Fear of radiation is irrational. Fear of dangerous levels of radiation is wise.
Since the general population has no idea what levels are safe, the media is free to stir up catchy stories about anything radiation related. You can't expect the media to report responsibly, they're just regular folks incented to build audience.
Society could make more rational decisions if this were solved. Responsible reporting might compare newsy radiation to ordinary events ("about as much radiation exposure as a flight from NY to LA" or "twice the ordinary background radiation levels for New York City").
But how could you incent the media to report usefully? Laws? I'm stumped. If they don't feel inclined, it won't happen.
"Just to make sure the point gets across, these studies mean that all children will receive about 1 mSv of gamma radiation from background radiation each year and this results in their leukemia risk being increased by 12%."
And what is their baseline risk of leukemia? And are we talking across their lifetime (a whole lot of crap can kill them over their next 70 or so years) or within the next year?
How could it statistically significant but not be clinically relevant? Either you get it or you don't, and childhood leukemia fucking sucks (I should know, my mom was the manager of the Minneapolis Ronald McDonald House for 10 years and we lived on-site; many of my young childhood friends died as children).
Is the issue that "statistical relevance" is relative to measurements of radiation and "clinical relevance" is relative to impact on human health? Tiny amounts of radiation can be statistically relevant in environments that get no radiation, and yet have no impact on health.
Isn't the point of background radiation that it's in the background and you can't avoid it? Where does one find a control group not exposed to background radiation?
That's bad writing from the blog author who's trying to paraphrase this:
[...] the authors estimated that the excess risk of childhood leukaemia was 12% per millisievert of cumulative red bone marrow dose from background gamma radiation (Kendall et al, 2012).
One of big problems with comparing radiation exposure is that there is no quantity that can be both accurately measured and at the same time meaningfully quantifies biological effects.
One of projects that I consult on involves sorting of gravel from inactive uranium mines. On site the difference between "safe gravel for construction" and "radioactive waste" (which was found out to be viable as precursor for nuclear fuel) is mostly insignificant, but easily detectable. In my house this difference is swamped by natural background radiation (see "Living in a brick, stone..." in the XKCD chart, the sorting site is open-air installation).
Edit:
Somehow I think that the real danger of radiation comes from radioactive stuff that can be aspirated or ingested, not from "some well-localized thing that is radioactive" and thus any kind of "fear of radiation" is mostly irrational (given that one does not go near radiation sources unnecessarily). Otherwise it's poison as any other (and most radioactive isotopes with long half-life are primarily chemically poisonous with the radiation hazard being mostly insignificant).
Yes, ingestion/exposure to contaminated material seems to be more of an issue than exposure to direct radiation. Exceptions being something like space travel, where background gamma is high.
There is no safe level of radiation. Latest research suggests that any kind of exposure has a lasting effect. [1] Naturally, that effect is small for small doses but does compound over the individual's lifespan.
... which is about as practical an observation as the organization (I forget which- was it the skin cancer foundation?) that maintains there is no safe level of sunlight exposure, and that any and all forays outside should be accompanied with large sun hats, full-body clothing and an inch of sunscreen.
Technically correct, but so unreasonably stringent as to be pointless, and so lacking in perspective as to be laughable.
You cannot escape radiation, and frequently there are benefits that far outweight the risk. See: Bananas, x-rays, airlines, living in Colorado, using a computer, having friends.
Working with the chart, to reach the lowest dose clearly linked to cancer (100mSv) minus background radiation for a year (4 mSv, so to get 96 mSv), you can find some silly permutations of that to get to 100mSv:
Spend a year in the Fukushima Exclusion zone (26mSv) plus 10 Chest CT scans
Spend a year in the Fukushima Exclusion zone, then take the max dose for a US radiation worker and two chest CT scans.
The whole green area of the chart (75 mSv) plus taking a dose at the northwest edge of the Fukushima exclusion zone puts you 19 mSv over the limit. So lay off a couple of CT scans and visits to Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and Fukushima and you'd be beneath the limit clearly linked to cancer.
