As far as I can tell, the NRC's working definition of "reasonable" in As Low As Reasonably Achievable is any requirement that does not send the license applicant packing. Most applicants will accept any requirement that they think they can afford, meaning the plant will not lose money. During the boom of the early 1970's, this process pushed nuclear power plant costs up a factor of four or more. When the boom ended, nuclear was stuck with top of the boom costs; and since the regulatory ratchet only works one way, there was no recovery.
This is great. I lack expertise, and I can follow almost all of it. My uncertainty concerns Figure 1. Is it intended to show mortality when different doses of radiation are absorbed over a very short period rather than over a lifetime? To me the S curve looks almost linear; is that near-linearity the effect of the small low-end hook, and does that small hook result from the quickness of the dose? Does the curve resemble what LNT theory predicts? How would a non-lopsided S curve look? Thank you.
Very perceptive comments. The bomb survivor doses were all absorbed over a very short time,
most in seconds, well within a single repair period. In the jargon, these are called acute doses.
A symmetric S curve does not work at all and there's no reason to expect the curve to be symmetric. The fact that the low end hook is small is one of the reasons that LNT has survived, because as you point out, pull back, show a large dose range, the low end hook almost disappears, and a straight line does not look all that bad. And if you clump together, the low end data into a single wide dose range, say 0 to 50 mGy, you can make the hook totally disappear. This is a tactic that LNTers have used over and over again since 1947.
But in a NPP release all the action is at the low end, in the 0 to 5 mGy range. We need to
zoom in on this dose range. And in this dose range, the curves are completely different and this difference skyrockets as you go down in dose. In teh Chernobyl release, LNTers figured that 500,000,000 Europeans received an average dose of 0.33 mSv over 52 weeks. LNT with no repair claims this will result in 9000 eventual deaths. An S-shaped model with a one week repair period claims this dose will result in 0.05 eventual deaths. See Flop book for details.
Thanks very much. I appreciate the answer, and I'll work to understand it.
I'm trying to register at The Gordian Knot, and the site keeps telling me that the email is incorrect and I'm very likely a bot. Same results on Chrome and Firefox. No ad blocker. Anything else I need to do? Thanks again.
Lot of people are having this problem and we have not been able to figure out why. Send an email to djw1 at thorconpower dot com and we will figure out something.
Four syllables is a bit abrupt even for substack. But many people must be wondering if LNT is so obviously wrong how did we get stuck with it? Prof Calabrese lays out the sordid history. It's involves a strange combination of good intentions (stopping atom bomb testing) and academic greed. It's a fascinating story. The Flop book has its own summary. Kent's right
Bang on! It's all about the repair rate. Normal cellular metabolic processes -- resulting in oxygen free radicals which want to bind with any cellular molecules including DNA -- cause far more damage, including double DNA breaks, than does low level radiation. All living organisms, including humans, have evolved over millennia and have obviously survived the metabolic processes that are essential to life. Surely such medical scientific knowledge can be applied to put a stake in the heart of LNT and thus ALARA.
This is an excellent post. I'm wondering though, if in our wildest dreams we convinced the NRC that ALARA is baloney, what practical changes to the regulations would be reasonable? What about our current nuclear plants are wastefully overbuilt? Or is it more along the lines of not going into hysterics for every small release of radiation?
Getting rid of LNT may be a necessary condition, but it certainly isnt a sufficient condition. In my view, we need to stop telling the Two Lies (see eponymous companion piece) and we need to get rid of the NRC and regulate nuclear like we regulate other hazardous but beneficial activities. See Market Based regulation piece.
It is not so much that the plants are over-built. It is the enormous amount of money and time that goes into paperwork, paperwork that often decreases quality and robustness. See Flop book for discussion.
Hormesis means a small amount of a stressor makes us stronger and healthier — a zero amount of the stressor makes us weak and unhealthy. This has been found to be true for radiation, too — people living in high background radiation areas actually have lower cancer rates than those living in low radiation areas.
Hormesis is real. We can see it clearly when a quick priming dose is followed by a much larger challenge dose. But does it apply to a nuclear power plant release which is usually a step jump in dose rate followed by a slow decline? I have never seen any compelling evidence that it does. And if you cant sell me, you are not going to sell the public. A-release-is-good-for-you is a tough argument to make. And it's unnecessary. All we need is a dose-response curve whose slope goes to zero at zero dose. In my view, bringing hormesis into the discussion is counter-productive.
Jack, I'm not only focused on nuclear accidents. Many people are concerned about living near nuclear plants, or near nuclear waste disposal sites, because they believe that *any* level of radiation is bad. For those people, the hormesis phenomenon combined with the facts relating to natural background radiation, may ease their concerns.
