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- Hacker News
- > 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.
by epistasis - 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?by talon8635
- 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.
by teravor - > 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
by 627467 - 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?
by ptx - 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.
by cyberax - 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.by wat10000
- "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.
by fshafique - > 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.
by antonvs - 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.
by freetonik - > 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/
by gurjeet - 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.by pu_pe
- The ADA says annual X-rays are not best practice - perhaps ask your dentist why they don’t follow ADA guidelines?by NetMageSCW
- > 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.
by the_af - 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.by Symmetry
- Cancer cured (in mice)!
Radiation response shown to be sub-linear (in flies)!
by epistasis - 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.)
by sjmcmahon - 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.
by alexsmirnov - 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/
by m3047 - How's that paradoxical? Wouldn't TFA would seem to support findings of that sort?by sudosteph
- 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.
by ZeroGravitas - 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.
by sjmcmahon - 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.
by tomq - > 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.
by deepsun - 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]
by throw0101a - by KennyBlanken
- 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?by wat10000
- 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.by kmoser
- >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"' ..
by MomsAVoxell