Comment by dekhn
2 hours ago
Cancer risk associations studies are not normally described as "proving" anything. The article being criticized uses 'risk' and 'association'. There is a long history of argument around these sorts of studies, there was a previous series of these around people living near power plants (where it seems like SES, not plant proximity, was the strongest explanatory variable, see https://www.aps.org/archives/publications/apsnews/200710/ele... ). I've seen similar "living near a freeway causes cancer" arguments. There was a massive court case by flight attendants, who have a higher rate of cancer than the regular population.
In reading the criticism, I noticed the authors keep using the term "prove" and they also keep trying to come up with mechanisms ("refueling of the plant"). Even the argument about plant worker exposure compared to people living far away doesn't completely work, because the plant workers are taking all sorts of precautions to minimize exposure to radiation, but there are still mechanisms where something could go out the cooling stacks and deliver something harmful downwind.
The biophysics of cancer causation is entirely nontrivial and looking for the actual sources of the cancer risk is challenging, and watching physics people argue with epidemiologists gets old quickly (my field is biophysics, and I've had a few physics people insist that non-ionizing radiation couldn't possibly cause cancer, "because it doesn't damage DNA". Unfortunately, that argument isn't good, because it presupposes a mechanism (DNA damage due to radiation); we know now that non-ionizing radiation causes cellular heating, stress response, and more, which are all associated (based mostly on in vitro studies) with increased rate of cancer.
Note the authors (and the institute they work for) have vested interest: Dr. Adam Stein is the Director of the Nuclear Energy Innovation program at the Breakthrough Institute, where his work centers on the technology, regulation, economics, and risk governance of advanced nuclear energy.
Deric Tilson is a Senior Nuclear Energy Innovation Analyst at The Breakthrough Institute, where he focuses on advancing nuclear energy as a critical pathway to a carbon-free and energy-abundant future.
I thought the papers author's nearly ten year employment at `Petrofac` is interesting and probably warrents a mention.
> Petrofac designs, builds, manages and maintains oil, gas, refining, petrochemicals and renewable energy infrastructure.
https://hsph.harvard.edu/profile/yazan-alwadi/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/yazan-alwadi-ab1b112b/
he was a construction engineer, not a policymaker.
Doesn't matter; his paycheck depended on him not understanding these things.
> there was a previous series of these around people living near power plants (where it seems like SES, not plant proximity, was the strongest explanatory variable, see https://www.aps.org/archives/publications/apsnews/200710/ele... ). I've seen similar "living near a freeway causes cancer" arguments.
Social Economic Status is certainly associated with all sorts of things, but being near a freeway means being near brake dust (which used to have asbestos), being near all sorts of tailpipe nasties, being near tire dust, etc. I'd be surprised if it was all explained by money.
See- you immediately went to a mechanism that justified the result. It's all too easy to convince yourself something is true because you can see a pathway- yet that pathway might not matter.
Besides the bias question (which is possible and apparently likely for both sides), I realize this is a touchy subject for many but the tone of this article is rather more irritated than it really needs to be. They even mention that the authors of the Harvard paper said the study wasn't meant to show causality, but the very next section heading is "Ridiculous things you can 'prove' caused cancer mortality," which suggests that is what the authors of the original paper were trying to do. If you're going to accuse them of being deceptive, at least be open about it instead of using this sort of passive-aggressive approach.
Also, they say:
"Over the last several months, we have replicated the results of these papers. The authors supplied us with eight lines of code and answered a couple of questions about the covariates, which did not replicate the results. Most of our replication was done through first principles combined with trial and error. Once we were reasonably close to the results of the first national study on cancer mortality, we took the methodology and applied it to numerous other landmarks."
I'm no expert in experiment design, but unless I missed something, I have qualms about calling this method a true "replication."
My understanding was that they take issue with the word "attributable". They don't attempt to propose a mechanism by which living near Costco causes cancer (the most strongly associated of the landmarks they measured). Rather, the implication is that it doesn't. Like I think it's a lot of words arguing that "correlation doesn't prove causation" could be restated "association doesn't prove attribution."
Attributable risk is a specific term in epi, the FDA uses it, and it doesn't imply causality.
Do Tilson and Stein have more or less of a vested interest than the people who wrote the studies they are criticizing? It’s not obvious to me that they are more (or less) conflicted.
I could go on a long rant on how sociologists, pyschologists, and epidemiologists all play games with data to support their own pet theories and causes, but I won't.
To answer your question: without other data, generally I would expect a person who works for an industry supporting institute to have greater vested interest than academics working at a university- academics mainly just want to get more funding for their individual research, while the industry is dealing with multi-billion-dollar industries and they get paid well to write articles like this. But now that I look carefully, I don't think their institute is funded directly by the nuclear power/plant industry.