Get 5000 chest X-Rays
250 mammograms
Eat a million bananas
This silly exercise at least convinces me to worry less about X-rays, plane flights, and eating bananas. It would be nice if XKCD had the dose that takes your cancer risk above certain thresholds like 1/million, 1/1000, 1/100, etc. It would also be nice if the public calmed down about radiation.
For the Chernobyl quote, it is nowhere near as high as that. That is standing at the plant, but the closest you can get is a 1/4 mile away. And you only stay there for about 15 minutes. Most of the time in the tour is exploring the surrounding area and Pripyat.
When Ukraine stabilizes more, I would highly recommend a trip to the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, it is a really cool experience.
This is very helpful.. I think the problem most people have is the complete lack of any sense of scale when it comes to radiation.. I mean, without looking at something like this, how is anyone expected to know anything about what safe levels are?
Yes, most people have an irrational fear of radiation. I've run into the Fukushima thing myself. People think of it as a horrible disaster, and when I point out that the death toll is actually zero, they don't believe me.
> [..about Fukushima..] "Radiation exposure may have shortened the lives of some of those directly involved, but its effects are likely to be so small that we may never know for sure whether they are related to the accident or not."
I think this author has not realized (nor been informed) what an unmitigated disaster Fukushima really is. The media is downplaying its effects, and so is the author of this article.
How about listening to Helen Caldicott who is an MD and pediatrician, and deeply knowledgeable about the scientific and real-world effects of radiation exposure. Listen to her talk about the children of Fukushima and other places where people have been subjected to radiation. I think our fear of radiation may not be irrational at all.
While an MD and pediatrician may be knowledable about these things, I'd trust the information far more if it was in a paper format or a conference talk than in YouTube video format. I'm not going to spend an hour watching something that has such a high chance of being drivel, without more supporting information that lends it credibility.
It's not easy to identify the source of a cancer, so when people die of cancer caused by Fukushima, the 'skeptics' will not believe it. Any honest person that doesn't have bananas in his ears can see the massive effect Fukushima has had on oceanic life.
Not very convincing. In the first two minutes, she has already committed the fallacy of touting a change in relative risk while glossing over the fact that it is tiny in absolute terms.
She says -- correctly -- that a CT scan during pregnancy doubles the risk of leukemia. But another way to say the same thing is that it increases the lifetime risk from 0.0005% to 0.0011%. Compared with all of the other acceptable risks we choose to take every day, it is very far down the list of things that are worth worrying about.
And yet she chose to lead off with that particular fact. Which is proof to me that she's not actually sticking to the hard science, and more interested in telling scary stories.
Of course, just like if you could avoid ever driving in a car it would be better to skip that known -- and much bigger -- risk. Practical limitations apply.
I have to admit that if I have to choose between "the media is playing up the disaster, it's not as bad as they make it sound" and "the media is pooh-poohing the disaster and it's way worse than they're making it sound", you've got a huge uphill battle to convince me of the latter. Especially in radiological matters.
The media is basically paid to play up the disaster. It's through a couple other steps, of course (pay-per-eyeball is a terrible model for generating truth), but that's the net of it.
...has everyone forgotten the 20,000 people who died in the tsunami? What's the opportunity cost with the $300 billion that will be used to rebuild the devastated areas? And yet we've got no deaths from Fukushima. How many other deaths would we have suffered from a natural disaster, if it were a large enough event to have caused a bigger problem at Fukushima to cause one hundred radiation related deaths?
Statistically, worldwide 48% of humans will face cancer. 20% cancer will be their cause of death. Doing things like smoking cigarettes only increases risk of cancer from this baseline upwards. The health risks of exposure to radiation can be measured statistically as well, but there's still no way to tell whether you yourself "will get cancer" from radiation exposure.
It doesn't help that there are different varieties of radiation, with different energy levels, and different ways to damage living tissue.
This is why grays/rads are different units from sieverts/rems.
For instance, iodine-131 is a beta emitter. Most low energy beta emitters basically have zero health risk. Your internal organs are adequately shielded from it by nothing more than your own skin. The danger in I-131 is that if you are iodine-deficient, you will readily absorb the iodine into your body and concentrate it in your thyroid. Once there, it can zap your thyroid with high-energy electrons because it is sitting right there inside of it. This type of radiation can be protected against by swallowing a pill of nonradioactive KI prior to exposure.
