Steve Milloy
What if the public’s fears about common exposures to radiation were not only baseless, but the product of epic science fraud? And what if the people we have trusted with setting radiation safety standards have knowingly suppressed that reality for decades, including up to the present day?
JunkScience.com is presenting for the first time emails uncovered via the Freedom of Information Act that expose the inner workings of a little-known bureaucracy dedicated to keeping in place the so-called “linear non-threshold model” (LNT). The LNT is used by regulatory agencies to set permitted exposure standards for radiation.
So if you have been concerned or scared of anything associated with radiation — from medical diagnostics to TSA screening to radon in your basement to nuclear power plants — you have been an unwitting victim of the LNT. As explained in this recent article, the LNT has been responsible for producing crippling fear of low-level radiation exposures.
These emails are to and from a veritable Who’s Who of the current radiation safety establishment, including employees and affiliates of the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurements (NCRP), the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) and the Health Physics Society (HPS).
Depending on the reader’s familiarity with the LNT and the recent exposure of it as science fraud by Ed Calabrese of UMass Amherst, it is recommended that readers first watch and have their minds blown by the amazing 22-part Health Physics Society (HPS) video series featuring the incomparable Calabrese’s unparalleled research on the origins and development of the LNT: HPS.org | YouTube.com. It is 10 hours of truly incredible content. No exaggeration. A written summary of the video series is here (Web | PDF). A two minute-long teaser clip is below.
Top off your shock and amazement by reading what the FOIA-ed emails show is occurring now. You will no longer wonder why the LNT remains in use despite lacking any sort of scientific underpinning. But you will perhaps start to wonder why anyone believes any sort of government-related science at all.
Why you should care about this:
- Radiation safety standards. Virtually all radiation safety standards — e.g, medical and dental treatment, occupational exposure standards, nuclear plant safety, radon in the home — are all based on the LNT. The International Commission on Radiological Protection (ICRP), an independent non-government organization, is currently undertaking a review of its recommendations for radiation safety. The HPS video series was produced with an eye toward informing it on the actual history of the LNT.
- Chemical safety standards. All chemical safety standards addressing cancer risk — e.g,. EPA drinking water, air emission and hazardous waste clean-up standards — are based on the LNT. The LNT gives regulatory agencies like EPA maximum arbitrary power over the regulated community and the public mind.
- Medical imaging. Many members of the public refuse diagnostic x-rays, fearing a risk of cancer predicted by the LNT.
- Nuclear power. Excessive fears of nuclear power and nuclear accidents come from use of the LNT. These fears can themselves be deadly. No one was directly killed by radiation from the 2011 nuclear accident at Fukushima, but more than 1,600 people died in the ensuing panicky evacuation.
- Nuclear war. The possibility of nuclear war and or a dirty bomb detonated in an urban area or off the coast of, say, California — think Ukraine war, the Iran and North Korea nuclear programs, and China’s aggression toward Taiwan — all raise the the possibility that Americans and others may have to deal with radiation risks and potential evacuations. Strict application of the LNT guarantees these will be hysterical and disastrous.
- Reliability of government and institutional science. For many, there is little more authoritative than media reports with phrases like “Scientists say…” or “Government scientists say…” or “Nobel prize winner says…” But Calabrese’s work shows how terribly wrong it is to treat scientists, especially government and institutional ones, as if they exist on some higher moral and intellectual plane than the rest of us. They don’t.
- Other social and economic impacts. The LNT foments fear, which causes poor decision-making during times of crisis. The model implies there’s no safe exposures to radiation resulting in enormous costs to building nuclear plants or cleaning up contaminated environments to prevent low level exposures that pose no threat. Thus, applying the LNT wastes resources via an unjustified fear that ultimately harms public health.
1. Introduction
The linear no-threshold model (LNT) for cancer risk assessment is the foundation for a vast amount of radiation and chemical regulation in the US. First adopted by the radiation safety community in the 1950s, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has been its main sponsor and enforcer since the 1970s. Nonetheless, over the decades, many scientists and radiation safety experts have questioned the scientific validity of the LNT in the low dose/exposure range, and the EPA’s strict and unyielding application of it for those low doses/exposures, which happen to represent the vast majority of regulated exposures.
Over the past several decades, University of Massachusetts professor Ed Calabrese has conducted truly amazing historical research about the LNT’s origin and history. Calabrese’s work revealed the true and sordid history of the LNT’s development. He has demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt that the LNT was adopted for low doses/exposures despite it not having any supporting scientific data. To apply the LNT to low dose/exposure situations and call it “science” can now be shown to be an utter fraud. Words fail to do justice to the stark nature and significance of Calabrese’s revelations.
Until recently, Calabrese has been content to publish his findings in peer-reviewed academic journals. JunkScience.com has spotlighted many of them over the years. But in 2021, the Health Physics Society (HPS), a prestigious society of radiation safety experts and professionals, approached Calabrese to report his findings to the wider public. The result is a compelling 22-part, 10 hour-long video series which can viewed at HPS.org, YouTube.com or at JunkScience.com.
Shortly after the HPS video series was released in April 2022, an activist conducting research on a separate topic shared responses from a Freedom of Information Act request with Calabrese as his work with HPS had been mentioned. Intrigued and not one to leave any stone unturned, Calabrese sent Freedom of Information Act requests to federal agencies that use/rely on the LNT. Much to his surprise and chagrin, the emails revealed a covert campaign to:
- Discredit Calabrese and his video series and to
- Overthrow the current leadership of the HPS because it is viewed as being anti-LNT.
The emails and covert campaign are revealed here for the first time publicly. While Calabrese’s research and video series expose the dishonest way the LNT was developed and cemented into regulatory risk assessment, these emails expose the dishonesty, scheming and unscientific behavior of those trying to keep the LNT cemented in place.
2. Brief Description of the LNT
The linear no-threshold model (LNT) has been relied on by regulatory agencies for radiation and chemical risk assessment since the mid-1950s. The LNT is a just model, that is, an assumption vs. a scientifically validated fact. And it is a crude one at that. It is used to determine permitted levels of exposure to radiation or chemicals when there is no scientific data showing harm at low dose/exposure levels.
In an illustration from the HPS video series (below), the solid blue line shows a range of exposure for which there is real-life or laboratory data showing increasing risk of harm of health with increasing dose of radiation. The dashed blue line shows the exposure range for which there are no data. By use of the LNT, that low dose/exposure risk level is presumed to be linear with increasing dose with no safe level of exposure. [Note: In this illustration the line doesn’t go through the graph’s origin because, in the case of radiation, there is naturally occurring radiation (from the Earth itself and space) that we are all unavoidably exposed to every day (called background radiation). The health risk from this background level is presumed to present zero risk.] But through use of the LNT, all additional radiation risk is presumed to increased the risk of harm in linear (or proportional) fashion.
Because the LNT is not based on real-life observations or laboratory data, it is not the product of science, but rather something called “science policy” — i.e., an arbitrary political assumption made to fill a gap in knowledge or uncertainty in the science used in regulatory risk assessment. Science-policy decisions are said to be “conservative” in nature. This is not meant in a political context but in the context of “better safe than sorry.” Science policy decisions are an early form of the so-called “precautionary principle.” There are many types of science policy decisions made in regulatory risk assessment. But the LNT is perhaps the most prominent.
Although the LNT is often used for regulatory risk assessments for exposure to chemicals, the focus, here, will be radiation risk assessment. The gap in knowledge with risk assessment for radiation exposures is the absence of data showing harm from low dose/exposure to radiation. We know from the Japanese atomic bomb survivor data, for example, that cancer risk increases with with proximity to ground zero for the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombings. The survivors have been extensively studied for decades and the dose-response curve (i.e., analogous to solid blue line in the graph above) is generally accepted to be linear and increasing with proximity to the explosions (i.e., higher exposures).
But what, if any, is the risk from lower and less intense exposures to radiation? The actual shape and nature of dose-response curve in that exposure region is controversial to say the least. To set regulatory standards in that region, where the vast majority of human exposures to radiation occur, the LNT is assumed and used. Although it is often cloaked, presented and discussed as science, the LNT and its application is, in fact, pure guesswork. It is not the product of science, but rather its absence.
The director of the Health and Safety branch of the UK Atomic Energy Authority Dr. Andrew Mclean described the LNT as far back as 1963 as follows:
And the practitioners of the “radiological priestcraft” are politically powerful, watchful over their domain and are aggressive in defending it.
Why does the LNT still hold such tremendous sway over regulatory risk assessment and standard setting? A better question to start with might be, how did the LNT come to be used in the first place? Enter, Ed Calabrese.
There is a standard history of the LNT, portraying it as the outcome of Nobel prize-winning science, followed by the adoption of this science by learned committees of the National Academy of Sciences. Then there is the actual history of the LNT as revealed by Calabrese and the Health Physics Society. And that history, without even knowing what it is until Calabrese’s work, is what the LNT priesthood is trying to prevent the world from knowing.
