Here are some examples. You have a cold, so you are told to drink fluids and two weeks later your cold goes away. My, how wondrous. Or, you have a headache so you stand on your head and six hours later your headache goes away. You perform some task exceptionally well after forgetting to bathe, so the next time you have to perform the same task you don't bathe. A solar eclipse occurs so you beat your drums to make the gods spit back the sun. The sun returns, proving to you the efficacy of your action. It must have happened that way because one thing follows another.
The fly in the ointment is that sequences don't establish a probability of causality any more than correlations do. Coincidences happen. Occurring after an event is not sufficient to establish that the prior event caused the later one. To establish the probability of a causal connection between two events, controls must be established to rule out other factors such as chance or some unknown causal factor. Anecdotes aren't sufficient because they rely on intuition and subjective interpretation. A controlled study is necessary to reduce the chance of error from self-deception. Once a controlled study has been performed and validated, its conclusions can be used as a basis upon which to infer events observed in related circumstances under similar conditions. However, one must use caution in that complex systems often have interacting effects, which tend to mask or offset or sometimes enhance effects observed in the controlled study.
The “healthy worker” effect is one. Studies are often done of the workforce for specific nuclear facilities and the results point to a lower incidence of certain deleterious effects when compared with a cohort in the population at large. Now, can one infer that working in that environment leads to more positive health effects? Well, maybe, maybe not. Because other factors are at work. For example, the workforce may have an average educational level than the comparison group because of the nature of their work. Does being more educated make you healthy, then? Well, maybe, maybe not. What it does do is lead individuals, on average, to make different lifestyle choices than the comparison group population. More of them may choose not to smoke, for example, or perhaps, being more well-read, understand the need for moderate physical exercise, or certain stress-relieving techniques. Therefore, the positive effects of these lifestyle choices leads to enhanced well-being.
Since you were kind enough to share some real-life information, I will do likewise. My father died at an early age after working a significant portion of his working days in an office of the NJ Turnpike, just a few hundred yards from the roadway itself. I worked there for my summer jobs while in school and noted now and then that one of the employees would fall ill and perhaps die, usually from cancer, at a fairly young (late 50s or early 60s) age. My Dad passed away at age 65 from cancer and I visited with some of his (and my) friends back at the offices where he worked sometime later, and, sure enough, a good number of the people there had also succumbed to the dreaded illness. Now, one might wonder, is there some link here? Is working at the Turnpike somehow the cause? Well, I did some checking on my own, and, sure enough, all of those who died that I knew of, to a man, were all World War II veterans who died at about the same age. So, was it their war experiences that did them in? Well, yes and no. I also found that because of their stressful experiences, all of them had taken up the smoking habit. And, sure enough, all of the illnesses I became aware of among this cohort group had causal links to controlled studies of smokers. So, it wasn’t the Turnpike so much as the lifestyle choice, if you can call being in the war and being stressed out a lifestyle choice.
Now I will turn to the sad case of my Mom, who in her last years came down with Alzheimer’s, which ultimately led to her early passing. For the years after my Dad died she lived about nine miles from the Oyster Creek plant in NJ. I would visit every year and I noticed that quite a few of her neighbors, it seemed, were experiencing effects of Alzheimer’s. Then she came down with it. Now, are we to infer from this that something from the plant was causing all of the seemingly large number of similar cases? I mean, they had that link in common. Maybe the sequence was something like this: release-->exposure-->Alzheimer’s, with the events following each other in time. Well, again, I did some checking. Many things can cause the appearance of this illness. In my Mom’s case, it was likely the result of the suicide of my sister a few years before. For one of her neighbor’s, it may have been the loss of her husband of over 50 years and the isolation from her children. In the case of my Mom’s friend up the street, well, he was simply at that point in his life (late 70s) where the incidence of the illness is higher, for what reasons we know not.
My point in all this is to show that if there is credible causation for the particular case, and if that was a result of malfeasance by any individual or group, there is justification for remedial actions, whatever those might be. But, lacking that, it’s a tough one to beat.