Big Nuclear’s Big Mistake - Linear No-Threshold
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Nuclear is finally looking up from an informal “keep your head down” policy. However, it’s bringing with it a relic – a part of safety culture that is actua...

This may be a “hot” one, considering lots of people do not like anything nuclear. If you would want to know my “bias”, well I have always been “pro nuclear”. So if you want to take this claim with huge mountains of salts, feel free to do so.

Here is a relevant wiki article for radiation hormesis. This is a proposed effect that certain amounts of radiation exposure may even be beneficial instead of harmful as LNT may suggest.

TL;DW for folks who do not want to watch video (I have not included examples or numbers)

  • Radiation from natural sources (like radioactive bananas you eat, or from soil or space) are always present.

  • Most nuclear safety guidelines consider that there are no “safe limits” of exposure to radiation. For example, there are safe limits of some metals in our body, there is no limit for mercury or lead exposure. There is a required amount of vitamins you need, but there is also a limit beyond which they are not safe. Radiation is treated like mercury in guidelines.

  • If it has no safe limits, then due to natural exposure, places with higher background exposure must have naturally higher rates of cancers developing - but the thing is, experiments and data collected does not match.

  • Your body has natural means to repair damage done by radiation, and below a certain limit, your body can withstand (and arguably benefit, see the linked article) the radiation.

  • Over estimating danger due to radiation leads to large scale paranoia, and leads to general public be scared of nuclear disasters, when they are not as bad ast they may seem.

And pre-emptively answering some questions I am expecting to get

  • Do you support nuclear bombs? Hell no. We should stop making all kinds of bombs, not just nuclear.

Are there not better means of renewable energy generation like

  • solar? - no, you still need rare erath metals, you need good quality silicon, and you need a lot of area. Until we have a big “stability” bump in perovskite solar cells, it is not the best way. is it better than fossil fuel? everything is better than fossil fuel for practical purposes.

  • wind? geothermal? - actually pretty good. but limited to certain geographies. if you can make them, they are often the best options.

  • hydro? - dams? not so much. There are places where they kinda make sense, for example really high mountains with barely any wildlife or people. otherwise, they disturb the ecosystem a lot, and also not very resistant to things like earthquakes or flooding, and in those situations, they worsen the sitaution.

  • sga@piefed.socialOPEnglish
    2·
    2 days ago

    … And now, “What if exposing yourself to radiation is actually good for you?”

    you are using a guilt by association argument. yes the claim challenges what is currently percieved to be a appropriate model for nuclear damage (lnt).

    I have no comments about your 2nd para. i partly agree. presenting your argument as it was done in video feels wrong.

    but, what about the example studies. the town in iran, recieveing roughly 10-40 times radiation of currently considered safe limit.

    Treating radioactive material and radiation produced by a reactor with extreme caution is the best practice regardless

    I have written that very thing in other comments as well. idea is not to drop safety protocols. just change the fear of things by saying - you have not recieved a unsafe dosage.

    here is an example of a very similar thing - consider vaccines which use weaker/incapable strains of virus. or consider the very first vaccine, where they used the “pus” from a cow, to effectively use the cow virus to develop immunity in humans. if you think about it, example kinda matches well - in very low amounts virus is not that deadly. in very large amounts, it caused a pandemic. does that mean that it also follows a linear model (no, afaik, it has more of a network effects thing, so it is sigmoidal).

    I am repeating what i have said in other comments - “do not drop safety limits, spread awreness that it is not that bad”

    Furthermore, your dismissal of other forms of green energy is outdated

    I have completed my bachelors this year. I am by no means a expert, but i think i know enough to say that i am not 20-30 years behind. i am 5-10 behind at best (roughly the time studies take to actually be taught in courses). (yes i have studied energy).

    I am very willing to actually listen things i said which are very out dated, but i would like to hear them, instead of a blanket - my information is outdated.