Reminded of something that Geraldine Thomas, founder of the Chernobyl Tissue Bank, wrote when the Fukushima drama was going on, "Look at the science – smoking and obesity are more harmful than radiation":
> I can assure you that none of us are in the pay of the nuclear industry. I was anti-nuclear until I worked on the after effects of the Chernobyl accident – now I am very pro-nuclear as I realise that we have an unwarranted fear of radiation – probably due to all the rubbish about a nuclear winter we were fed during the Cold War.[10]
Individuals have a fair degree of control over whether they smoke or overeat. They have little to no control over a nuclear accident that may subject them to an indeterminate amount of radiation.
That doesn't even make any sense. How can you compare the harm of completely different things with completely different mechanisms and exposures? And why would nuclear winter have anything to do with it?
> Fifteen people have already died of these cancers
Don't forget that USSR and Belarus authorities did everything to attribute illnesses to anything but radiation. And it's really hard to prove that some illness is _due_ to radiation anyway. The reporting was way less transparent and non-biased than in democratic countries.
> Drinking one beer a night for a year is a lot less harmful than drinking 365 beers in one go. The same applies to radiation exposure, but regulation doesn’t agree.
I know I may be overreacting, but when the dentists try to convince me that the annual x-ray of my family members is the same as being outside in the sun for a whole day, I try to explain it with a similar analogy; getting exposed to small amounts of x-ray over a long period is not the same as getting exposed to all of it in a fraction of a second.
They insist it because it is covered by insurance, and that I shouldn't worry about the cost. I have to clarify that the monetary cost is not my primary concern.
I have now learnt to simply say No, and agree to sign a waiver that's required by the insurance company.
I am okay with getting the x-ray if a professional has a legitimate reason to suspect there's something hidden that can be better investigated by getting an x-ray. My family has received x-ray, MRI, CT scans, ultrasound, etc. but only when its benefits outweigh the risks; e.g. bone fracture, pregnancy, concussion, etc.
As I said, I may be overreacting, but I'd like to err on the side of caution when it comes to my kids' and family's long-term health.
> As I said, I may be overreacting, by I'd like to err on the side of caution when it comes to my kids' and family's long-term health.
But isn't it a trade off, like many things in life? I don't think refusing the x-ray is necessarily erring on the side of caution. You may miss a relevant diagnostic. You have to weigh the probability and impact of the x-ray doing harm vs not getting the routine x-ray and failing to discover something harmful in time.
> But isn't it a trade off, like many things in life?
It absolutely is. For example, as soon as I turned 45, I got colonoscopy done, because the benefit of getting tested outweighed the cost of getting tested.
So if the dentist says, I suspect there's some rot, or my family member has started complaining of toothache, I would have no hesitation to get the x-ray, if recommended. But it is the regular, nonchalant nature of annual dental x-ray procedures that concerns me.
Paradoxically active ongoing research suggests that the same dose of (medically determined) radiation delivered over a very short period of time increases its efficacy against the cancer compared to damage to the surrounding tissue.
It's interesting that the core of this effect - that large doses delivered on timescales of a second or less significantly reduce normal tissue toxicity - was actually observed over 40 years ago, e.g.:
Some of the authors of that work were still active when the "Flash" concept came around again, and to hear them tell the story they tried to get funding to test it in tumour-bearing mice, but both their lab heads and external funders were sure the effect would be the same in tumours as normal tissue, and so wouldn't fund the work.
They eventually moved on to other things, and it needed a few decades for someone with enough soft money to give it a go and kick off this new research field.
Even before Linear No Threshold was a thing scientists were doing experiments showing that dosing fruit flies with radiation all at once would lead to a highly mutated second generation, but spreading that radiation out over the course of a month wouldn't.
Most radiobiological effects for acute exposures are actually quadratic in dose - this applies to things like mutations, chromosome aberrations, and lethal events.
The quadratic term relates (loosely) to interactions between damage from multiple ionising particles which are present in cells at the same time. When you protract exposures, more damage is repaired before subsequent ionising particles arrive, and you see a reduction in the quadratic term, to effectively a linear form at very low dose rates.
So it's not surprising that spreading the radiation out significantly reduces the yield of biological events, but actually supports a linear trend for mutation yield in low-dose and low dose-rate conditions. (Whether that tracks linearly in turn to cancer risk, on the other hand, is a topic of much more debate.)
People who want to step away from linear no threshold seem to ignore the extreme likelihood people will get cancer at some point. Which means for any given population there will be many people who are really close to the threshold of getting cancer.
Studying the effects of radiation on healthy tissue isn’t therefore representative of the general population. You need population level data, and the sensitivity just isn’t there to be able to detect if their model is correct or if linear no threshold is correct etc.
At the time (the 1950s) evidence from fruit flies was essentially all the evidence there was. But as the article points out we have pretty good data showing it works the same way in humans.
I do not agree that they have good data showing it works the same in humans. I see a lot of stretching of datasets, a lot of squinting, and above all a lot of hope!
"Lie" is such a click-baity triggering word to use here. Sounds more like they overstated the harm of cumulative small doses of radiation.
But, I mostly just skimmed through the beginning of the article, so maybe it gets better, like maybe the author reveals an international cabal of influential anti-nuclear activists who are holding human progress back.
> Sounds more like they overstated the harm of cumulative small doses of radiation.
Not even that, they simply didn’t know because they couldn’t measure, so they took a conservative approach.
Btw you can count me in to the cabal of anti-nuclear activists. Humans simply are too greedy and incompetent to manage the technology responsibly over the long term. We’ve already irreversibly altered the biosphere with the nuclear activity we’ve engaged in so far. Time for it to stop.
Your not wrong, but you seem to be missing one significant detail: we have altered the biosphere even more by not engaging in nuclear activity, instead opting for less-scary-but-worse alternatives like coal, oil and gas.
You're not wrong, but you seem to be missing one significant detail: if we had invested in renewable energy resources like solar and wind to begin with, we wouldn't have needed (as much) assistance from nuclear, coal, oil, and gas.
