How Not to End a Sermon

Pericles, you ain’t.

Substack makes it easy to make a fool of yourself. In a recent post on the "cost" of LNT, your preacher argued that, depending on your assumptions, the "cost" of LNT could be anywhere between zero and "the difference between a healthy, wealthy humanity on a cool planet, and a very uncertain future." And then I just stopped.

It's hard to imagine a more infelicitous peroration. However, the "cost" of LNT is defined, and whatever that nebulous number is, is totally irrelevant to the underlying question: which is should we get rid of LNT?

LNT should not be kept because you can make a myopic argument that it's not that expensive. LNT should not be dumped because you can make a logically consistent argument that LNT is auto-genocidally expensive. If LNT were a realistic representation of our biology, then we would just have to live with it. If LNT is incompatible with indisputable biology, then LNT must be replaced with something better.

LNT must be judged not on its implications; but it's correctness. The foundational premise of LNT is: radiation damage to our DNA is unrepairable. We now know that assumption is false. A providential Nature has equipped us with DNA damage repair mechanisms that can cope with radiation dose rates 100's of times above normal background. She had to do this to allow us to have an oxygen based metabolism, which damages our DNA at a rate that is at least 25,000 times larger than average background radiation.

LNT must be replaced not because it's bad news for humanity, but because it's wrong.