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The Radiation Exposure Lie

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Re: The Radiation Exposure Lie

#81

Post by kmoser »

chasil wrote: post #59
duskwuff wrote: post #48

> 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 irradiate…

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…

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.

Re: The Radiation Exposure Lie

#82

Post by UltraSane »

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…

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.

Re: The Radiation Exposure Lie

#83

Post by UltraSane »

antonvs wrote: post #39
amarant wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

a 100% wind solar storage grid really isn't viable.

Re: The Radiation Exposure Lie

#84

Post by cwillu »

glitchc wrote: post #18
teravor wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I believe you misread the comment you are replying to.

Re: The Radiation Exposure Lie

#85

Post by ZeroGravitas »

m3047 wrote: post #16

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/

Is it relevant that the paper linked has been retracted?

> The Editors-in-Chief have retracted this article. An investigation by the journal found evidence of authorship manipulation. The Editors-in-Chief therefore no longer have confidence in the provenance and reliability of the article contents. The authors disagree with the decision to retract.

Re: The Radiation Exposure Lie

#86

Post by Kon5ole »

>Chernobyl is the only accident in commercial nuclear history that has exposed people to large enough doses of radiation to poison and kill them.

This is not true, it wasn't the only and not even the first. Some examples are collected in this list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_orphan_source_incident...

The argument is also an annoyingly common attempt to sell the idea that nuclear power is not dangerous because there haven't been worst-case accidents yet.

But we know they can happen and what the consequences would be, so it's entirely irrelevant what has happened so far.

Both Fukushima and Chernobyl are active incidents ongoing as we speak, we don't know how bad even they will turn out to be.

Re: The Radiation Exposure Lie

#87

Post by bariumbitmap »

This article makes some good points but is missing a lot of the larger context. It doesn't use this phrase, but the topic it discusses is called the linear no-threshold (LNT) model:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_no-threshold_model

The relevant sub-field of physics that studies the effects of radiation is called health physics:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_physics

Whether and how to replace the LNT model is one of the most controversial topics in health physics. The most basic modification to the model is to assign a threshold, but for that we need better research to establish a threshold for various circumstances. In the US, the Department of Energy started a research program to study low doses of radiation in 1999:

https://www.science.org/content/article/us-lawmakers-looking...

This was cancelled in 2016 and later revived in 2021:

https://www.aip.org/fyi/2021/academies-panel-consider-future...

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK552793/

https://www.nationalacademies.org/read/26434/chapter/3

The US agency that regulates radioactive emissions, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), still uses the LNT. The NRC is a conservative agency (in the sense of being averse to change) and they are required by law to regulate for protection of the public. They won't change regulations if there is no consensus on what to replace LNT with. They were petitioned to change it in 2015 and rejected the petition in 2021:

https://jnm.snmjournals.org/content/62/11/17N

https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2021/08/17/2021-17...

A majority of adults in the US now favor nuclear power, so there is some basis for cautious optimism of continued research and potential regulatory changes in this area:

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/10/16/support-f...

https://pubs.naruc.org/pub/B78A069C-1866-DAAC-99FB-DF480282D...

Re: The Radiation Exposure Lie

#88

Post by Kon5ole »

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.

>we have altered the biosphere even more by not engaging in nuclear activity

You imply that we could have made enough nuclear plants to replace coal, oil and gas and that would have prevented the effects of fossil fuel consumption.

That's not the case. It would have been entirely impossible to make enough plants to even replace coal and oil fast enough, and even if we did, electricity is only 25% of emissions.

Re: The Radiation Exposure Lie

#89

Post by freetonik »

Anyone who lived in USSR, or otherwise familiar with the way soviet authorities operate, would know not to trust any official data from USSR. I personally treat any statistics and data from the soviet government to be unreliable to the degree of meaninglessness.

So, in my eyes, there is no info available about the true health consequences of the Chernobyl catastrophe in Ukraine and Belarus.

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