Radon-222 is an alpha-emitter. Alphas are positively charged, so they too are stopped by very light shielding. The greatest danger is from ionization and scattering, like a high-energy cue ball hitting a triangle of billiard balls which all plow through the back rail of the pool table. The greatest danger is when the emitter is inside your body, such as stuck to the alveoli in your lungs--which is what would happen if you sat in a radon-rich spa for a while.
But in any case, the dose makes the poison, and if a radiation hormesis effect exists, good luck to the people wanting to prove it. As for myself, I fear radiation itself far less than both the human who fears it beyond what is rational and the human who does not sufficiently respect its dangers.
It isn't irrational, it is emotional. The difference being that people have a harder time reasoning about their emotions than they do about facts (or even the facts that lead to the emotions).
I've had similar conversations with people about radiation, I've pointed them to the excellent radiation chart, and I've gone over papers and articles and data galore. But if they are afraid, they are afraid. And deciding not to be afraid is often challenging. It is no different than people who are afraid of germs and are incessantly cleaning their living spaces or sanitizing their dishes in an autoclave. They know germs can kill them, they know they can't see or feel or taste germs they might be ingesting or coming into contact with, so they spend all sorts of time and energy on eliminating germs.
Is it irrational? No, not in the strict sense, germs really can kill them. Is it emotional? Absolutely there is a very real fear response there. Is it proportional to the threat? No, and that is where folks need to have a discussion in terms of proportion rather than real / not-real or threat / not-threat.
It is very similar to the emotions stirred up by a plane crash vs. the ongoing car accidents. I believe in both cases it comes down to not feeling in control.
As a population, we over-estimate our ability to safely drive cars. Yet because we are in control, we FEEL safer than being in a plane where, should anything go wrong, we'd be totally powerless as we descend to our doom.
Most of us have a general grasp on how a fire is put out, or how a dam is repaired, or how an oil well is fixed. But this invisible thing called radiation, which is used in the most powerful bombs ever made and which appears to be near incontrollable because it deals with the very structure of matter, this radiation ends up associated with a very powerful fear.
One thing that probably confuses many is the mechanism by which ionizing radiation causes cancer. A lot of non-ionizing radiation, such as visible light, wifi, radio, or infrared, will only excite the molecules in your body, causing an increase in heat. Obviously, too much heat is bad for you, but it won't cause cancer. It will just cook you like meat in a microwave oven.
Ionizing radiation, on the other hand, has a small chance of popping an atom out of a molecule in your body. It's the energy of single particles that matters, not the number of them (although you can certainly be cooked alive by enough ionizing radiation). If an atom is popped out of the right molecule (i.e. the DNA stored in one of your cells) in exactly the right place (e.g. the portions that suppress out-of-control replication) then you can get cancer. That mistake in your DNA might be repaired or the cell might simply die. It might be fine for a while, but that one mistake could lead to compounding errors in future cell divisions, eventually leading to cancer.
There are many forms of cancer, but their severity is not a function of how much radiation a person has been exposed to. Someone with a lot of exposure to man-made radiation sources might get a slow growing tumor in a non-vital area while a person who spent his life a thousand kilometers from civilization could get an aggressively spreading form of cancer in an inoperable area.
So, can light exposure to radiation be therapeutic? Probably not. If there are benefits to the treatments at Radhausberg, they are likely either due to some other factor or the placebo effect. The radiation is at a mostly harmless level for visitors, but it's not impossible that this could be the place where you get cancer. I'd be more concerned for the staff who are exposed year-round. The exposure received by nuclear plant workers is meticulously monitored and is likely far lower than what the workers at Radhausberg are receiving. 1 mSv is in the range of a medical diagnostic test, but multiply that by 2-3 hundred per year for several years and you get a pretty big dose.
Perhaps the most ironic thing related to this story is the fact that background radiation exposure for typical Germans has probably increased significantly in the last few years. Germany's main source of electricity is coal power, and they're relying on it more heavily than before now that they've shut down their nuclear reactors. For power plants of the same capacity, radioactive emissions are typically two orders of magnitude higher for coal power plants than for nuclear power plants.
