The Radiation Exposure Lie

This Wikipedia article seems completely irrelevant to the quote you posted. They're clearly talking about commercial nuclear energy plants, not orphan sources from radiography and radiotherapy machines.

> Do you know what's the count?

No one does. https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190725-will-we-ever-kno... and we did not take advantage of the event to get better data.

And were not done at that site. It looks like they are going to have to replace the whole New Safe Containment structure. https://world-nuclear-news.org/articles/chernobyl-protective...

No one is in a rush to do that.

Chernobyl is going to be a problem on a time scale that most people can not comprehend. It already requires a "atomic priesthood" kind of outlook... https://www.zygonjournal.org/article/id/14327/

>rubbish about a nuclear winter we were fed during the Cold War

If it weren't for the deterrent factor in the radiation narrative, the Cold War would've become hotter - and there is some truth in the observation that younger generations, not having had this fear of radiation inculcated in them, are too flippant about the idea of a nuclear hot war as a consequence.

So I hope folks will stop thinking that the radiation factor is 'rubbish', swinging the needle the other direction, somehow. Its disheartening to talk to youth these days who had no clue of how terrified we all were in the 80's with the idea of nuclear annihilation, and so feel that a 'hot nuke against Russia would be "okay"' ..

YMMV on the annual x-ray thing. I used to mostly think the same as you. Expensive and unnecessary risk for no real benefit.

I skipped my x-rays for 3-4 years due to dropping my long term dentist for unrelated reasons.

I recently went to a new dentist due to a previous filling cracking and had the regular x-ray done as part of routine new patient intake.

The x-ray caught the problem in another tooth done at the same time - rot behind a filling that was not visible just by looking. The same thing happened on the tooth that cracked, and had I caught it earlier I wouldn’t have had to have a crown done on it. It’s only a matter of time now until it needs a root canal due to how much material had rotted during those few years between x-rays. Most likely it was shoddy work on the two fillings be previous dentist, but in general fillings have a limited lifetime, they will generally fail at some point and need redoing. A small gap can let bacteria in and starting growing where you can’t see it and a brush won’t reach.

The annual x-ray likely saved me from another crown since the material loss was less due to being caught relatively early. $70 to remove the old filling and refill it vs a $2200 crown.

Xray also caught a pretty serious bone infection issue due to a birth defect combining in an unfortunate way with a sports injury from my teens. Although that one probably would have been done in time due to my two front teeth starting to wiggle I guess. Would have been a couple more years of bone loss though, and and even longer recovery time after the bone graft. And likely more than one implant needed vs the single one I have now.

Your personal risk tolerance and how you weigh things of course is very individualistic and only you can set it. Just tossing one random datapoint out there.

The list is entirely relevant - the article itself talks about radiation and spends half the text analyzing the result of exactly the kind of exposure that the wikipedia article has several examples of:

"There are cases of Keralans exposed to sand containing thorium; Manhattan Project scientists who inhaled so much plutonium that they peed it out; early British radiologists who worked without any protection from the X-rays they worked with. "

But the article avoided the ones that caused fatalities, despite there being many, many examples.

Why did it do that? Why cherry-pick harmless examples to argue that something is harmless when there are many, many examples that show the opposite?

The explanation is revealed quickly - while the article pretends to talk about low-level radiation being harmless, which is frankly entirely uncontroversial, it is actually using that to try to argue that nuclear power is over-regulated:

"the world’s international radiation protection regime is based on the idea that any release of radioactive material from a nuclear power plant is intolerable. This has led to regulations that have increased the costs of nuclear electricity over time to the point where it is widely considered a slow, backward, and ineffective technology. "

But the safety protocols for nuclear power are NOT based on worries from low-level radiation exposure, they are based on the known risks and dangers of HIGH radiation exposure!

If anything the current problem with nuclear power plans is a lack of respect for how dangerous it actually is.

Nuclear power has been allowed to operate with nowhere near the security measures it requires for decades. The realization of the dangers have so far mostly been discovered by close calls - the 9/11 hijackers at one point planned to hit a nuclear plant. Oops, nuclear plants worldwide were upgraded with security measures to handle passenger jets crashing into them. At least one.

Fukushima had bad reserve power. Oops, let's ensure we have better reserve power. The Sellafield site, The Asse II mine - Oops - We need better storage.

(https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/dec/05/sellafield-...)

We have gotten reminders of how lax the security of nuclear power is many, many times, but so far we have never had a worst case scenario. And because of that, articles like this one pop up claiming it's safe. But it's a lie.

The actual truth is that operating a nuclear power plant safely takes enormous effort and is so expensive no company can do it profitably. The cost always gets shifted to governments.