> 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.

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.

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.

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/

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

There's a "hidden gem" interview with Dr Bernie Cohen, who did a lot of early epidemiological work in this area. The interviewer is rather woo, but the professor is as hard-nosed a scientist as you could hope for. In this case it makes for a good pairing, since it let him correct many misconceptions.

Long story short, Dr Cohen became unpopular after his data showed home radon levels were negatively correlated with lung cancer risk.

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

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

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.

"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.