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The people I talk to who don't seem to have an ideological dog in this fight and who are informed are generally of the "LNT seems to work pretty well; the newer, larger datasets in the last few years seem to back it up; the hormesis people vastly overstate their case" view.
Nobody asserts that we totally understand the effects of very-low level radiation, but the LNT thesis assumes that in our ignorance, we should be wary about exposing large populations to low levels of radioactivity. The hormesis thesis instead assumes we can be cavalier about it.
For anyone who is curious, "what kinds of human studies have been available on this since the last BEIR report?", this page has some very useful references and puts a lot of the data into a common framework. http://iangoddard.com/LinearNoThreshold.html …pic.twitter.com/0SAjE31yy0
I'm not suggesting the data speaks for itself, or that his interpretation of the data is the only one out there. But I've found it a useful resource, and the references are *very* useful.
If the people who are advocating for one side or the other are using facile examples ("did you know Denver has high radiation levels?") and not talking about serious studies with real data and serious statistical analysis... be wary.
(And FWIW... I think the hormesis advocates would be smarter to NOT push this during the Trump admin. The bad-science association will not wash off easily. But then again, many of them previously chose to take money from Big Tobacco, so... anyway. Do what you are going to do.)
Was with you until the final tweet. As scientific hypotheses, neither LNT or hormesis "assumes" anything our attitudes or policies. LNT is right, or hormesis is right, & we may not know which yet, but that doesn't say anything about what policies are best.
There are different ways one can interpret uncertainty in risk, to be sure. Some people (and countries) are of the "don't worry about it until you have seen a lot of evidence of harm," some are of the "be precautionary about risk unless you know it's safe."
In the US we tend to use the former and in Europe they tend to use the latter. In the case of things like radiation, where we do have evidence of harm at a variety of exposures, I think it makes sense, in the face of uncertainty, to err on the side of preventing harm.
Which is leaning more towards the precautionary principle than not, to be sure. Your mileage may vary.
Sure, no problem there; my only point was that "precautionary principle" vs. "wait until proven harm" is a different axis than hormesis vs. LNT.
It's an approach to uncertainty, which certainly exists in this area. I think LNT is the more conservative assumption, and thus most precautionary.
This is my interpretation as well. We've written two books to support the case for nuclear power in the climate fight, but our review of evidence and discussions with experts strongly suggest that LNT is a good enough model. Couple of points:
1) it's possible that there are effective threshold levels below which radiation doses are not harmful, but if they exist, they are likely to be dependent on the individual and things like age, sex, etc. So determining thresholds is extremely hard.
2) in any case, health effects from small doses are small. The case for or against nuclear power in particular is not dependent on the LNT.
3) there is a small but definitely non-zero possibility that low doses cause other health effects than cancer. Cardiovascular issues and neural defects in embryos have been suggested, for instance. So even if LNT overstates cancer risk, it may work well enough for total risk.
4) as long as there is not credible evidence - and gathering large enough cohorts for the required studies is hard - it is only prudent to err to the side of caution.
All of this is very well put.
We already do expose large populations to low-level radiation. There are lots of places in the world with what we could consider to be elevated levels of radioactivity. Like Denver, for example.
This is an article about places with high natural radioactivity - including cities like Ramsar, Iran.https://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/earth/geology/hot-not-what-makes-some-places-naturally-high-radioactivity.htm …
Cancer is complicated, and so is epidemology. A "HowStuffworks" treatment that only quotes industry lobbyists, doesn't quite cut it for me, sorry. It shouldn't cut it for you, either.
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