Reminded of something that Geraldine Thomas, founder of the Chernobyl Tissue Bank, wrote when the Fukushima drama was going on, "Look at the science – smoking and obesity are more harmful than radiation":
> I can assure you that none of us are in the pay of the nuclear industry. I was anti-nuclear until I worked on the after effects of the Chernobyl accident – now I am very pro-nuclear as I realise that we have an unwarranted fear of radiation – probably due to all the rubbish about a nuclear winter we were fed during the Cold War.[10]
Paradoxically active ongoing research suggests that the same dose of (medically determined) radiation delivered over a very short period of time increases its efficacy against the cancer compared to damage to the surrounding tissue.
Even before Linear No Threshold was a thing scientists were doing experiments showing that dosing fruit flies with radiation all at once would lead to a highly mutated second generation, but spreading that radiation out over the course of a month wouldn't.
At the time (the 1950s) evidence from fruit flies was essentially all the evidence there was. But as the article points out we have pretty good data showing it works the same way in humans.
I do not agree that they have good data showing it works the same in humans. I see a lot of stretching of datasets, a lot of squinting, and above all a lot of hope!
> Drinking one beer a night for a year is a lot less harmful than drinking 365 beers in one go. The same applies to radiation exposure, but regulation doesn’t agree.
Stating something confidently doesn't make it true. Show me the data.
The article is long on emotion, exposition, but very short on the data.
There's a big concerted effort to change this regulation, but it's not based on data, it's based on feelings.
It's quite likely that there's non-linear response, but it could just as easily be that the dose that's tolerated well in a 1 day exposure, might have higher risk when spread out over 365 days. When they say something like:
> nor any major chromosomal aberrations.
They don't have the technology to measure DNA damage that might be significant. I've spent some time in the past examining the REBC dataset of whole-genome sequencing of tumors of thyroid cancers from Chornobyl, where you actually do see the types of translocations that cause cancer from radiation.
We can't detect these types of translocations in non-cancerous tissue. The only reason we can see them in cancer is that the cancer has replicated billions of times, giving us many many many copies of the translocation to put through DNA sequencing. Doing the type of sequencing where we identify translocations that happen in individual cells, before the cell has become cancerous, would require a good amount of engineering effort, and I've never seen anything like it. And in 2006, when the study was published, we barely had any of the latest sequencing technologies.
> Chen interpreted this as evidence of the health benefits of radiation. This theory, known as hormesis, holds that low doses of stressors, including ionizing radiation, can improve health (in this case, reducing cancer risk) by triggering the body’s repair systems in much the same way that exercise improves fitness by stressing the cardiovascular system. While popular among a small community of researchers, it has not gained widespread acceptance due to limited and conflicting evidence in humans.
Yes, limited and conflicting evidence in humans. Yet these sorts of propaganda efforts are pushing hard on the idea being present, being obvious.
This article is not science, despite trying to put on airs of science. The data does not support their claims.
Let's see actual review articles published making these claims that aggregate over large numbers of small data. Let's see whether such aggregation claims hold up on scrutiny from those that have spent a lot of time thinking about this.
The active regulatory push to invalidate LNT should follow the science, not be ahead of the science.
Plus, the whole goal of this, to somehow how make nuclear construction cheaper, does not seem to be well served by changing LNT. The costs of nuclear are massive because it's a big constructuon project with lots of coordination. Making concrete walls 50% as thick is going to do very little to lessen the massive costs, which are related to construction productivity, or rather the lack of it in the West.
It seems like the nuclear industry tries to focus on anything except the one thing that will actually make it succeed: get really good at construction.
in a world where there is no safe low radiation dose, it would be quite easy to generate the data to demonstrate this. so either low doses cause no harm or cause such minimal harm as to be safely disregarded.
> in a world where there is no safe low radiation dose, it would be quite easy to generate the data to demonstrate this.
This is the classic fallacy seeing an absence of evidence and using that as evidence of absence!
And the lack of evidence goes both ways, it should be easy to show that current regulations are fully safe by doing epidemiology to show that living close to a nuclear power plant carries no additional risk!