So should we tell people living in a low radiation part of the country, but next to a nuclear plant: "Get a little radiation to build your immunity, maybe a little extra radon for your basement." ??? I agree with Jack. The benefits are so small that it's just not worth an argument.
Until recently I put radiation hormesis in the same bag as homeopathy - a quack theory. I even repeated a joke about a guy who drank thorium water for good health, until his jaw fell off. It didn't take much to convince me hormesis was real, but then I am a scientist, not a typical Walmart shopper.
My advice: lay out the facts of background radiation and radiation harm. But don't make your arguments depend on hormesis. It can be a by-the-way point.
I agree that LNT is bunk, but not all "exposure" is the same, and simply walking around with a Geiger counter measuring levels at a particular location won't tell you what the risks are. Exposure from sources external to the body are one thing, but if you inhale or ingest radioactive particles, the hazards are quite different.
True. External radiation is only one pathway, and the piece makes no claim that it is the only pathway. Many of the examples involve internal exposure.
But however the dose is received the same repair processes go to work.
I recently found https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6NnKVWzqVW8 by a professor of public health, though did not listen as I am deaf and subtitles are very tedious. Anyway I think he is saying what Jack Devanney has been saying (for a long time).
Calabrese does a good job of laying out how we got LNT. It was a strange mixture of good intentions (stop nuclear weapons testing) and academic greed on the part of a group of geneticists. Fascinating story which is also retold in the Flop book.
Calabrese however falls in the false dichotomy trap, pitting LNT (no safe dose) against a threshold (there is a safe dose). In the piece, I argue this is a mistake. It puts the thresholders in teh very difficult position of defending a threshold, rather than focusing on LNT's nonsensical claim that dose RATE is irrelevant.
In the UK dentists taking little x-rays always leave the room while the photograph is taken. I would assume that, unless you take a very large number of x-rays each day this is an unnecessary precaution.
But if regulations are to change you need warnings about how much in a given period. Like the UK says 14 units of alcohol in units per week (used to be 21 but the new Puritans sensed an opportunity).
Maybe you could do a piece on that because something will need to replace LNT and as a layman I have to say I don't even know what the units would be!
It's pretty simple. Combine a non-linear (preferably S-shaped) dose-response curve with a repair period. A logistic is the standard dose-response curve everywhere except radiation. The repair period is a few minutes to a few days depending on the dose rate. The longer the assumed repair period, the more conservative the model. This is addressed in some detail in
In Hermann Muller's case wasn't it not so much "greed" as sheer desperation, as his political beliefs had caused him to move countries a lot (preventing him from building a secure retirement fund) while his infant daughter had a very expensive illness?
I agree that LNT is incorrect, but the nuclear bomb seems like a bad way to prove it. It is, for the most part, a single catastrophic event. If you look at the data, those "Not In City (NIC)" are considered as receiving 0 dose. So, any remaining radiation is not considered.
Maybe I need to read this again but couldn't you produce evidence to prove/disprove LNT with mice studies? Just raise cancer sensitive mice in an environment with a small dose of radiation spread over a long period of time versus another set with one given the same dose in a short period?
I find the human data most convincing. See the Table inthe latest post.
But there have been lots of animal studies that contradict LNT.
Perhaps the strongest are the beagle studies described in Section 5.7 of the Flop book which you can download from https://gordianknotbook.com
I can't show the graphs in this comment, but here's some of the text
Figure 5.27 shows a more informative way of looking at the beagle mortality data. In this set
of experiments, the dogs were exposed to steady whole body photon radiation until they died, at dose rates varying from 540 mSv/day to background for the control group. The key point to take away from this figure is the overwhelming importance of dose rate. Since the radiation stopped when the dogs died, the cumulative doses increase as you move to the right in the figure, until you get down to a dose rate of 7.5 mSv/day. The dogs who received the larger cumulative doses lived longer, because they were getting that dose at a lower dose rate. Dose rate was much more important than cumulative dose. Notice there is very little difference between the dogs that were continuously exposed to 3 mSv/day and the control group.
As far as I can tell, the NRC's working definition of "reasonable" in As Low As Reasonably Achievable is any requirement that does not send the license applicant packing. Most applicants will accept any requirement that they think they can afford, meaning the plant will not lose money. During the boom of the early 1970's, this process pushed nuclear power plant costs up a factor of four or more. When the boom ended, nuclear was stuck with top of the boom costs; and since the regulatory ratchet only works one way, there was no recovery.