Unless by "viability" you're completely ignoring price, I disagree (I would argue that excessively expensive solutions aren't viable). We don't have good alternatives to gas (carbon fuel) peakers yet. Nor is winter generation a solved problem. Non-nuclear carbon-free generation needs a tremendous amount of battery storage to get to 0% carbon-emitting.
The problem is that stopping nuclear activity has ancillary effects -- like increased carbon emissions -- that are potentially much more harmful than the radiation. The results of technological decisions are never independent of one another.
In theory. But in fact, attempting to build nuclear power plants results in big increases in electric rates, and the supposed benefits of nuclear power end up being delayed by many years and in many cases decades.
The effect of trying and failing to build nuclear power plants on time and on budget uses up many billions in capital that could've been applied to reliable delivery of renewables.
Even the supposedly efficient French nuclear power program vastly underestimated decommissioning costs.
In other words project risk for nuclear is hideously expensive, even when you think you've dodged project risk problems, there's another whole very expensive project in decommissioning that has its own set of project risks.
Global CO2 emissions would be drastically lower if people hadn't opposed nuclear energy so irrationally. No other technology can produce 1.2GW of zero CO2 electricity anywhere you want.
Alright, let's say the author is right and low-level radiation exposure is not harmful. Then... what? If a little radiation is not harmful, then we should be more relaxed about radiation, deregulate it and allow companies to contaminate our living spaces? Is that why the argument is being made?
But as the article mentions, in those Taiwanese flats there were large variations in radiation levels in different spots in the building. If we allow radioactive contamination everywhere, will it be neatly spread out at harmless levels? How would you know? What if you happen to ingest traces of the harmlessly radioactive material now surrounding you?
> Drinking one beer a night for a year is a lot less harmful than drinking 365 beers in one go. The same applies to radiation exposure, but regulation doesn’t agree.
Stating something confidently doesn't make it true. Show me the data.
The article is long on emotion, exposition, but very short on the data.
There's a big concerted effort to change this regulation, but it's not based on data, it's based on feelings.
It's quite likely that there's non-linear response, but it could just as easily be that the dose that's tolerated well in a 1 day exposure, might have higher risk when spread out over 365 days. When they say something like:
> nor any major chromosomal aberrations.
They don't have the technology to measure DNA damage that might be significant. I've spent some time in the past examining the REBC dataset of whole-genome sequencing of tumors of thyroid cancers from Chornobyl, where you actually do see the types of translocations that cause cancer from radiation.
We can't detect these types of translocations in non-cancerous tissue. The only reason we can see them in cancer is that the cancer has replicated billions of times, giving us many many many copies of the translocation to put through DNA sequencing. Doing the type of sequencing where we identify translocations that happen in individual cells, before the cell has become cancerous, would require a good amount of engineering effort, and I've never seen anything like it. And in 2006, when the study was published, we barely had any of the latest sequencing technologies.
> Chen interpreted this as evidence of the health benefits of radiation. This theory, known as hormesis, holds that low doses of stressors, including ionizing radiation, can improve health (in this case, reducing cancer risk) by triggering the body’s repair systems in much the same way that exercise improves fitness by stressing the cardiovascular system. While popular among a small community of researchers, it has not gained widespread acceptance due to limited and conflicting evidence in humans.
Yes, limited and conflicting evidence in humans. Yet these sorts of propaganda efforts are pushing hard on the idea being present, being obvious.
This article is not science, despite trying to put on airs of science. The data does not support their claims.
Let's see actual review articles published making these claims that aggregate over large numbers of small data. Let's see whether such aggregation claims hold up on scrutiny from those that have spent a lot of time thinking about this.
The active regulatory push to invalidate LNT should follow the science, not be ahead of the science.
Plus, the whole goal of this, to somehow how make nuclear construction cheaper, does not seem to be well served by changing LNT. The costs of nuclear are massive because it's a big constructuon project with lots of coordination. Making concrete walls 50% as thick is going to do very little to lessen the massive costs, which are related to construction productivity, or rather the lack of it in the West.
It seems like the nuclear industry tries to focus on anything except the one thing that will actually make it succeed: get really good at construction.
in a world where there is no safe low radiation dose, it would be quite easy to generate the data to demonstrate this. so either low doses cause no harm or cause such minimal harm as to be safely disregarded.
> in a world where there is no safe low radiation dose, it would be quite easy to generate the data to demonstrate this.
This is the classic fallacy seeing an absence of evidence and using that as evidence of absence!
And the lack of evidence goes both ways, it should be easy to show that current regulations are fully safe by doing epidemiology to show that living close to a nuclear power plant carries no additional risk!
So let's go looking for those epidemiological studies...
> May 19 2026 - Does Proximity to Nuclear Power Plants Increase Cancer Risk? New research finds correlation between disease and living close to a facility
> Koutrakis says that his advisee’s research is notable because it is the first series of studies to systematically demonstrate associations between residential proximity to nuclear power plants and cancer outcomes across multiple settings using large, population-based datasets. “This work fills a critical gap in the literature by providing large-scale, systematic evidence on a question that has remained unresolved for decades.”
> Using nationwide mortality data from 2000-2018, we assess long-term spatial patterns of cancer mortality in relation to proximity to nuclear facilities while accounting for socioeconomic, demographic, behavioral, environmental, and healthcare factors. Cancer mortality is higher across multiple age groups in both males and females, with the strongest associations among older adults, males aged 65–74 and females aged 55–64.
So there's a dose-response curve for cancer based on living close to a nuclear power plant. This survives correction for other confounders.
Notably, this is correlation not causation, but the only evidence getting close to disproving LNT actual leans towards super-linear, rather than sub-linear, correct?
Then you are not understanding it. Looking at a map of people not close to power plants would show the same rough picture. People live where people live, of course! But proximity to nuclear power plants has higher incidence of cancer.
What is different about this study that's worthy of a national map is that it's an evaluation of national data, after having first found the discovery on smaller state level datasets.
there is a small problem though, everything in those power-plants is monitored. so there is no radiation increase anywhere to be found.
if it's the pollutants as the Nature paper claims without evidence, then any other industrial plant would also be emitting those. in fact, coal power plants will emit much more. chemical pollutants are no less dangerous than radioactive ones when the radioactive ones are too low to measure (that is not to say that coal power-plants don't produce radioactive pollutants, they do much more than nuclear power plants).
