1) It’s not plastics or benzine or [insert something else random] that causes the large cancer rates increase (they may have a tiny effect). It’s that fact that the chance of cancer is very strongly age dependent. Now a days we live longer. A fact not entirely unrelated to our knowledge of plastics and the cheapness of energy. As medical care gets better cancer rates go up. Check out any developing country. In the UK Prostate rates shot up over the last 2 years. Due to the demise of concord? Eh no,we simply got better at detecting it so now more cases are recorded.

2) Unless you mess up you don’t kill cancer you cure cancer it’s a disease not a separate entity. Although funding drives make it sound like it is a lurking monster.

3) The background level in Bikini atoll is far too low to cause the increase in bio diversity. Thou it would slightly increase the mutation and thus evolution rate. But speeded up evolution is still bloody slow. People do research where bacteria are blasted with radiation at thousands of times the atoll level and then is still bloody slow. This is for bacteria the fastest evolving living stuff on the planet!

4) I agree the biomass (not counting humans) and biodiversity increase is purely due to the lack of humans there breeding like fools and raping the resources. (Acting very much like a planetary cancer which would then make the nukes radiotherapy I guess).

5) Normally “wild” animals don’t live long enough to get cancer. For this reason and others biodiversity is actually a good measure of a ecosystem thats why zoologists use it.

Rant Over!

Uncle B, you have a fairly rational point to consider.

Furthermore, plastics – made from petroleum – were never tested to, for example, contain, package or feed us (straws and cups) our foods. (Not to my knowledge, anyway) Seems to me the advent of cancer was somewhere in the timeline of plastics’ rise to power.