* 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]
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/
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.
Here's one: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10640654/
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?
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.
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.
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.
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%.
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.
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.
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.
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.
No one will be able to live in Chernobyl or Fukushima for hundreds of years. Or, well, they could but it would be stupid.