So let's go looking for those epidemiological studies...
> May 19 2026 - Does Proximity to Nuclear Power Plants Increase Cancer Risk? New research finds correlation between disease and living close to a facility
> Koutrakis says that his advisee’s research is notable because it is the first series of studies to systematically demonstrate associations between residential proximity to nuclear power plants and cancer outcomes across multiple settings using large, population-based datasets. “This work fills a critical gap in the literature by providing large-scale, systematic evidence on a question that has remained unresolved for decades.”
> Using nationwide mortality data from 2000-2018, we assess long-term spatial patterns of cancer mortality in relation to proximity to nuclear facilities while accounting for socioeconomic, demographic, behavioral, environmental, and healthcare factors. Cancer mortality is higher across multiple age groups in both males and females, with the strongest associations among older adults, males aged 65–74 and females aged 55–64.
So there's a dose-response curve for cancer based on living close to a nuclear power plant. This survives correction for other confounders.
Notably, this is correlation not causation, but the only evidence getting close to disproving LNT actual leans towards super-linear, rather than sub-linear, correct?
They studied the population in Hiroshima and Nagasaki for generations and found that in the first generations after the bombs there were elevated levels of hard-tissue cancers and in later generations elevated levels of soft-tissue/blood cancers. They're still dealing with the population effects of radiation 75-years later.
No one will be able to live in Chernobyl or Fukushima for hundreds of years. Or, well, they could but it would be stupid.
Much of the Fukushima area is inhabited again (the exclusion zone has shrunk from an original 1250km2 down to 371) and there is ample evidence that the overreaction evacuation did a lot more harm than good.
Reminded of something that Geraldine Thomas, founder of the Chernobyl Tissue Bank, wrote when the Fukushima drama was going on, "Look at the science – smoking and obesity are more harmful than radiation":
* https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2011/apr/26/obesity-...
> I can assure you that none of us are in the pay of the nuclear industry. I was anti-nuclear until I worked on the after effects of the Chernobyl accident – now I am very pro-nuclear as I realise that we have an unwarranted fear of radiation – probably due to all the rubbish about a nuclear winter we were fed during the Cold War.[10]
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geraldine_Thomas
Paradoxically active ongoing research suggests that the same dose of (medically determined) radiation delivered over a very short period of time increases its efficacy against the cancer compared to damage to the surrounding tissue.
Here's one: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10640654/
Even before Linear No Threshold was a thing scientists were doing experiments showing that dosing fruit flies with radiation all at once would lead to a highly mutated second generation, but spreading that radiation out over the course of a month wouldn't.
Cancer cured (in mice)!
Radiation response shown to be sub-linear (in flies)!
At the time (the 1950s) evidence from fruit flies was essentially all the evidence there was. But as the article points out we have pretty good data showing it works the same way in humans.
I do not agree that they have good data showing it works the same in humans. I see a lot of stretching of datasets, a lot of squinting, and above all a lot of hope!
> Drinking one beer a night for a year is a lot less harmful than drinking 365 beers in one go. The same applies to radiation exposure, but regulation doesn’t agree.
Stating something confidently doesn't make it true. Show me the data.
The article is long on emotion, exposition, but very short on the data.
There's a big concerted effort to change this regulation, but it's not based on data, it's based on feelings.
It's quite likely that there's non-linear response, but it could just as easily be that the dose that's tolerated well in a 1 day exposure, might have higher risk when spread out over 365 days. When they say something like:
> nor any major chromosomal aberrations.
They don't have the technology to measure DNA damage that might be significant. I've spent some time in the past examining the REBC dataset of whole-genome sequencing of tumors of thyroid cancers from Chornobyl, where you actually do see the types of translocations that cause cancer from radiation.
We can't detect these types of translocations in non-cancerous tissue. The only reason we can see them in cancer is that the cancer has replicated billions of times, giving us many many many copies of the translocation to put through DNA sequencing. Doing the type of sequencing where we identify translocations that happen in individual cells, before the cell has become cancerous, would require a good amount of engineering effort, and I've never seen anything like it. And in 2006, when the study was published, we barely had any of the latest sequencing technologies.