The emails unearthed by Calabrese reveal senior levels of the radiation protection community, prominent individuals and key institutions, scheming not only to undermine Calabrese but also conspiring to seize control of the HPS and to cleanse it of anyone in a leadership role who questions the validity of the LNT.
3. The Calabrese Videos and the Emails
To provide the public and radiation protection community with the benefit of Calabrese’s discoveries, the Health Physics Society (HPS) released in April 2022 a series of videos (HPS.org | YouTube | JunkScience.com) documenting and exposing the historic science fraud behind the LNT that Calabrese single-handedly uncovered.
In July 2022, Theodora Scarato of the environmental activist group Environmental Health Trust (EHT) notified Calabrese of the results of a Freedom of Information Act that EHT had submitted to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Scarato sent Calabrese 1,200 pages of the FOIA results, including email to and from Armin Ansari, a past president of the HPS (2012-2013) and current president-elect of the American Academy of Health Physicists (AAHP). Unexpectedly, these emails contained communications by and between HPS board members and others in the radiation protection establishment critical of Calabrese, HPS leadership and the video series.
After reviewing the emails and wanting to better understand expressed displeasures with HPS video series, Calabrese submitted his own FOIA request to CDC. This action is entirely consistent with Calabreses’s meticulous and thorough research methods. In Episode 4 of the video series, for example, Calabrese revealed how he purchased personal letters between key members of the 1956 National Academy of Sciences’ Biological Effects of Atomic Radiation (BEAR) Committee in order to better understand the motives and relationships that led to their recommendation of the LNT Model for use in risk assessment.
After receiving FOIA-ed material from CDC, Calabrese shared the results with HPS leadership.
The FOIA-ed information reveals a coordinated and covert campaign by John Boice, the past president (2012-2018) and current director of science of the National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurements (NCRP), and some HPS members to “save the Society.”
The cabal intended to accomplish this by covertly recruiting, nominating and electing HPS members to HPS leadership who had views consistent with their own, i.e., ignorant of the LNT’s history yet supportive of it. The emails revealed that many prominent figures in the field of radiation safety are acting to protect the continued reliance on the LNT model by suppressing relevant scientific information and silencing critics like Calabrese.
Only HPS members in leadership positions working at government or public institutions were the subject of Calabrese’s FOIA requests, some of which are still in progress. What follows is a presentation of noteworthy emails. It reveals how leaders in the field of radiation safety who hold influential or prominent positions on national and international committees, academic programs and government agencies nefariously control the exchange of scientific information to the detriment of the rest of us.
This is rank politics and political activism, not science.
4. The ‘Move the Needle’ Plot
Emails show that just days after John Cardarelli was elected president of the Health Physics Society in January 2020, Boice communicated with CDC’s Ansari about the election:
Boice and others held a meeting to discuss HPS during which they expressed concern about its “downward spiral.”
Ansari, Boice and Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center’s Larry Dauer initiated a campaign, including a logo, that Boice referred to as “moving the needle” and defined as “incremental steps for a healthy Health Physics Society and [to] renew the past excellence.”
At a meeting to advance the “moving the needle” campaign, several NCRP and HPS members discussed:
- HPS position statements (specifically the HPS document, “Radiation Risk in Perspective“);
- Potential future nominees to run for HPS president and/or board of director positions;
- Concerns on how to “save the Society”; and
- Names of HPS members with gravitas, name recognition and institutional credentials who might support NCRP efforts to “move the needle.”
The email below shows Boice complementing Ansari (“I thing [sic] you moved the needle at least three clicks!”) in response to Ansari beginning to recruit nominees to run for HPS leadership. Dauer is concerned about a conflict of interest in being on the HPS nominating committee while trying to get nominated as a candidate for HPS leadership.
Five months later, Dauer shared his joy at successfully getting the “move the needle” cabal’s candidates nominated at HPS:
Dauer’s efforts resulted in two “move the needle” HPS members (Mike Boyd and Adela Salame-Alfie, both of the NCRP) being elected to the HPS board of directors later that year.
Despite the election of the “move the needle” nominees, it should be noted that:
- Less than 25% of HPS members typically vote in board elections. So such a low turn-out tends to benefit a motivated minority.
- Boyd was a long-term employee of the EPA, which always uses the LNT Model in its radiation and chemical cancer risk assessments. [Note: Boyd retired from EPA and was replaced by Ansari. Boyd now works for Ansari as contractor]
- Salame-Alfie is a CDC employee who worked in the same office as Ansari, who left the CDC and now works at EPA.
- While there is no express rule preventing Dauer from sharing the HPS ballot while serving on the HPS nominating committee, there certainly is an expectation of confidentiality with respect to internal HPS deliberations. Instead Dauer opted to act as a source for Boice and other NCRP members who held multiple meetings on the HPS nominations and elections throughout 2021.
5. HPS releases LNT video series triggering a flurry of NCRP actions
Just ahead of the release of the HPS video series, HPS corporate secretary Nicole Martinez emails John Boice about her effort to talk Cardarelli out of releasing the video series:
Without having seen the HPS video series, Boice responds with:
“The rest of story”, per Boice, is revealed in this attachment to an email sent to Martinez on March 10, 2022:
Keep in mind that Boice was President of NCRP for seven years (2012-2018) and is now its director of science. Boice is also a leader on the Million-Person study, proposed research of radiation workers intended to understand the effects of low-dose radiation. Is Boice’s intolerant attitude what he brought every day to his leadership position in what is supposed to be a science-based organization? Is that what can be expected in his leadership of the Million-Person study?
On April 14, 2022, the HPS published the 22-part video series on the history of the LNT model (HPS.org, YouTube.com or at JunkScience.com.) The series has been viewed by more than 16,000 unique IP addresses, in more than 700 cities and more than 70 countries world-wide. It has been widely acclaimed. Calabrese tells quite an amazing story based on original documents, many of which have never before seen the light of day.
Around the time the documentary was released, a flurry of activities occurred within the NCRP leadership. The NCRP’s Boice emailed Ansari:
Despite my best efforts, after stepping down from President, I was unable to prevent NCRP contamination with anti-LNTers.
This statement conveys clear animus on the part of Boice towards those holding a different view of the LNT from himself. It raises questions, including:
- Did Boice’s long-term leadership create a culture at NCRP in which only pro-LNT views were welcomed?
- How many nominees were excluded from NCRP membership over the past 10 years because of his bias or influence?
- With his seemingly profound pro-LNT bias, should Boice be leading a study to understand the effects of low-dose radiation exposure?
- Will anyone ever find out?
Keep in mind the video series does not explicitly address the suitability (or not) of the LNT model for use in radiation protection. It merely reveals how the U.S. came to adopt the LNT model for risk assessment. This is not a direct anti-LNT message.
What Calabrese exposed is the sordid and non-scientific past of the LNT. That does not necessarily mean that it should not or cannot be used in risk assessment. What it means is that the LNT has no actual basis in science. As discussed before, it is “science policy.” So the problem with the LNT is not so much that it is blindly used. But when it is used, it is portrayed as being scientific in nature when it is clearly not.
If regulators nonetheless choose to use the LNT despite the absence of scientific support — a state that continues to exist almost 70 years after it was adopted — they should describe to the public their ongoing reliance on the LNT as a political or policy choice, not a choice dictated by the extant scientific knowledge. Otherwise, they are lying to the public if not to themselves as well.
But lying to themselves is precisely what they continue to choose to do.
Northwestern University radiation oncology professor and HPS member Gayle Woloschak disparaged Calabrese as a “cultic character.”
EPA health physicist Philip Egidi called university professor Calbrese “a known corporate hack.”
About the video series, newly elected HPS board member and NCRP member Derek Jokisch said he, “couldn’t make it through a single [episode] in their entirety” and labeled them as “low quality junk.”
Martinez, the HPS Secretary and a newly-elected NCRP member stated, “I can’t even make myself sit through a video.”
Juvenile name-calling aside, their much more nefarious action was to ignore Calabrese’s discoveries. None of them are specifically addressed. They just engage in ad hominem attack.
While the cabal doesn’t like Calabrese, it does meet to talk about him and his work.
In the email below, Woloschak (via her secretary Laura Atwell) sets up a meeting of the NCRP’s “PAC 1: Basic Criteria, Epidemiology, Radiobiology, and Risk” committee specifically to discuss Calabrese and the HPS video series.
Amid the uproar about the videos series, Boice told Martinez that his concerns about HPS dated back to 2017 when LNT-critic Brant Ulsh was selected as editor-in-chief of the Health Physics Journal.
Following a 2017 presentation at an HPS meeting by Ulsh on the LNT, Boice expressed outrage and considered resigning from the Society. Instead, he stayed and organized an effort to “turn things around” by working with the American Academy of Health Physics (AAHP) to counter alleged “false science with good scientific sessions.” During the 2018 HPS annual meeting in Cleveland, Boice participated in an AAHP special session in which Calabrese had been initially invited to be a speaker and then was disinvited by the AAHP president, Kyle Kleinhans.
