Little ado about nothing

Not much media attention has been paid to the article, which has been labeled as "flawed" by the Nuclear Energy Institute. NEI, on its blog site, subsequently posted columns about the article and about Mangano, who has a history as an anti-nuclear writer. In one of the posts, NEI points out that "Mike Moyer, the writer at Scientific American who so expertly debunked Joe Mangano's 'research' in June, had a chance to read Mangano's latest coauthored piece."

Moyer wrote:

No attempt is made at providing systematic error estimates, or error estimates of any kind. No attempt is made to catalog any biases that may have crept into the analysis, though a cursory look finds biases a-plenty (the authors are anti-nuclear activists unaffiliated with any research institution). The analysis assumes that the plume arrived on U.S. shores, spread everywhere, instantly, and started killing people immediately. It assumes that the "excess" deaths after March 20 are a real signal, not just a statistical aberration, and that every one of them is due to Fukushima radiation.

Moyer went on to say:

The publication of such sloppy, agenda-driven work is a shame. Certainly radiation from Fukushima is dangerous, and could very well lead to negative health effects-even across the Pacific. The world needs to have a serious discussion about what role nuclear power should play in a power-hungry post-Fukushima world. But serious, informed, fact-based debate is a difficult enough goal to achieve without having to shout above noise like this.

Others have chimed in to debunk Mangano's junk science. You can read about it by visiting NEI's blog site here and scrolling down to the article titled "Dr. Robert Peter Gale's Statement on the Mangano-Sherman Report on Fukushima Fallout."

NEI's blog site also has other posts on the Mangano-Sherman report, which you can find by scrolling down at the site.

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