> 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.<p>Stating something confidently doesn't make it true. Show me the data.<p>The article is long on emotion, exposition, but very short on the data.<p>There's a big concerted effort to change this regulation, but it's not based on data, it's based on feelings.<p>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:<p>> nor any major chromosomal aberrations.<p>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 <i>do</i> see the types of translocations that cause cancer from radiation.<p>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 <i>any</i> of the latest sequencing technologies.<p>> 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.<p>Yes, limited and conflicting evidence in humans. Yet these sorts of propaganda efforts are pushing hard on the idea being present, being obvious.<p>This article is not science, despite trying to put on airs of science. The data does not support their claims.<p>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.<p>The active regulatory push to invalidate LNT should <i>follow</i> the science, not be ahead of the science.<p>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.<p>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.
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.<p>luckily the government is moving away from your position: <a href="https://www.eenews.net/articles/nrc-considers-eliminating-half-century-old-radiation-standard/" rel="nofollow">https://www.eenews.net/articles/nrc-considers-eliminating-ha...</a><p>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.<p>Consumed them already, you say? Well I guess you're screwed then.
Luckily? The NRC is considering it, hopefully they follow science rather than popular propaganda.<p><a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-026-69285-4" rel="nofollow">https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-026-69285-4</a><p>> in a world where there is no safe low radiation dose, it would be quite easy to generate the data to demonstrate this.<p>This is the classic fallacy seeing an absence of evidence and using that as evidence of absence!<p>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!<p>So let's go looking for those epidemiological studies...<p>> May 19 2026 - Does Proximity to Nuclear Power Plants Increase Cancer Risk? New research finds correlation between disease and living close to a facility<p>> 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.”<p><a href="https://gsas.harvard.edu/news/does-proximity-nuclear-power-plants-increase-cancer-risk" rel="nofollow">https://gsas.harvard.edu/news/does-proximity-nuclear-power-p...</a><p>And what do they see?<p>> 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.<p><a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-026-69285-4" rel="nofollow">https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-026-69285-4</a><p>So there's a dose-response curve for cancer based on living close to a nuclear power plant. This survives correction for other confounders.<p>Notably, this is <i>correlation</i> not <i>causation</i>, but the only evidence getting close to disproving LNT actual leans towards super-linear, rather than sub-linear, correct?