Date: 30/07/20
Andrew Montford, GWPF
Another nail in the LNT coffin
A few weeks ago, we at GWPF published a paper by Ed Calabrese and Mikko Paunio, about the linear no-threshold (LNT) model as applied to the harms caused by nuclear radiation. The LNT model encapsulates the idea that there is no safe level of radiation exposure, no threshold below which exposure is not a problem. It is therefore the cause of all extraordinary levels of bureaucracy and safety measures that have all but killed off the nuclear industry in much of the western world.
As our paper showed, however, the post-war science that led to the LNT model’s acceptance was at best plain wrong and potentially even fraudulent. For those who haven’t read the paper, it’s well worth taking a look, but those who have may well be interested in Ed Calabrese’s new paper, which is another nail in the coffin of the LNT hypothesis.
“The Muller-Neel dispute and the fate of cancer risk assessment” is a review of the correspondence between members of the so-called BEAR I panel, which was tasked by the US government with assessing radiation risk during the 1950s. It subsequently concluded that the LNT model should be adopted, with fateful consequences for civil nuclear energy ever since. Calabrese was trying to understand how the panel had reached this conclusion despite the existence of the report of the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission (ABCC), a major study, commissioned by the US National Academy of Sciences, which had found that the children of atomic bomb survivors seemed to have suffered no ill effects, at least in the shape of genetic damage. This seemed to indicate that prolonged exposure to low-levels of radiation was in fact harmless.
Why then had the BEAR panel reached the opposite conclusion? Calabrese’s review shows that it not only did not take the ABCC study into account in reporting its findings, it didn’t even look at it, instead concentrating solely on studies that extrapolated from animal subjects to human ones. These could be used to argue in favour of the LNT model.
Why would this be? The panel’s correspondence shows that its members’ minds were made up before they started work, and that they had “a strongly unified belief in the LNT model”. Worse still, many of its members were involved in animal studies themselves, and were unhappy that studies on humans were giving a different answer. Essentially the ABCC work had shown that the whole approach of extrapolating from animals to humans was flawed. In essence, groupthink and the self-interest of the panel members put paid to any truth-seeking tendencies they might have had.
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Another issue that I only write about reluctantly in public forums: the risk of a lawfare-radioactive dirty bomb terrorism.
The HARMLESS spread of minute amounts of radio isotopes could force BY LAW the closure of a center. What if it’s a strategic region? What if it’s a place that provides essential, vital service to the population? Who would have the authority to OVERRIDE LAW?
Note that the pro civil rights leftists have been enthusiastic with limiting basic rights in a way no even seen during WWII. But here, the situation would be reversed: you would have to maintain rights in face of law.
And there is even a more vicious terror-lawfare-international law-terrorism scenario that might eliminate people lives with radiation lawfare (via EURATOM). I don’t want to elaborate further, but intelligent people should be able to see how EURATOM can be used for terrorism and murder via law (EURATOM being a treaty it even overrides our Constitution, sic) with trivially dangerous radiations or even non existant radio isotopes (via a bluff you can’t call).
It makes me sick just to think that people promote EURATOM – even pretend BREXIT promoters.
That’s why we should never enter ANY treaty that regulates internal matters, like protecting women from violence; Poland was right to exist that Istanbul nonsense.
https://notesfrompoland.com/2020/07/25/poland-to-begin-withdrawal-from-international-convention-on-violence-against-women/
We are bathed in radiation down in the west country from Radon gas coming off the granite every house is built with. My dad was a Chiropractor, he had an regular inspection of his X Ray machine, all the inspector could read on his meter was Radon gas coming off the walls.
Radiation is vastly over rated.
Growing up, I had a neighbor DC that worked under his fluoroscope. He wore heavy latex gloves in public and strong fragrances to hide his horrible burns.
Obviously massive does.
I saw a TV program about local radiation, a rock in a car park locally was thousands of times the permitted EU dose, yet this is what our houses are made of.
This proposal was part of my physics degree in the ’80s. The problem stemmed from the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic weapons. The radiation was so enormous that they had to extrapolate linearly to zero. That showed that death and or damage occurred at all levels of radiation.
Then came Chernobyl where the radiation level were slightly above the minimum levels of Nagasaki going down to very low levels. What this showed was the the linear extrapolation was flawed.
The overblown enviroactivist thing about nuclear was clear certainly after the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone turned into Europe’s Serengeti Game Park. There were small animals that were affected with deformed offspring in the early years, but guess what? They were all eaten by wolves!
Little known except locally, were бабушки (grandmothers) who for decades have been regularly picking and preserving edible mushrooms, berries and other delicacies for their families from the Exclusion Zone. If I can find it in this Lysenkoist censorious climate these days, an article with one of these healthy old бабs and the healthy abundant game is photographed.
