The issue is that the ALARA (as low as reasonably achievable) principle has been improperly applied and has quietly over time changed to leave out the “reasonably” part. So regulations and protective measures have gone for as low as achievable period.
This is in part driven by fear of nuclear radiation –stemming from the Chernobyl disaster, Fukushima and others– and the application of the LNT model (linear non-threshold).
That’s where we meet another issue: we actually have no idea what low levels of radiation exposure do to a human body. There very well might be threshold, after which the risk becomes linear. All we know about the effects is based on studies on high radiation dosages from the nuclear bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Yet we have applied the linear risk of cancer we found in those studies and simply drew the line in the graph from the lowest risk we observeren down to zero, which gives us the LNT model.
The article kind of makes it seem like this model is proven fact, but for the lower exposures, which is basically all we’re dealing with at nuclear facilities, it simply isn’t.
You’re mostly right.
The issue is that the ALARA (as low as reasonably achievable) principle has been improperly applied and has quietly over time changed to leave out the “reasonably” part. So regulations and protective measures have gone for as low as achievable period.
This is in part driven by fear of nuclear radiation –stemming from the Chernobyl disaster, Fukushima and others– and the application of the LNT model (linear non-threshold).
That’s where we meet another issue: we actually have no idea what low levels of radiation exposure do to a human body. There very well might be threshold, after which the risk becomes linear. All we know about the effects is based on studies on high radiation dosages from the nuclear bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Yet we have applied the linear risk of cancer we found in those studies and simply drew the line in the graph from the lowest risk we observeren down to zero, which gives us the LNT model.
The article kind of makes it seem like this model is proven fact, but for the lower exposures, which is basically all we’re dealing with at nuclear facilities, it simply isn’t.