"On 23 May 2025, President Trump signed four executive orders on nuclear power, intended to speed up approvals of and reduce regulatory burdens on new nuclear reactors in America. Buried in one of them was a requirement that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission reconsider its use of ‘Linear No Threshold’"
I don't know a physicist named Donald Trump.
adrian_b•6mo ago
Regardless of the involvement of Trump, the use in the past of the "Linear No Threshold" hypothesis may have been flawed, so corrections may have been truly necessary.
Even if we ignore the mechanisms for nucleic acid repair and we assume that any level of radiation causes a risk of mutations, thus of cancer, proportional to it, the fact that the human bodies and their environments are intrinsically radioactive unavoidably creates a threshold effect for any additional radiation caused by human activities.
As long as the additional radiation remains smaller than the natural levels of radiation to which our bodies are exposed, from their internal content of radioactive potassium, radioactive carbon and radioactive calcium and from the ambient cosmic radiation, the additional radiation cannot produce observable effects, so there exists a threshold that cannot be lower than the natural radiation level.
The greatest danger from artificial sources of radiation comes from substances like radioactive iodine, which would be concentrated in a very small part of the body, instead of being diluted through the entire body, like the natural radioactive elements.
AbleWilliam•6mo ago
Still (sadly) guided by the surprising efficacy of our 1950s weapons tests. Fascinating read.
_aavaa_•6mo ago
> For example, the cumulative harm model applied to alcohol would say that drinking a glass of wine once a day for a hundred days is equivalent to drinking one hundred glasses of wine in a single day.
What is ridiculous example. Alcohol poisoning and liver cancer are two different problems, not a stronger and weaker version of the same problem.
java-man•6mo ago
adrian_b•6mo ago
Even if we ignore the mechanisms for nucleic acid repair and we assume that any level of radiation causes a risk of mutations, thus of cancer, proportional to it, the fact that the human bodies and their environments are intrinsically radioactive unavoidably creates a threshold effect for any additional radiation caused by human activities.
As long as the additional radiation remains smaller than the natural levels of radiation to which our bodies are exposed, from their internal content of radioactive potassium, radioactive carbon and radioactive calcium and from the ambient cosmic radiation, the additional radiation cannot produce observable effects, so there exists a threshold that cannot be lower than the natural radiation level.
The greatest danger from artificial sources of radiation comes from substances like radioactive iodine, which would be concentrated in a very small part of the body, instead of being diluted through the entire body, like the natural radioactive elements.