Kleinhans reassured Calabrese that the disinvitation was neither personal nor political, and stated to another AAHP member who questioned the decision that he decided to change the focus of his special session and Calabrese didn’t fit with the new focus.
Later, Kleinhans co-authored a publication summarizing the session stating that it, “was structured to describe the current state of science, from molecular biology to human epidemiology, as well as to explain how that science is translated to radiation protection policy and regulations for low levels of radiation” (Ansari, Kleinhans, & Boice, 2019). This focus is very consistent with Calabrese’s publications.
That session was led by the Ansari and Kleinhans with Boice filling the Calabrese speaker slot. As recounted by Calabrese during a 2022 lecture, the actions of the AAHP leadership were unprofessional, disrespectful, self-serving and deceitful.
Kleinhans later shared his impression of Calabrese’s video series with HPS president Cardarelli by stating:
I’m a bit embarrassed at my naivete expecting scientists to do the right thing and report all of the relevant data. I wasn’t aware of the bad science and cherry-picking of data done by some of the scientist [sic] to point to their predisposed outcome. I guess I shouldn’t have been too surprised to see a number of the scientist [sic]‘following the money’.
More of that type of exchange is needed.
6. Suppressed opposition to the LNT emerges
Other FOIA-ed emails shows a more balanced view of the LNT, as expressed by radiation safety consultant Graham Smith:
If you take a holistic view of the issues affecting, say, management of radioactively contaminated land, waste disposal, but also use of ionising radiation in medicine, then below about 5 mSv/y you are wasting your time looking at small risks when there are clear bigger risks to be concerned about that deserve anyone’s attention first. And this is true whether you agree with applying LNT, or disagree.
EPA health physicist Mike Boyd also seems on board with moving past the LNT, agreeing with Australian low dose radiation researcher Pamela Sykes’ conclusion:
In the short term, if LNT is left out of the argument, and replaced with suggestions for sensible approaches to improve the ways to reduce financial and administrative burden based on acceptable risk using a graded approach within the current regulatory system, then there will be a clearer path forward toward more sensible regulation of ionizing radiation (Sykes, 2020).
But moving past the LNT doesn’t appear to be on EPA’s agenda as seen in exchanges between then-EPA radiation chief and now director of EPA’s Office of Indoor Air and Radiation, Jonathan Edwards, and then-EPA Office of Emergency Management deputy office director and now-US Coast Guard emergency management director, Dana Tulis. She seeks an open-minded discussion to ensure EPA uses the latest science in its radiation policies. Edwards states his office would never subscribe to opening up the LNT policy for review and that it is “set in stone” EPA policy.
7. National Academy of Sciences Committee view of Calabrese and the HPS documentary
Before the video series controversy, the National Academy of Sciences had established its Committee on Developing a Long-Term Strategy for Low-Dose Radiation Research in the United States.
The Committee was chaired by Joe Gray and included two HPS members, Woloschak and Shaheen Dewji. Email FOIA-ed by Calabrese revealed the concern of the Committee in how to address the video series.
Here Woloschak apprises NAS staff officer Ourania Kosti, chairman Gray, and NAS committee member, current HPS board member and Georgia Institute of Technology assistant professor Shaeen Dewji of the NCRP meeting on the video series and whether the NCRP would respond.
Although no official NCRP response has been delivered to date, during these exchanges, Gray floated the idea of trying to disparage Calabrese as being funded by the U.S. Department of Energy because of the Department’s “checkered history.”
The Department of Energy has, in fact, not sponsored Calabrese’s research. So an attempt to link the Department of Energy with Calabrese’s work lacks a factual basis. But it is quite ironic that Gray would try to smear Calabrese with a funding connection to the Department of Energy as his own NAS Committee was sponsored by… the Department of Energy.
Woloschak expressed concern that citing Calabrese to make Gray’s point would risk credibility of the report. She stated that the entire committee had this discussion when another committee member proposed referencing one of his papers and that the “committee pushed back.”
Woloschak followed with:
I do not think weshould [sic] cite Calabrese… No one complained that they weren’t there…as far as I can tell. My concern is more broadly for the community.
Kosti stated that at least 2 to 3 committee members did not want the report to even reference Calabrese’s work because it was controversial.
These actions show a conscious decision by the NAS Committee to effectively ignore the most published author on this topic. Calabrese has a long history of directing conferences designed to explore leading edge scientific issues, typically with the inclusion of diverse and opposing views. He has directed or co-directed several dozen of such meetings.
Gray’s response to Woloschak further discusses the planned cover-up:
Sorry to be difficult… but what I see is a Society backing Calabrisi [sic] and a lot of PUBLISHED papers articulating his positions that are critical of some of the institutions with which we are associated including the NAS. I know we have discussed this and that you have asserted that there are issues with his positions. However, we as a committee have not done a thorough review of the evidence behind your assertions. Selfishly, I also think it is very likely that I as a defender of this document will be asked about the lack of attention to these publications by unfriendly questioners. As it sits, I would be left to say that the committee did not find them credible but I would not be able to point to documents that back up the lack of credibility. So while you say that that [sic] citing them might be a problem, I can certainly see downsides to not citing them – namely that the NAS could be accused of suppressing “uncomfortable truths” as other agencies have done in the past. Perception is important. 99% of our readers will have access only to the published literature. The fact that the reviewers did not pick up on it does not mean that our detractors won’t.
I am not going to push this any farther but I will appreciate a suggestion about how to respond to questions about why we did not cite, should those questions arise.
Woloschak responds by claiming there’s a large body of literature that is opposed to Calabrese’s work which she was not inclined to search for unless Gray found it necessary. However, she did provide him with a recent Calabrese publication, characterizing it as having “alot [sic] of inaccuracies (perhaps downright lies)” based on her conversations with Bob Ullrich and Julian Preston who knew the players in the paper and indicated that there are many problems with the article (Calabrese & Selby, 2022).
Paul Selby, the co-author on this paper, shared his response to her characterization with Calabrese. He indicated that Ullrich and Preston had no first-hand knowledge of the cancer study cover up study details, raising serious questions with the factual basis of Woloschak’s assertions.
Woloschak further explained why the NAS report neglected to mention the word “hormesis,” a criticism raised by the ANS Executive Director during the July 15, 2022 webinar. She stated:
Our committee decided not to take on the word ‘hormesis’ (which is the one Calabrese uses) because of both the controversy and the vast literature that do not support the overall hormesis model.
Woloschak opines that it would be better not to deal with Calabrese and, in essence, to ignore his work. Instead of “hormesis,” the NAS report used the term “adaptive response.”
It’s worth noting that nearly 150,000 citations exist in the Web of Science based on the terms “hormesis” or “hormetic.” There were about 400 peer-reviewed publications in 2022 on hormesis and that number has increased by about 10-15% per year over the past two decades. The vast majority of these papers are not authored by Calabrese.
Woloschak’s guidance to the NAS study committee demonstrates how a single member can influence the direction of an entire institutional committee of experts. Ironically, Calabrese was invited to give a seminar to the BEIR VII Committee on hormesis, yet two decades later, this new NAS committee showed disdain for the messenger and the message despite the tremendous growth of this topic.
Kosti said the NAS committee was not tasked to review the history of the LNT or to make policy recommendations. She states “The use of the LNT is a policy decision” – another reference to acceptance of the LNT model based on an EPA policy decision instead of its scientific validity at low doses. Gray accepted these responses but expressed his hope that someone publishes a counter to Calabrese sometime soon.
Here is another email between EPA staffers Philip Egidi and Stuart Walker raging about Calabrese and about HPS president Cardarelli having “stabbed EPA in the back” by producing the video series.
Final Thought For Now…
If you had the benefit of watching the HPS video series, it’s easy to make sense of the behavior revealed by the FOIA-ed emails. They are just a continuation of the same sort of intellectual and moral corruption that have unjustly burdened and misled society about the LNT and radiation safety.
Honest and transparent pursuit for the truth is a necessary part of science. The issues presented here are larger than a question about the validity of the LNT model for risk assessment. Without honesty and transparency, science cannot advance. And that is just what has happened to radiation safety science over the past almost 100 years.
Stay tuned.
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So the scientific basis for the choices in the energy sector have been corrupt across the board?
The Big Lie is very big indeed. It will take a tremendous effort to overcome it.
There sure are a lot of pissed government hacks.
I dont see it as essentially corrupt in its inception. Back in the day no one knew, same as with climate change.
Today, as with climate change, we know the politiucally accepted models do not give accurate predictions.
But they generate profits, keep bureaucrats in power, and the public in their place.
Energy is, after IIRC drugs, the second biggest global indutry. In cash terms.
its far too big to allow inconvenient truths to affect its profits. A trillion buys a lot of politicians, and funds a lot of bureaucrats and activist organizations.
IN a world where jobs are increasingly hard to fund, money talks and bullshit doesnt walk, it tramples on everything..