Minor point: The way that these high energy particles 'pop' out an atom is by ionizing it. Essentially, it interacts with the electron, raising the energy of the electron, and allows for transitions to previously too energetic states of the molecule. This may pop the atom out and rejigger the molecule, or it may just allow for a rejiggering of the molecule and not allow it back. Essentially it can break or kink the DNA very badly. There are many modes of cancer formation and progression, and ionizing radiation is but one that itself has many modes besides genetic damage as well.
The amount of bad science in the article is incredible.
The idea that "small amounts of radiation do little/no measurable harm" is neither new nor unknown. This does not mean that exposure to low levels of radiation is beneficial. That argument is on a par with homeopathy.
Yes, there's a long-running argument that a nuclear power industry causes less damage to health than the traditional fossil-fuel alternatives. Again, nothing new.
But on to the radon tunnels: "I spent my 30 radon-breathing minutes had room for 20 or so people who had signed on for its protective value or its alleged benefit".
"The doctor in charge on the day of my visit…told me of clinical trials" - so far, so good.
"of surveys testifying to the popularity of the treatment" - uh oh.
"of patients who are able to cut down on or even abandon the drug therapies they would otherwise have been using" - hmm.
"How much of this evidence would rate as gold standard in quality, I have no idea" - then perhaps this is the time to investigate further, before reporting.
Clinical, peer-reviewed studies would go a long way to supporting the article. But even though clinical studies are mentioned in the article, there's no link to the supporting study.
Sure, homeopathy and all sorts of dodgy remedies have their advocates. But until this is backed up by a published peer-reviewed clinical study, this article belongs firmly in the camp of bad science.
The doctor in charge on the day of my visit was Simon Gütl. He told me of clinical trials, of surveys testifying to the popularity of the treatment, and of patients who are able to cut down on or even abandon the drug therapies they would otherwise have been using. How much of this evidence would rate as gold standard in quality, I have no idea – but I was struck by the enthusiasm with which some people seek out the same force of nature that most others think we have to avoid at any cost. One of my fellow transient troglodytes was on her 70th visit.
Considering the headline, I was hoping for a bit better than this.
It's not external exposure that's the big problem. You have to be near a big gamma source for that to be a problem. It's ingesting or breathing alpha and beta emitters. Especially in forms that are retained by the body, such as strontium-90. Or worse, concentrated by plants and animals used for food.
Most discussions about radiation safety seem to concentrate on being exposed to emissive radiation sources. In small doses and in exceptional situations where you walk away from the source, it does indeed seem low risk.
I'm no expert, but I've seen much less discussion and safety study about radiation exposure via intake and biological binding. The pathway of concern there would where dust or other particles of a radioactive substance are spread in an environment, then concentrated via natural means: erosion or biological (e.g. predators taking in prey); then exposed to humans. In that context, even a small amount of bound material may be continuously emitting where one is always getting a dose.
We actually take advantage of this pathway for short-lived isotopes for medical procedures, but obviously longer lived isotopes are more dangerous. Most safety in radiation discussions seem to measure the emissive strength, and declare things safe while ignoring the accumulation side of things. I think it's actually a much more difficult risk to characterize and to perform experiment with for obvious reasons..
On the contrary I believe it is very rational to fear radon. In Spain or France it is normal for families in some places to have family wineries on caves.
In those places if there was radon(coming from minerals associated to granites) cancer was way higher than normal levels. You have to be careful to ventilate those caves when they stay closed for some time.
My family had one of those. As there are lots of scientists in my family, we were always careful, including using a geiger counter and controlling how much time we played there as kids(it was a very fun place to play) but I had seen pretty stupid people about it(neighbors, friends), their stupidity coming from ignorance. And I had seen people getting ill from cancer and dying too.
Radon is not (ionising) radiation, it's a radioactive substance!
Fear of radiation is indeed irrational, because the radiation most likely to give you cancer is sunlight!