> Nuclear power plants emit radioactive pollutants that can disperse into the surrounding environment, leading to potential human exposure through inhalation, ingestion, and direct contact. These pollutants can be transported through air, water, and soil, contributing to long-term environmental contamination
yet their source for this:
> Radiation doses and cancer incidence among the population living within 25 km of three nuclear power plants (NPPs) in Ontario, Canada were investigated for the period 1985 to 2008 for radiation exposure and 1990 to 2008 for cancer incidence. This study design provided at least a five-year latency period between potential radiation exposure and cancer incidence. Around the NPPs, the incidence of childhood cancers, leukemia and non-Hodgkin lymphoma, in young children (aged 0 - 4) was lower than the general Ontario population, but not statistically so. Cancer incidence in children aged 0 - 14 was similar to the Ontario population. Overall, for all ages there was no consistent pattern of cancer incidence (all cancers combined and radio-sensitive cancers) across the population living within 25 km of the three NPPs. Some types of cancers were statistically higher than expected, others were statistically lower than expected, and others were similar to the general Ontario population. Although variations in all cancers combined and radiosensitive cancers were found in this study, the pattern was found to be within the natural variation of cancer in Ontario. During the period 1985 to 2000 (Pickering and Bruce NPPs) and 1985 to 2002 (Darlington NPP) radiation doses to members of the public from the operation of the NPPs, estimated on the basis of a hypothetical individual at the facility fence line, were ≤0.052 mSv/year; while for the period 2001 to 2008 (Pickering and Bruce NPPs) and 2003 to 2008 (Darlington NPP) radiation doses, more realistically estimated using the critical group concept for six age classes, were ≤0.0067 mSv/year. Hence, public doses from environmental releases of radionuclides from Ontario NPPs represent a very small fraction of natural background radiation (1.338 and 2.02 mSv/year) in the regions where the NPPs are located. Our study shows no evidence of childhood leukemia clusters around the three NPPs and that the incidence of all the cancers investigated for all age groups is within the natural variation of the disease in Ontario. The radiation exposure from NPP operation is a small contributor to the public’s total exposure to radiation and is not a plausible explanation for any excess cancers observed within 25 km of any Ontario NPP.
I wonder why none of these researchers just go and grab soil samples around the nuclear power plant and compare those to random samples from any other industrial installation... since it's such an obvious thing to do they no doubt did this, why isn't it in any of the relevant papers? could it be that the results are against their ideological anti-nuclear project?
Try looking a little closer, and you'll find it's not. South Carolina and Tennessee are obvious discrepancies in one direction, as are New York up by Lake Ontario, central Pennsylvania, eastern Washington, and the Iowa-Nebraska border.
Regarding the beer analogy, can anyone on earth survive 365 beer servings of alcohol without dying? Are you demanding research that 365 beers at once is more harmful than 1/day/year?
365 beers even if 0.33l.. one would die of acute electrolytic disbalance while being quite drunk, about same as if one would neither drink nor eat anything but water.
edit: IIRC it takes about 10 liters of water to commit suicide. Depends on body weight of course.
TL;DR: enriched uranium solution was poured into a tank with improper geometry and reached criticality; three workers were severely irradiated, and two of them subsequently died.
I remember someone from the Manhattan Project that suffered the same fate. Is that "commercial nuclear history?"
This article on Douglas Crofut [died 1981] implies that there were several.
"His death was the first of its kind in the United States since the 1940s, when radiation deaths occurred during the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, New Mexico."
It's a technicality, but I think those events don't qualify as both "accident" and "commercial." The Manhattan Project was a government project, not a commercial enterprise. Crofut's exposure seems to have been an attempted suicide, not an accident.
I realize the article is about nuclear plants and accidental exposure to radiation, but it conveniently omits the fact that thousands of people died from radiation when Hiroshima and Nagasaki were nuked. Those bombings were no accident, of course, but from the point of view of the victims, what's the difference? They were subject to forces beyond their control, just like any other accident.
In China in 1992, a cobalt-60 source was lost and picked up by an unsuspecting individual. Three persons in the family died of resulting overexposure;
In Georgia in 1997, a group of border frontier guards became ill and showed signs of radiation-induced skin disease. Eleven servicemen had to be transferred to specialized hospitals in France and Germany. The cause of the exposures was found to be several abandoned caesium-37 and a cobalt-60 sources of varying activities, abandoned in a former military barracks that had been under the control of the former Soviet Union;
In Istanbul, Turkey in 1998, two cobalt-60 sources in their shipping containers were sold as scrap metal and ten persons were inadvertently exposed to radiation and had to be treated for acute radiation syndrome;
In Peru in 1999, a worker put an iridium-192 industrial source in his pocket and suffered severe radiation burns;
The most serious of these accidents occurred in the south-central Brazilian city of Goiânia in September of 1987. he Brazilian Nuclear Energy Commission sent in a team and they discovered that over 240 persons were contaminated with caesium-137, four of whom later died.
These things should be somewhat easy to keep under control, yet we cant. There are currently 90,000 tons of spent fuel in the USA. We keep hearing that the cost of nuclear is cheaper than gas... because we just leave the problem sitting on site. The moment that you either dig the massive hole in the ground to dump this, or build a fuel reprocessing site(s) that economic value pretty much disappears. And fule reprocessing doesn't get rid of the problematic parts, only concentrates them, you still need a hole.
Check out the interview with Dr Bernie Cohen, who did a lot of the early epidemiological work. The interviewer is rather woo, but the professor is as hard-nose a scientist as you could hope for. It makes a good pair because it let him correct misconceptions.
Long story short, Dr Cohen became unpopular after his data showed home radon levels to be negatively correlated with lung cancer risk. The more radon, the lower your risk of lung cancer.
My problem with radiation: the units of exposure are so clumsy. We should have standardized on nanoSieverts as the main unit. The normal background radiation is 200 nSv per hour, and you get acute radiation sickness at 1_000_000_000 nSv. The lethal dose is 5_000_000_000. It really puts things into perspective.
