Alex WellersteinVerified account

I hate getting in discussions about hormesis, as an aside, because non-scientists are easily suckered into the hormesis agenda (because they like to believe it might be true, or something), and don't realize how skimpy the evidence is.

Hormesis advocates have done a good job of making it seem, on the Internet, like this is a mainstream idea. My discussions with, and readings of, health physicists and geneticists, suggest it is not at all.

Compounding this is that most people DO have a pretty terrible understanding about the risks of radiation, so it's easy to fall into the trap of, "most people exaggerate it, so maybe people on the total other side of the spectrum are right!" Which is just a cognitive error.

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.

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.