Things That Apparently Cause Cancer

This critique targets a series of studies that use a distance-based “proximity score” to link living near nuclear power plants with higher cancer incidence and mortality. The score treats every ZIP code or county within large radii (120 km in one study, 200 km in another) as exposed, cumulates exposure from multiple sites, and then uses regressions to derive relative risks, attributable fractions, and counts of attributed deaths from 2000-2018. Replicators applied the same method to unrelated landmarks and got absurd results: Costco attributed to >2.2 million cancer deaths, private four‑year colleges 1.59 million (one test singled out a specific university for ~111,000 deaths), Superfund sites 895,258, and sports venues collectively attributed millions more - showing the technique will produce positive associations for virtually anything.

The core argument is that proximity is not the same as exposure: measured radiation doses to monitored nuclear workers and the public are effectively negligible, and the proposed emission pathways contradict dosimetry and physics. The method’s huge distance buffers (areas as large as ~48,500 square miles) and ecological design make it blind to causal mechanisms; sophisticated statistics therefore yield precise but meaningless results and even produce positives with randomized outcomes. The attributable death counts are likely spurious, and relying on this flawed methodology risks producing misleading science and harmful policy conclusions.