Excellent. Very convincing evidence that vested interests are the driving force behind radiophobia. I see it in discussions on FaceBook - outrage from a radiation remediation expert, when I published Robert Hargraves' figure debunking EPA's claim that radon was causing more deaths than drunk driving. What followed was a multi-year debate, which I have summarized at
At first I was going to just delete the offending figure. Radon is not essential to our article on radiophobia, and Citizendium does not take sides on controversial issues. But after digging in on the basis for the figure (County-level data on lung cancer and radon) I decided not to back down.
Where the debate stands today: The pro-LNTers are insisting that the apparent 30% drop in lung cancer with moderate levels of radon, is not due to any beneficial effect of the radon, but a "confounding" of the data by smoking or some other unknown factor. That is mathematically possible, but not plausible. There are statistics experts on both sides, and the debate degenerates into terms our readers cannot understand.
Jack, I would love see you do a thorough debunking of the radon "hill they will die on". Here is my rough draft. It does not require statistics any more than understanding histograms and scatterplots:
In learning about radiation, I think we all go thru a radon phase. I know I did. AFAIK the Cohen study was the first large bit of epidemiology that explicitly questioned LNT. It's what got me to start digging into the subject. But it is far from the most compelling.
The clumping of smokers by state, when what we really need are individual dose rate profiles. The plethora of possible confounding factors. If you look at a radon map of the US, it looks a lot like a presidential election result map. Maybe Republicans are more radiation resistant then Democrats. Most importantly, the dose rate profiles are tiny. And all radon DRP's are qualitatively similar, low dose rates stretched out over long periods. The signal to noise ratio is just two small to say anything convincing.
I say again, if you want to test a radiation harm model, you must do so with measured or at least estimatable dose rate profiles that are big enough and different enough so that you can compellingly falsify a theory. The RERF Life Span Study, the dial painters, the Taipei apartment exposure, the beagle studies qualify. No radon study that I know of does.
Finally, I came to realize if you want to test a radiation harm model, the first thing you should do, long before jumping into some very noisy data is ask: is it consistent with the biology. Biology first, then data. So now the first thing I ask an LNTer is: do you believe our bodies are unable to repair DNA damage?
This framing flips the script brilliantly. The idea that the nuclear complex needed public fear to sustain itself explains so much more than the standard narrative ever could. I've always wondered how regulatory capture works in reverse, where agencies don't just get captured by industry but actualy create the conditions that make their own expansion necesary. The 1967 timeline evidence is kinda devastating to the conventional wisdom.
Excellent. Very convincing evidence that vested interests are the driving force behind radiophobia. I see it in discussions on FaceBook - outrage from a radiation remediation expert, when I published Robert Hargraves' figure debunking EPA's claim that radon was causing more deaths than drunk driving. What followed was a multi-year debate, which I have summarized at
https://citizendium.org/wiki/Fear_of_radiation/Debate_Guide#LNT_and_radon,_Controversy_over_Figure_4
At first I was going to just delete the offending figure. Radon is not essential to our article on radiophobia, and Citizendium does not take sides on controversial issues. But after digging in on the basis for the figure (County-level data on lung cancer and radon) I decided not to back down.
Where the debate stands today: The pro-LNTers are insisting that the apparent 30% drop in lung cancer with moderate levels of radon, is not due to any beneficial effect of the radon, but a "confounding" of the data by smoking or some other unknown factor. That is mathematically possible, but not plausible. There are statistics experts on both sides, and the debate degenerates into terms our readers cannot understand.
Jack, I would love see you do a thorough debunking of the radon "hill they will die on". Here is my rough draft. It does not require statistics any more than understanding histograms and scatterplots:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1bTrkJSvrq-hzHaiE5WJBcPZOdkUoLHJb7Y3p13BLyUw/edit?tab=t.0#heading=h.54fwqtl8kxaw
David,
In learning about radiation, I think we all go thru a radon phase. I know I did. AFAIK the Cohen study was the first large bit of epidemiology that explicitly questioned LNT. It's what got me to start digging into the subject. But it is far from the most compelling.
The clumping of smokers by state, when what we really need are individual dose rate profiles. The plethora of possible confounding factors. If you look at a radon map of the US, it looks a lot like a presidential election result map. Maybe Republicans are more radiation resistant then Democrats. Most importantly, the dose rate profiles are tiny. And all radon DRP's are qualitatively similar, low dose rates stretched out over long periods. The signal to noise ratio is just two small to say anything convincing.
I say again, if you want to test a radiation harm model, you must do so with measured or at least estimatable dose rate profiles that are big enough and different enough so that you can compellingly falsify a theory. The RERF Life Span Study, the dial painters, the Taipei apartment exposure, the beagle studies qualify. No radon study that I know of does.
Finally, I came to realize if you want to test a radiation harm model, the first thing you should do, long before jumping into some very noisy data is ask: is it consistent with the biology. Biology first, then data. So now the first thing I ask an LNTer is: do you believe our bodies are unable to repair DNA damage?
This framing flips the script brilliantly. The idea that the nuclear complex needed public fear to sustain itself explains so much more than the standard narrative ever could. I've always wondered how regulatory capture works in reverse, where agencies don't just get captured by industry but actualy create the conditions that make their own expansion necesary. The 1967 timeline evidence is kinda devastating to the conventional wisdom.