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The Radiation Exposure Lie

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Re: The Radiation Exposure Lie

#31

Post by BrandoElFollito »

beders wrote: post #24

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,…

> there are much better and cheaper alternatives.

Such as? (of course with the same energy density and 24/7 capacities)

Re: The Radiation Exposure Lie

#32

Post by sjmcmahon »

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.

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.)

Re: The Radiation Exposure Lie

#33

Post by schiffern »

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

Re: The Radiation Exposure Lie

#34

Post by lisper »

antonvs wrote: post #30
fshafique wrote: post #26

"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 nucl…

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.

Re: The Radiation Exposure Lie

#35

Post by amarant »

antonvs wrote: post #30
fshafique wrote: post #26

"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 nucl…

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.

Re: The Radiation Exposure Lie

#36

Post by PaulHoule »

lisper wrote: post #34
antonvs wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 nucl…

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.

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.

Re: The Radiation Exposure Lie

#37

Post by microgpt »

amarant wrote: post #35
antonvs wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 nucl…

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.

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

Re: The Radiation Exposure Lie

#38

Post by havefunbesafe »

beders wrote: post #24

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,…

Very odd risk calculations seem to be afoot here

Re: The Radiation Exposure Lie

#39

Post by antonvs »

amarant wrote: post #35
antonvs wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 nucl…

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.

Historically, yes. We have good alternatives now, though. What’s stopping us moving off carbon fuel is not the viability of alternatives.

Re: The Radiation Exposure Lie

#40

Post by epistasis »

rozab wrote: post #25
epistasis wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

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