Background radiation from isotopes in nature, and from the sun provide 99.99% off all the radiation the normal person will ever be exposed to.

Even at Fukushima To protect yourself from radiation, the most dangerous source is still the sun, and to make yourself safe you should never go outside, and should line your ceiling with lead.

Hear, hear Wade. Can you imagine, they were cleaning irradiated soil around Fukushima, with lower rads, than that produced by granite blocks in buildings, which have stood for centuries, without any observable harm, to any of the inhabitants.
This asinine absurdity can be slammed home to the ludicrous fear campaign and misinformation; put about by the eco-fascist, anti nuclear lobby, whose real goal, may well be anti-development and de-industrialisation?
Rhrosty.

Quote
Following the work of Marie Curie the health of people around the world today has improved out of all recognition thanks to radiation and nuclear technology.
End Quote

Yes and she died of aplastic anemia brought on by her years of exposure to radiation, which amply demonstrates that safety in in nuclear research is vitally necessary.

The article takes a simplistic view of the world and them draws highly dubious conclusions. Typical internet rubbish with a veneer of scientific language thrown in just to con the ill informed.

Wow, Rhrosty, well said.

warmair
Of course safety in nuclear mattes is important and the case of Madam Curie underlines that concern, but as the article points out the public have extrapolated a healthy fear into a phobia over all things nuclear, to the point where the health results of the fear itself overshadow any health results from actual exposure.

The same thing can be seen in the now passe public reaction to mobile phone towers where parents would keep their children indoors (and so more susceptible to colds and the flu). Their reaction created health risks that far outweighed any risk from the source, real or imagined.. .

Meanwhile of course this one stark image sums up the world-view promoted by all the techno-optimists. http://www.dartmouth.edu/~spanmod/mural/panel21.html As did the Avatar film of a few years back wherein having already destroyed the biosphere on planet earth, the techno-realists were compelled by the inexorable dominator logic/momentum of their "culture" to invade and plunder "virgin" territories, and to exterminate any resistance (including Black Ducks)- just like we always have.

Despite our obvious technological genius we are still essentially barbarians. Hence, we "play" with everything, but we cannot fully control our effects. We slaughter, exploit, poison, and spoil. We achieve power over great natural forces in the environment, but we cannot be the wise and loving masters of sex, or population, or industrial waste, or international politics. Therefore we are inevitably a destructive influence in the world.

We presume and act to force every thing into degraded submission and to our own aggressive and stupid will to eat and use any and every thing that is technologically feasible, without any long-term regard for the future (while pretending otherwise). While perhaps waiting for some superior understanding to emerge in the future to clean up our wreckage, and perhaps hoping that a Cosmic Parent will keep everything in order or eventually "save" us.

But Daffy, you're still here, and still able to point to irrelevant images, and fictional films. Actually the film Avatar is interesting in that the Na'vi were uninterested in understanding their world or in any of the human party tricks such as being able to make, walking, talking copies of the themselves remotely controlled by humans.. And that trick was forced on them because the Na'vi were so arrogant and intolerant of anything new that they would not deal directly with humans.

I amused myself an essay on how really the Na'vi were to blame for the events on Pandora on www.vaderisinnocent.com if you ever get a chance to look.

I swear, Daffy, if you didn't already exist it would be necessary to invent you. Are you seriously putting an animated film about blue-skinned people forward as evidence that we're all do-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-med?

Since when has ultraviolet been categorised as "Ionising Radiation". I was under the impression that a much shorter wavelength was indicated.

David

This article is itself bogus science. . The author baldly states that “Modern scientific experiments establish beyond doubt that moderate doses of radiation do no harm. “
We’re supposed to believe that. Presumably, we are supposed to dismiss:
the findings of:
1. ‘Studies of the Mortality of Atomic Bomb Survivors, Report 14, 1950–2003: An Overview of Cancer and Noncancer Diseases’
2.Biological Effects of Ionizing Radiation (BEIR) V11 NATIONAL RESEARCH COUNCIL OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMIES
3. Preliminary Dose Estimation from the nuclear accident after the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami - World Health Organisation Report 2013

These are the 3 largest, most reputable reports on health effects of ionising radiation. All conclude that low dose radiation is harmful, and causes cancer.

As to the 1987 Goiânia medical radiation accident, (cited as evidence of no harm from lower dose radiation) - it hasn't been properly studied, and would certainly need longer than 25 years proper follow up to get meaningful results.