While serving in the Navy Nuclear power program I got a Training Manual circa 1958 that explained how the dose limit was determined before the two bombs were dropped. They exposed the extremities of a group of people to a mild dose of radiation until their skin reddened like a mild sunburn. They then set the time limit for exposure to that dose level to be 1/10th of the time that reddened the skin. Later they set all of the dose limits to about 1/100th of those values as that was less than the dose level in Denver CO. LNT came years afterward.
I follow my crewmates I served with on the various members Submarine members web pages. Even went to a few reunions. Not one person who served with me on submarines, all Nuclear, has had an Obit indicating that they died from radiation induced cancer. Yes, this is anecdotal but begs the question WHY?
Have suspected for ages that the radiation risk is overstated. Since as long ago as the 1950s.
After all, life developed within a radiation ‘soup’ from multiple sources and is well designed to resist variations therein.
Small doses result in an invigorated immune system rather than an immune system failure.
The 1950s prospect of energy being too cheap to meter was just too much for an authoritarian elite so they embarked on scare stories that persist to this day.
The lost opportunities are incalculable.
I have been lobbying for years within the UK’s Institute of Nuclear Engineers to get rid of the LNT. I have received no support despite the fact that the LNT has cost the nuclear industry billions and done untold damage to society. Why this reluctance to get rid of the result of corrupt science?
Power and control.
EXCERPT from
FACTS AND INFORMATION ABOUT RADIATION EXPOSURE
https://www.windtaskforce.org/profiles/blogs/facts-and-information-…
Elements that contain unstable nuclei are radioactive; they are called radionuclides. They decay by releasing mostly alpha and beta particles accompanied by gamma rays.
– An alpha particle has low-energy, is positively charged and consists of two protons and two neutrons, i.e., a helium atom without its 2 electrons; it can be stopped by tissue paper or human skin.
– A beta particle is a high-energy, negatively charged electron (negatron) or a positively charged positron; it can be stopped by a sheet of aluminum.
– Gamma rays are high energy, short-wavelength, electromagnetic radiation; they can be stopped by concrete or lead.
The energy released by radionuclides may knock electrons out of their orbits around an atom’s nucleus. This process is called ionizing radiation.
Ionizing radiation damages living tissues, leads to changes in constituents of the cell, including the DNA of chromosomes, and results in changes in structure and function of the cells and organ systems.
Understanding the potential for ionizing radiation to effect changes to living tissues requires knowing how much radioactive energy is absorbed by the tissues.
RADIATION DOSES
All very well, but as for “ionising radiation” bull. It implies non-ionising radiation is safe.
The whole concept is a red herring, almost like conspiracy theory.
“Cell phone networks are causing various radiation diseases.”
“Aw, shuddup, it’s non-ionising!”
I dare you put a head inside a working microwave oven, why not? It’s totally “non-ionising”.
Bit offensive innit? Telling people to put their head in a microwave, tut, tut.
Maybe the sods will mutate, grow a brain or something. At the very least it will sterilise the sack of inside their skulls.
I note the many down-votes, unaccompanied by any reasons or facts.
Because protecting their own world picture is more important than actually looking at the world?
The second highest expense after “Security Staff” is Radiation mitigation costs while repairing/refueling the plant. I worked at one plant that spent three months building a mockup of the area around the lower elbow of the Reactor coolant pump in a warehouse, and then the six weeks of practicing, critiquing, practicing, etc. untill performance time of the repair was down to an acceptable value. Was told it cost in the $Millions.
Sometimes, one has to distinguish between the cost of something, and the price reported to the tax collector/ subsidy clerk/ budget controller.
You know, like the 25-grand plastic toilet seat rings the Pentagon buys from their approved supplier?
Also, never undersetimate the negotiation skills of an expert advisor with no provable personal links to the buying office…if you know what I mean.
Can’t find it now, but just a few weeks ago there was an article on a medical journal report that they have discovered that DNA can learn how to repair itself.
Think of DNA as a data stream with 30Gb of data.
Now imagine digital error correction.
Now imagine the RNA that ‘reads’ your DNA for guidance in the metabolic process, and the concept of DNA mistakes being corrected, seems like a basic requirement for existence.
P.S. DNA itself is like a library, by itself fairly static, but the things it enables with the correct hardware (RNA) is nearly unlimited.
Now you may know why Baal Gates injected you with specific RNA, as well as the DNA that usually contaminates all vaccines.
We have to turn the precautionary principle on its head and point out that the consequences and costs of following it in low threshold models (also applied to pollution exposure etc.) are far more damaging than the ills they pretend exist.
Yes, Fight fear with more fear. Facts don’t matter in politics. Policy is contingent not on facts but on what people can be made to, or already, believe.
You cannot know that without proper data, and the data has been historically corrupt.
Remember the good professor hired by Motorola to study the radio radiation safety issue? No?
Neither does Motorola. They paid him 4 million dollars (1980?), buried his report, and deny any acquaintance.
Please stand by while I warm up to the subject. While you wait, please refer to the possibly hundreds of times on this site alone I explain how glyphosate might be the registered “active ingredient”, but they refuse to say what the other 40-odd ingredients are, even though admitting some of those ingredients are “a thousand times more poisonous than glyphos…”
Ionising/ Non-ionising my inbetweenglutae maximus.
If the world was as dangerous as you believe, we’d all be dead already.
If the world was as black-and-white as you think it is, there would have been no space for thinking any further than you do.
I’d complain that your post makes no sense, but you’d probably accuse me of binary thinking again.
It’s a thread, Mark, a conversation. You have to follow the entire thread, Mark, otherwise you are just the guy that walks in on a conversation and interrupts.
I was pointing out fallacious logic (assumes universal tendency to hormosis) to a guy partaking in a sub-thread attempting to inject the non/ionising ideology of telecomms charlatans.
The last guy is not the first guy, go read the whole thread again. That’s why we add quotes, Mark.
Corruption and dishonesty should not be allowed in any democracy.
Corruption and dishonesty form the cornerstones of the U.S. Congress, and the top levels of the Executive branch.
How else can people with so little wealth when they enter “public service” become multimillionaires within a few years?
If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.
Who will bell the cat?
“If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.”
Mother used to tell me that. 🙂
LNT is “policy”, just like The Precautionary Principle in the EU, and is a much religious doctrine as anything. It is an Ad Ignorantium argument, that because we know nothing, it must be X.
And as it is policy, we will of course never fund any research to test that model.
Thorium liquid salts cooled reactors could provide cheap abundant safe electricity,
And fantasies could turn out to be true. Thorium is just as dangerous and way further from viable large scale production than a PWR, and is not germane to the topic under discussiom here.
Not germane, TRUE.
Further from large scale production than PWR, TRUE.
Just as dangerous, Probably FALSE*, but more research will prove that out.
* (Not pressurized, no steam/hydrogen explosion risk, no Xe or Tritium buildup, no meltdown {it’s already melted} risk, negative temperature coefficient, multiple passive safety options)
In the late 1980’s the radon in basement scare was ragging in western New Jersey where we live. I tested the level in our basement with the standard kit. It registered 11 pico curies. The limit was set a 4 pico curies. I did some reading in the science journals and discovered it was derived from uranium mine workers exposed to 10’s of thousands pico curies using this kind methodology. Needless to say we didn’t remediate
In Bretagne people are told to test their basement for radon but AFAIK nobody bothers, except for the purpose of selling the house when it’s part of standard diagnostic.
What is “it“. It sounds like you are saying the 4 pico curies upper limit was derived from mine workers’ exposure but your position seems to be that the 4 pico curies limit is invalid based upon the study evidence.
It is complicated. For two reasons. One is the LNT model which basically states ‘if 50% of people die at single dose X, then 5% will die at cumulative dose of X/10′ and so on.
An assumption that has been demonstrated to be incorrect. And leads to far lower regulatory limits on radiation, than are necessary.
And the other is that in the case of radon there is evidence to suggest that it is not the radiation that is the problem, it is the heavy metals, all poisonous and cancer inducing, that it turns into.
Radon is not just radiation, It’s radiation plus a poison, as well…
Sounds a little like armor penetrating Uranium shells. Also there, the chemical toxicity of exploded shells is far worse than their radioactivity.
Actually, there is evidence that radon in the basement, particularly in combination with smoking, actually caused an uptick in lung cancer cases. The model that fits this data is that if lung function is degraded, by smoking, contaminants are not coughed up, and the radon decay products – essentially radioactive polonium, bismuth and finally stable non radioactive lead IIRC, stay in the lungs and they are what causes the cancer, not radiation.
It is not a huge risk, but natural radon is in fact far more dangerous than any man made radiation,because as a gas you can inhale it, and it turns into a poison.
Radon exposure levels have been set based on non-smokers who got lung cancer while living in houses with radon seeping into them. As Radon decays, Alpha, Beta, and Gamma radiation are emitted. Alpha is the worst. It’ll cause damage from outside or inside you. Gamma can go right through you and a lot of other stuff, so it’s least dangerous. Beta can’t penetrate paper, so normal clothing shields against it very well. But you do not want to breathe in or swallow anything with beta radiation. That’s not good at all.
So there’s good reason to seal up a basement or crawlspace or ventilate the Radon away.