This is great. I lack expertise, and I can follow almost all of it. My uncertainty concerns Figure 1. Is it intended to show mortality when different doses of radiation are absorbed over a very short period rather than over a lifetime? To me the S curve looks almost linear; is that near-linearity the effect of the small low-end hook, and does that small hook result from the quickness of the dose? Does the curve resemble what LNT theory predicts? How would a non-lopsided S curve look? Thank you.
Michael,
Very perceptive comments. The bomb survivor doses were all absorbed over a very short time,
most in seconds, well within a single repair period. In the jargon, these are called acute doses.
A symmetric S curve does not work at all and there's no reason to expect the curve to be symmetric. The fact that the low end hook is small is one of the reasons that LNT has survived, because as you point out, pull back, show a large dose range, the low end hook almost disappears, and a straight line does not look all that bad. And if you clump together, the low end data into a single wide dose range, say 0 to 50 mGy, you can make the hook totally disappear. This is a tactic that LNTers have used over and over again since 1947.
But in a NPP release all the action is at the low end, in the 0 to 5 mGy range. We need to
zoom in on this dose range. And in this dose range, the curves are completely different and this difference skyrockets as you go down in dose. In teh Chernobyl release, LNTers figured that 500,000,000 Europeans received an average dose of 0.33 mSv over 52 weeks. LNT with no repair claims this will result in 9000 eventual deaths. An S-shaped model with a one week repair period claims this dose will result in 0.05 eventual deaths. See Flop book for details.
Thanks very much. I appreciate the answer, and I'll work to understand it.
I'm trying to register at The Gordian Knot, and the site keeps telling me that the email is incorrect and I'm very likely a bot. Same results on Chrome and Firefox. No ad blocker. Anything else I need to do? Thanks again.
Lot of people are having this problem and we have not been able to figure out why. Send an email to djw1 at thorconpower dot com and we will figure out something.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L3ZfL4vTPPM
LNT is a lie
Kent,
Four syllables is a bit abrupt even for substack. But many people must be wondering if LNT is so obviously wrong how did we get stuck with it? Prof Calabrese lays out the sordid history. It's involves a strange combination of good intentions (stopping atom bomb testing) and academic greed. It's a fascinating story. The Flop book has its own summary. Kent's right
and the tellers knew it.
Very useful to have LNT explained.
Bang on! It's all about the repair rate. Normal cellular metabolic processes -- resulting in oxygen free radicals which want to bind with any cellular molecules including DNA -- cause far more damage, including double DNA breaks, than does low level radiation. All living organisms, including humans, have evolved over millennia and have obviously survived the metabolic processes that are essential to life. Surely such medical scientific knowledge can be applied to put a stake in the heart of LNT and thus ALARA.
This is an excellent post. I'm wondering though, if in our wildest dreams we convinced the NRC that ALARA is baloney, what practical changes to the regulations would be reasonable? What about our current nuclear plants are wastefully overbuilt? Or is it more along the lines of not going into hysterics for every small release of radiation?
Sean,
Getting rid of LNT may be a necessary condition, but it certainly isnt a sufficient condition. In my view, we need to stop telling the Two Lies (see eponymous companion piece) and we need to get rid of the NRC and regulate nuclear like we regulate other hazardous but beneficial activities. See Market Based regulation piece.
It is not so much that the plants are over-built. It is the enormous amount of money and time that goes into paperwork, paperwork that often decreases quality and robustness. See Flop book for discussion.
Jack, you may be interested in the phenomenon of hormesis:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hormesis
Hormesis means a small amount of a stressor makes us stronger and healthier — a zero amount of the stressor makes us weak and unhealthy. This has been found to be true for radiation, too — people living in high background radiation areas actually have lower cancer rates than those living in low radiation areas.
Johann,
Hormesis is real. We can see it clearly when a quick priming dose is followed by a much larger challenge dose. But does it apply to a nuclear power plant release which is usually a step jump in dose rate followed by a slow decline? I have never seen any compelling evidence that it does. And if you cant sell me, you are not going to sell the public. A-release-is-good-for-you is a tough argument to make. And it's unnecessary. All we need is a dose-response curve whose slope goes to zero at zero dose. In my view, bringing hormesis into the discussion is counter-productive.
Jack, I'm not only focused on nuclear accidents. Many people are concerned about living near nuclear plants, or near nuclear waste disposal sites, because they believe that *any* level of radiation is bad. For those people, the hormesis phenomenon combined with the facts relating to natural background radiation, may ease their concerns.
So should we tell people living in a low radiation part of the country, but next to a nuclear plant: "Get a little radiation to build your immunity, maybe a little extra radon for your basement." ??? I agree with Jack. The benefits are so small that it's just not worth an argument.