E.g. even 10x the normal background is still ridiculously low.
Also, the LNT model is good enough. It's really the most conservative model that we have, so it makes sense to keep using it. We just need to quantify the risk increases properly.
I don't understand the relevance of the normal background level. The natural background level of mercury is many orders of magnitude below the level that causes acute mercury poisoning. That tells me absolutely nothing about the risks of mercury exposure from industrial activity or accidents.
Wow, this was a cherry-picking peace of misinformation, conveniently ignoring the actual counts of people affected by Chernobyl.
There's no safe dose of radiation, there's only statistics.
And I'm not sure what this article is supposed to justify?
Building power generation technology with the potential to make whole regions unlivable is ok now?
Willfully creating hazards that can affect people for thousands of years, starting with Uranium mining & processing to nuclear waste is a good idea?
Having to fortify a nuclear plant so it can withstand a plane crash (most won't withstand double plane crashes), securing it against terrorist - and then still have it fall into enemy hands that can use it as a bargaining chip (Russians are controlling Zaporizhzhia) is a good idea?
You know what the engineers of Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima had in common?
They thought their plants were safe.
So even if "Radiation totally not bad, actually healthy" is the point here: It is still a tremendously stupid idea to build nuclear power plants when there are much better and cheaper alternatives.
There are studies that show cancer risk is higher near a nuclear plant. The reason is likely that poorer people live near a nuclear plant; it's _probably_ not because of radiation. My point is: Just having nuclear plants nearby lowers the market price of the property. If there _is_ an accident, the market price of many properties drops to zero. That's why no insurance company will insure the full risk of a nuclear accident: the remaining risk is on the population and land owners. (Property owners may get compensated - paied by taxes.)
In Switzerland there is now again the idea to build nuclear plants, by some (I'm pretty sure the political party that initiated this gets a lot of money from the nuclear lobby - unfortunately the money flow is intransparent in Switzerland.) A recent study in Switzerland [1] has shown nuclear plant are not competitive with solar, wind, hydro, and batteries, not even taking into account that accidents are not fully insured.
> There's no safe dose of radiation, there's only statistics.
You need potassium to live; it's radioactive. UVB rays provide vitamin D, but too much can give you skin cancer. Of course it's all a stats game, but (ionizing) radiation plays an important part in our lives and survival.
Of course it's all a stats game, but the stats can play out how much you should worry about it. Living in Denver can expose you to up to twice as much cosmic radiation as somebody living at sea level, yet there are no statistical differences in cancer rates. You don't need to worry about your granite countertops, either (though it's fun to joke about the radioactive stone in the US capital building making congress "toxic").
There's some very suspicious cherry-picking going on with the author's choice of Ukrainian milk and raw numbers (which is never how public health researchers describe impact from things like this, it's per-population stats and relative increases/decreases) about childhood thyroid cancer rates. For an unspecified region, presumably Ukraine, but the author doesn't specify...also suspicious.
Chernobyl is the northern part of Ukraine. The plume was highly directional and initially blew almost directly north into Belarus:
"Radiation impacts on Scandinavia and Germany, where there were major fears about the effects of the fallout, were nugatory"
Well, yeah, because very little ended up in those areas comparatively?
If you wanted to trick the average person into thinking "wow even in the country where the reactor was, there was almost no health impact", the author's repeated choices in terms of information presented would be a fantastic way to do so.
"The study carried out in Minsk showed 40-fold increase of the incidence of thyroid cancer in the years 1986-1994, in comparison to the period 1977-1985. An increase of the incidence of thyroid cancer has generally been observed in many countries after the Chernobyl accident."
Later the author goes completely off the rails with whataboutism talking about Bhopal (which he claims isn't well known. I say: it's probably one of the most famous chemical industry disasters of all time? and the China dam disaster, which is pretty well known, mostly because nuclear proponents bring it up incessantly.)
This is nearly as bad as the nuclear proponents who always compare nuclear to coal, when in the US alone solar is what's replacing nuclear at a ratio of 6MW of solar for every 1MW of nuclear, and coal has been getting phased out for well over a decade because it's expensive.
They studied the population in Hiroshima and Nagasaki for generations and found that in the first generations after the bombs there were elevated levels of hard-tissue cancers and in later generations elevated levels of soft-tissue/blood cancers. They're still dealing with the population effects of radiation 75-years later.
No one will be able to live in Chernobyl or Fukushima for hundreds of years. Or, well, they could but it would be stupid.
Much of the Fukushima area is inhabited again (the exclusion zone has shrunk from an original 1250km2 down to 371) and there is ample evidence that the overreaction evacuation did a lot more harm than good.
Reminded of something that Geraldine Thomas, founder of the Chernobyl Tissue Bank, wrote when the Fukushima drama was going on, "Look at the science – smoking and obesity are more harmful than radiation":
* https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2011/apr/26/obesity-...
> I can assure you that none of us are in the pay of the nuclear industry. I was anti-nuclear until I worked on the after effects of the Chernobyl accident – now I am very pro-nuclear as I realise that we have an unwarranted fear of radiation – probably due to all the rubbish about a nuclear winter we were fed during the Cold War.[10]
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geraldine_Thomas
Individuals have a fair degree of control over whether they smoke or overeat. They have little to no control over a nuclear accident that may subject them to an indeterminate amount of radiation.
That doesn't even make any sense. How can you compare the harm of completely different things with completely different mechanisms and exposures? And why would nuclear winter have anything to do with it?
> why would nuclear winter have anything to do with it?
Because humans are creatures of association, not logic.
Surely that the West's perception (especially the popular narrative) of Chernobyl is tinted with Cold War logic is self-evident?
Surely you jest Sir. It's obvious, plain as day to any one who has eyes and can read.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism
> Fifteen people have already died of these cancers
Don't forget that USSR and Belarus authorities did everything to attribute illnesses to anything but radiation. And it's really hard to prove that some illness is _due_ to radiation anyway. The reporting was way less transparent and non-biased than in democratic countries.