I, with another geologist, did a due diligence of virtually all the best mineral resource areas in Ukraine for a European investor in 2005, from the Russian border area in the Dombas/Dniprpetrovsk region (coal, manganese, gold, uranium) to the Carpathians in the west (gold, copper, barite, etc). I wanted to visit the EZ but was not permitted.
Surprise! The BBC did an article that was very upbeat on the healthy animals in the EZ game park:
http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20160421-the-chernobyl-exclusion-zone-is-arguably-a-nature-reserve
A final note on safety (maybe health benefits!) of low level radiation: Hiroshima radioactivity after the bombing fell to background levels in less than a year. They rebuilt the city and Bob’s your uncle.
World socialism is the worst pollution of humankind and the wilderness environment.
Calabrese’s review shows that it not only did not take the ABCC study into account in reporting its findings, it didn’t even look at it, instead concentrating solely on studies that extrapolated from animal subjects to human ones. These could be used to argue in favour of the LNT model.
It is not true that animal studies support LNT.
Only cell culture studies do – individual cancer-derived calls in culture.
Organisms behave in complex integrated ways that are poorly predictable from behaviour of cultures of neoplastic (cancerous) cells.
There is a logarithmic heirarchy of thresholds of radiation effects in living organisms.
At the whole organism (rat, mouse) level, ~10 Gy are needed to have tissue damagingand lethal effect.
At the cell level (in culture), ~1 Gy is needed to damage DNA and thus curteil replication and survival.
At the DNA gene expression level, only 0.01-0.1 Gy are needed to evoke changes in gene expression (heat shock proteins etc..)
In a few seconds it is possible to find numerous studies on mice where low dose radiation stimulates the immune system, suppresses (makes LESS) cancers, and increases lifespan (makes them live LONGER).
Here goes – turning to Google Scholar:
https://cancerres.aacrjournals.org/content/58/24/5686.short
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0360301603019382
https://cancerres.aacrjournals.org/content/59/14/3374.short
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0002944013002204
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17016015/
Yoshio Hosoi (2006) Antitumor effects by low dose total body irradiation
Yakugaku Zasshi – Journal of the Pharmaceutical Society of Japan.
2006 Oct;126(10):841-8. doi: 10.1248/yakushi.126.841.
[Article in Japanese]
Abstract
Total-body irradiation (TBI) with 0.02-0.25 Gy has been reported to have antitumor effects. In mice, low-dose TBI induces tumor growth delay, antimetastatic effects, suppressive effects on the incidence of spontaneous thymiclymphoma, sensitization of tumor to ionizing radiation, and decrease in TD50 value. In artificial metastasis, 0.20 Gy TBI suppressed lung metastasis when it was conducted between 3 h before and 3 h after tumor cell injection into a tail vein. In spontaneous metastasis, 0.15-0.20 Gy TBI suppressed lung metastasis. Irradiation with 0.15 Gy twice a week from 11 weeks of age for 40 weeks significantly suppressed the incidence of spontaneous thymic lymphoma in AKR/J mice, which caused prolonged life span. Low-dose TBI has been used in the clinical treatment of lymphomatous malignancies including chronic lymphocytic leukaemia (CLL) and non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma (NHL). The usual practice was to give 0.1 Gy TBI three times a week or 0.15 Gy TBI two times a week to a total dose of 1.5 Gy. Despite this low total dose, low-dose fractionated TBI could induce long-term remissions and was as effective as the chemotherapy to which it was compared. Experimental data suggest that the antitumor effects of low-dose TBI could be explained by immune enhancement, induction of apoptosis, and intrinsic hypersensitivity to low-dose irradiation. Possible mechanisms of immune enhancement are elimination of the T-suppressor subset of lymphocytes and augmentation of the immune response including alteration of cytokine release and enhanced proliferative activity of lymphocytes to mitogenic stimuli.
Faulty reasoning like the LNT “model” is the reason kids can’t get radioactive ore, even with parental supervision, to use testing their homemade Geiger counters, as I did as a child. P*sses me off.
I’ve not seen a radium watch dial in many years, and the phosphorescent versions don’t work worth a damn.
There’s no conspiracy of fear, imo. We’re doing it to ourselves.
jsyk, I used to be a regular here, and now spend time bringing science to the Quora community.
The new film about Marie Curie, “Radioactive”, is worth watching.
(Rosamund Pike is one of my favourite actresses.)
It captures the excitement and surprise at the discovery of radioactivity.
It is only mildly politicised by Hollywood standards, making valid points about discrimination against women. Overall it’s a nicely told story. The first half is better than the second, it loses its way a bit toward the end but is a good scientific film overall capturing that excitement of discovery.
Phil.
Thanks for the shout out! I loved her in “Pride and Prejudice” and “Jack Reacher” although I still want someone to do a series of ‘Reacher’ movies with an appropriate male lead.
Too bad Nolte is so old (and damaged!)