Until recently I put radiation hormesis in the same bag as homeopathy - a quack theory. I even repeated a joke about a guy who drank thorium water for good health, until his jaw fell off. It didn't take much to convince me hormesis was real, but then I am a scientist, not a typical Walmart shopper.
"[LNT] is like saying taking one aspirin a day for a year is the same as taking 365 aspirins in a day."
Or like saying 365 people each taking one aspirin is the same as one of 365 people taking 365 aspirin.
Johan,
My advice: lay out the facts of background radiation and radiation harm. But don't make your arguments depend on hormesis. It can be a by-the-way point.
I agree that LNT is bunk, but not all "exposure" is the same, and simply walking around with a Geiger counter measuring levels at a particular location won't tell you what the risks are. Exposure from sources external to the body are one thing, but if you inhale or ingest radioactive particles, the hazards are quite different.
True. External radiation is only one pathway, and the piece makes no claim that it is the only pathway. Many of the examples involve internal exposure.
But however the dose is received the same repair processes go to work.
LNT is equally nonsensical in either case.
The difference between internal and external exposure is the subject of 600 Year Old Nuclear Fuel is Just another Poison, jackdevanney.substack.com/p/600-year-old-spent-fuel-is
I recently found https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6NnKVWzqVW8 by a professor of public health, though did not listen as I am deaf and subtitles are very tedious. Anyway I think he is saying what Jack Devanney has been saying (for a long time).
Peter,
Calabrese does a good job of laying out how we got LNT. It was a strange mixture of good intentions (stop nuclear weapons testing) and academic greed on the part of a group of geneticists. Fascinating story which is also retold in the Flop book.
Calabrese however falls in the false dichotomy trap, pitting LNT (no safe dose) against a threshold (there is a safe dose). In the piece, I argue this is a mistake. It puts the thresholders in teh very difficult position of defending a threshold, rather than focusing on LNT's nonsensical claim that dose RATE is irrelevant.
In the UK dentists taking little x-rays always leave the room while the photograph is taken. I would assume that, unless you take a very large number of x-rays each day this is an unnecessary precaution.
But if regulations are to change you need warnings about how much in a given period. Like the UK says 14 units of alcohol in units per week (used to be 21 but the new Puritans sensed an opportunity).
Maybe you could do a piece on that because something will need to replace LNT and as a layman I have to say I don't even know what the units would be!
Peter,
It's pretty simple. Combine a non-linear (preferably S-shaped) dose-response curve with a repair period. A logistic is the standard dose-response curve everywhere except radiation. The repair period is a few minutes to a few days depending on the dose rate. The longer the assumed repair period, the more conservative the model. This is addressed in some detail in
https://gordianknotbook.com/download/compensating-radiation-harm
The Flop book goes into still more detail and applied the model (which we call Sigmoid No Threshold) to both the Fukushima and Chernobyl releases.
Job done!
In Hermann Muller's case wasn't it not so much "greed" as sheer desperation, as his political beliefs had caused him to move countries a lot (preventing him from building a secure retirement fund) while his infant daughter had a very expensive illness?
https://atomicinsights.com/why-was-h-j-muller-an-effective-tool-in-effort-to-exaggerate-danger-of-radiation/
I agree that LNT is incorrect, but the nuclear bomb seems like a bad way to prove it. It is, for the most part, a single catastrophic event. If you look at the data, those "Not In City (NIC)" are considered as receiving 0 dose. So, any remaining radiation is not considered.
Maybe I need to read this again but couldn't you produce evidence to prove/disprove LNT with mice studies? Just raise cancer sensitive mice in an environment with a small dose of radiation spread over a long period of time versus another set with one given the same dose in a short period?
I find the human data most convincing. See the Table inthe latest post.
But there have been lots of animal studies that contradict LNT.
Perhaps the strongest are the beagle studies described in Section 5.7 of the Flop book which you can download from https://gordianknotbook.com
I can't show the graphs in this comment, but here's some of the text
Figure 5.27 shows a more informative way of looking at the beagle mortality data. In this set
of experiments, the dogs were exposed to steady whole body photon radiation until they died, at dose rates varying from 540 mSv/day to background for the control group. The key point to take away from this figure is the overwhelming importance of dose rate. Since the radiation stopped when the dogs died, the cumulative doses increase as you move to the right in the figure, until you get down to a dose rate of 7.5 mSv/day. The dogs who received the larger cumulative doses lived longer, because they were getting that dose at a lower dose rate. Dose rate was much more important than cumulative dose. Notice there is very little difference between the dogs that were continuously exposed to 3 mSv/day and the control group.
Obviously that experiment was deeply immoral.