The Radiation Exposure Lie

https://worksinprogress.co/issue/how-to-lie-about-radiation/

by duffydotsvg • 23 days ago

139 135 23 days ago

epistasis6• 23 days ago

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.

Stating something confidently doesn't make it true. Show me the data.

The article is long on emotion, exposition, but very short on the data.

There's a big concerted effort to change this regulation, but it's not based on data, it's based on feelings.

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:

nor any major chromosomal aberrations.

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 do see the types of translocations that cause cancer from radiation.

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 any of the latest sequencing technologies.

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.

Yes, limited and conflicting evidence in humans. Yet these sorts of propaganda efforts are pushing hard on the idea being present, being obvious.

This article is not science, despite trying to put on airs of science. The data does not support their claims.

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.

The active regulatory push to invalidate LNT should follow the science, not be ahead of the science.

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.

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.

teravor2• 23 days ago

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.

epistasis6• 23 days ago

Luckily? The NRC is considering it, hopefully they follow science rather than popular propaganda.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-026-69285-4

in a world where there is no safe low radiation dose, it would be quite easy to generate the data to demonstrate this.

This is the classic fallacy seeing an absence of evidence and using that as evidence of absence!

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!

So let's go looking for those epidemiological studies...

May 19 2026 - Does Proximity to Nuclear Power Plants Increase Cancer Risk? New research finds correlation between disease and living close to a facility
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.”

https://gsas.harvard.edu/news/does-proximity-nuclear-power-p...

And what do they see?

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.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-026-69285-4

So there's a dose-response curve for cancer based on living close to a nuclear power plant. This survives correction for other confounders.

Notably, this is correlation not causation, but the only evidence getting close to disproving LNT actual leans towards super-linear, rather than sub-linear, correct?

glitchc• 23 days ago

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.

adrian_b• 21 days ago

There is a safe radiation dose, because all living beings concentrate in them several radioactive isotopes (14C, 40K, 48Ca), so they are more radioactive than the environment.

Also, for example I have a dental bridge made of platinum-gold alloy and dental crowns made of zirconia ceramic.

Platinum is one of the most radioactive natural elements after uranium and thorium, while any piece of zirconia also contains radioactive isotopes of zirconium and hafnium.

Despite this, the people who wear platinum jewelry are not worried (though perhaps that is due more to ignorance than to rational risk assessment, since those who sell platinum jewelry do not advertise them as being radioactive).

Because the living beings have evolved in a radioactive environment (and the radioactivity of the environment was many times higher in the past, before most of the potassium 40 decayed) all have mechanisms for repairing the damage caused by radiation.

The efficiency of the repair mechanisms vary a lot between different living beings, but all of them can withstand the relatively low radioactivity levels of most environments on Earth.

627467• 23 days ago

There's a big concerted effort to change this regulation, but it's not based on data, it's based on feelings.

Is the regulation based on hard, systematic and replicated data? Looks based on emotion (fear, greed) too

talon8635• 23 days ago

Regarding the beer analogy, can anyone on earth survive 365 beer servings of alcohol without dying? Are you demanding research that 365 beers at once is more harmful than 1/day/year?

lstodd2• 23 days ago

365 beers even if 0.33l.. one would die of acute electrolytic disbalance while being quite drunk, about same as if one would neither drink nor eat anything but water.

edit: IIRC it takes about 10 liters of water to commit suicide. Depends on body weight of course.

epistasis6• 23 days ago

The analogy is an obviously true statement that has been extensively documented with enormous amounts of evidence, followed by a statement that has no solid evidence to support it.

Why would you think that I object to the obviously true statement, unless you are being obtuse?

comrade12342• 23 days ago

They studied the population in Hiroshima and Nagasaki for generations and found that in the first generations after the bombs there were elevated levels of hard-tissue cancers and in later generations elevated levels of soft-tissue/blood cancers. They're still dealing with the population effects of radiation 75-years later.

