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Monday, January 14, 2013

Anti-Nuclear No Lower Threshold Theory Dropped - Continued

  After yesterday's article on the UN regulatory authority acknowledging that there was no basis for the LNT theory I sent it out as a letter to the world's press and to some other sites.

  Jerry Pournelle published it today adding this comment:

As far as I am concerned, the linear damage all the way down hypothesis was disproved years ago, and the balance of evidence strongly favors the theory of hormesis. The linear damage theory says that the dose make the poison, and even a little bit of radiation damage is too much; hormesis says that a little bit of radiation can actually be good for you. It does NOT state that if a little is good more is better.

We discussed all this years ago at http://www.jerrypournelle.com/archives2/archives2mail/mail311.html#hormesis

And more recently at http://www.jerrypournelle.com/mail/2010/Q1/mail616.html#hormesis

See also http://a-place-to-stand.blogspot.com/2010/03/radiation-hormesis-spreading-question.html

And in fact I have been writing about this since my days as science editor of Galaxy Science Fiction. There is a section on radiation hormesis in A Step Farther Out http://www.amazon.com/Step-Farther-Out-Jerry-Pournelle/dp/0441785832

But one need not accept hormesis to realize that the lowest levels of radiation don’t have much effect on large mammals.

   Predictably the world's mainstream media has continued censoring.

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Comments:
Mr Pournelle makes arather dim remark: "The linear damage theory says that the dose makes the poison". Actually both the competing theories agree that the dose makes the poison, they simply disagree about the form of the dependence.

So at least both are a bit more sophisticated than what I think of as Guardian-science, as in "ooh, it's got a carcinogen in it so it will kill us all".
 
No, the point is that at certain levels almost everythying is a poison and at certain levels almost everything is a trace element/vitamin.

The quote given used to be used by the undisputed view of the medical profession, but we now live in an age of hysterical state promoted fears of everything.

For example salt is a poison if you eat it by the pound but its total absence will swiftly kill.

Hormesis is the normal state in nature, LNT is virtually unknown anywhere.
 
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