Radon can also be in water. There are two ways to get Radon out of water. 1. A whole house filter which must be periodically replaced and is treated as nuclear waste. 2. A spray system that blows the water into a very fine mist for long enough the Radon leaves the water and floats off into the air outside the home. No need to replace filters full of radioactive particles but one must have a place for the spray system and a collection tank to hold enough de-Radoned water to support normal household water use.
There’s enough people who got lung and digestive system cancers from breathing Radon or Radon contaminated water to support doing what it takes to keep it out of the air in a home and remove it from the water if it’s present.
One of my cousins lives smack in the middle of the “hottest” Radon area in Idaho. Fortunately the air and water tests showed no Radon in the basement or well water. But his closest neighbor’s house could have high levels of it. I live in an area with no known Radon, don’t have a basement, and have city water supply.
If you don’t smoke, don’t do any of the other things known to be connected to lung cancer, but still end up with lung cancer after many years living in your house you know has that level of it in the basement…
The easiest thing to do is seal the floor and foundation walls. If it’s an unfinished basement it’s easy to apply a paintable urethane caulk to cracks and joints, then
roll on a couple of coats of UGL or similar waterproofing membrane. Anything to block water and moisture intrusion will also block Radon.
I know all that. What I’m contesting is the low limit of 4 pc.
This “Deadly” [LOL] gas was discovered when a NPP Worker came into work wearing his brand new 100% coarse wool Hunting shirt and stood in the entrance monitor and set off the alarm. [Circa, fall of 75] Health physics Techs gave him the third degree. Took a few hours to determine that his shirt had been “Exposed” that it was not particulate but gaseous and the rest of the day to determine that it was radiation in his home. Eventually they determined that the valley he lived in was above radon emitting coal. Worse, the Coal power plants nearby burnt that coal putting more Radon in the air. Years later they showed that people around the plant received more radiation from the Coal Plant exhaust than the radiation released by the Accident at TMI.
The testimony of “experts” from the anti-nuclear power side, such as Mr. Egidi with his Associate degree in Applied Science in “Environmental Restoration and Waste Management,” who style themselves, “health physicist,”
on an issue involving real physics and engineering
is weak.
Compare the C.V.’s of the bona fide experts with degrees in Physics and other hard sciences who are arguing in favor of data-driven radiation measuring methodology, such as Brice (above) and Calabrese (above and here: https://mronline.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/CV_Calabrese_Aug2013.pdf ).
In a courtroom, with a fair jury/judge, the anti-nuclear power side would lose.
Have you ever heard of Judicial Notice. In controversial cases, depending upon the judge, the issue may be declared settled from the beginning and no evidence to the contrary can be presented to the jury.
Yes. I was assuming a fair judge. “Judicial notice” is abused if it is used to exclude evidence against anything but what is generally accepted and well-established fact, for instance, “The jury will take as given that it was a full moon on that date,” or “I will take judicial notice of the fact that Mr. P. T. Barnum was no longer living when the plaintiff drove his car into the circus tent.”
Since there is NO data establishing causation between human CO2 and “climate change,” to use judicial notice to exclude evidence of this would be UNETHICAL.
Good point, all the same, Andy.
“In a courtroom, with a fair jury/judge, the anti-nuclear power side would lose.” What you seek no longer exist in the USA. Especially on the Federal level.
Most certainly this is the case in DC.
The issue of LNT versus some effect threshold goes back now to the 1930’s. The original radiation LNT guy won a Nobel Prize in medicine, which Calabrese now argues was improperly awarded. Somehow I don’t think so.
I did some quick research including viewing at HPS.org prose summaries of each of the 10 hours of 22 video segments. I also read the saga of Calabrese’s 2015 letter to Science requesting retraction of a paper published about 50 years ago on grounds of academic misconduct. And I read some critiques of Calabrese hormesis papers, as well as those papers. I conclude based on several grounds that Milloy is mistaken is his reliance mainly on Calabrese, although the underlying LNT/threshold debate is very reminiscent of AGW, and there is substantial literature support for chemical exposure threshold models based on animal experiments. Not so much for radiation. Milloy’s thing has been EPA PM2.5 LNT.
“But every hormesis paper of his that I scanned (did five via PubMed at NIH then stopped) was subsequently criticized in a peer reviewed journal as methodologically flawed.”
Yes, but isn’t that what you’d expect?
Hormesis makes no sense to me. If there is a harm threshold, then exposure below that threshold is a so what, not a benefit. So if hormesis is real, then real Science should be able to show it exists. I have no dog in this hunt, but some of the medical methodology critique of Calabrese sure made sense to me.
Essentially every drug that is believed to be useful for any ill health condition has thresholds below which the substance is beneficial and above which it is harmful, even deadly. How is that not the very essence of the hormesis thesis?
Data, please.
Common sense can substitute for data here if one accepts that the toxicology adage “the dose makes the poison” applies even to chemicals necessary for life such as water, oxygen, salt, etc. (which it does).
In all of these cases, too much of X will kill you and too little of X will kill you. In between is hormesis.
That’s not quite what hormesis is, or is claimed to be.
We know the the body has many ways of fighting diseases. Versus in infection the body has physical barriers (eg, the skin) and both antibody and cellular defenses. Exposure to viruses can increase the body’s production if interferon, which helps cells prevent viruses from entering the cells. Hormesis would occur if a small exposure to virus induces the various defenses to strengthen and thereby prevents illness from the virus.
We know we have DNA repair mechanisms to counter some degree of radiation-induced DNA injury. It is theorized that low doses of radiation have a net beneficial effect by induced more activity of the DNA repair mechanisms.
This should be a question of empirical science—-looking for and measuring hormetic effects…or confirming their absence. It is bad that the government is tipping the scales for its bureaucratic benefit.
This is reminiscent of the overselling of the covid vaccines and the supposed benefit of lockdowns by the CDC.
I support fully your argument on this. It would be better to fund serious research on the topic, rather than “the government says so …” They’re attributing enough research grants for a lot of other “junk science” such as climate change topics …
That is an invalid reasoning. Too little a rock will not kill me like a large one, and enough medium ones are a favourite execution method amongst our more self-obsessed societies, if you know what I mean.
There is no hormesis for rocks, and if a Thing is not universal, it is not a universal law. But I await your calculations for depleted uranium and hormone blockers… where’s the zero /low dose harm, where’s your midpoint hormesis?
A non-contradictory world view is something to strive for….
You’ve never heard of over doses of pain medication, sedatives, antidepressants, cancer treatments, stimulants fed to children for behavioral disorders, treatments of serious allergy attacks, to name just a few? Perhaps you believe that normal doses are just unnecessary coddling?
Hormesis is “a little water stops you dying, a lot of water kills you”.
Evidence for radiation hormesis is weak, but it does exist.
The real go to guy on radiation is Wade Allison.
See ‘Radiation And Reason’ Wade Allison, Wade Allison Publishing 2009.
Allison is a nuclear and medical physicist and Emeritus Prof of Physics at Keble College, Oxford.
The evidence is in Denver CO and in the North-east area of Iran. Both have a high Background Radiation level, Greater than NRC allowable dose limits. If it is OK for Denver, it is OK for NY. To claim otherwise proves the limits are based on junk science, like the MASK MANDATES. The body cannot tell if an alpha, beta, gamma ray came from a NPP or from the sky.
You’re forgetting, that sometimes biology adapts to a situation. This is called induction. DNA repair improves when being challenged below the limit where it’s overwhelmed …
Sometimes it even goes the wrong way: some drugs induce an increase in specific cytochromes for example, which affect metabolism for other drugs.
Receptor upregulation is also a known problem in drug addiction.
YOUR body needs Arsenic – in very small amounts and the same for dozens of other Poisons. Munks hundreds of years ago would take small amounts of Arsenic to purify their body. Yes, some died, however most did not. Even some home made apple juice (Cider) has higher than the recommended amounts of cyanide.
Radiation causes some cancer by disturbing DNA structure. Recently, doctors have determined that DNA can “Learn” how to repair itself. People that live in Denver CO, the northeast corner of Iran live in two of the highest areas of background radiation. AND they have a lower-than-average death rate from cancer. Connect the dots.
Yes and?
Still not convinced even after the massive (large N, not large doses) children exposure from Fukushima Daiichi? The effect on thyroid cancer isn’t clear?
Please enlighten, increase or the magical decrease under discussion on this particular sub-thread?
Thanks for providing some perspective, Rud.
Wow! In the article the light is thrown on many people. You know what cockroaches do when the light is suddenly switched on? Much scuttling out of sight.
In real life, cockroaches are not evolved to deal effectively with humans. Quite often they can be observed to freeze in place, relying, one presumes, on the frequent ability of many preditors to detect motion but not to be able to identify stationary appearances. Thus, if one moves carefully, it is possible to scoop them up or smash them (smashing them dead is far less easy than one might believe based on other organisms).
Yep.
Just as the best reaction when you nearly step on an Eastern Brown snake is to immediately and absolutely freeze.
Don’t even breathe.
