Wade Allison is an Emeritus Professor of Physics at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Keble College, where he taught physics and medical physics for over 40 years. He was inspired at the age of 13 in 1954 after stumbling upon the Atoms for Peace exhibition in Geneva, and went on to study at Cambridge and earn his doctorate in particle physics at Oxford and CERN. His research spanned experimental and theoretical physics, but a final-year course he created on the applications of nuclear physics drew him toward radiation safety, where he became convinced that public fear of radiation is wildly out of proportion to the actual risk. He argues that the blast, fire, fear, and panic surrounding nuclear accidents have caused far more harm than the radiation itself, pointing to the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the cleanup of Chernobyl, and the panic evacuation at Fukushima as evidence. He is the author of Radiation and Reason and Nuclear is for Life, and the Honorary Secretary of Supporters of Nuclear Energy.

Expect to learn what nuclear energy actually is and how it works, what the three things are that happen when radiation hits living tissue, why the linear no threshold model used to set safety rules is wrong, what really happened to the radium girls who painted glowing watch dials, how a lifetime radiation experiment on dogs revealed a safe threshold, why the fear of radiation was deliberately exaggerated after the war, what the precautionary principle gets wrong, whether a serious nuclear accident could still happen today, why fear and panic do more damage than radiation, how the placebo and nocebo effects can make people genuinely ill, what the Goiania accident in Brazil teaches us, what radiation did and did not do to the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, why nuclear fuel holds a million times more energy than fossil fuels, and whether nuclear power is really as expensive as people believe.

Wade Allison online:

Website: http://www.nuclear4life.com

Email: [email protected]

Supporters of Nuclear Energy: www.sone.org.uk

Books: Radiation and Reason (2009) and Nuclear is for Life (2015), available on Amazon and all good booksellers

0:00 Introduction

4:41 What is nuclear energy

6:57 Three things radiation does

15:23 The linear no threshold myth

20:59 Chernobyl death data

23:05 Marie Curie

24:54 The radium girls

33:20 Lifetime radiation dog study

41:38 Why the fear was exaggerated

43:19 The precautionary principle

48:06 Could an accident still happen

53:02 The real danger fear and panic

55:56 Placebo and nocebo effects

1:01:34 The Goiania accident

1:07:40 Hiroshima and Nagasaki survivors

1:11:47 Energy density of nuclear

1:14:21 A million times more powerful

1:21:30 Churchill on nuclear energy

1:23:38 Where the energy comes from

1:33:34 The cost of nuclear

1:36:41 China and the future

1:38:56 Closing thoughts