> Drinking one beer a night for a year is a lot less harmful than drinking 365 beers in one go. The same applies to radiation exposure, but regulation doesn’t agree.
I know I may be overreacting, but when the dentists try to convince me that the annual x-ray of my family members is the same as being outside in the sun for a whole day, I try to explain it with a similar analogy; getting exposed to small amounts of x-ray over a long period is not the same as getting exposed to all of it in a fraction of a second.
They insist it because it is covered by insurance, and that I shouldn't worry about the cost. I have to clarify that the monetary cost is not my primary concern.
I have now learnt to simply say No, and agree to sign a waiver that's required by the insurance company.
I am okay with getting the x-ray if a professional has a legitimate reason to suspect there's something hidden that can be better investigated by getting an x-ray. My family has received x-ray, MRI, CT scans, ultrasound, etc. but only when its benefits outweigh the risks; e.g. bone fracture, pregnancy, concussion, etc.
As I said, I may be overreacting, but I'd like to err on the side of caution when it comes to my kids' and family's long-term health.
edit: s/by I'd like/but I'd like/
> As I said, I may be overreacting, by I'd like to err on the side of caution when it comes to my kids' and family's long-term health.
But isn't it a trade off, like many things in life? I don't think refusing the x-ray is necessarily erring on the side of caution. You may miss a relevant diagnostic. You have to weigh the probability and impact of the x-ray doing harm vs not getting the routine x-ray and failing to discover something harmful in time.
> But isn't it a trade off, like many things in life?
It absolutely is. For example, as soon as I turned 45, I got colonoscopy done, because the benefit of getting tested outweighed the cost of getting tested.
So if the dentist says, I suspect there's some rot, or my family member has started complaining of toothache, I would have no hesitation to get the x-ray, if recommended. But it is the regular, nonchalant nature of annual dental x-ray procedures that concerns me.
Paradoxically active ongoing research suggests that the same dose of (medically determined) radiation delivered over a very short period of time increases its efficacy against the cancer compared to damage to the surrounding tissue.
Here's one: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10640654/
It's interesting that the core of this effect - that large doses delivered on timescales of a second or less significantly reduce normal tissue toxicity - was actually observed over 40 years ago, e.g.:
https://radiation-research.kglmeridian.com/view/journals/rar...
Some of the authors of that work were still active when the "Flash" concept came around again, and to hear them tell the story they tried to get funding to test it in tumour-bearing mice, but both their lab heads and external funders were sure the effect would be the same in tumours as normal tissue, and so wouldn't fund the work.
They eventually moved on to other things, and it needed a few decades for someone with enough soft money to give it a go and kick off this new research field.
How's that paradoxical? Wouldn't TFA would seem to support findings of that sort?
Even before Linear No Threshold was a thing scientists were doing experiments showing that dosing fruit flies with radiation all at once would lead to a highly mutated second generation, but spreading that radiation out over the course of a month wouldn't.
Most radiobiological effects for acute exposures are actually quadratic in dose - this applies to things like mutations, chromosome aberrations, and lethal events.
The quadratic term relates (loosely) to interactions between damage from multiple ionising particles which are present in cells at the same time. When you protract exposures, more damage is repaired before subsequent ionising particles arrive, and you see a reduction in the quadratic term, to effectively a linear form at very low dose rates.
So it's not surprising that spreading the radiation out significantly reduces the yield of biological events, but actually supports a linear trend for mutation yield in low-dose and low dose-rate conditions. (Whether that tracks linearly in turn to cancer risk, on the other hand, is a topic of much more debate.)
> a topic of much more debate.
People who want to step away from linear no threshold seem to ignore the extreme likelihood people will get cancer at some point. Which means for any given population there will be many people who are really close to the threshold of getting cancer.
Studying the effects of radiation on healthy tissue isn’t therefore representative of the general population. You need population level data, and the sensitivity just isn’t there to be able to detect if their model is correct or if linear no threshold is correct etc.
Cancer cured (in mice)!
Radiation response shown to be sub-linear (in flies)!
At the time (the 1950s) evidence from fruit flies was essentially all the evidence there was. But as the article points out we have pretty good data showing it works the same way in humans.
I do not agree that they have good data showing it works the same in humans. I see a lot of stretching of datasets, a lot of squinting, and above all a lot of hope!
"Lie" is such a click-baity triggering word to use here. Sounds more like they overstated the harm of cumulative small doses of radiation.
But, I mostly just skimmed through the beginning of the article, so maybe it gets better, like maybe the author reveals an international cabal of influential anti-nuclear activists who are holding human progress back.
> Sounds more like they overstated the harm of cumulative small doses of radiation.
Not even that, they simply didn’t know because they couldn’t measure, so they took a conservative approach.
Btw you can count me in to the cabal of anti-nuclear activists. Humans simply are too greedy and incompetent to manage the technology responsibly over the long term. We’ve already irreversibly altered the biosphere with the nuclear activity we’ve engaged in so far. Time for it to stop.
Your not wrong, but you seem to be missing one significant detail: we have altered the biosphere even more by not engaging in nuclear activity, instead opting for less-scary-but-worse alternatives like coal, oil and gas.
You're not wrong, but you seem to be missing one significant detail: if we had invested in renewable energy resources like solar and wind to begin with, we wouldn't have needed (as much) assistance from nuclear, coal, oil, and gas.
Historically, yes. We have good alternatives now, though. What’s stopping us moving off carbon fuel is not the viability of alternatives.
Unless by "viability" you're completely ignoring price, I disagree (I would argue that excessively expensive solutions aren't viable). We don't have good alternatives to gas (carbon fuel) peakers yet. Nor is winter generation a solved problem. Non-nuclear carbon-free generation needs a tremendous amount of battery storage to get to 0% carbon-emitting.
That is much, much cheaper than nuclear at today's prices.
Up to how many hours of battery capacity?
a 100% wind solar storage grid really isn't viable.
This could be a convincing argument 70 years ago but we have other options now - mostly batteries and renewables.
"But what about the cobalt mines?" - that damage is limited in both space and time
The problem is that stopping nuclear activity has ancillary effects -- like increased carbon emissions -- that are potentially much more harmful than the radiation. The results of technological decisions are never independent of one another.