You just might avoid a life-threating nibble from a disturbed predator.
The cockroaches have obviously come to realize this.
And many think they will easily survive a nuclear exchange conflagration.
When I bought my first house, the place was roach heaven. The wife and I, seriously opposed to poisons around the house, rid our house in about a month. First, of course, we cleaned every single nesting place we could find, even unscrewing counter tops and wall fixtures.
Then came what I call “manual eradication”: You never leave the kitchen light on, and when you go there, you go armed with a toilet-paper covered hand. Light on, squish-squish-squash until every roach is either cripple, dead or hiding. Repeat every time you visit the kitchen. it is much more effective than it sounds.
The only time we had bug poison in my house, was when I caught monster-in-law spraying little black ants, instead of wiping up the spilled food.
Oh, what a fight that was! I still think that’s what done the poor dear in before her time, sitting in a haze of bug spray all day every day.
I wonder what the hormosis level is for bug spray…
At college I shared a house with 2 women – one of them put their gas fire on and then found out there was an ants nest behind the fire. Said ants, believing it to be mating season, let out all of the winged queens and drones into her room. I was the one who she insisted had to go in with a can of bug spray in each hand and deal with them – when I’d finished the carpet was black and crunchy.
So hormosis level is obviously higher than 2 full cans in an enclosed room for about 30 mins!
All the government agencies would have to do now to scare the living sh1t out of most of the citizenry is to declare that nuclear radiation is –
‘SAFE AND EFFECTIVE”
What could possibly be a rational for going to the opposite extreme?
Well Andy, the political sales pitch for the mRNA “vaccines” (“Safe and Effective”) is turning out to be a curse of illness, death & misery inflicted on legions of unsuspecting but compliant healthy people all around the world.
So for governments and NGOs to promote anything these days as “Safe and Effective” should be a general signal that it is the opposite extreme of that claim.
Q.E.D.
This is not new. In the late 1980s, the US government triggered an exploration of LNT via the BEIR commission (biological effects of ionizing radiation). It tabled its review of the literature in BEIR V. In the last few lines of its introduction, it confesses its failure to find any evidence of LNT.
Health Effects of Exposure to Low Levels of Ionizing Radiation: BEIR V |The National Academies Press
This fraud has been going on for a very long time, and the question is why.
Why? Regulatory power, the essence of all bureaucratic dreams.
Not to mention nice brown envelopes.
Agreed. Provided by oil companies via a host of charitable trusts.
One of these days an alarmist is going to provide evidence supporting their belief that oil companies are funding those who follow the science.
But I’m not going to hold my breath.
It seems to me not unlike the multiple investigations of actual PM2.5 exposure that were independently carried out by a fair number of researchers starting soon after EPA first announced its determination (secret data) of the peril of such small dust particles. No data was found by other researchers that such particles have caused any deaths. Plutonium dust might be an exception, along with a few other specific materials.
I am shocked — shocked! — to learn that bureaucrats are not guided by our best interests and do not always speak truth.
I worked on primary standards with Doctors Aston and Barnard who were knew messrs Lindop and Rotblat scientifically post the studies at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, when the safe levels were still being debated, vigorously, in the early 60s. I later worked at the Radiological Protection Service under Walter Binks then the NRPB under Andrew MacLean, mentioned above. We also had scientists working on radiobiological effects BUT no one really knew how cancers started, the belief was that cell division was interfered with, when in fact this is not a problem at low dosage, because natural cell division generates cancerous cells all the time, that our immune system kills off in their millions per day or we die. So what matters in radiobiological reality is what the effects of low and high dose radiation on the immune system actually are.
SCience now knows the effects are good and bad respectively, a finding that was wholly unimagined in the 60s and showed the low dose radiation LNT presumption to be wholly wrong. THere is a threshold and the response curve may even reverse and be hormetic at soome level. The science claimed by radiation protection “expers” was an ALARA belief/religion made up in ignorance, and its practitioners priests of a false god.
A craft not a science. A cost with no benefit. There are a lot of rent taking charlatans above, with NO idea how stuff really works, just how to wangle epidemiology in consensual science papers that support the LNT racket, the Fergussons of radiation protection.
We know MUCH better now, for sure. But it cannot be said out loud.
Everyone in the 60s did real science and were aware this was an arbitrary measure, that effectively became invalid as a real problem when the natural levels of radiation background around the World became known. Massively above “safe” levels with no cancer related consequences in the record. Up to nearly 1Sv pa, Geiger counter off the scale, Damage does depend on rate and period of long term exposure, but elevated low dose radiation up to 1Sv pa is clearly not a problem, as natural levels tell us from the cancer epidemiology where background is naturally high, up tp 800mSv pa on Monazite sands.
The people for “Protection” are simply charlatans, of poor intellectual calibre, mostly protecting their phoney baloney jobs. clinging to their thoroughly disproven beliefs as the source of their power and budgets, at massive avoidable cost to the society that pays them, They are, in reality, simple craft technicians, modelling priests protecting their false gods in a sinecured racket. It’s not about the science at all. It’s about keeping hold of their easy “expert’ money and power. When a scientist finds out what he has assumed is proven wrong by new evidence, or any evidence, it behoves them to change your response to risk to match what the science tells you. THis is exactly the opposite what these charlatans above are doing. Too thick to do real science, overly unaware of how science is even done, just rime serving bureaucrats, pantomime experts. A disgrace to science. Also see climate change and COVID. Ot’s science j Jim, but not as we know it…
PS but, sadly, it increasingly is how we know it….. told to believe the models by crooked politicians “advised” by sinecured consensual science modellers who prove for political reward. And we must believe the predictions of their models, that deny the observations of nature. Consensual science.
Consensus science?
Thank you, brian Catt.
Your comments agree with my experiences.
Geoff S
Complicit in this anti science fraud is the leftist liberal media that relentlessly hype this propaganda in support of their incompetent political governance policies.
Are there tactics exposed in this story that are being used to suppress science in other subjects where political governance preferred policies are supported by leftist liberal media?
https://www.academie-medecine.fr/irradiation-medicale-dechets-desinformation-un-avis-de-lacademie-nationale-de-medecine/
No study has detected a cancerous effect <100 mSv.
Signed: French Academy of Medicine, 2001
It’s the conclusion of a national “moral” authority.
It was never discussed in the French medias, the same medias who can’t get enough of vaccines are safe and efficacious according to authorities.
Isn’t it just one of these where we’re dealing with ‘experts’
(They will be the end of us all, they really will)
The problem with experts is that any given one:
Knows everything about nothing…
And knows nothing about everything (else)
Radiation: Creepy scary stuff that doesn’t register on any of our senses – and we’ve got more than 5 that’s for sure.
Hence, it can ‘get you‘ without your knowing
But we have discovered by using what senses we have got, know where it is and what it is by circumstantial means.
When radiation ‘gets us’ – when we are exposed or zapped by the stuff, being it energetic particles (Alpha or Beta Rays) or electromagnetic radiation (Gamma Rays, also UV, X-rays) the effect on us is the same.
An alpha particle would be nice visualisation – regard it as Chemical or Molecular Bullet shooting through us when we’re exposed to a source of such things.
As it passes through, it breaks open chemical bonds in the myriad chemicals that we’re made of.
i.e. It creates Free Radicals = atoms or molecules with unpaired electrons
Atoms don’t ‘like’ that and they become very energetic in their desperation to re-pair their electrons – to make nice stable bonds with each other.
One of The Worst Things inside of us is Oxygen, we’ve plenty of that and if an Oxygen atom finds it has lost an electron, it becomes The Angriest Critter anywhere this universe.
Thus, an Oxygen Free Radical is capable of breaking, and it will, almost other chemical bond in order to get its electron back.
Inside a delicate ‘chemical thing’ like us, that is not a good thing to happen because when the Oxygen gets its electron back, it will have made a whole new chemical that shouldn’t probably be inside of us.
It is quite capable of re-programming our DNA
We will have heard of Oxidative Stress and that is exactly it.
Exposure to radiation causes Oxidative Stress
But but BUT, Oxidative Stress happens naturally inside us anyway – it has to happen.
Classically as we burn food to make energy. That involves creating Oxygen radicals which then attack the fats, ketones and sugars we eat or create elsewhere inside ourselves.
And some radicals are bound to escape the ‘reaction place’ where it’s all supposed to happen and when they do, they will have the exact same effect as the radiation has/had.
i.e. Create more radicals, create unwanted/toxic stuff and damage our DNA = Cancer
(This where the eating of sugar is sooooo very bad. We have completely no control over sugar (Glucose) and it can go within us wherever it likes.
Trouble is, sugar molecules have most the properties of dynamite – they burn and explode at the slightest provocation and in all sorts of places they shouldn’t)
Anyway, we actually have 3 mechanisms for controlling free radicals and those systems care not one jot what created them or where they came from.
1/ Anti-oxidant chemicals/substances: Classically of course, Vitamin C but there are plenty others.
