The Wall Street Journal Article on LNT

Error: the Nobel prizes to Lindahl, Modrich and Sancar for DNA repair were awarded in 2015, not 2018. Mea culpa.

On Saturday, the Wall Street Journal published an article that was mildly critical of LNT. The article made the same mistake that almost all anti-LNTers make calling LNT the theory that there is no safe dose. Not only is this not factual, as soon as you make LNT the theory that there is no safe dose, then all the replacements must be theories that claim there is a threshold below which there is absolutely zero harm, and they all lose. The Gordian Knot Group was asked to comment. For the record, here's how we responded.

A 2025-07-12 WSJ article called the Linear No Threshold (LNT) radiation the model, the model that assumes "there is no safe level of exposure to radiation". LNT makes no such claim. LNT converts a dose rate profile into a cancer incidence prediction. That's it. LNT like many other possible models predicts a positive cancer incidence for any dose rate profile whose cumulative dose is positive. So in calling LNT the "no safe dose" model the caller is making his (not LNT's) judgement that any non-zero radiation dose is "unsafe". If the caller is a pro-nukie, he should rethink his support of nuclear power.

A far better definition of LNT is: the model that assumes radiation damage to our DNA is unrepairable. Harm just keeps building up. Therefore, the only thing that counts is total dose. How quickly or slowly that dose is incurred is irrelevant.

The no repair assumption was proposed about 100 years ago, at a time when we knew nothing about DNA. We did not even know it existed. We now know a providential Nature has equipped us with a remarkably effective DNA repair system. She had to do this to protect our DNA from our own oxygen based metabolism which produces double strand breaks of the DNA helix at least 25,000 times more rapidly than average background radiation. This repair system can be overwhelmed if the dose rate is high enough; but such dose rates will almost never be encountered by the public in a nuclear power plant release.

LNT denies well established, indisputable biology. In 2018, Nobel prizes were awarded to three scientists that have been in the forefront of figuring out just how the repair processes work. This failure to follow the science leads to predictions of cancer incidence that are multiple orders of magnitude too high when large doses are spread more or less evenly over protracted periods, as is the case in a nuclear power plant release. LNT should be rejected not because it claims there is no safe dose, which it does not. LNT should not be rejected because that would help us provide humanity with cheap, low CO2 electricity, which is most certainly would. LNT should be rejected because it's flat wrong.