In theory. But in fact, attempting to build nuclear power plants results in big increases in electric rates, and the supposed benefits of nuclear power end up being delayed by many years and in many cases decades.
The effect of trying and failing to build nuclear power plants on time and on budget uses up many billions in capital that could've been applied to reliable delivery of renewables.
Even the supposedly efficient French nuclear power program vastly underestimated decommissioning costs.
In other words project risk for nuclear is hideously expensive, even when you think you've dodged project risk problems, there's another whole very expensive project in decommissioning that has its own set of project risks.
> attempting to build nuclear power plants results in big increases in electric rates
Largely due to the costs of complying with draconian regulatory regimes.
Don't forget
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturally_occurring_radioactiv...
considerable amounts of low-level radiation is emitted by fossil fuel production and use as well as and construction materials.
Global CO2 emissions would be drastically lower if people hadn't opposed nuclear energy so irrationally. No other technology can produce 1.2GW of zero CO2 electricity anywhere you want.
Alright, let's say the author is right and low-level radiation exposure is not harmful. Then... what? If a little radiation is not harmful, then we should be more relaxed about radiation, deregulate it and allow companies to contaminate our living spaces? Is that why the argument is being made?
But as the article mentions, in those Taiwanese flats there were large variations in radiation levels in different spots in the building. If we allow radioactive contamination everywhere, will it be neatly spread out at harmless levels? How would you know? What if you happen to ingest traces of the harmlessly radioactive material now surrounding you?
> Drinking one beer a night for a year is a lot less harmful than drinking 365 beers in one go. The same applies to radiation exposure, but regulation doesn’t agree.
Stating something confidently doesn't make it true. Show me the data.
The article is long on emotion, exposition, but very short on the data.
There's a big concerted effort to change this regulation, but it's not based on data, it's based on feelings.
It's quite likely that there's non-linear response, but it could just as easily be that the dose that's tolerated well in a 1 day exposure, might have higher risk when spread out over 365 days. When they say something like:
> nor any major chromosomal aberrations.
They don't have the technology to measure DNA damage that might be significant. I've spent some time in the past examining the REBC dataset of whole-genome sequencing of tumors of thyroid cancers from Chornobyl, where you actually do see the types of translocations that cause cancer from radiation.
We can't detect these types of translocations in non-cancerous tissue. The only reason we can see them in cancer is that the cancer has replicated billions of times, giving us many many many copies of the translocation to put through DNA sequencing. Doing the type of sequencing where we identify translocations that happen in individual cells, before the cell has become cancerous, would require a good amount of engineering effort, and I've never seen anything like it. And in 2006, when the study was published, we barely had any of the latest sequencing technologies.
> Chen interpreted this as evidence of the health benefits of radiation. This theory, known as hormesis, holds that low doses of stressors, including ionizing radiation, can improve health (in this case, reducing cancer risk) by triggering the body’s repair systems in much the same way that exercise improves fitness by stressing the cardiovascular system. While popular among a small community of researchers, it has not gained widespread acceptance due to limited and conflicting evidence in humans.
Yes, limited and conflicting evidence in humans. Yet these sorts of propaganda efforts are pushing hard on the idea being present, being obvious.
This article is not science, despite trying to put on airs of science. The data does not support their claims.
Let's see actual review articles published making these claims that aggregate over large numbers of small data. Let's see whether such aggregation claims hold up on scrutiny from those that have spent a lot of time thinking about this.
The active regulatory push to invalidate LNT should follow the science, not be ahead of the science.
Plus, the whole goal of this, to somehow how make nuclear construction cheaper, does not seem to be well served by changing LNT. The costs of nuclear are massive because it's a big constructuon project with lots of coordination. Making concrete walls 50% as thick is going to do very little to lessen the massive costs, which are related to construction productivity, or rather the lack of it in the West.
It seems like the nuclear industry tries to focus on anything except the one thing that will actually make it succeed: get really good at construction.
> There's a big concerted effort to change this regulation, but it's not based on data, it's based on feelings.
Is the regulation based on hard, systematic and replicated data? Looks based on emotion (fear, greed) too
in a world where there is no safe low radiation dose, it would be quite easy to generate the data to demonstrate this. so either low doses cause no harm or cause such minimal harm as to be safely disregarded.
luckily the government is moving away from your position: https://www.eenews.net/articles/nrc-considers-eliminating-ha...
not having cheaper nuclear energy imposes a far greater cost on society.
No safe low radiation dose, you say? Well then, you had better stay away from red meat, brazil nuts and even bananas.
Consumed them already, you say? Well I guess you're screwed then.
Luckily? The NRC is considering it, hopefully they follow science rather than popular propaganda.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-026-69285-4
> in a world where there is no safe low radiation dose, it would be quite easy to generate the data to demonstrate this.
This is the classic fallacy seeing an absence of evidence and using that as evidence of absence!
And the lack of evidence goes both ways, it should be easy to show that current regulations are fully safe by doing epidemiology to show that living close to a nuclear power plant carries no additional risk!
So let's go looking for those epidemiological studies...
> May 19 2026 - Does Proximity to Nuclear Power Plants Increase Cancer Risk? New research finds correlation between disease and living close to a facility
> Koutrakis says that his advisee’s research is notable because it is the first series of studies to systematically demonstrate associations between residential proximity to nuclear power plants and cancer outcomes across multiple settings using large, population-based datasets. “This work fills a critical gap in the literature by providing large-scale, systematic evidence on a question that has remained unresolved for decades.”
https://gsas.harvard.edu/news/does-proximity-nuclear-power-p...
And what do they see?
> Using nationwide mortality data from 2000-2018, we assess long-term spatial patterns of cancer mortality in relation to proximity to nuclear facilities while accounting for socioeconomic, demographic, behavioral, environmental, and healthcare factors. Cancer mortality is higher across multiple age groups in both males and females, with the strongest associations among older adults, males aged 65–74 and females aged 55–64.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-026-69285-4
So there's a dose-response curve for cancer based on living close to a nuclear power plant. This survives correction for other confounders.
