A Place to Stand

  I recently realised that the Linear No Threshold theory of radiation damage, since it does posit a very very simple relationship between radiation and death, so that government employees can calculate it, must have a simple formula but I didn't know it.

   The Wikipedia article on LNT didn't have it either which is really strange.

   Eventually I found it on page 6 here

Garwin claims that world data are described by the relationship in a linear no-threshold model of

                       Rcancer = 0.04 deaths/Sv

  Well that's nice. Taking average world background radiation as 2 mSv (2 thousandths of an SV) and world population as 7 billion we get [7 billion  X 0.00004 X2] 560,000 annually.

   Of course it shows the entire claim, no matter how "officially approved" is a lie. That figure is roughly a 1/3rd of malaria deaths - something which we have no trouble noticing, so finding statistical proof of this would be relatively easy if it existed. Malaria even varies over time as drainage, weather and other conditions do - malaria was a major killer in Britain in the 18thC but is unknown now.

  Here is a map of world background radon radiation.
  So background radiation varies a hundredfold across large areas of the globe and so such cancers must also, if the story is not a scam. Good news for Scotland and Japan then where nobody ever suffers from cancer? 

“The discussion was rather heated and I said some uncomplimentary things about making math into a fetish without understanding it.  At issue was the reference to a linear relation between dose and effect, which I still believe is entirely unnecessary for the definition of the current radiation guidelines, since they are pulled out of thin air without any knowledge on which to base them.”  President Eisenhower’s science advisor, George Kistiakowsky, noted in his diary for May 13, 1960