> Drinking one beer a night for a year is a lot less harmful than drinking 365 beers in one go. The same applies to radiation exposure, but regulation doesn’t agree.
Stating something confidently doesn't make it true. Show me the data.
The article is long on emotion, exposition, but very short on the data.
There's a big concerted effort to change this regulation, but it's not based on data, it's based on feelings.
It's quite likely that there's non-linear response, but it could just as easily be that the dose that's tolerated well in a 1 day exposure, might have higher risk when spread out over 365 days. When they say something like:
> nor any major chromosomal aberrations.
They don't have the technology to measure DNA damage that might be significant. I've spent some time in the past examining the REBC dataset of whole-genome sequencing of tumors of thyroid cancers from Chornobyl, where you actually do see the types of translocations that cause cancer from radiation.
We can't detect these types of translocations in non-cancerous tissue. The only reason we can see them in cancer is that the cancer has replicated billions of times, giving us many many many copies of the translocation to put through DNA sequencing. Doing the type of sequencing where we identify translocations that happen in individual cells, before the cell has become cancerous, would require a good amount of engineering effort, and I've never seen anything like it. And in 2006, when the study was published, we barely had any of the latest sequencing technologies.
> Chen interpreted this as evidence of the health benefits of radiation. This theory, known as hormesis, holds that low doses of stressors, including ionizing radiation, can improve health (in this case, reducing cancer risk) by triggering the body’s repair systems in much the same way that exercise improves fitness by stressing the cardiovascular system. While popular among a small community of researchers, it has not gained widespread acceptance due to limited and conflicting evidence in humans.
Yes, limited and conflicting evidence in humans. Yet these sorts of propaganda efforts are pushing hard on the idea being present, being obvious.
This article is not science, despite trying to put on airs of science. The data does not support their claims.
Let's see actual review articles published making these claims that aggregate over large numbers of small data. Let's see whether such aggregation claims hold up on scrutiny from those that have spent a lot of time thinking about this.
The active regulatory push to invalidate LNT should follow the science, not be ahead of the science.
Plus, the whole goal of this, to somehow how make nuclear construction cheaper, does not seem to be well served by changing LNT. The costs of nuclear are massive because it's a big constructuon project with lots of coordination. Making concrete walls 50% as thick is going to do very little to lessen the massive costs, which are related to construction productivity, or rather the lack of it in the West.
It seems like the nuclear industry tries to focus on anything except the one thing that will actually make it succeed: get really good at construction.
They studied the population in Hiroshima and Nagasaki for generations and found that in the first generations after the bombs there were elevated levels of hard-tissue cancers and in later generations elevated levels of soft-tissue/blood cancers. They're still dealing with the population effects of radiation 75-years later.
No one will be able to live in Chernobyl or Fukushima for hundreds of years. Or, well, they could but it would be stupid.
Even before Linear No Threshold was a thing scientists were doing experiments showing that dosing fruit flies with radiation all at once would lead to a highly mutated second generation, but spreading that radiation out over the course of a month wouldn't.
Paradoxically active ongoing research suggests that the same dose of (medically determined) radiation delivered over a very short period of time increases its efficacy against the cancer compared to damage to the surrounding tissue.
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]
Wow, this was a cherry-picking peace of misinformation, conveniently ignoring the actual counts of people affected by Chernobyl.
There's no safe dose of radiation, there's only statistics.
And I'm not sure what this article is supposed to justify?
Building power generation technology with the potential to make whole regions unlivable is ok now?
Willfully creating hazards that can affect people for thousands of years, starting with Uranium mining & processing to nuclear waste is a good idea?
Having to fortify a nuclear plant so it can withstand a plane crash (most won't withstand double plane crashes), securing it against terrorist - and then still have it fall into enemy hands that can use it as a bargaining chip (Russians are controlling Zaporizhzhia) is a good idea?
You know what the engineers of Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima had in common?
They thought their plants were safe.
So even if "Radiation totally not bad, actually healthy" is the point here: It is still a tremendously stupid idea to build nuclear power plants when there are much better and cheaper alternatives.
"Lie" is such a click-baity triggering word to use here. Sounds more like they overstated the harm of cumulative small doses of radiation.
But, I mostly just skimmed through the beginning of the article, so maybe it gets better, like maybe the author reveals an international cabal of influential anti-nuclear activists who are holding human progress back.
My problem with radiation: the units of exposure are so clumsy. We should have standardized on nanoSieverts as the main unit. The normal background radiation is 200 nSv per hour, and you get acute radiation sickness at 1_000_000_000 nSv. The lethal dose is 5_000_000_000. It really puts things into perspective.
E.g. even 10x the normal background is still ridiculously low.