These are things that float around inside us and should they encounter a free radical, will give it the electron its looking for but without creating a toxic by-product
2/ Our normal immune system: If a free radical has ‘done some chemistry’, chances are it will have created an alien or rogue protein.
And that is exactly what our immune system is to finding/identifying and removing them as it goes. Usually via our kidneys – that’s where (nearly all) the bad boys go.
3/ Apoptosis: If a free radical escaped being neutralised by Vitamin C and then went on to damage a cell’s DNA and if the immune system didn’t see/find the damaged cell, the cell will do what it’s programmed to do = die after (typically) 28 days.
But before it does, it makes a brand new copy of itself
That way, any damaged cells are got rid of.
All our cells do that, on slightly varying timescales – except our nerve cells. They (should) last us a lifetime.
If the DNA had been damaged, chances are the replication/copying process would fail – the cell would die anyway and in that way the damage would be removed/cleared away.
Anyway, did you get that…..
Radiation is no more dangerous than eating sugar – and we have 3 distinct mechanisms for coping with that
Actually, eating sugar is a very dangerous thing to do – it swamps us with free radicals.
But we are positively informed by Science, Medicine and our Elders/Betters/ Doctors that we have to eat sugar and that, best of all, eating nothing but sugar will deliver us from Climate Armageddon
completely blindly desperately wrong – this world has gone mad
We get most of our sugar from things like potato, pasta, bread, etc. Your digestive system quickly breaks down the starches etc to the component sugars mostly glucose. Glucose is the primary metabolic fuel of human cells. It only become a problem if you become diabetic.
And if nothing else is available, the body will break down muscle tissue to produce the glucose for necessary bodily functioning.
Fructose, which is 1/2 of most dietary sugars, is the potential problem. It can be used for energy but the metabolic pathway is very different than that of glucose. When it is not immediately used it is also stored in a completely different way than glucose is stored and is thereafter much harder for the body to use. Too much fructose accumulates and produces the same symptoms as too much ethanol, the alchocol so many people love to drink and so many die from.
Fructose gets converted to glucose like glycogen in the liver. Only one other sugar in your diet galactose from dairy. Fructose use to be recommended to diabetics for sweetening before diet sweeteners as it has a lower glycemic index than sucrose
Fructose, or a direct product of fructose, is converted to visceral fat for storage. Its metabolic path to energy production from there is much more difficult for the body than using stored glucose, so in a major part of the population, who are not physically active enough, stored visceral fat amount grows and grows. Fatty liver is just one of the destructive conditions that is the same end result from sugar consumption as from high alcohol consumption.
What I have read the primary conversion is to glycogen a polysaccharide of glucose and secondarily fat.
Peta,
Are you arguing that you know a better design for the natural digestive system, than the natural one from Nature?
Anti-oxidants (professional Chemists say ‘reductants’) are a trendy topic, spoken about by many with an authority that they do not possess. Like the LNT pushers in this thread. Geoff S
Just an FYI, alpha particles (ie helium nuclei) do not pass through the body.
They are stopped by clothing/dead skin layer.
They are a big deal if they are inhaled into the lungs.
They have what is called a quality factor of 20.
Gamma has a QF of 1.
This is not New look up Galen Winsor
Add this one the value of waste
Typo: “The LNT is a just model” should be “The LNT is just a model”.
There have been other articles about LNT in regard to radiation which presented that there were (at least) several hundred published research projects completed before the adoption of the LNT model for radiation exposure which showed significant health benefits from low level radiation exposure. I imagine, but do not know, that these studies were not done on humans although there has been mention of deliberate exposure of military personnel for data collection. Is there evidence that the above contention is false?
There has since been a number of seemingly significant data collected from “event is the wild” that support those earlier conclusions being applied to humans. These would be “Know Effects” that are seemingly ignored in the displayed graph History of the Linear No-Threshold Model.
Does anyone know if there is real data that contradicts any of those beneficial findings, rather than that there is just a determined ignoring of inconvenient results? Of course we know from other contentious fields that LNT has also been applied to more than radiation exposure, without evidence, or in opposition to evidence. Those positions, whether taken for the express purpose or for other reasons, lend great power to regulatory agencies.
“The LNT is a just model,…” Rather, The LNT is just a model,…
Good models are based in experiment and contain as much physics as can be brought to bear.
The Linear Free Energy Relationships used in Organic Chemistry to organize e.g., non-aqueous acidities or the reactivities of substituted aromatics, are credible scientific models. They’re rigorously based in experiment and are predictive.
The LNT model abandons experimental science. It’s an expression of personal hubris and possibly consciously chosen as a tool of oppression by administrative tyrants.
I’m guessing that Timothy Wirthism exposed a widespread failing among humans, when Wirth said, regarding global warming, that, “we’ve got to ride the global-warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing…”
Doing the right thing. Unsupported by any science, but it sure feels right. The pure motive of every mass-murdering tyrant. And Timothy Wirth. And the LNT hubristers.
Pat,
Ralph Nader with slogans like “Unsafe at any speed” infiltrated many minds of the feeble and willing. Add Carson “Silent Spring” and a few more fermenting agents and you get more people like these LNT pushers.
I am fearful about the degradation of hard science that we now have in progress.
Geoff S
It’s always been there, Goeff, the degraded science, but these days it’s smeared across our entire civilization.
I used to be that our various scientific organizations fought to contain bad science.
Today they promote it.
Debating the LNT is something stupid people with PhD do. And it is just as stupid here.
I do not have an irrational fear of small doses or it being a little warmer. It is the fatal dose or the deadly explosion that I worry about.
No one has ever been hurt by radiation from US Navy reactors or commercial .reactors designed and operated to US standards.
What I had to show was how we met requirements not how we prevented irrational fears.
I use the smoking gun theory. Show me the smoking gun and the dead body.
My last job in the navy included being the radiation safety officer. We had a problem that resulted from deviation for SOP (common sense). They got the hint when I made a show of making copies of records where I had documented my objections. We safely fixed the problem.
Two died on a USSR sub fixing the same problem.
In Japan no children were even exposed to I-131. It is easy to measure. In the USSR, many children died from I-134 exposure.
Emergency plans include provisions for evacuation based on my smoking gun theory not LNT.
History is full of examples of bodies being stacked like cord wood because it was worse than expected. You can not ask the fire marshal or police chief why they stood around and watched with everyone else that got killed.
A claim that the rest of your rant did nothing to support or even expound upon.
Why is it NOT a stupid debate? Because the hypothesis, principal, or whatever one wishes to call it, of NLT is embedded in, is at least in part the basis of, a great deal of regulatory practice that is responsible for extreme expenses of and extreme restrictions on human activity, and if it is an untrue principal, as it seems to be from much evidence, a great detriment to human society.
“a great detriment to human society”
Your rant did not support your claim!
I used nuclear power as an example of the mistaken belief of what sets limits.
Pollution controls on coal plants , low sulfur diesel fuel an d DEF to reduce PM 2.5 is a big gripe of mine.
However, an increase of 50000 deaths of young people in the US caused over doses on shit made in China; is a great detriment to society.
I do not need a Harvard Medical school study to tell me either.
LNT is a stupid debate.
“I do not have an irrational fear of small doses or it being a little warmer. It is the fatal dose or the deadly explosion that I worry about “
That’s easy to say if you know what a small dose is, and how to measure it. Do you know what a safe dose of Selenium is and how to measure it, and do you have the equipment at hand when confronted with exposure to selenium? “Fatal dose” is a rather vague expression without a time frame. Would you consider dose of radition that takes a few years to kill you, “safe”. For that matter, would you not worry about an explosion that would only blow your arm off?
It is confusing but if you are a radiation worker and deal with radioactive elements you get the training. As a radiation worker I was allowed to get a larger small dose by federal regulations. If I got the maximum allowed dose every year it would take 2000 years to get a fatal dose.
Measuring external exposure is relatively easy. I did a job where I could have ingested fission products internally. I had to get a sensitive whole body scan. The technician told me that I was a non-smoking banana eater. That was true.
Everything you eat and the air you breath is radioactive.
The world is dangerous. Nuclear power is dangerous. It is safe because we take precautions and do not hurt anyone with radiation let alone kill anyone.
There have been people killed by expositions while making electricity. Fatal accidents at power plants are rare. I was inspecting a system when it had a mechanical failure. Judging from the damage to the floor, I could have been killed.
The system could have been leaking hydrogen, so I went to a safe place and called the control room.
For sake of argument, what would you want me to do if it blew your arm off?
I could leave the radiation area and let you bleed out. What I am trained to is get help and start first aid. To save a life in an emergency, radiation exposure is secondary. Even if got 50 or 100 times the allowed annual exposure, it would not kill me. It might hurt me but it would not kill me.
We’re discussing assessing risk above all. Naturally if you have no clear indication of the likelyhood or gravity of the risk, you’re not likely to be prepared it. I find your faith in higher authority particularly stunning in view of the content of this article.
The reason I have faith in the higher authority is because I was that higher authority. I was the risk assessment team leader. With my signature comes the risk of prison time.