No one will be able to live in Chernobyl or Fukushima for hundreds of years. Or, well, they could but it would be stupid.

formerly_proven4• 23 days ago

Around 98% of Fukushima is inhabited again, unless of course you meant the NPP itself, but people were not living in a power plant to begin with.

masklinn3• 23 days ago

That’s the entirety of the prefecture, most of which had not been evacuated.

masklinn3• 23 days ago

Much of the Fukushima area is inhabited again (the exclusion zone has shrunk from an original 1250km2 down to 371) and there is ample evidence that the overreaction evacuation did a lot more harm than good.

antonvs7• 23 days ago

I love the way people try to make the case that "we only made 371 km^2 uninhabitable, it's fine!"

Symmetry4• 23 days ago

Even before Linear No Threshold was a thing scientists were doing experiments showing that dosing fruit flies with radiation all at once would lead to a highly mutated second generation, but spreading that radiation out over the course of a month wouldn't.

epistasis6• 23 days ago

Cancer cured (in mice)!

Radiation response shown to be sub-linear (in flies)!

Symmetry4• 23 days ago

At the time (the 1950s) evidence from fruit flies was essentially all the evidence there was. But as the article points out we have pretty good data showing it works the same way in humans.

sjmcmahon2• 23 days ago

Most radiobiological effects for acute exposures are actually quadratic in dose - this applies to things like mutations, chromosome aberrations, and lethal events.

The quadratic term relates (loosely) to interactions between damage from multiple ionising particles which are present in cells at the same time. When you protract exposures, more damage is repaired before subsequent ionising particles arrive, and you see a reduction in the quadratic term, to effectively a linear form at very low dose rates.

So it's not surprising that spreading the radiation out significantly reduces the yield of biological events, but actually supports a linear trend for mutation yield in low-dose and low dose-rate conditions. (Whether that tracks linearly in turn to cancer risk, on the other hand, is a topic of much more debate.)

Retric• 23 days ago

a topic of much more debate.

People who want to step away from linear no threshold seem to ignore the extreme likelihood people will get cancer at some point. Which means for any given population there will be many people who are really close to the threshold of getting cancer.

Studying the effects of radiation on healthy tissue isn’t therefore representative of the general population. You need population level data, and the sensitivity just isn’t there to be able to detect if their model is correct or if linear no threshold is correct etc.

m3047• 23 days ago

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/

sudosteph• 23 days ago

How's that paradoxical? Wouldn't TFA would seem to support findings of that sort?

sjmcmahon2• 23 days ago

It's interesting that the core of this effect - that large doses delivered on timescales of a second or less significantly reduce normal tissue toxicity - was actually observed over 40 years ago, e.g.:

https://radiation-research.kglmeridian.com/view/journals/rar...

Some of the authors of that work were still active when the "Flash" concept came around again, and to hear them tell the story they tried to get funding to test it in tumour-bearing mice, but both their lab heads and external funders were sure the effect would be the same in tumours as normal tissue, and so wouldn't fund the work.

They eventually moved on to other things, and it needed a few decades for someone with enough soft money to give it a go and kick off this new research field.

ZeroGravitas• 23 days ago

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.

throw0101a• 23 days ago

Reminded of something that Geraldine Thomas, founder of the Chernobyl Tissue Bank, wrote when the Fukushima drama was going on, "Look at the science – smoking and obesity are more harmful than radiation":

* https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2011/apr/26/obesity-...

I can assure you that none of us are in the pay of the nuclear industry. I was anti-nuclear until I worked on the after effects of the Chernobyl accident – now I am very pro-nuclear as I realise that we have an unwarranted fear of radiation – probably due to all the rubbish about a nuclear winter we were fed during the Cold War.[10]

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geraldine_Thomas

KennyBlanken2• 23 days ago

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

wat100003• 23 days ago

That doesn't even make any sense. How can you compare the harm of completely different things with completely different mechanisms and exposures? And why would nuclear winter have anything to do with it?

andrewflnr• 23 days ago

why would nuclear winter have anything to do with it?