Fear of radioactive substances is very rational. The danger of radioactive material is that it can be consumed, and so bypasses the protection of the only organ that has actually evolved substantial defence against ionising radiation (your skin). As it hangs around for an indeterminate amount of time you have little way of knowing how much radiation you have absorbed.
For those of us born in the 60's through to the 80's, I think the cold war and living under what sometimes felt like impending nuclear armageddon left a very negative imprint on our psyches regarding radiation. Who remembers duck and cover?
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[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 112 ms ] threadSince the general population has no idea what levels are safe, the media is free to stir up catchy stories about anything radiation related. You can't expect the media to report responsibly, they're just regular folks incented to build audience.
Society could make more rational decisions if this were solved. Responsible reporting might compare newsy radiation to ordinary events ("about as much radiation exposure as a flight from NY to LA" or "twice the ordinary background radiation levels for New York City").
But how could you incent the media to report usefully? Laws? I'm stumped. If they don't feel inclined, it won't happen.
http://www.ianfairlie.org/news/recent-evidence-on-the-risks-...
"Just to make sure the point gets across, these studies mean that all children will receive about 1 mSv of gamma radiation from background radiation each year and this results in their leukemia risk being increased by 12%."
https://xkcd.com/1252/
[...] the authors estimated that the excess risk of childhood leukaemia was 12% per millisievert of cumulative red bone marrow dose from background gamma radiation (Kendall et al, 2012).
... where (Kendall et al, 2012) refers to http://www.nature.com/leu/journal/v27/n1/full/leu2012151a.ht....
One of projects that I consult on involves sorting of gravel from inactive uranium mines. On site the difference between "safe gravel for construction" and "radioactive waste" (which was found out to be viable as precursor for nuclear fuel) is mostly insignificant, but easily detectable. In my house this difference is swamped by natural background radiation (see "Living in a brick, stone..." in the XKCD chart, the sorting site is open-air installation).
Edit: Somehow I think that the real danger of radiation comes from radioactive stuff that can be aspirated or ingested, not from "some well-localized thing that is radioactive" and thus any kind of "fear of radiation" is mostly irrational (given that one does not go near radiation sources unnecessarily). Otherwise it's poison as any other (and most radioactive isotopes with long half-life are primarily chemically poisonous with the radiation hazard being mostly insignificant).
An interesting example: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_fleas
A. that you can't sense when you are being exposed.
B. it penetrates most things that would stop say a harmful gas.
[1] http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanhae/article/PIIS2352-30...
Technically correct, but so unreasonably stringent as to be pointless, and so lacking in perspective as to be laughable.
You cannot escape radiation, and frequently there are benefits that far outweight the risk. See: Bananas, x-rays, airlines, living in Colorado, using a computer, having friends.
But even if the relation is linear, for some doses the effect in negligible, comparing to other diseases/accidents/...
Spend a year in the Fukushima Exclusion zone (26mSv) plus 10 Chest CT scans
Spend a year in the Fukushima Exclusion zone, then take the max dose for a US radiation worker and two chest CT scans.
The whole green area of the chart (75 mSv) plus taking a dose at the northwest edge of the Fukushima exclusion zone puts you 19 mSv over the limit. So lay off a couple of CT scans and visits to Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and Fukushima and you'd be beneath the limit clearly linked to cancer.
Get 5000 chest X-Rays
250 mammograms
Eat a million bananas
This silly exercise at least convinces me to worry less about X-rays, plane flights, and eating bananas. It would be nice if XKCD had the dose that takes your cancer risk above certain thresholds like 1/million, 1/1000, 1/100, etc. It would also be nice if the public calmed down about radiation.
When Ukraine stabilizes more, I would highly recommend a trip to the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, it is a really cool experience.
Yes, most people have an irrational fear of radiation. I've run into the Fukushima thing myself. People think of it as a horrible disaster, and when I point out that the death toll is actually zero, they don't believe me.
I think this author has not realized (nor been informed) what an unmitigated disaster Fukushima really is. The media is downplaying its effects, and so is the author of this article.