> Chen interpreted this as evidence of the health benefits of radiation. This theory, known as hormesis, holds that low doses of stressors, including ionizing radiation, can improve health (in this case, reducing cancer risk) by triggering the body’s repair systems in much the same way that exercise improves fitness by stressing the cardiovascular system. While popular among a small community of researchers, it has not gained widespread acceptance due to limited and conflicting evidence in humans.
Yes, limited and conflicting evidence in humans. Yet these sorts of propaganda efforts are pushing hard on the idea being present, being obvious.
This article is not science, despite trying to put on airs of science. The data does not support their claims.
Let's see actual review articles published making these claims that aggregate over large numbers of small data. Let's see whether such aggregation claims hold up on scrutiny from those that have spent a lot of time thinking about this.
The active regulatory push to invalidate LNT should follow the science, not be ahead of the science.
Plus, the whole goal of this, to somehow how make nuclear construction cheaper, does not seem to be well served by changing LNT. The costs of nuclear are massive because it's a big constructuon project with lots of coordination. Making concrete walls 50% as thick is going to do very little to lessen the massive costs, which are related to construction productivity, or rather the lack of it in the West.
It seems like the nuclear industry tries to focus on anything except the one thing that will actually make it succeed: get really good at construction.
in a world where there is no safe low radiation dose, it would be quite easy to generate the data to demonstrate this. so either low doses cause no harm or cause such minimal harm as to be safely disregarded.
luckily the government is moving away from your position: https://www.eenews.net/articles/nrc-considers-eliminating-ha...
not having cheaper nuclear energy imposes a far greater cost on society.
No safe low radiation dose, you say? Well then, you had better stay away from red meat, brazil nuts and even bananas.
Consumed them already, you say? Well I guess you're screwed then.
Luckily? The NRC is considering it, hopefully they follow science rather than popular propaganda.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-026-69285-4
> in a world where there is no safe low radiation dose, it would be quite easy to generate the data to demonstrate this.
This is the classic fallacy seeing an absence of evidence and using that as evidence of absence!
And the lack of evidence goes both ways, it should be easy to show that current regulations are fully safe by doing epidemiology to show that living close to a nuclear power plant carries no additional risk!
So let's go looking for those epidemiological studies...
> May 19 2026 - Does Proximity to Nuclear Power Plants Increase Cancer Risk? New research finds correlation between disease and living close to a facility
> Koutrakis says that his advisee’s research is notable because it is the first series of studies to systematically demonstrate associations between residential proximity to nuclear power plants and cancer outcomes across multiple settings using large, population-based datasets. “This work fills a critical gap in the literature by providing large-scale, systematic evidence on a question that has remained unresolved for decades.”
https://gsas.harvard.edu/news/does-proximity-nuclear-power-p...
And what do they see?
> Using nationwide mortality data from 2000-2018, we assess long-term spatial patterns of cancer mortality in relation to proximity to nuclear facilities while accounting for socioeconomic, demographic, behavioral, environmental, and healthcare factors. Cancer mortality is higher across multiple age groups in both males and females, with the strongest associations among older adults, males aged 65–74 and females aged 55–64.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-026-69285-4
So there's a dose-response curve for cancer based on living close to a nuclear power plant. This survives correction for other confounders.
Notably, this is correlation not causation, but the only evidence getting close to disproving LNT actual leans towards super-linear, rather than sub-linear, correct?
They studied the population in Hiroshima and Nagasaki for generations and found that in the first generations after the bombs there were elevated levels of hard-tissue cancers and in later generations elevated levels of soft-tissue/blood cancers. They're still dealing with the population effects of radiation 75-years later.
No one will be able to live in Chernobyl or Fukushima for hundreds of years. Or, well, they could but it would be stupid.
Much of the Fukushima area is inhabited again (the exclusion zone has shrunk from an original 1250km2 down to 371) and there is ample evidence that the overreaction evacuation did a lot more harm than good.
Around 98% of Fukushima is inhabited again, unless of course you meant the NPP itself, but people were not living in a power plant to begin with.
That’s the entirety of the prefecture, most of which had not been evacuated.