Because humans are creatures of association, not logic.

NamlchakKhandro• 23 days ago

Surely you jest Sir. It's obvious, plain as day to any one who has eyes and can read.

the_af3• 23 days ago

Surely that the West's perception (especially the popular narrative) of Chernobyl is tinted with Cold War logic is self-evident?

kmoser4• 23 days ago

Individuals have a fair degree of control over whether they smoke or overeat. They have little to no control over a nuclear accident that may subject them to an indeterminate amount of radiation.

MomsAVoxell3• 23 days ago

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"' ..

Symmetry4• 23 days ago

It's unfortunate that we only have one vocabulary for radiation to cover both a 100 uS dose of fallout and a 10 S one. If a quantity of rock drops on someone we have different words like "pebble" and "boulder" that tell us how concerned we should be. I was shocked to learn that "fallout" in the context of a nuclear war could mean something that could cause you to die in hours, not raise your lifetime risk of cancer somewhat.

beders• 23 days ago

Wow, this was a cherry-picking peace of misinformation, conveniently ignoring the actual counts of people affected by Chernobyl.

There's no safe dose of radiation, there's only statistics.

And I'm not sure what this article is supposed to justify? Building power generation technology with the potential to make whole regions unlivable is ok now?

Willfully creating hazards that can affect people for thousands of years, starting with Uranium mining & processing to nuclear waste is a good idea?

Having to fortify a nuclear plant so it can withstand a plane crash (most won't withstand double plane crashes), securing it against terrorist - and then still have it fall into enemy hands that can use it as a bargaining chip (Russians are controlling Zaporizhzhia) is a good idea?

You know what the engineers of Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima had in common? They thought their plants were safe.

So even if "Radiation totally not bad, actually healthy" is the point here: It is still a tremendously stupid idea to build nuclear power plants when there are much better and cheaper alternatives.

BrandoElFollito• 23 days ago

there are much better and cheaper alternatives.

Such as? (of course with the same energy density and 24/7 capacities)

havefunbesafe• 23 days ago

Very odd risk calculations seem to be afoot here

thomasmg• 23 days ago

There are studies that show cancer risk is higher near a nuclear plant. The reason is likely that poorer people live near a nuclear plant; it's _probably_ not because of radiation. My point is: Just having nuclear plants nearby lowers the market price of the property. If there _is_ an accident, the market price of many properties drops to zero. That's why no insurance company will insure the full risk of a nuclear accident: the remaining risk is on the population and land owners. (Property owners may get compensated - paied by taxes.)

In Switzerland there is now again the idea to build nuclear plants, by some (I'm pretty sure the political party that initiated this gets a lot of money from the nuclear lobby - unfortunately the money flow is intransparent in Switzerland.) A recent study in Switzerland [1] has shown nuclear plant are not competitive with solar, wind, hydro, and batteries, not even taking into account that accidents are not fully insured.

[1] https://www.20min.ch/story/akw-debatte-neue-atomkraftwerke-l...

ShinyLeftPad• 23 days ago

There's no safe dose of radiation,

The article claims the opposite with sources.

there's only statistics.

You forgot about lies.

jenadine• 23 days ago

ignoring the actual counts of people affected by Chernobyl.

Do you know what's the count?

zer00eyz2• 23 days ago

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/

hylaride• 23 days ago

There's no safe dose of radiation, there's only statistics.

You need potassium to live; it's radioactive. UVB rays provide vitamin D, but too much can give you skin cancer. Of course it's all a stats game, but (ionizing) radiation plays an important part in our lives and survival.

