[ExI] How dangerous is radiation?

[Robin D Hanson]

On Jul 8, 2014, at 8:02 AM, John Clark <johnkclark at gmail.com<mailto:johnkclark at gmail.com>> wrote:
For example, the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki who received 2000 millisieverts of radiation were 7.9 times as likely to get Leukemia as the general population of Japanese, If they received half that amount of radiation (1000 millisieverts) and the LNT theory was true  you would expect them to be 3.95 times as likely to get that disease but instead they were only 2.1 times as likely; and if they got 200 millisieverts they were 4% LESS likely and with 100 millisieverts they were 17% LESS likely to get Leukemia. Somebody please explain to me how these NONLINEAR results are consistent with the LINEAR No Threshold theory.

The survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki who received more than 100 millisieverts were more likely to develop solid cancers than the general population of Japanese, but those who were under 100 millisieverts were not. Somebody please explain to me how the existence of such a THRESHOLD is consistent with the Linear NO THRESHOLD theory.

None of the data spurts the Linear No Threshold theory,  and yet the UN and the NRC and the WHO and just about every other organization you can name operates under the assumption that the LNT theory is true and makes policy accordingly.

Your examples are provocative, but rather than base our beliefs on such examples, can't we just have a systematic review article? Surely there must be one on this subject.

Robin Hanson  http://hanson.gmu.edu
Res. Assoc., Future of Humanity Inst., Oxford Univ.
Assoc. Professor, George Mason University
Chief Scientist, Consensus Point
MSN 1D3, Carow Hall, Fairfax VA 22030
703-993-2326 FAX: 703-993-2323



-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20140708/73dc7e06/attachment.html>