Also, the LNT model is good enough. It's really the most conservative model that we have, so it makes sense to keep using it. We just need to quantify the risk increases properly.
Check out the interview with Dr Bernie Cohen, who did a lot of the early epidemiological work. The interviewer is rather woo, but the professor is as hard-nose a scientist as you could hope for. It makes a good pair because it let him correct misconceptions.
Long story short, Dr Cohen became unpopular after his data showed home radon levels to be negatively correlated with lung cancer risk. The more radon, the lower your risk of lung cancer.
> Fifteen people have already died of these cancers
Don't forget that USSR and Belarus authorities did everything to attribute illnesses to anything but radiation. And it's really hard to prove that some illness is _due_ to radiation anyway. The reporting was way less transparent and non-biased than in democratic countries.
There's some very suspicious cherry-picking going on with the author's choice of Ukrainian milk and raw numbers (which is never how public health researchers describe impact from things like this, it's per-population stats and relative increases/decreases) about childhood thyroid cancer rates. For an unspecified region, presumably Ukraine, but the author doesn't specify...also suspicious.
Chernobyl is the northern part of Ukraine. The plume was highly directional and initially blew almost directly north into Belarus:
"Radiation impacts on Scandinavia and Germany, where there were major fears about the effects of the fallout, were nugatory"
Well, yeah, because very little ended up in those areas comparatively?
If you wanted to trick the average person into thinking "wow even in the country where the reactor was, there was almost no health impact", the author's repeated choices in terms of information presented would be a fantastic way to do so.
"The study carried out in Minsk showed 40-fold increase of the incidence of thyroid cancer in the years 1986-1994, in comparison to the period 1977-1985. An increase of the incidence of thyroid cancer has generally been observed in many countries after the Chernobyl accident."
Later the author goes completely off the rails with whataboutism talking about Bhopal (which he claims isn't well known. I say: it's probably one of the most famous chemical industry disasters of all time? and the China dam disaster, which is pretty well known, mostly because nuclear proponents bring it up incessantly.)
This is nearly as bad as the nuclear proponents who always compare nuclear to coal, when in the US alone solar is what's replacing nuclear at a ratio of 6MW of solar for every 1MW of nuclear, and coal has been getting phased out for well over a decade because it's expensive.
TL;DR: enriched uranium solution was poured into a tank with improper geometry and reached criticality; three workers were severely irradiated, and two of them subsequently died.
Agreed, being wrong does not always involve lying. The article title is "How to lie about radiation" and the HN title is "The Radiation Exposure Lie", but the word "lie" does not appear in the article except the title.
Alright, let's say the author is right and low-level radiation exposure is not harmful. Then... what? If a little radiation is not harmful, then we should be more relaxed about radiation, deregulate it and allow companies to contaminate our living spaces? Is that why the argument is being made?
But as the article mentions, in those Taiwanese flats there were large variations in radiation levels in different spots in the building. If we allow radioactive contamination everywhere, will it be neatly spread out at harmless levels? How would you know? What if you happen to ingest traces of the harmlessly radioactive material now surrounding you?
> 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.
I know I may be overreacting, but when the dentists try to convince me that the annual x-ray of my family members is the same as being outside in the sun for a whole day, I try to explain it with a similar analogy; getting exposed to small amounts of x-ray over a long period is not the same as getting exposed to all of it in a fraction of a second.
They insist it because it is covered by insurance, and that I shouldn't worry about the cost. I have to clarify that the monetary cost is not my primary concern.
I have now learnt to simply say No, and agree to sign a waiver that's required by the insurance company.
I am okay with getting the x-ray if a professional has a legitimate reason to suspect there's something hidden that can be better investigated by getting an x-ray. My family has received x-ray, MRI, CT scans, ultrasound, etc. but only when its benefits outweigh the risks; e.g. bone fracture, pregnancy, concussion, etc.
As I said, I may be overreacting, but I'd like to err on the side of caution when it comes to my kids' and family's long-term health.
The argument is also an annoyingly common attempt to sell the idea that nuclear power is not dangerous because there haven't been worst-case accidents yet.
But we know they can happen and what the consequences would be, so it's entirely irrelevant what has happened so far.
Both Fukushima and Chernobyl are active incidents ongoing as we speak, we don't know how bad even they will turn out to be.
"After the Windscale fire released radioactive fallout onto grazing land in 1957, Britain discarded contaminated milk for 44 days, thereby avoiding any harm."
This is also not true, the actual reports estimate 33-100 deaths, 90 nonfatal cancers and 10 birth defects. (summary from wikipedia):
"These deaths were attributed not only to thyroid cancer, but also to lung cancer.[74] An updated 1988 UK government report (the most recent government estimate) estimated that 100 fatalities "probably" resulted from cancers as a result of the releases over 40 to 50 years.[75][76] The government report also estimated that 90 non-fatal cancers were caused by the incident, as well as 10 hereditary defects.[75]"
It's hard to imagine ignorance that manages to be familiar with Windscale yet not know anything about the estimated harm.