Notably, this is correlation not causation, but the only evidence getting close to disproving LNT actual leans towards super-linear, rather than sub-linear, correct?
I am looking at their county level distance-to-power-plant map and it's literally xkcd 1138.
Then you are not understanding it. Looking at a map of people not close to power plants would show the same rough picture. People live where people live, of course! But proximity to nuclear power plants has higher incidence of cancer.
What is different about this study that's worthy of a national map is that it's an evaluation of national data, after having first found the discovery on smaller state level datasets.
there is a small problem though, everything in those power-plants is monitored. so there is no radiation increase anywhere to be found.
if it's the pollutants as the Nature paper claims without evidence, then any other industrial plant would also be emitting those. in fact, coal power plants will emit much more. chemical pollutants are no less dangerous than radioactive ones when the radioactive ones are too low to measure (that is not to say that coal power-plants don't produce radioactive pollutants, they do much more than nuclear power plants).
yet their source for this: I wonder why none of these researchers just go and grab soil samples around the nuclear power plant and compare those to random samples from any other industrial installation... since it's such an obvious thing to do they no doubt did this, why isn't it in any of the relevant papers? could it be that the results are against their ideological anti-nuclear project?Try looking a little closer, and you'll find it's not. South Carolina and Tennessee are obvious discrepancies in one direction, as are New York up by Lake Ontario, central Pennsylvania, eastern Washington, and the Iowa-Nebraska border.
Regarding the beer analogy, can anyone on earth survive 365 beer servings of alcohol without dying? Are you demanding research that 365 beers at once is more harmful than 1/day/year?
365 beers even if 0.33l.. one would die of acute electrolytic disbalance while being quite drunk, about same as if one would neither drink nor eat anything but water.
edit: IIRC it takes about 10 liters of water to commit suicide. Depends on body weight of course.
> Chernobyl is the only accident in commercial nuclear history that has exposed people to large enough doses of radiation to poison and kill them.
The Tokaimura incident (Japan, 1999) comes to mind as a counterexample.
https://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/Publications/PDF/TOAC_web.pdf
TL;DR: enriched uranium solution was poured into a tank with improper geometry and reached criticality; three workers were severely irradiated, and two of them subsequently died.
I remember someone from the Manhattan Project that suffered the same fate. Is that "commercial nuclear history?"
This article on Douglas Crofut [died 1981] implies that there were several.
"His death was the first of its kind in the United States since the 1940s, when radiation deaths occurred during the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, New Mexico."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Crofut
It turns out that there were two Manhattan Project fatalities, one in 1945, and one in 1946.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Daghlian
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Slotin
It's a technicality, but I think those events don't qualify as both "accident" and "commercial." The Manhattan Project was a government project, not a commercial enterprise. Crofut's exposure seems to have been an attempted suicide, not an accident.
I realize the article is about nuclear plants and accidental exposure to radiation, but it conveniently omits the fact that thousands of people died from radiation when Hiroshima and Nagasaki were nuked. Those bombings were no accident, of course, but from the point of view of the victims, what's the difference? They were subject to forces beyond their control, just like any other accident.
"First of its kind since the 1940s" still seems a little questionable given the Cecil Kelley incident (Los Alamos, 1958).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cecil_Kelley_criticality_accid...
Interestingly, both the Tokaimura and Kelley incidents involved a radioactive solution in an unfavorable geometry.
> Chernobyl is the only accident in commercial nuclear history...
https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/pressreleases/inadequate-con...
Some of the more notable such accidents include:
In China in 1992, a cobalt-60 source was lost and picked up by an unsuspecting individual. Three persons in the family died of resulting overexposure;
In Georgia in 1997, a group of border frontier guards became ill and showed signs of radiation-induced skin disease. Eleven servicemen had to be transferred to specialized hospitals in France and Germany. The cause of the exposures was found to be several abandoned caesium-37 and a cobalt-60 sources of varying activities, abandoned in a former military barracks that had been under the control of the former Soviet Union;
In Istanbul, Turkey in 1998, two cobalt-60 sources in their shipping containers were sold as scrap metal and ten persons were inadvertently exposed to radiation and had to be treated for acute radiation syndrome;
In Peru in 1999, a worker put an iridium-192 industrial source in his pocket and suffered severe radiation burns;
The most serious of these accidents occurred in the south-central Brazilian city of Goiânia in September of 1987. he Brazilian Nuclear Energy Commission sent in a team and they discovered that over 240 persons were contaminated with caesium-137, four of whom later died.
These things should be somewhat easy to keep under control, yet we cant. There are currently 90,000 tons of spent fuel in the USA. We keep hearing that the cost of nuclear is cheaper than gas... because we just leave the problem sitting on site. The moment that you either dig the massive hole in the ground to dump this, or build a fuel reprocessing site(s) that economic value pretty much disappears. And fule reprocessing doesn't get rid of the problematic parts, only concentrates them, you still need a hole.
It was contained and therefore not worth mentioning. Someone got blown up by the tyre he was pumping up, no sweat.
What's missing is the Mayak accident / Kyshtym disaster, 1957.
It also did not result in any world-ending stuff. People died, is all.
Only ~35% of women in the UK support nuclear power while ~65% of men do.
https://spectator.com/article/why-are-women-so-anti-nuclear/
So technically, if one extrapolates the best case scenario, if women wouldn't have voting rights, we'd already have nuclear power everywhere.
Though to be fair, this varies from country to country and in some countries even women are over 50%.
But in many countries women are under 50% while men are seemingly always over 50%.
What are you trying to say? Women shouldn't be allowed to vote?
Women, at least in the USA, are going to college and graduating at a higher rate than guys. They have a more legitimate opinion.
To be honest, i have chud fatigue.
> nugatory
til
Same with UV radiation (sunlight).
Skeptical? I was too.
Check out the interview with Dr Bernie Cohen, who did a lot of the early epidemiological work. The interviewer is rather woo, but the professor is as hard-nose a scientist as you could hope for. It makes a good pair because it let him correct misconceptions.
Long story short, Dr Cohen became unpopular after his data showed home radon levels to be negatively correlated with lung cancer risk. The more radon, the lower your risk of lung cancer.