From https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4128341/
The goto source for this is Wade Allison: He presents a rather more tolerant take on why, and a far more severe take on how much, LNT has damaged nuclear power.
Animal studies are not mentioned. He is a nuclear physicist concerned with impacts of radiation on all cellular tissue. His take (from memory – read ‘Radiation and Reason’ available as an Ebook) – was that at the time the regulations were drawn up, all that was known was that for sure prolonged exposure to moderately high radiation or short term exposure to intense radiation caused cancer, and that the Hiroshima 50-percentile death rate was around IIRC 2Sv.
Lacking any further data, they asked the power station scientists ‘how low can you get the radiation’ , and got an answer, then drew a straight line from 500 in a thousand dead at 2SV down to 0 in a thousand dead at no radiation, looked at what kind of mortality rate was then predicted for what the engineers felt they could build, and adding up twenty years of it into a single dose, pronounced that it was a reasonable regulatory limit, in the absence of ANY data on chronic low level radiation.
They needed a limit, and the engineers were happy that they could meet it (and they have) and the politicians were happy that one cancer in a thousand years was acceptable.
What then happened was that soviet inspired anti-nuclear organisations deliberately represented this as ‘your own government’s regulations admit that there is no safe limit for radiation’
And bearded and be-sandalled academics used it to predict ‘cancer clusters’ round badly managed nuclear facilities, that got great publicity – to the extent that a late friend of mine assured me that these clusters existed and had happened, but no evidence of them could I find, only evidence of the study predicting them. But I digress.
The problem is of course twofold, and Allison did the research.
Firstly there appears to be a cell correction mechanism such that unless two bits of DNA get simultaneously mangled in exactly the same way, no viable mutations will happen. The cell just dies. The effect of this is akin to digital signal error correction. At low to moderate doses there is no mutation, just normal cell death and replacement, at a slightly more rapid level.
Secondly, the effect of a dose taken over time is – gasp – not the same as taking it all at once. Radiation does not accumulate in the body. Although some radioactive elements like caesium can …In fact the evidence from cancer treatment is that in fact the risk is from short duration high intensity radiation, not chronic exposure to low level radiation, although the picture is complicated when e.g. we talk about inhalation of natural radon where there is evidence that the decay products are heavy lead, polonium and bismuth and stay in the lungs, especially the impaired lungs of a smoker. These elements are carcinogenic even when not radioactive.
However Ramsar in Iran has a massive background radiation level – the highest in the world – is populated by many smokers and does not appear to have any measurably higher rates of cancer…
So the evidence is somewhat conflicting, but the broad swathe of it, as Allison maintains, indicates that we are between one hundred and one thousand times more scared of radiation (as reflected in the regulatory standards) than we need to be.
A short article by Wade is free to read here
http://www.templar.co.uk/downloads/Public_Trust_in_Nuclear_Energy.pdf
In addition, people interested in nuclear power should read the late Professor Cohen’s e-book – again free – on the impact of (well meaning) regulation on the cost of nuclear power.
http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc/book/
Taken in conjunction with Allison’s conclusions, the implication is that we could build nuclear power stations for relative peanuts – certainly not much different from coal power stations – and end up with electricity prices – especially in today’s negative interest rate environment – less than any other energy source and massively below renewable energy prices. At least if the nukes were driven continuously for baseload. The price per MWh starts to climb if the capital cost is not offset by high capacity factors. So whilst technically possible to operate nuclear power stations as load following dispatchable sources, it becomes more expensive than – say – using less capital intensive, but more expensively fuelled gas power stations to do load following at lower capacity factors.
Naturally this represents and extreme commercial threat to the other big players on the energy game – Gas and coal, and of course renewables, none of which (renewables) can come anywhere near the price of coal gas or nuclear except by creative accounting, externalising system costs onto other players , political rent seeking and scare mongering and over-regulating nuclear….
Business as usual…
The Linear No Threshold model is one of the most magnificent tools in all the propagandist’s toolbox to confuse people and scare them into non rationale decision making.
Used skillfully, it can prove anything is harmful to however many people you need in order to reach some threshold to promote a false idea.
Any thoughts on breast cancer X-rays screening?
Who could possibly benefit from it?
Who should never even think of it?
Does the first group include the second?
Why would there be people who should never think of it?
I think of it whenever the subject arises.
Do you mean people who should not get it done?
How can anyone reach a decision if they do not think about it and consider it?
What does your third question even mean?
Best I can tell, you are asking if there are people who could possibly benefit from it who should “never even think of it?”
The people who can benefit from it are women who have breast cancer which is at a curable stage, and who find out they have it before it reaches an advanced stage that may be incurable, or require more drastic measures to prolong the patients life.
Cancer is progressive.