Of course it's all a stats game, but the stats can play out how much you should worry about it. Living in Denver can expose you to up to twice as much cosmic radiation as somebody living at sea level, yet there are no statistical differences in cancer rates. You don't need to worry about your granite countertops, either (though it's fun to joke about the radioactive stone in the US capital building making congress "toxic").

fshafique• 23 days ago

"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.

antonvs7• 23 days ago

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 nuclear activity we’ve engaged in so far. Time for it to stop.

lisper5• 23 days ago

The problem is that stopping nuclear activity has ancillary effects -- like increased carbon emissions -- that are potentially much more harmful than the radiation. The results of technological decisions are never independent of one another.

amarant2• 23 days ago

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.

UltraSane2• 23 days ago

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.

cyberax2• 23 days ago

My problem with radiation: the units of exposure are so clumsy. We should have standardized on nanoSieverts as the main unit. The normal background radiation is 200 nSv per hour, and you get acute radiation sickness at 1_000_000_000 nSv. The lethal dose is 5_000_000_000. It really puts things into perspective.

E.g. even 10x the normal background is still ridiculously low.

Also, the LNT model is good enough. It's really the most conservative model that we have, so it makes sense to keep using it. We just need to quantify the risk increases properly.

wat100003• 23 days ago

I don't understand the relevance of the normal background level. The natural background level of mercury is many orders of magnitude below the level that causes acute mercury poisoning. That tells me absolutely nothing about the risks of mercury exposure from industrial activity or accidents.

cyberax2• 23 days ago

I remember breathless editorials about "the RADIATION is at TEN TIMES the normal levels we need to shut down EVERYTHING"!

These numbers really need to be put into proper perspective.

schiffern• 23 days ago

Skeptical? I was too.

Check out the interview with Dr Bernie Cohen, who did a lot of the early epidemiological work. The interviewer is rather woo, but the professor is as hard-nose a scientist as you could hope for. It makes a good pair because it let him correct misconceptions.

Long story short, Dr Cohen became unpopular after his data showed home radon levels to be negatively correlated with lung cancer risk. The more radon, the lower your risk of lung cancer.

Part 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xhkBLhw-8pk

Part 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SuUFiUoynPo

deepsun• 23 days ago

Fifteen people have already died of these cancers

Don't forget that USSR and Belarus authorities did everything to attribute illnesses to anything but radiation. And it's really hard to prove that some illness is _due_ to radiation anyway. The reporting was way less transparent and non-biased than in democratic countries.

KennyBlanken2• 23 days ago

There's some very suspicious cherry-picking going on with the author's choice of Ukrainian milk and raw numbers (which is never how public health researchers describe impact from things like this, it's per-population stats and relative increases/decreases) about childhood thyroid cancer rates. For an unspecified region, presumably Ukraine, but the author doesn't specify...also suspicious.

Chernobyl is the northern part of Ukraine. The plume was highly directional and initially blew almost directly north into Belarus:

https://radioactivity.eu.com/articles/nuclearenergy/chernoby...

Not surprisingly, the majority of contamination was, overwhelmingly, in Belarus:

https://radioactivity.eu.com/articles/nuclearenergy/chernoby...

The author goes on:

"Radiation impacts on Scandinavia and Germany, where there were major fears about the effects of the fallout, were nugatory"

Well, yeah, because very little ended up in those areas comparatively?

If you wanted to trick the average person into thinking "wow even in the country where the reactor was, there was almost no health impact", the author's repeated choices in terms of information presented would be a fantastic way to do so.

The real facts: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16832789/

"The study carried out in Minsk showed 40-fold increase of the incidence of thyroid cancer in the years 1986-1994, in comparison to the period 1977-1985. An increase of the incidence of thyroid cancer has generally been observed in many countries after the Chernobyl accident."

Later the author goes completely off the rails with whataboutism talking about Bhopal (which he claims isn't well known. I say: it's probably one of the most famous chemical industry disasters of all time? and the China dam disaster, which is pretty well known, mostly because nuclear proponents bring it up incessantly.)

