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The Radiation Exposure Lie

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Re: The Radiation Exposure Lie

#11

Post by teravor »

epistasis wrote: post #4

> 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…

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.

Re: The Radiation Exposure Lie

#12

Post by Symmetry »

epistasis wrote: post #10
Symmetry wrote: post #9

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.

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.

Re: The Radiation Exposure Lie

#13

Post by formerly_proven »

comrade1234 wrote: post #7

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 co…

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.

Re: The Radiation Exposure Lie

#14

Post by comrade1234 »

the_af wrote: post #8
comrade1234 wrote: post #3

[flagged]

> I'd rather not drink radioactive milk, eat radioactive mushrooms and pork [...] Boy (or gal), do I have news for you... More seriously, whether the author is right or wrong (I cannot judge), assessing these things scientifically is warranted. You cannot simply appeal to emotions or alleged common sense.

[flagged]

Re: The Radiation Exposure Lie

#15

Post by epistasis »

teravor wrote: post #11
epistasis wrote: post #4

> 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…

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.

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?

Re: The Radiation Exposure Lie

#17

Post by masklinn »

comrade1234 wrote: post #7

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 co…

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.

Re: The Radiation Exposure Lie

#18

Post by glitchc »

teravor wrote: post #11
epistasis wrote: post #4

> 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…

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.

Re: The Radiation Exposure Lie

#19

Post by throw0101a »

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

Re: The Radiation Exposure Lie

#20

Post by masklinn »

formerly_proven wrote: post #13
comrade1234 wrote: post #7

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 co…

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.
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