We only considered potentially fatal events. We did not lost time accidents or LNT risk. For example, a workers is handling enriched U-235 powder. He falls and spills the uranium cutting is arm in the process. The lost time accident and possible internal toxic material exposure would be the subject of a root cause investigation.
I have also done root cause investigation because it is better to learn form minor events than fatal ones.
One of the hazards of handling enriched U-235 powder is it could go critical. If that happens anyone not shielded will die within a short time. So spilling U235 powder was an event that the team mitigated.
In the navy and at commercial nukes I have many times produced energy by slowly pulling control rods out remotely with a critical mass of U235, in a carefully designed geometry using water as a moderator.
I did not walk off the street to do this. Years of training was provided by higher authorities.
Your blind faith in higher authority reminds me of Richard Muller’s account in “Nemesis, the death star” of how Luis and Walter Alvarez nearly gave up their investigation of the iridium layer because of a typo in one of the standard physics teaching texts, which gave the wrong atomic weight of Iridium, IIRC.
On a lighter note, I too happen to be heavy banana consumer, and also live 20/7 in a very Radon rich environment, after having been a two pack smoker for 15 or so years in my youth.
So I can’t pass up this opportunity to ask how many bananas per day you’d have to eat or how many Becquerels of Radon you’d have to inhale to approximate the cancer risk of smoking a pack of cigarettes.
I have deep contempt for the army of leeches who have pinned their comforts and incomes to the defence of a myth. Collectively, they have added near zero to the advancement of science or the pleasure of the citizen, but they have been an enormous cost to us all.
It was inevitable that the structure of support for the LNT would fail. Those who have actually done measurements and inferred their clear meanings have known forever of the artificiality of LNT and the rent-takers who feed from it.
LNT is well on the path to practical oblivion because the leeches are running out of three-letter acronyms to describe each new job they invent.
This huge and expensive collections of leeches avoids confronting the question: is LNT scientifically valid or not? It is not so hard to solve. There are examples of measured radiation exposure, there are examples of health effects that could be related to radiation exposure – draw a response curve with confidence limits and in the future, manage accordingly. The LNT approach is to claim that the uncertainties on that curve are too large to try toattribute scientific causes, so drop-kick the topic into the psychological arena and make social laws assisted by romantic notions of precautionary principles. “Take heart, Fair Maiden in peril, I the Brave Good Knight will protect you from rape and pillage – then i will bang you in comfort”.
One problem with that investigative approach is the difficulty of finding any person who has been adversely affected by ionisining radiation in customary use. A citizen scientist would wonder why low dose seems so important when there are so few – even zero – bodies to count. Such a citizen might also conclude that we do not need radiation health regulations and laws, because society already knows enough for competent managers to avoid disasters. Like we do not have laws and regs to dictate how much oxygen we breath each day, yet we continue to live. Or how much beetroot we eat. Radiation should be treated in that detatched manner since it has always been part of our lives and something that we can not change very much. Mother earth emits a steady stream of alpha, beta, gamma and more.
(Disclaimer: I worked intensively with these concepts from 1970 when I was invited to join the team that had just discovered the massive Ranger Uranium deposits in Australia’s Northern Territory, now mined out with no harm to the workers. I once owned a fast neutron generator in my lab, which not many private people have done. Perhaps none. Hands-on experience matters) Geoff S
I can’t cite sources but there seems to be adequate evidence that large enough doses of ionizing radiation are fatal, even in a rather short time. Therefore, when there is a reasonable possibility of such a large dose, precautionary practices can reasonably be deemed desirable.
The trick is to determine if doses below some amount are not dangerous, and to determine if small doses with no observable short term results can be cumulative, resulting in significant long term damage. If the evidence is that such small exposures are benign, or even beneficial, then they should not be regulated to the detriment of any human activity or wealth.
Also, as I questioned above, were there really a largish number of controlled research projects that found beneficial effects from small doses as reported in a number of article on NLT for radiation exposure? That seems something that could, probably should, be revisited and expanded.
Also, there is data collected from unintended long exposures that strongly suggest beneficial results for the humans exposed therein. There have been a number of varied occurrences. The data might be confounded by something else unobserved in the situations but it certainly could be justification for more controlled studies.
Worldwide the average background radiation dose is 2.4 mSv pa.
Plenty of people live, however, in areas where the background dose is higher than this and some in areas where it is much higher, for example Kerala in India, Ramsar in Iran, Yangjiang in China and Guara-pari in Brazil. They seem to suffer no ill effects from this background radiation. Indeed in some parts of Ramsar the background radiation can be as high as 260 mSv pa much higher than the 20 mSv set for radiation workers in Iran.
https://radiationnetwork.com/index.htm
Shows near real time radiation levels for various cities across the US.
They also have maps for other parts of the world.
The amount showed inside the circles, is the most recent reading.
So my burning question is, was Angela Merkel aware of the LNT conspiracy when she decided to shut down nuclear power production in Germany, and if not, would it have changed her mind? After all, she has a doctorate in physics, and so does her husband.
Almost as pressing is the question whether the government of Japan was in on this costly hoax at the time Fukushima was evacuated, and if so, could its executives and those of the power company be held criminally and civilly responsible for the unnecessary collateral deaths of thousands of Japanese cited in this article?
And finally, can those who maintain(ed) the LNT myth be held criminally and/or civilly liable in US, Canadian, and/or British courts for deaths, injuries, and financial losses that ensue?
Think of Ivan the Not So Terrible (John Demjaniuk), sentenced to die in a German prison after being convicted on 27,000 counts of being an accessory to murder for accepting a job in a German death camp as a 22 year old Soviet prisoner of war.
The government of the USA stripped him of his citizenship (for a second time) despite his having already spent three years on death row in Israel before being acquitted by the Israeli Supreme Court, and allowed his extradition to Germany.
No documents nor any witnesses were ever produced to prove that Ivan had committed any crimes or abuses. His acceptance of a job that would somewhat improve his chances of survival in a German POW camp was deemed enough to convict him. Compare that to dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki…
It isn’t necessary to invoke an LNT conspiracy in regard to nuclear reactors. There is ample evidence that they are a very clean and safe method of fueling electricity generation. Fukushima was just an excuse to do what so many already wanted to do on ideological grounds. If nuclear generation were accepted, massive destruction of the economy and life styles would be a much harder sale.
What does ideology have to do with nuclear reactors? Nuclear reactors are only clean and safe if you ignore the ones the explode and/or melt down and the problem of safe transport and storage of the spent fuel. And the evidence is that Merkel intended to go ahead with nuclear power development prior to Fukushima. She was taking major measures to prepare long-term storage for spent fuel.
ostropogo, LNT conspiracy theory had nothing to do with German reactor shutdowns. Starting in the late 1960s, the KGB under Yuri Andropov had been influencing the policy direction of Germany Green groups and the SDP, turning them increasingly, violently, antinuclear. The goal of this program was to ensure that Germany built no new reactors after Emsland. This was because the USSR produced nothing that anyone else wanted. Except oil and gas. The biggest energy market in Europe was West Germany.
Hence, Andropov’s campaign. And it worked. This is why Andropov was selected to succeed Leonid Brezhnev in 1982. This was all well known in the 1980s. Ronald Reagan warned the Germans that they were making a fatal mistake by creating a permanent dependency on Russian energy supply.
I don’t know about any LNT conspiracy “theory”. It seems clear from the article and associated documents thayt their definitely has been a long-standing conspiracy to maintain this myth. To say that LNT has no relevance to nuclear power generation is absurd.
This myth is the main reason people in the developed world oppose nuclear reactors in their neighbourhood.
And BTW, Angela Merkel was a conservative Chancellor, not green or a socialist one. I can’t imagine how the Russians could have persuaded her and her Christian Democrat Party to shelve nuclear power.
Should every soldier who fired a gun, dropped a bomb or somehow killed a member of an enemy army also be convicted of war crimes?
By bringing the war to an end and negating the necessity of invading the Japanese home islands, those bombs ended up saving hundreds of thousands of lives.
That’s quite a lumping of categories you’ve presented. Certainly Nato members consider dropping a bomb on civilians is a war crime. “Somehow” killing an enemy soldier certainly could be, if he’s unarmed or trying to surrender. Who said anything about firing a gun being a war crime? In fact, who even mentioned “war crimes”?
Let’s just keep it simple and call it “murder”. Youre argument about saving lives by killing enemy civilians would serve Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and will undoubtedly serve Xi and Putin as well.
It’s the old “the end justifies the means” argument. If you’re going to go that route, essentially throwing out justice, fairness, decency, compassion, and the rule of law in favour of “might is right”, I suggest the old Hindu trick called “Karma” is by far the more elegant mantra.
On a lighter note, would it be possible to develop LNT as a policy for judging such things as the effect of taxation on the human condition, or government power on economic success? Or that of three letter agencies on human freedom, or even scientific advancement?
I’m sure the pharmaceutical industry would be interested in such a self evaluation?
NLT obvoiusly isn’t an issue for taxation and regulation in general. The more of each, the richer and more free the society. Evey leftest knows that.