This is nearly as bad as the nuclear proponents who always compare nuclear to coal, when in the US alone solar is what's replacing nuclear at a ratio of 6MW of solar for every 1MW of nuclear, and coal has been getting phased out for well over a decade because it's expensive.

duskwuff2• 23 days ago

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 irradiated, and two of them subsequently died.

lstodd2• 23 days ago

It was contained and therefore not worth mentioning. Someone got blown up by the tyre he was pumping up, no sweat.

What's missing is the Mayak accident / Kyshtym disaster, 1957.

It also did not result in any world-ending stuff. People died, is all.

chasil• 23 days ago

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 were two Manhattan Project fatalities, one in 1945, and one in 1946.

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

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

duskwuff2• 23 days ago

"First of its kind since the 1940s" still seems a little questionable given the Cecil Kelley incident (Los Alamos, 1958).

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

Interestingly, both the Tokaimura and Kelley incidents involved a radioactive solution in an unfavorable geometry.

kmoser4• 23 days ago

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.

zer00eyz2• 23 days ago

Chernobyl is the only accident in commercial nuclear history...

https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/pressreleases/inadequate-con...

Some of the more notable such accidents include:

In China in 1992, a cobalt-60 source was lost and picked up by an unsuspecting individual. Three persons in the family died of resulting overexposure;

In Georgia in 1997, a group of border frontier guards became ill and showed signs of radiation-induced skin disease. Eleven servicemen had to be transferred to specialized hospitals in France and Germany. The cause of the exposures was found to be several abandoned caesium-37 and a cobalt-60 sources of varying activities, abandoned in a former military barracks that had been under the control of the former Soviet Union;

In Istanbul, Turkey in 1998, two cobalt-60 sources in their shipping containers were sold as scrap metal and ten persons were inadvertently exposed to radiation and had to be treated for acute radiation syndrome;

In Peru in 1999, a worker put an iridium-192 industrial source in his pocket and suffered severe radiation burns;

The most serious of these accidents occurred in the south-central Brazilian city of Goiânia in September of 1987. he Brazilian Nuclear Energy Commission sent in a team and they discovered that over 240 persons were contaminated with caesium-137, four of whom later died.

These things should be somewhat easy to keep under control, yet we cant. There are currently 90,000 tons of spent fuel in the USA. We keep hearing that the cost of nuclear is cheaper than gas... because we just leave the problem sitting on site. The moment that you either dig the massive hole in the ground to dump this, or build a fuel reprocessing site(s) that economic value pretty much disappears. And fule reprocessing doesn't get rid of the problematic parts, only concentrates them, you still need a hole.

pazimzadeh• 23 days ago

Same with UV radiation (sunlight).

tribal808• 23 days ago

technically not a lie, and the article need to show more data

memcg2• 22 days ago

Agreed, being wrong does not always involve lying. The article title is "How to lie about radiation" and the HN title is "The Radiation Exposure Lie", but the word "lie" does not appear in the article except the title.

ptx• 23 days ago

Alright, let's say the author is right and low-level radiation exposure is not harmful. Then... what? If a little radiation is not harmful, then we should be more relaxed about radiation, deregulate it and allow companies to contaminate our living spaces? Is that why the argument is being made?

But as the article mentions, in those Taiwanese flats there were large variations in radiation levels in different spots in the building. If we allow radioactive contamination everywhere, will it be neatly spread out at harmless levels? How would you know? What if you happen to ingest traces of the harmlessly radioactive material now surrounding you?

NotGMan2• 23 days ago

Only ~35% of women in the UK support nuclear power while ~65% of men do.

https://spectator.com/article/why-are-women-so-anti-nuclear/

So technically, if one extrapolates the best case scenario, if women wouldn't have voting rights, we'd already have nuclear power everywhere.

Though to be fair, this varies from country to country and in some countries even women are over 50%.

But in many countries women are under 50% while men are seemingly always over 50%.

comrade12342• 23 days ago

What are you trying to say? Women shouldn't be allowed to vote?

