Re:Tokyo Radiation Less Than Paris’s Three Years After Meltdown
by pessimizer on Monday March 10, 2014 @01:46PM
(#7374447)
>There are good arguments that low doses are handled by the cell's mutation correction mechanisms in a way that cannot be done for high doses.
Might be better to present those arguments, or links to those arguments. The argument that scientific opinion isn't settled, but there may be a magic number that has to be reached within a short period of time for exposure to be dangerous sounds like pro-nuclear FUD, whether it is or not.
> One of the organizations for establishing recommendations on radiation protection guidelines internationally, the UNSCEAR, has recently recommended policies that do not agree with the Linear No-Threshold model at exposure levels below background levels of radiation to the UN General Assembly from the Fifty-Ninth Session of the Committee. Its recommendation states that "the Scientific Committee does not recommend multiplying very low doses by large numbers of individuals to estimate numbers of radiation-induced health effects within a population exposed to incremental doses at levels equivalent to or lower than natural background levels." This is a reversal from previous recommendations by the same organization.[2]
> Whether the model describes the reality for small-dose exposures is disputed. It opposes two competing schools of thought: the threshold model, which assumes that very small exposures are harmless, and the radiation hormesis model, which claims that radiation at very small doses can be beneficial. Because the current data are inconclusive, scientists disagree on which model should be used. Pending any definitive answer to these questions and the precautionary principle, the model is sometimes used to quantify the cancerous effect of collective doses of low-level radioactive contaminations, even though such practice has been condemned by the International Commission on Radiological Protection
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_no-threshold_model