How about listening to Helen Caldicott who is an MD and pediatrician, and deeply knowledgeable about the scientific and real-world effects of radiation exposure. Listen to her talk about the children of Fukushima and other places where people have been subjected to radiation. I think our fear of radiation may not be irrational at all.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4qX-YU4nq-g
That would be the same one who (absurdly) claimed that the space shuttle had destroyed 10% of the earth's ozone layer?
The only thing she's "deeply knowledgeable" about is how to incite panic.
She says -- correctly -- that a CT scan during pregnancy doubles the risk of leukemia. But another way to say the same thing is that it increases the lifetime risk from 0.0005% to 0.0011%. Compared with all of the other acceptable risks we choose to take every day, it is very far down the list of things that are worth worrying about.
And yet she chose to lead off with that particular fact. Which is proof to me that she's not actually sticking to the hard science, and more interested in telling scary stories.
I have to admit that if I have to choose between "the media is playing up the disaster, it's not as bad as they make it sound" and "the media is pooh-poohing the disaster and it's way worse than they're making it sound", you've got a huge uphill battle to convince me of the latter. Especially in radiological matters.
The media is basically paid to play up the disaster. It's through a couple other steps, of course (pay-per-eyeball is a terrible model for generating truth), but that's the net of it.
This is why grays/rads are different units from sieverts/rems.
For instance, iodine-131 is a beta emitter. Most low energy beta emitters basically have zero health risk. Your internal organs are adequately shielded from it by nothing more than your own skin. The danger in I-131 is that if you are iodine-deficient, you will readily absorb the iodine into your body and concentrate it in your thyroid. Once there, it can zap your thyroid with high-energy electrons because it is sitting right there inside of it. This type of radiation can be protected against by swallowing a pill of nonradioactive KI prior to exposure.
Radon-222 is an alpha-emitter. Alphas are positively charged, so they too are stopped by very light shielding. The greatest danger is from ionization and scattering, like a high-energy cue ball hitting a triangle of billiard balls which all plow through the back rail of the pool table. The greatest danger is when the emitter is inside your body, such as stuck to the alveoli in your lungs--which is what would happen if you sat in a radon-rich spa for a while.
But in any case, the dose makes the poison, and if a radiation hormesis effect exists, good luck to the people wanting to prove it. As for myself, I fear radiation itself far less than both the human who fears it beyond what is rational and the human who does not sufficiently respect its dangers.
I've had similar conversations with people about radiation, I've pointed them to the excellent radiation chart, and I've gone over papers and articles and data galore. But if they are afraid, they are afraid. And deciding not to be afraid is often challenging. It is no different than people who are afraid of germs and are incessantly cleaning their living spaces or sanitizing their dishes in an autoclave. They know germs can kill them, they know they can't see or feel or taste germs they might be ingesting or coming into contact with, so they spend all sorts of time and energy on eliminating germs.
Is it irrational? No, not in the strict sense, germs really can kill them. Is it emotional? Absolutely there is a very real fear response there. Is it proportional to the threat? No, and that is where folks need to have a discussion in terms of proportion rather than real / not-real or threat / not-threat.
As a population, we over-estimate our ability to safely drive cars. Yet because we are in control, we FEEL safer than being in a plane where, should anything go wrong, we'd be totally powerless as we descend to our doom.
Most of us have a general grasp on how a fire is put out, or how a dam is repaired, or how an oil well is fixed. But this invisible thing called radiation, which is used in the most powerful bombs ever made and which appears to be near incontrollable because it deals with the very structure of matter, this radiation ends up associated with a very powerful fear.
It is irrational to possess a fear of radiation in lieu of other things that pose a far greater threat.
Ionizing radiation, on the other hand, has a small chance of popping an atom out of a molecule in your body. It's the energy of single particles that matters, not the number of them (although you can certainly be cooked alive by enough ionizing radiation). If an atom is popped out of the right molecule (i.e. the DNA stored in one of your cells) in exactly the right place (e.g. the portions that suppress out-of-control replication) then you can get cancer. That mistake in your DNA might be repaired or the cell might simply die. It might be fine for a while, but that one mistake could lead to compounding errors in future cell divisions, eventually leading to cancer.