Perhaps the author of this article does not grasp the difference between a small individual risk from low level radiation, and the collective population risk, which is significant

>>These are the 3 largest, most reputable reports on health effects of ionising radiation. All conclude that low dose radiation is harmful, and causes cancer.<<

Maybe it does Noel but there is no way to avoid it. You'll cop a higher dose of radiation from an in international flight or a diet rich in potassium than you will from living next to nuclear power station for a year - people still fly and eat brazil nuts because if there are any risks from the tiny doses involved those risks are negligible and of less concern than more dangerous carcinogens like alcohol.

Do you drink Noel?

Cheers,

Tony

Noel,

If you actually read the report, the studies you cited looked at very high doses of radiation and extrapolated to lower levels.

There is no study yet of low doses of radiation and their effects that concurs with their conclusions.

As a former Radiation Safety Officer I am very aware of the ALARA principle as applied to ionising radiation, which means that doses should be kept As Low As Reasonably Achievable. The key is the word "reasonably".

The stochastic risk (the chance that some ionising event will occur) increases with increasing time, activity and type of radiation exposure. It's a bit like saying that spending more time driving in heavy traffic increases the risk of having some form of accident.

However, not all such events will have a measurably deleterious effect, just as most car accidents are merely fender-benders, not catastrophic or fatal. For example, a beta particle will be stopped by the epidermis, which is dead, and will be very unlikely to cause any negative effect at all unless one happens to inhale a source. The same applies to alpha particles. On the other hand, high-energy neutrons can do a lot of damage, although most of them are going to pass straight through a body doing no harm at all and the same applies to gamma. The chance of actual harm occurring during an ionising event is the "deterministic risk". To use the driving analogy, this is the chance that an accident will cause an injury and we take steps, such as seatbelts, airbags,crumple zones, to reduce that risk, as well as speed limits, signage, road rules, driver training to reduce the stochastic risk, with the result that an intrinsically hazardous activity is now so safe that we do it with our kids routinely.

Radiation workers are allowed about 50 times the annual dose of the general public and this is monitored using film badges. It is so much higher because they are few in number - raising the stochastic risk in a a small number of people is not going to lead to an explosion of cases of radiation-induced illness/injury. In the same way, we allow emergency workers to ignore speed limits, provided they do so in certain ways that limit risk to others. This is where the "reasonable" part comes in. [cont]

We reasonably recognise that the job of being a radiation worker or an emergency worker entails some unavoidable added risk from the work itself and we do what we can to ensure that they are reasonably safe. We don't say "no risk is acceptable", because that would mean society would not enjoy the benefits that such work produces. Instead, we give those workers the tools to minimise their exposure to avoidable risk and expect them to accept the unavoidable ones as part of the job.

The problem we face is that there is very poor understanding of genuine risk management principles among the public and even among those professionals who are in the safety management business. Instead, we have allowed a silly "zero tolerance"/zero-thought approach, in which any risk, whether stochastic or deterministic is seen as unacceptable and so truck drivers are not allowed to climb on trays, forklift drivers have to beep their horn every time they turn a corner, men are not allowed to sit next to children on planes, the list goes on and on and it's a depressing story about our society and the problem of managerialism as it is playing out in the risk-management industry.

Let's face it, cancer treatment using radiation would never have been developed if the risk-managers of today had to approve the experiments that lead to it.

Shadow Minister is simply wrong. A number of reputable scientific bodies have studied high AND LOW dose radiation effects on animals. Among these were the research of Clinton Laboratories (later Oak Ridge National Laboratory) on hundreds of thousands of mice, and on beagles at the University of California. For ethical reasons, such studies are supposedly not done on humans, (but in fact have been done - results kept secret, by US military).
More recently, reputable studies by the University of California, and Oxford University (UK) have shown increased leukaemia in children exposed to three or more X rays,
USA Department of Energy is now funding very small tinpot studies on small numbers of mice to try to show that low dose radiation is harmless.

Noel,

At least you admit that the studies you mentioned have no comparison for low level radiation.

I have read the Oxford study and I note that they very carefully said that they found a modest "association" (not a causal link) for the very reason that the reasons people needed >3 x rays could be linked to why the leukemia developed. They also commented on another similar study that found no association, and finally "Given the lack of precision in the exposure estimates, the results of this study should be interpreted with caution, but they warrant further investigation"

If you have anything that is substantial I would be glad to see it.