This article makes some good points but is missing a lot of the larger context. It doesn't use this phrase, but the topic it discusses is called the linear no-threshold (LNT) model:
Whether and how to replace the LNT model is one of the most controversial topics in health physics. The most basic modification to the model is to assign a threshold, but for that we need better research to establish a threshold for various circumstances. In the US, the Department of Energy started a research program to study low doses of radiation in 1999:
The US agency that regulates radioactive emissions, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), still uses the LNT. The NRC is a conservative agency (in the sense of being averse to change) and they are required by law to regulate for protection of the public. They won't change regulations if there is no consensus on what to replace LNT with. They were petitioned to change it in 2015 and rejected the petition in 2021:
A majority of adults in the US now favor nuclear power, so there is some basis for cautious optimism of continued research and potential regulatory changes in this area:
Anyone who lived in USSR, or otherwise familiar with the way soviet authorities operate, would know not to trust any official data from USSR. I personally treat any statistics and data from the soviet government to be unreliable to the degree of meaninglessness.
So, in my eyes, there is no info available about the true health consequences of the Chernobyl catastrophe in Ukraine and Belarus.
32 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 52.0 ms ] threadStating 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.
No one will be able to live in Chernobyl or Fukushima for hundreds of years. Or, well, they could but it would be stupid.
Here's one: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10640654/
* https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2011/apr/26/obesity-...
> I can assure you that none of us are in the pay of the nuclear industry. I was anti-nuclear until I worked on the after effects of the Chernobyl accident – now I am very pro-nuclear as I realise that we have an unwarranted fear of radiation – probably due to all the rubbish about a nuclear winter we were fed during the Cold War.[10]
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geraldine_Thomas
There's no safe dose of radiation, there's only statistics.
And I'm not sure what this article is supposed to justify? Building power generation technology with the potential to make whole regions unlivable is ok now?
Willfully creating hazards that can affect people for thousands of years, starting with Uranium mining & processing to nuclear waste is a good idea?
Having to fortify a nuclear plant so it can withstand a plane crash (most won't withstand double plane crashes), securing it against terrorist - and then still have it fall into enemy hands that can use it as a bargaining chip (Russians are controlling Zaporizhzhia) is a good idea?
You know what the engineers of Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima had in common? They thought their plants were safe.
So even if "Radiation totally not bad, actually healthy" is the point here: It is still a tremendously stupid idea to build nuclear power plants when there are much better and cheaper alternatives.
But, I mostly just skimmed through the beginning of the article, so maybe it gets better, like maybe the author reveals an international cabal of influential anti-nuclear activists who are holding human progress back.
E.g. even 10x the normal background is still ridiculously low.
Also, the LNT model is good enough. It's really the most conservative model that we have, so it makes sense to keep using it. We just need to quantify the risk increases properly.
Check out the interview with Dr Bernie Cohen, who did a lot of the early epidemiological work. The interviewer is rather woo, but the professor is as hard-nose a scientist as you could hope for. It makes a good pair because it let him correct misconceptions.
Long story short, Dr Cohen became unpopular after his data showed home radon levels to be negatively correlated with lung cancer risk. The more radon, the lower your risk of lung cancer.
Part 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xhkBLhw-8pk
Part 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SuUFiUoynPo
Don't forget that USSR and Belarus authorities did everything to attribute illnesses to anything but radiation. And it's really hard to prove that some illness is _due_ to radiation anyway. The reporting was way less transparent and non-biased than in democratic countries.
Chernobyl is the northern part of Ukraine. The plume was highly directional and initially blew almost directly north into Belarus:
https://radioactivity.eu.com/articles/nuclearenergy/chernoby...
Not surprisingly, the majority of contamination was, overwhelmingly, in Belarus:
https://radioactivity.eu.com/articles/nuclearenergy/chernoby...
The author goes on:
"Radiation impacts on Scandinavia and Germany, where there were major fears about the effects of the fallout, were nugatory"
Well, yeah, because very little ended up in those areas comparatively?
If you wanted to trick the average person into thinking "wow even in the country where the reactor was, there was almost no health impact", the author's repeated choices in terms of information presented would be a fantastic way to do so.
The real facts: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16832789/
"The study carried out in Minsk showed 40-fold increase of the incidence of thyroid cancer in the years 1986-1994, in comparison to the period 1977-1985. An increase of the incidence of thyroid cancer has generally been observed in many countries after the Chernobyl accident."
