I haven't followed all of the posts on this topic, but I wanted to
point out that Luis Alverez published a study a long time ago on the
topic. This is the way I remember it (please correct me if I am
wrong about it). He had a graph showing the incidence per hundred
thousand of cancers and it increased in a slowly increasing, nearly
exponential manner from the year 1900. He plotted on the same graph,
the electricity production per hundred thousand people and it
increased at a larger exponential rate over the same period. Then,
he removed the respiratory cancers from the earlier plot and found a
nearly constant rate of non-respiratory cancers. From this, we
conclude that although we have substantially increased our production
of electricity over the past hundred years, we haven't increased the
incidence of cancer. Presumably, the increase in respiratory cancers
is due to air pollution and smoking increases over that period.
Take care,
David Marx
Southern Illinois University
Carbondale, IL