There are many forms of cancer, but their severity is not a function of how much radiation a person has been exposed to. Someone with a lot of exposure to man-made radiation sources might get a slow growing tumor in a non-vital area while a person who spent his life a thousand kilometers from civilization could get an aggressively spreading form of cancer in an inoperable area.
So, can light exposure to radiation be therapeutic? Probably not. If there are benefits to the treatments at Radhausberg, they are likely either due to some other factor or the placebo effect. The radiation is at a mostly harmless level for visitors, but it's not impossible that this could be the place where you get cancer. I'd be more concerned for the staff who are exposed year-round. The exposure received by nuclear plant workers is meticulously monitored and is likely far lower than what the workers at Radhausberg are receiving. 1 mSv is in the range of a medical diagnostic test, but multiply that by 2-3 hundred per year for several years and you get a pretty big dose.
Perhaps the most ironic thing related to this story is the fact that background radiation exposure for typical Germans has probably increased significantly in the last few years. Germany's main source of electricity is coal power, and they're relying on it more heavily than before now that they've shut down their nuclear reactors. For power plants of the same capacity, radioactive emissions are typically two orders of magnitude higher for coal power plants than for nuclear power plants.
The idea that "small amounts of radiation do little/no measurable harm" is neither new nor unknown. This does not mean that exposure to low levels of radiation is beneficial. That argument is on a par with homeopathy.
Yes, there's a long-running argument that a nuclear power industry causes less damage to health than the traditional fossil-fuel alternatives. Again, nothing new.
But on to the radon tunnels: "I spent my 30 radon-breathing minutes had room for 20 or so people who had signed on for its protective value or its alleged benefit".
"The doctor in charge on the day of my visit…told me of clinical trials" - so far, so good. "of surveys testifying to the popularity of the treatment" - uh oh. "of patients who are able to cut down on or even abandon the drug therapies they would otherwise have been using" - hmm. "How much of this evidence would rate as gold standard in quality, I have no idea" - then perhaps this is the time to investigate further, before reporting.
Clinical, peer-reviewed studies would go a long way to supporting the article. But even though clinical studies are mentioned in the article, there's no link to the supporting study.
Sure, homeopathy and all sorts of dodgy remedies have their advocates. But until this is backed up by a published peer-reviewed clinical study, this article belongs firmly in the camp of bad science.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_hormesis#Studies_of_...
I agree that clinical trials would be better.
Considering the headline, I was hoping for a bit better than this.
edited to add - I found their website - http://translate.google.co.uk/translate?hl=en&sl=de&u=http:/... - it has not improved my opinion.
I'm no expert, but I've seen much less discussion and safety study about radiation exposure via intake and biological binding. The pathway of concern there would where dust or other particles of a radioactive substance are spread in an environment, then concentrated via natural means: erosion or biological (e.g. predators taking in prey); then exposed to humans. In that context, even a small amount of bound material may be continuously emitting where one is always getting a dose.
We actually take advantage of this pathway for short-lived isotopes for medical procedures, but obviously longer lived isotopes are more dangerous. Most safety in radiation discussions seem to measure the emissive strength, and declare things safe while ignoring the accumulation side of things. I think it's actually a much more difficult risk to characterize and to perform experiment with for obvious reasons..
On the contrary I believe it is very rational to fear radon. In Spain or France it is normal for families in some places to have family wineries on caves.
In those places if there was radon(coming from minerals associated to granites) cancer was way higher than normal levels. You have to be careful to ventilate those caves when they stay closed for some time.
My family had one of those. As there are lots of scientists in my family, we were always careful, including using a geiger counter and controlling how much time we played there as kids(it was a very fun place to play) but I had seen pretty stupid people about it(neighbors, friends), their stupidity coming from ignorance. And I had seen people getting ill from cancer and dying too.
It doesn't hurt to be careful.
Fear of radiation is indeed irrational, because the radiation most likely to give you cancer is sunlight!
Fear of radioactive substances is very rational. The danger of radioactive material is that it can be consumed, and so bypasses the protection of the only organ that has actually evolved substantial defence against ionising radiation (your skin). As it hangs around for an indeterminate amount of time you have little way of knowing how much radiation you have absorbed.