Later the author goes completely off the rails with whataboutism talking about Bhopal (which he claims isn't well known. I say: it's probably one of the most famous chemical industry disasters of all time? and the China dam disaster, which is pretty well known, mostly because nuclear proponents bring it up incessantly.)
This is nearly as bad as the nuclear proponents who always compare nuclear to coal, when in the US alone solar is what's replacing nuclear at a ratio of 6MW of solar for every 1MW of nuclear, and coal has been getting phased out for well over a decade because it's expensive.
The Tokaimura incident (Japan, 1999) comes to mind as a counterexample.
https://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/Publications/PDF/TOAC_web.pdf
TL;DR: enriched uranium solution was poured into a tank with improper geometry and reached criticality; three workers were severely irradiated, and two of them subsequently died.
But as the article mentions, in those Taiwanese flats there were large variations in radiation levels in different spots in the building. If we allow radioactive contamination everywhere, will it be neatly spread out at harmless levels? How would you know? What if you happen to ingest traces of the harmlessly radioactive material now surrounding you?
https://spectator.com/article/why-are-women-so-anti-nuclear/
So technically, if one extrapolates the best case scenario, if women wouldn't have voting rights, we'd already have nuclear power everywhere.
Though to be fair, this varies from country to country and in some countries even women are over 50%.
But in many countries women are under 50% while men are seemingly always over 50%.
I know I may be overreacting, but when the dentists try to convince me that the annual x-ray of my family members is the same as being outside in the sun for a whole day, I try to explain it with a similar analogy; getting exposed to small amounts of x-ray over a long period is not the same as getting exposed to all of it in a fraction of a second.
They insist it because it is covered by insurance, and that I shouldn't worry about the cost. I have to clarify that the monetary cost is not my primary concern.
I have now learnt to simply say No, and agree to sign a waiver that's required by the insurance company.
I am okay with getting the x-ray if a professional has a legitimate reason to suspect there's something hidden that can be better investigated by getting an x-ray. My family has received x-ray, MRI, CT scans, ultrasound, etc. but only when its benefits outweigh the risks; e.g. bone fracture, pregnancy, concussion, etc.
As I said, I may be overreacting, but I'd like to err on the side of caution when it comes to my kids' and family's long-term health.
edit: s/by I'd like/but I'd like/
til
This is not true, it wasn't the only and not even the first. Some examples are collected in this list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_orphan_source_incident...
The argument is also an annoyingly common attempt to sell the idea that nuclear power is not dangerous because there haven't been worst-case accidents yet.
But we know they can happen and what the consequences would be, so it's entirely irrelevant what has happened so far.
Both Fukushima and Chernobyl are active incidents ongoing as we speak, we don't know how bad even they will turn out to be.
"After the Windscale fire released radioactive fallout onto grazing land in 1957, Britain discarded contaminated milk for 44 days, thereby avoiding any harm."
This is also not true, the actual reports estimate 33-100 deaths, 90 nonfatal cancers and 10 birth defects. (summary from wikipedia):
"These deaths were attributed not only to thyroid cancer, but also to lung cancer.[74] An updated 1988 UK government report (the most recent government estimate) estimated that 100 fatalities "probably" resulted from cancers as a result of the releases over 40 to 50 years.[75][76] The government report also estimated that 90 non-fatal cancers were caused by the incident, as well as 10 hereditary defects.[75]"
It's hard to imagine ignorance that manages to be familiar with Windscale yet not know anything about the estimated harm.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_no-threshold_model
The relevant sub-field of physics that studies the effects of radiation is called health physics:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_physics
Whether and how to replace the LNT model is one of the most controversial topics in health physics. The most basic modification to the model is to assign a threshold, but for that we need better research to establish a threshold for various circumstances. In the US, the Department of Energy started a research program to study low doses of radiation in 1999:
https://www.science.org/content/article/us-lawmakers-looking...
This was cancelled in 2016 and later revived in 2021:
https://www.aip.org/fyi/2021/academies-panel-consider-future...
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK552793/
https://www.nationalacademies.org/read/26434/chapter/3
The US agency that regulates radioactive emissions, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), still uses the LNT. The NRC is a conservative agency (in the sense of being averse to change) and they are required by law to regulate for protection of the public. They won't change regulations if there is no consensus on what to replace LNT with. They were petitioned to change it in 2015 and rejected the petition in 2021:
https://jnm.snmjournals.org/content/62/11/17N
https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2021/08/17/2021-17...
A majority of adults in the US now favor nuclear power, so there is some basis for cautious optimism of continued research and potential regulatory changes in this area:
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/10/16/support-f...
https://pubs.naruc.org/pub/B78A069C-1866-DAAC-99FB-DF480282D...
So, in my eyes, there is no info available about the true health consequences of the Chernobyl catastrophe in Ukraine and Belarus.