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From Chris Busby, European Committee on Radiation Risk

It was unfair of Brian Spratt to dismiss the report of the European Committee on Radiation Risk (ECRR) as merely some anti-nuclear platform (17 May, p 24). The Royal Society’s own evidence on depleted uranium is arguably irrelevant since DU particles are entirely novel and cannot be equated with uranium ore dust. There are only a few relevant studies and these are alarming.

But the ECRR report has a much wider remit than DU. It is a response to the scientifically indefensible risk model maintained by the pro-nuclear International Commission on Radiological Protection (ICRP). The dissonance between the predictions of the ICRP and observation (on DU, on nuclear site leukaemias, on Chernobyl effects) is now so great that the UK government has set up a new committee () to investigate.

The ICRP’s model was developed in the cold war to provide a justification for nuclear weapon development. Many scientists involved in it turned against it (for example, Karl Z. Morgan, John Gofman, Ed Radford). Political pressures maintained it through decades of new discoveries, such as the structure of DNA, cell repair, SOS response, genomic instability, bystander effect, cell communication fields and minisatellite mutations. It is an insecure basis for Brian Spratt’s offhand dismissal of the ECRR report.

The ECRR includes many eminent radiation researchers, members of the Russian Academy of Sciences, professors of radiation physics, eminent epidemiologists, science philosophers, lawyers – a long list of serious and powerful thinkers, authors of hundreds of contributions in peer-reviewed literature – who have come together to try and develop an accurate and inductive model based on a rational analysis of mechanistic and epidemiological evidence. Such a project is long overdue. It marks the resurgence of European science and the end of the blind adherence to (largely US) political control.

Aberystwyth, Ceredigion, UK