Professor John Robertson OBA
From earth.com, tow days ago:
Nuclear power plants run tight radiation monitoring programs, yet the question keeps coming up. Do many years of small workplace radiation doses still raise cancer risk? In a new study, researchers followed 75,350 nuclear power plant workers and linked their individual dose histories to national cancer registries. They found more cases of melanoma and prostate cancer than expected when compared with incidences in the general population. Melanoma is a serious form of skin cancer that starts in pigment-producing cells.
The researchers also found suggestive dose response patterns within the cohort. The analysis reported fewer lung cancers than expected, and a negative dose trend for that site, which the authors interpret cautiously. The work was led by Paul J. Villeneuve of Carleton University. He analyzed incident cancers rather than deaths to capture outcomes with long survival and better timing. The participants were all workers at five Canadian nuclear power plants. People often think that only big, one time blasts of radiation drive cancer risk. Most workers receive small doses, year-after-year, so total exposure adds up over time.
https://www.earth.com/news/nuclear-power-plant-workers-report-much-higher-common-cancer-risk/
The above research study reinforces the findings of the enormous INWORKS study in 2023, reported in the BMJ:
Cohorts of workers in the nuclear industry in France, the UK, and the US included in a major update to the International Nuclear Workers Study (INWORKS). The study included 103 553 deaths, of which 28 089 were due to solid cancers. 309 932 workers with individual monitoring data for external exposure to ionising radiation and a total follow-up of 10.7 million person years. The estimated rate of mortality due to solid cancer increased with cumulative dose by 52%
UK and Scottish Labour have ignored this research with callous disregard for the lives of nuclear workers and their families.
Also:
From the Guardian in September 2025:
‘Families are dying’: an Ohio town suffering from fallout years after nuclear plant’s closure – As Trump calls for more nuclear power, Piketon, the site of an enrichment facility, knows first hand its ill effects. Three years after starting work as an electrician at the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant, Vina Colley started getting sick.
The huge facility in the foothills of Appalachian Ohio was opened in 1954 to enrich weapons-grade uranium for the military as America’s cold war with the Soviet Union ramped up, and later, for commercial purposes.
But in the decades since, Colley, her fellow former workers and the wider Pike county community find themselves paying a terrible price. The cancer mortality rate in Pike county for the years 2018 to 2022 was 44% above the national rate and well exceeded the state level. At 70.6 years, Pike county’s life expectancy at birth is nearly eight years below the national rate.
“I don’t think anyone disputes the fact that hosting a former uranium enrichment plant has led to our high cancer rates. The independent assessment showed widespread off-site contamination,” said Matt Brewster, the Pike county health commissioner. “Those samples were taken before open-air demolition began of some of the most contaminated buildings in the world.”
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/sep/23/ohio-piketon-nuclear-enrichment-facility-health
Remind you of anything, closer to home?
From BBC Cumbria, in March 2025:
A longstanding leak at “Britain’s most hazardous building” is a nuclear plant’s “single biggest environmental issue”, a select committee has heard. The leak in the Magnox Swarf Storage Silo (MSSS) – built more than 50 years ago at Sellafield in Cumbria – started in 2019 after first occurring in the 1970s. Labour MP Luke Charters told the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) on Thursday that every three years the silo leaked enough material to fill an “Olympic-sized swimming pool”. A longstanding leak at “Britain’s most hazardous building” is a nuclear plant’s “single biggest environmental issue”, a select committee has heard. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ckgy77y21djo
BBC Scotland have shown no interest in this. Well, it’s not in Scotland is it? It’s not, just, but it is upstream and upwind of most of Scotland.
Why would that matter?
In Scotland, downstream and downwind:
In 2021, the rate, or risk, of new cancers also increased to 644 per 100,000 [around 700 for men and 600 for women (an increase of 3.1% compared with 2019).
In England, in 2020, the rate for men was 590 and for women, 487.
These are significant differences.
There are several explanatory factors including smoking (England lowest 13%, Scotland next at 13.9%, N Ireland at 14% and Wales at 14.1%) and better NHS detection services but you have to wonder about the Sellafield reprocessing plant, the most toxic nuclear plant in Europe, seeping pollutants around our coast for 70 years now, the nuclear submarines in the Clyde and munitions on the roads and rail, the waste travelling to Sellafield, the rotting nuclear hulks in Rosyth, as well as the power stations, only recently shut down.
Sources:
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I have a feeling that the data relating to there being few lung cancers than expected will be decontextualised and used to imply that nuclear energy is beneficial to health.
We know that radiation has been used with a great deal of success to treat cancers. Is there a likelihood that it might be suggested that working in a nuclear power station has health benefits?
I recall, when some years ago, the Beatson unit at Gartnavel had identified a mix of drugs which cured some leukaemias. A Daily Record reporter noticed that one of these drugs/chemicals was also one of the many additives in Barr’s Irn Bru and produced a front page story: ‘Does Irn Bru cure cancer?’
When profits are involved the morality of some people is jettisoned.
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