Eideard

Some books are written to be read, others to be put in a cannon and blasted at the seat of power. Two such blasts have just crossed my desk, from academics on either side of the Atlantic. Both are on the same subject, the consequence of the irrational fear of radiation.

The first book, Radiation and Reason, is by an Oxford professor of physics, Wade Allison. It narrates the history and nature of nuclear radiation, culminating in an attack on the obsessive safety levels governing nuclear energy. These overstate the true risk, in Allison’s view, by up to 500 times, thus rendering nuclear prohibitively expensive and endangering the combat of global warming.

The second is Atomic Obsession by John Mueller, professor of political science at Ohio State University. Mueller describes the toxic fear associated with radiation from nuclear weapons. It distorts the balance of international relations and senselessly makes enemies of friends. The books jointly undermine conventional wisdom on the two greatest political challenges of the day, in the fields of energy and defence. As such, they are sensational.

Radiation, says Allison, is nothing like as dangerous as the anti-nuclear lobby and its paranoid regulators claim. The permitted radiation level in the waste storage hall at Sellafield is so low (1 mSv per hour) as to be negligible, a figure achieved at vast cost in construction and inspection. This compares with the 100 mSv threshold for even remote cancer risk and 5,500 for radiation sickness. According to Allison, someone would have to live for a million hours in Sellafield to absorb the same radiation as is administered in a hospital radiotherapy suite. Higher doses are permitted in food processing and even in medicinal resorts, with supposed beneficial or at least harmless effects…

Meanwhile, over in Ohio, Mueller describes the same terror infecting reaction to nuclear weapons. He points out that nuclear bombs are extremely hard to make, let alone deploy, and their destructive power and radiological aftermath are grossly overstated. The devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was largely the result of the buildings bombed being made of wood. Numbers killed were similar to those dying in conventional bomb attacks at the time. Yet we memorialise Hiroshima but not Tokyo, where 100,000 were killed in March 1945…

As for the much-vaunted risk of a terrorist getting a nuclear weapon – the “1% chance” that kept poor Dick Cheney awake at night – Mueller points out that the chance must be not one in a hundred but one in millions. Cheney would have done better worrying about the proliferation of AK47s…

This is all a massive failure of science to pierce the carapace of public ignorance. As Allison and Mueller argue, nothing is as potent as the politics of fear, and there is no fear as blind as that which comes from a bomb and a death ray. So what is science doing? The world is in the grip of a prejudice from which nothing seems able to free it. At least these books try.

Added to my Wish List at Amazon

Only breadsticks can save us, now!

Like many food-obsessed people, I collect things. In my case, I collect mostly useless things. For example, I have a drawer full of plastic chopsticks from my local Vietnamese takeaway that I am convinced will come in handy should I decide to make noodles for 40 surprise dinner guests or if I plan to fashion a representation of The Gherkin on a rainy Sunday afternoon when Bolton Wanderers v West Bromwich is the only football on the box.

I have a library of takeaway menus stretching back at least 18 years and most of which, I am sure, refer to places that have rightly long since closed. I also have a dusty pile of well over 2,000 business cards from restaurants all over the world, which I pick up as a matter of habit and almost never look at again.

However, my favourite collection of all is a rapidly growing list of overheard middle-class foodie lamentations – railings against the general unfairness of life and how it can come between a person and the eating happiness they deserve.

The catalogue was already quite a lengthy one and is growing all the time and the current incumbent at the top of the pile is my brother-in-law, Matt. He is a good northern lad and a long time supporter of Sheffield Wednesday who would definitely mark himself down as being credible on a street level, even if said street was a leafy avenue with nice detached houses. However, during a family holiday in Devon, while scouring the aisles of a sparsely stocked budget supermarket with my nephew and niece in tow he was heard to wail to my sister:

“The children are getting upset. Quick, where are the grissini?”

Fracking hilarious article if you’re a foodie. And I am. I hear remarks like these every Saturday morning on our weekly grocery shopping run.