Nuclear Power Related Media Thread, page-5054

I have been reading up on Sewie's hypothesis that all radiation is harmful (i.e the Linear No threshold - LNT theory). I came across this series on comments posted by Stephen Wilson (Professor at Univ of Qld - who up until 2019 accepted the LNT theory) which i thought were worthwhile:

One influence was reading a paper by the former head of UNSCEAR.

Another was listening to what Prof Geraldine Thomas, who managed the Chernobyl human tissue bank at Imperial College London for decades (waiting for the wave of cancers that never came). Another was listening to Ed Calabrese in the series of videos about the problems with the Linear No Threshold model.

Another was a conversation with a retired nuclear engineer at the ANA conference.

And the prompt for all this was a question from the floor at the 2019 #ANA conference: “When are we going to get rid of the LNT model?” (I thought: what’s the LNT model? Now I know! It’s the thing that predicted the huge wave of thousands or tens of thousands of post-Chernobyl cancers that never came. It’s the precautionary principle on steroids).

Peter Ridd: “If we used the LNT hypothesis in medicine, most pharmaceutical drugs would be banned. For example, it would calculate that taking two tablets of a common non-prescription medication [e.g. paracetemol] would give a 6 per cent chance of dying because 30 tablets, taken at once, are lethal. The LNT hypothesis also leads to the conclusion that giving half a litre of blood to the Red Cross must kill about 25% of donors because losing 2 litres is lethal. By this calculation, the Red Cross has killed more people than Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, and Adolf Hitler combined, and is still doing it.”

For more iformation on an interesting series of posts on this topic go to:

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/energyeconomist_food-set-to-be-grown-near-chernobyl-38-years-activity-7210414096976891904-RBk_