Women, at least in the USA, are going to college and graduating at a higher rate than guys. They have a more legitimate opinion.

To be honest, i have chud fatigue.

NotGMan2• 23 days ago

If more women are graduating and they still have such negative opinion about nuclear then I'm not sure this points to more women graduates being the good thing you think it means.

memcg2• 22 days ago

Your answer is in the linked article.

https://spectator.com/article/why-are-women-so-anti-nuclear/

"Some will inevitably use this polling for point-scoring in the battle of the sexes. They shouldn’t. Everyone is ignorant about something. Most of the time, it is because there is no need or opportunity to learn the facts. The sad truth is that the case for nuclear power is most often confined to publications and media disproportionately consumed by men."

antonvs7• 23 days ago

I guess we need to study why men are so overwhelmingly wrong on this issue. If men weren't allowed to vote, we'd be in better shape.

gurjeet3• 23 days ago

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.

I know I may be overreacting, but when the dentists try to convince me that the annual x-ray of my family members is the same as being outside in the sun for a whole day, I try to explain it with a similar analogy; getting exposed to small amounts of x-ray over a long period is not the same as getting exposed to all of it in a fraction of a second.

They insist it because it is covered by insurance, and that I shouldn't worry about the cost. I have to clarify that the monetary cost is not my primary concern.

I have now learnt to simply say No, and agree to sign a waiver that's required by the insurance company.

I am okay with getting the x-ray if a professional has a legitimate reason to suspect there's something hidden that can be better investigated by getting an x-ray. My family has received x-ray, MRI, CT scans, ultrasound, etc. but only when its benefits outweigh the risks; e.g. bone fracture, pregnancy, concussion, etc.

As I said, I may be overreacting, but I'd like to err on the side of caution when it comes to my kids' and family's long-term health.

edit: s/by I'd like/but I'd like/

the_af3• 23 days ago

As I said, I may be overreacting, by I'd like to err on the side of caution when it comes to my kids' and family's long-term health.

But isn't it a trade off, like many things in life? I don't think refusing the x-ray is necessarily erring on the side of caution. You may miss a relevant diagnostic. You have to weigh the probability and impact of the x-ray doing harm vs not getting the routine x-ray and failing to discover something harmful in time.

gurjeet3• 23 days ago

But isn't it a trade off, like many things in life?

It absolutely is. For example, as soon as I turned 45, I got colonoscopy done, because the benefit of getting tested outweighed the cost of getting tested.

So if the dentist says, I suspect there's some rot, or my family member has started complaining of toothache, I would have no hesitation to get the x-ray, if recommended. But it is the regular, nonchalant nature of annual dental x-ray procedures that concerns me.

pu_pe• 23 days ago

The amount of radiation exposure on a dental x-ray is still tiny though, we are talking like 5 or 6 orders of magnitude lower than radiation poisoning thresholds. Plus there is extensive epidemiological data about their safety.

ectospheno• 22 days ago

Agreed. My problem is that every dental association I’m aware of recommends dental X-rays on an individual, clinically justified basis and not a regular schedule. There are very few dental scenarios requiring yearly X-rays. They do them to get more money.

NetMageSCW2• 22 days ago

The ADA says annual X-rays are not best practice - perhaps ask your dentist why they don’t follow ADA guidelines?

gurjeet3• 20 days ago

I didn't know that. I feel somewhat vindicated :-) I'll cite the ADA guidelines next time they insist.

edit: link to the latest ADA recommendation on x-rays. https://www.ada.org/about/press-releases/new-recommendations...

You wouldn’t get an X-ray of another part of your body unless the doctor believed there was reason to order one after an examination. Similarly, dental X-rays should be ordered only after first examining the patient’s medical and dental histories, prior X-ray images, and current clinical exam findings.

jareklupinski• 23 days ago

nugatory

til

Kon5ole5• 23 days ago

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.

free_bip• 23 days ago

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.

