Beyond Nuclear issued a press release today strongly criticizing the advanced publication of a section of the 2020 United Nations Scientific Committee on Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR) report —Sources, effects and risks of ionizing radiation, Scientific Annex B, Advance Copy -- which claims that “a rise in thyroid cancer among children in the last decade was not related to increased radiation,” and instead attributes the increases to more thorough and sophisticated testing.
An increase of 20 times the expected number of thyroid cancers were detected among the exposed children. We can't know the actual number of thyroid cancer cases because we lack information to do a proper calculation, especially for children ages 0 to 4. However, UNSCEAR gives a large collective thyroid dose (44,000 man Gy) that certainly could have resulted in these cancers.
The rush to release just this section of the report just before the 10th anniversary of the Fukushima nuclear disaster, appears political rather than scientific and mirrors earlier efforts by UNSCEAR to similarly downplay or whitewash the true health effects of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster in Ukraine.