By DV82XL, Section Commentary Posted on Wed Feb 28, 2007 at 07:20:13 AM PST
The natural energy of the Universe, the power that lights the stars in the sky, is nuclear. Chemical energy, wind, and water are, from the viewpoint of the Universe, almost as rare as a coal-burning star. If this is so, and if the Universe is nuclear-powered, why then are so many prepared to march in protest against its use to provide us with electricity and preserve our food?
Boiled down to its fundamentals the fear of nuclear energy has its roots in the fear of radiation. Invisible, silent, and thus undetectable by human senses, it is the bogeyman of all things atomic. Fear feeds on ignorance.
When X rays and nuclear phenomena were discovered at the end of the nineteenth century, they were seen as great benefits to medicine--the near-magic sight of the living skeleton, and the first means to palliate and cure cancer. But sure enough, there was a dark side also, and too much radiation means a lingering death.
But even sunlight, (also in fact a form of radiation,) can kill with too much exposure, conversely not enough will harm a human as well. Surprisingly a number of scientist believe, that what is true of sunlight, may be true of other forms of radiation. They claim that low-dose radiation has been shown to enhance biological responses for immune systems, enzymatic repair, physiological functions and help prevent the onset of cancer. This effect known as radiation hormesis: a moderate overcompensation to a disruption in homeostasis caused by the radiation; it is a stimulus to the repair mechanisms that cope with non-radiation damage as well, so that the overall effect is a health benefit. Many studies have been done that support this view.
For example: no chromosomal damage was detectable in animals with high radiation counts living around Chernobyl and a lower than expected increases in cancers have been found in the human population living near the area at the time of the accident. This is not an isolated case, populations living in areas of high natural radiation show a marked decrease in the cancers reported, and occupational studies on nuclear industry workers, where they had good radiation dosimetry and records, found that cancer mortality was statistically significantly lower among nuclear workers than among non-nuclear workers.
Legislatively however, the current accepted standard is the linear no-threshold model (LNT) , which states that the damage caused by ionizing radiation presupposes that the response is linear (i.e. directly proportional to the dose) at all dose levels. Thus LNT asserts that there is no threshold of exposure below which there is no adverse impact. In practice this means that if a particular dose of radiation is found to produce one extra case of cancer in every thousand people exposed, the LNT predicts that one thousandth of this dose will produce one extra case in every million people so exposed, and that one millionth of this dose will produce one extra case in every billion people exposed, and so on with no safe limit except zero. Thus it is claimed that radiation's carcinogenic effects should be considered to be proportional to the dose an individual receives, regardless of how small that dose is.
The evidence against the linear model and for radiation hormesis has been solid as a rock for 40 years. Yet the LNT model prevails. Why? Follow the money and the politics. The health-physics community is divided, roughly along the lines of who puts money before principles. There have been some amazingly bitter fights within the Health Physics Society. A look at the historical background of radiation research is instructive.
After World War II, the details were released of the A-bombing of Japan. Studies of atomic bomb survivors from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, showed a linear relationship between cancer mortality and high doses of radiation as a result fallout hysteria became one of the themes of the times. The situation was not helped by lurid stories of several high dose incidents reported in the press. Health Physics and Genetics were supported lavishly by radiation hysteria, and Radiation Biology became the most intensely researched science in history. Health physicists soon learned that their livelihood depended upon scaring funds out of governments and science became irrelevant if the paymasters wanted to mislead the public about the hazards of radiation. If a particular study failed to find evidence of radiation's ill effects, the data was simply forced into the LNT model. Yet some of these studies are among the best evidence for radiation hormesis because the authors were not looking for it, and effectively denied that it existed.
The LNT model was first considered in the 1940s purely on the theoretical grounds that a single hit by ionizing radiation on a single cell could cause chromosome damage that could cause a mutation or cancer without any hard evidence to support that contention. The justification for using the LNT model was that too many test animals or too much time would be needed to evaluate chronic dose rates. If the LNT model is correct, there is no "no observed adverse effect level" (NOAEL) for regulators to observe, thus officials responsible for public health can claim justification in calling for minimization of exposures to ionizing radiation. Note that this is tantamount to saying that avoiding sunlight is justified on the grounds that nobody will get sunburns in the dark. Added to this, during the Cold War a number of people promoted the LNT model in an attempt to discourage nearly all uses of nuclear weapons and nuclear power, but other scientists disagreed with LNT from the beginning.
As a result the radiophobes and the politicians took a handy but false rule of thumb and enshrined it in law and regulation. The second problem, related, is that this results in a lot of stupid but expensive procedures where people and vendors can make a lot of money thus entrenching this false standard through special interests.
In spite of this atmosphere, during the 1960's and 1970's, about 40 articles per year described hormesis. In 1963, the AEC repeatedly confirmed lower mortality in guinea pigs, rats and mice irradiated at low dose. In 1964, the cows exposed to about 150 rads after the Trinity A-Bomb test in 1946 were quietly euthanized because of extreme old age. This trend continues. It was found that there was decreased cancer mortality in government nuclear facility workers in Canada, the UK, and the US. Whether exposed in uranium mines or processing plants, laboratories, or nuclear power plants--and whether the exposure was to uranium, plutonium, thorium or radium, so long as the dose was 50 times background (chronic) or, 50 rad acute, workers were healthier than those in the general population, mainly due to lower cancer incidence. Decreased cancer mortality, decreased leukemia rate, decreased infant mortality rate and increased lifespan in atomic bomb survivors from both Hiroshima and Nagasaki who received 1.2 rad. was found and a 20% lower cancer death rate in Idaho, Colorado and New Mexico, which have background radiation of 0.72 rad/yr compared with Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama with 0.22 rad/yr was also reported. There were many other similar examples as a quick look through the literature will reveal.
What is the upshot of this reliance on a thoroughly debunked standard? At a minimum it has created astronomical expenses in the public and private sector attempting to protect the population from dangers that are not really there. It has severely limited the use of therapeutic radiation treatments and hobbled the development of new ones. It has severely limited the use of radiation to reduce spoilage in food, and to disinfest food shipments of vermin.
Most importantly an unwarranted fear of radiation hazards has limited the development of nuclear energy by unnecessarily raising the cost of nuclear power plants and generating public opposition to their construction.
The organization Radiation, Science, and Health is an international non-profit organization dedicated to exposing the misrepresentation of data, and the waste of public funds that provide NO public health benefit. They can be found at http://www.radscihealth.org/rsh/index.html. The website also includes a large number of papers and studies supporting the existence of radiation hormesis
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