Every cancer starts out as one cell which accumulates numerous types of damage and alteration, and instead of the cell activating it’s self destruct mechanism, called apoptosis, it begins to reproduce in an uncontrolled and unconstrained way. At that point there is still plenty of chances for nothing much to come of it: The immune system regularly destroys damaged cells using one of several means; a cell cannot multiply very much unless it can commandeer the mechanisms that cause formation of a blood supply to a growing neoplasm (new tissue…i.e an incipient tumor); and a tumor might at some point reach some level of limit to growth at stop doing so, and all the while whatever has allowed the cell to evade notice by the immune system to the presence of “nonself” or damaged cells might be overcome, and a strong immune system attack can then destroy the neoplasm, before it can grow to a size that becomes fatal to the person; the neoplasm might not be able to acquire the ability to spread to remote parts of the body…known as metastasis. Only a relatively few types of cells have the ability to move or travel around, or to become detached from the matrix which holds cells in their usual spot within the body while still surviving. Every cell needs nutrients and oxygen, and so must always be within a very short distance, usually in direct contact with, at least one circulatory system capillary.
Breasts are relatively easy to image using x rays. X rays are able to visualize tumors before they reach a stage that can be readily detected by means of self exam, or the tumor might be in a location that makes them difficult or impossible to find this way. Caught early, many cancers are easily treatable, while those same cancers, when not caught early, can be very deadly and incurable. And it is a type of cancer which can progress rapidly.
Since breast cancer is one of the more common types, and the breast is not way inside the body, but instead a surface appendage of the body, it makes sense to screen individuals at some level of increased risk for getting the disease.
There are all sorts of reasons why it is impossible for everyone in the world to ever agree on anything that is a complex issue. People can never all agree on even basic no brainer issues.
I have a set of questions for your homework:
1) Are there people who can benefit from vaccinations?
2) Are there people who should never consider getting a vaccination?
3) Does the first group include the second?
“1) Are there people who can benefit from vaccinations?”
In 1st world countries, I see no evidence of that for those mandatory vaccines for school children.
You may suggest one example of a vaccine for which there are clear benefits.
Any vaccine that provides protection against an infectious disease provides a clear benefit: Protection from an infectious disease.
I will, instead of one, list 27 of them:
Cholera
Dengue fever
Diphtheria
Ebolavirus
Haemophilus influenzae type b
Hepatitis A
Hepatitis B
Hepatitis E
Human papilloma-virus
Influenza
Japanese encephalitis
Malaria
Measles
Meningococcal disease
Mumps
Pneumococcal disease
Pertussis
Poliomyelitis
Rabies
Rotavirus gastroenteritis
Rubella
Tetanus
Tick-borne encephalitis
Tuberculosis
Typhoid fever
Varicella
Yellow fever
Shingles (Herpes Zoster)
But I would not want to miss an opportunity to ‘splode your noggin, so I will also give you this-
An article describing a 10 year study of over 667,000 kids showing that not only does the MMR vaccine not cause autism, it prevents it. Autism was reduced by 7% in the vaccinated vs the unvaccinated children.
This backs up the results of an earlier study of over 537,000 kids that found no increased risk of autism in vaccinated children:
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/05/health/measles-vaccine-autism.html
And the research paper which published this result:
https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M18-2101
BTW, this list conspicuously omits smallpox.
This is because small pox no longer exists, having been eradicated worldwide due to the vaccine which prevents it.
“A greater than 92% decline in cases and a 99% or greater decline in deaths due to diseases prevented by vaccines recommended before 1980 were shown for diphtheria, mumps, pertussis, and tetanus. Endemic transmission of poliovirus and measles and rubella viruses has been eliminated in the United States; smallpox has been eradicated worldwide. Declines were 80% or greater for cases and deaths of most vaccine-preventable diseases targeted since 1980 including hepatitis A, acute hepatitis B, Hib, and varicella. Declines in cases and deaths of invasive S pneumoniae were 34% and 25%, respectively.”
Historical Comparisons of Morbidity and Mortality for Vaccine-Preventable Diseases in the United States
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/209448
Has anyone heard of the 1954 Gerschman & Gilbert paper in Science “Oxygen Poisoning & X-Irradiation: A Mechanism in Common”. Radiation and oxygen cause biological damage via the same sequences of highly reactive intermediary oxidants formed from water in the cell. We’re exposed to oxygen all the time. The body copes using an array of evolved defences common to and essential for any organism that uses oxygenic respiration. (Oxygen, The Molecule That Made the World by UCL biochemist Dr Nick Lane). These defences (antioxidants) are equally effective against radiation damage up to a point.
The poison is in the diose. No water kills and too much water kills.
Hormesis is real and LNT is stupid. Smoking is a confound.
Radon studies prove that some radiation is healthier than none or too much.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=Residential+Radon+Appears+to+Prevent+Lung+Cancer
Dr. Stan Young recently did meta analysis of this and I will try to find a citation.