Kon5ole5• 23 days ago

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.

Kon5ole5• 22 days ago

The article claims:

"After the Windscale fire released radioactive fallout onto grazing land in 1957, Britain discarded contaminated milk for 44 days, thereby avoiding any harm."

This is also not true, the actual reports estimate 33-100 deaths, 90 nonfatal cancers and 10 birth defects. (summary from wikipedia):

"These deaths were attributed not only to thyroid cancer, but also to lung cancer.[74] An updated 1988 UK government report (the most recent government estimate) estimated that 100 fatalities "probably" resulted from cancers as a result of the releases over 40 to 50 years.[75][76] The government report also estimated that 90 non-fatal cancers were caused by the incident, as well as 10 hereditary defects.[75]"

It's hard to imagine ignorance that manages to be familiar with Windscale yet not know anything about the estimated harm.

bariumbitmap• 23 days ago

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...

thisrod• 23 days ago

I think you're being too kind. The article is entirely one-sided. The title says lies, so it's fair game to call the content propaganda.

The facts on low-dose radiation exposure are pretty simple.

There is no useful direct evidence about the health effects of low doses of radiation, and there never will be. It's a needle in a haystack problem: the diseases caused by radiation are common, with large fluctuations; the effects of a small additional dose are small. The article claims that the impossibility of measuring outcomes is a reason to believe that small doses of radiation are harmless. It's wrong. No one knows.

There is watertight, laws-of-physics level evidence about the effects of radiation on biological tissues. There is an expert consensus on how those kinds of tissue damage lead to cancer and other diseases. This evidence supports the linear no threshold model.

The weak link is the pathology: that expert consensus could be wrong. I'm a physicist, so I'm not qualified to hold an opinion. I've never heard a specific reason to think it's wrong.

Those are the ises. For the rest of this post, suppose that the linear-no-threshold model is correct (as the available evidence suggests). The oughts that follow are also very murky.

Everyone is exposed to radiation in their daily life, and lots of lives are shortened by the effects. When you are exposed to a tiny bit of extra radiation, you are a tiny bit more likely to die from radiation; there are much worse hazards that you should worry about first.

When everyone is exposed to a tiny bit of extra radiation, many people will die prematurely. It's universally agreed that those people are just as valuable as other people, exposed to rarer and more spectacular risks, who a lot of money is spent to save. If a few less razors were confiscated at airports, and aircraft occupants were a bit better shielded from radiation, more lives could be saved overall.

Any question like that is bound to be politically controversial.

freetonik• 23 days ago

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.

tomq• 22 days ago

It sounds like the shape of the dose response curve for chronic low dose radiation is controversial. There's a lack of definitive evidence either way and reasonable arguments in both directions. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_hormesis and other independent sources.

This article is making the case in one direction and is biased. I'm not saying it's wrong, but I wouldn't walk away using this as your only source on the topic.

alexsmirnov• 22 days ago

From the first hand: I was in the air base service regiment, Ovruch ( 30 km from reactor ), 1 year in service at the time of disaster.

The average numbers have a little sense. By our measurements, it was't an "even" distribution, but some "hot spots" that had 10x time radiation level than surrounding territory.

The article focuses on cancer, but for me and my buddies, the worst was an impact on immune system. In the six months after disaster, the healthy boy before, I got: pneumonia, chicken pox ( and 2 more with me ), furunculosis ( the whole company got it as well ), and endless flu/fevers. The weak immune continued for about 10 years.

LorenPechtel4• 21 days ago

This is an intelligent enough group that I'll throw out something that's been bugging me for quite a while and this makes me question it even more:

Did the radium girls actually die of radiation?

Radium is a row 7 element, AFIAK everything in row 7 is quite toxic. Radium is below calcium in the periodic table. Thus, the body is going to put it in bones. And we saw horrors in their bones. Did it kill via radiation or via being toxic?

The Radiation Exposure Lie

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