Part 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xhkBLhw-8pk
Part 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SuUFiUoynPo
technically not a lie, and the article need to show more data
My problem with radiation: the units of exposure are so clumsy. We should have standardized on nanoSieverts as the main unit. The normal background radiation is 200 nSv per hour, and you get acute radiation sickness at 1_000_000_000 nSv. The lethal dose is 5_000_000_000. It really puts things into perspective.
E.g. even 10x the normal background is still ridiculously low.
Also, the LNT model is good enough. It's really the most conservative model that we have, so it makes sense to keep using it. We just need to quantify the risk increases properly.
I don't understand the relevance of the normal background level. The natural background level of mercury is many orders of magnitude below the level that causes acute mercury poisoning. That tells me absolutely nothing about the risks of mercury exposure from industrial activity or accidents.
I remember breathless editorials about "the RADIATION is at TEN TIMES the normal levels we need to shut down EVERYTHING"!
These numbers really need to be put into proper perspective.
Wow, this was a cherry-picking peace of misinformation, conveniently ignoring the actual counts of people affected by Chernobyl.
There's no safe dose of radiation, there's only statistics.
And I'm not sure what this article is supposed to justify? Building power generation technology with the potential to make whole regions unlivable is ok now?
Willfully creating hazards that can affect people for thousands of years, starting with Uranium mining & processing to nuclear waste is a good idea?
Having to fortify a nuclear plant so it can withstand a plane crash (most won't withstand double plane crashes), securing it against terrorist - and then still have it fall into enemy hands that can use it as a bargaining chip (Russians are controlling Zaporizhzhia) is a good idea?
You know what the engineers of Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima had in common? They thought their plants were safe.
So even if "Radiation totally not bad, actually healthy" is the point here: It is still a tremendously stupid idea to build nuclear power plants when there are much better and cheaper alternatives.
There are studies that show cancer risk is higher near a nuclear plant. The reason is likely that poorer people live near a nuclear plant; it's _probably_ not because of radiation. My point is: Just having nuclear plants nearby lowers the market price of the property. If there _is_ an accident, the market price of many properties drops to zero. That's why no insurance company will insure the full risk of a nuclear accident: the remaining risk is on the population and land owners. (Property owners may get compensated - paied by taxes.)
In Switzerland there is now again the idea to build nuclear plants, by some (I'm pretty sure the political party that initiated this gets a lot of money from the nuclear lobby - unfortunately the money flow is intransparent in Switzerland.) A recent study in Switzerland [1] has shown nuclear plant are not competitive with solar, wind, hydro, and batteries, not even taking into account that accidents are not fully insured.
[1] https://www.20min.ch/story/akw-debatte-neue-atomkraftwerke-l...
> There's no safe dose of radiation, there's only statistics.
You need potassium to live; it's radioactive. UVB rays provide vitamin D, but too much can give you skin cancer. Of course it's all a stats game, but (ionizing) radiation plays an important part in our lives and survival.
Of course it's all a stats game, but the stats can play out how much you should worry about it. Living in Denver can expose you to up to twice as much cosmic radiation as somebody living at sea level, yet there are no statistical differences in cancer rates. You don't need to worry about your granite countertops, either (though it's fun to joke about the radioactive stone in the US capital building making congress "toxic").
> ignoring the actual counts of people affected by Chernobyl.
Do you know what's the count?
> There's no safe dose of radiation,
The article claims the opposite with sources.
> there's only statistics.
You forgot about lies.
Very odd risk calculations seem to be afoot here
> there are much better and cheaper alternatives.
Such as? (of course with the same energy density and 24/7 capacities)
There's some very suspicious cherry-picking going on with the author's choice of Ukrainian milk and raw numbers (which is never how public health researchers describe impact from things like this, it's per-population stats and relative increases/decreases) about childhood thyroid cancer rates. For an unspecified region, presumably Ukraine, but the author doesn't specify...also suspicious.
Chernobyl is the northern part of Ukraine. The plume was highly directional and initially blew almost directly north into Belarus:
https://radioactivity.eu.com/articles/nuclearenergy/chernoby...
Not surprisingly, the majority of contamination was, overwhelmingly, in Belarus:
https://radioactivity.eu.com/articles/nuclearenergy/chernoby...
The author goes on:
"Radiation impacts on Scandinavia and Germany, where there were major fears about the effects of the fallout, were nugatory"
Well, yeah, because very little ended up in those areas comparatively?
If you wanted to trick the average person into thinking "wow even in the country where the reactor was, there was almost no health impact", the author's repeated choices in terms of information presented would be a fantastic way to do so.
The real facts: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16832789/
"The study carried out in Minsk showed 40-fold increase of the incidence of thyroid cancer in the years 1986-1994, in comparison to the period 1977-1985. An increase of the incidence of thyroid cancer has generally been observed in many countries after the Chernobyl accident."
Later the author goes completely off the rails with whataboutism talking about Bhopal (which he claims isn't well known. I say: it's probably one of the most famous chemical industry disasters of all time? and the China dam disaster, which is pretty well known, mostly because nuclear proponents bring it up incessantly.)
This is nearly as bad as the nuclear proponents who always compare nuclear to coal, when in the US alone solar is what's replacing nuclear at a ratio of 6MW of solar for every 1MW of nuclear, and coal has been getting phased out for well over a decade because it's expensive.
They studied the population in Hiroshima and Nagasaki for generations and found that in the first generations after the bombs there were elevated levels of hard-tissue cancers and in later generations elevated levels of soft-tissue/blood cancers. They're still dealing with the population effects of radiation 75-years later.
No one will be able to live in Chernobyl or Fukushima for hundreds of years. Or, well, they could but it would be stupid.
Much of the Fukushima area is inhabited again (the exclusion zone has shrunk from an original 1250km2 down to 371) and there is ample evidence that the overreaction evacuation did a lot more harm than good.
Around 98% of Fukushima is inhabited again, unless of course you meant the NPP itself, but people were not living in a power plant to begin with.
That’s the entirety of the prefecture, most of which had not been evacuated.