Dr. Rosalie Bertel
In Dr. Bertell’s 1986 speech, she candidly describes the two tactics that she used to report radiological incidents and the release of radionuclides into the environment.
“It’s become even worse of late because in order to impress the public with how insignificant the exposures are, there seem to be two tactics. One tactic is to make the numbers small. So if you’ve been in the business of reporting radiation exposure or accidents for awhile, you’ll remember that it used to be in terms of maybe eighty millirem at Three Mile Island, or a hundred millirem as background radiation, or 5,000 millirem permitted to workers per year. It’s now changed so that instead of eighty millirem it would be eight-tenths of a millisievert. Eight-tenths is a littler number. Instead of workers getting 5,000 millirems per year they now get fifty millisieverts. So they changed the unit to make it a hundred times bigger which makes the numbers a hundred times smaller. So that’s one tactic.The other tactic is to give everything in percent so that you’re told `well, there’s a little bit of iodine 131 in your milk, but it’s O.K., it’s only a small percentage of the permissible level.’ Now you’re not really told where that permissible level came from, or who said you could have radioactive material in your milk and it was O.K. But to even express it as a small percentage of a permissible level is very deceptive because those permissible levels are extraordinarily high.”
Since this speech was given, there have been many more radiation disasters in the US and abroad, most notably, Fukushima.
Recently, the White House dramatically raised “permissible” levels of radiation in our drinking water and soil. This was done without any input or discussion from you or me.
By raising permissible levels the administration seeks to create a “new normal” for our radiation exposure.
Nuclear Orwellian Doublespeak
Deliberately twisting words and using vague language to confuse and mislead people is part and parcel for the nuclear PR mill.
It’s a huge win for the nuclear industry because it allows them to legally say that everything is within “permissible levels.” However, the permissible levels “allowed” by the White House is equivalent to Orwellian doublespeak...
read: New Protection Action Guidelines Will Leave You Chilled to the Bone – Nuclear World Network
Exactly ! When people say, it's only a millisievert, that's a lot. It's something people should be talking about in terms of per year, not per hour ! There are trolls who visit the groups from time to time just to try to confuse people. I can't even trust my own stuff I save to be correct. I have had a chart that I was putting on facebook have its numbers changed from what they were on my original chart. The only way I caught it was because I had the original info written in an old notebook.
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