Does Costco Cause Cancer?

Alex Tabarrok summarizes a string of papers led by Yazan Alwadi at Harvard claiming that living closer to nuclear power plants is associated with higher cancer incidence and mortality. The researchers published a Massachusetts incidence study, a nationwide mortality analysis in Nature Communications, follow-ups on lung, breast and colon cancers, and a broader total-mortality paper. Their pattern of results was presented as evidence that proximity to nuclear plants increases cancer risk.

Deric Tilson and Adam Stein demonstrate that the same analytic approach generates absurd associations when applied to other landmarks, showing that living near a private four-year university is linked to a 15-fold rise in cancer mortality and that “Costco” yields the largest effect - 2.2 million cancer deaths, over 20% of U.S. cancer deaths from 2000-2018. The critique argues the original teams selected a sensational framing and failed to test their methodology against alternative, implausible anchors; instead of uncovering a causal effect of nuclear plants, they likely captured methodological artifacts. The attributable number of deaths from the purported nuclear-plant effect is probably zero, while the published literature now contains multiple flawed papers resulting from this approach.