"There are 12 states that met 50 to 120% of their demand over the last year with just wind, water, solar. South Dakota met 120% of its demand with just wind, water, solar over the last year," he said, and in "11 of those 12 states that price of electricity was"below the U.S. average. So, it's cheaper to use clean renewable energy. Nuclear is just driving costs up everywhere you put it up. It's really expensive and it's just going to increase in cost."
Mangano then spoke. He is the author or co-author of more than 40 peer-reviewed medical journal articles and is the author of the books Low-Level Radiation and Immune Disease: An Atomic Era Legacy; Radioactive Baby Teeth; The Cancer Link; and Mad Science: The Nuclear Power Experiment.
The "efforts to expand nuclear power have been marked by certain claims. The one I'm going focus on is the claim that nuclear power is clean or specifically emission-free or zero emission," he said. "You'll see these terms quite often. This is a very misleading".really contradictory to what nuclear power is in a nuclear power reactor."
"The way" nuclear power is generated, he said, "is to take uranium 235 atoms and split them no differently than they are split in an atomic bomb explosion," Mangano continued. "And this produces over 100 radioactive chemicals not found in nature but only when this fission process occurs. They are tiny metal particles or gases. They are considered waste products. There's no practical use for them. And they have to be stored"which is another issue of nuclear power."
"These chemicals once they're in the environment enter bodies either by
breathing or by food or by water," he went on. "Since each is radioactive, each is a risk for cancer, birth defects and other health problems."
"Now the mantra that nuclear power is emission-free, zero emission" has been combined with "since the beginning of the nuclear era that any emissions are too low and too small to cause harm to humans," he went on. "This ignores many studies on low dose radiation exposure that have showed increased risk of cancer and other diseases. The way that regulators got around this is when nuclear reactors began operating in the 1950s, regulators set what they called 'permissible limits,' permissible limits of emissions and permissible limits of radioactivity in"air and water and food. And every owner of a nuclear plant must every year do a review of these levels and report them publicly."
But "there is no regulation to monitor cancer in the local area or health trends in areas near nuclear plants," said Mangano. "Our group which formed in in the late 1980s has tried to fill this void by doing studies of health near nuclear plants. And today I'm going to present"information about the plants in New York State which is the focus of this symposium."
"The four reactors that are now operating are in upstate New York on Lake Ontario about 35 miles north of Syracuse. Three are in Oswego County".It consists of small towns, rural areas, and farms. Demographically, there's really no obvious health risk factor. "
Then Mangano presented charts and said: "This is a time trend looking at the percentage of the Oswego County cancer death rate is either above or below the New York rate. And it goes by five-year periods. Now, if you look at the bar on the left-hand side, you see it is pointing
downward. This is the period from 1968 to 1973 just before and just after the reactors began operating during which we wouldn't expect any effect on cancer. But as you see as time goes on, we move to the right, within 10 years the county cancer death rate began to exceed that of the U.S. and the gap has grown since. The largest gap is the most recent period 2019 to 2023 where the county death rate is 32% above the state as opposed to 10% below before it started".This is all CDC data."
"That is a very quick look at what happens when a nuclear reactor operates," Mangano said. "We have done similar studies on cancer trends near nuclear facilities in a number of states, New Jersey, Ohio, Tennessee, Michigan, Illinois. And we have pretty much found a consistent pattern where at the beginning of startup"the cancer death rates are roughly the same as the state or may be a bit lower and then that is followed by a rising and growing gap where the county rate is much higher. "
He continued with further details about the nuclear plant-cancer link including about a study led by the Harvard T.H. Chain School of Public Health finding a significantly increased cancer incidence in the proximity of nuclear power plants in Massachusetts published in the December 2025 issue of Environmental Health.
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