John,

You're a complete shonk. The LNT model, just like IBM Johnny, has been dishonest from inception.

https://genesenvironment.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s41021-018-0114-3#Sec5

As you amply demonstrate, the LNT model has become a tool of political activists to spread fear of radiation in the community. While having a margin of safety is a good precaution, there is also some concern that defining that having excessively large safety margins calculated from the unscientific LNT model combined with radiation fearmongering, has resulted in compromised health outcomes.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0009279718311013

You accuse me of cherry picking data, yet how is your exclusive choice of links supporting the LNT model not cherry picking? A feature of a sound scientific theory is reproducibility of results. That is not the case with the LNT theory below 100msv doses.

And to finish with, a quote from the first link:

"Hazards by both respiration and low-dose ionizing radiation are caused mainly by ROS, but ROS production by respiration overwhelms that by low-dose radiation by thousands to a million of times the magnitude. ROS-quenching systems developed under intensive ionizing radiation conditions for more than billion years before the appearance of oxygen in the air must be readily applied to quench ROS by respiration."

So why aren't you raising the alarm about the dangers of breathing IBM?

And here is another paper discussing the flawed biological assumptions and statistical methods inherent in the LNT model:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0009279718310858

From the article:

"The main pitfall of the LNT model is due to the inappropriate extrapolation of mutation and DNA damage studies that were conducted at high radiation doses delivered at a high dose-rate [4,[12], [13], [14]]. These studies formed the basis of several outdated paradigms [1] that are either incorrect or do not hold for LDR doses. First, it was assumed that the primary radiation-related cause of cancer was due to DNA damage, and since DNA mutation increases as a linear function of radiation dose it was postulated that cancer frequency would also increase as a linear function of dose [15]. The second paradigm was based on the idea that ionizing radiation always produced adverse effects and that each ionization event increased the health risk proportionately. Finally, the radiation dose-response curves were interpreted using the “hit theory”, which determined biological risks as the number of cells traversed by discrete ionizing radiation energy packets [16]. Here, only the cells that were “hit” with the ionizing energy packet responded to the radiation exposure [17].
This review of cellular mechanisms will demonstrate that studies conducted in LDR biology in the last 20 years largely invalidates the outdated paradigms discussed above [18]. "

Fester,

The name-calling isn’t doing you any favours, but thanks for the links. They’re a perfect illustration of your entire approach: loud certainty, selective sourcing, and complete disregard for actual scientific consensus.

You open with a personal insult, then link to a 2018 article claiming the LNT model was “dishonest from inception.” The author, from the radiation hormesis school, argues that low-dose radiation is harmless - or even beneficial - and that LNT is politically motivated. That’s not new. It’s also not the view of the ICRP, BEIR, UNSCEAR, WHO, U.S. NRC, or any of the bodies that actually regulate radiation exposure.

Next, you cite a 2019 Mutation Research review - again, not an empirical study, not consensus-setting, and not a refutation of INWORKS or the fact that every major regulatory body still uses LNT as its default risk model.

Then comes another article arguing that: “studies conducted in LDR biology in the last 20 years largely invalidates the outdated paradigms discussed above.” But again, it’s theoretical reinterpretation - not population-level data. You're not disproving LNT; you're just collecting papers that say “we don’t like it,” and treating that as conclusive.

//As a workplace health and safety measure I am all for it, but as a predictor of harm it tends to fail below annual exposures below 100 millisieverts.//

No one claimed otherwise. Bronwyn - like BEIR VII and INWORKS - referenced long-term cumulative exposure in earlier, less-regulated periods. You’re pretending she said everyone near a plant today is doomed. She didn’t.

//You accuse me of cherry picking data, yet how is your exclusive choice of links supporting the LNT model not cherry picking?//

Because I cited the consensus. Cherry-picking is when you mine dissenting reviews and ignore the rest of the data.

//So why aren’t you raising the alarm about the dangers of breathing ...?//

Because ROS from respiration is biologically regulated. Ionising radiation is not.

You haven’t discredited LNT. You’ve just decided it offends you. That’s not science. That’s a grievance.

John,

There is strong evidence that the LNT model is based on fraud. The American Health Physics Society thought so highly of Dr Calabrese's forty years of research into the LNT model that they published 10 hours of interviews with him on the matter.

https://hps.org/hpspublications/historylnt/episodeguide.html

"Because I cited the consensus. Cherry-picking is when you mine dissenting reviews and ignore the rest of the data."

Garbage. It is a fact that there is not consistent validation of the LNT model below 100msv, and the value of the model in predicting health outcomes is so poor that the model is only used to set dose limits. The studies that you cite are very much in the minority and rely on inaccurate and subjective assumptions like the Healthy Worker Effect to give them validity for low exposures.

That scientists can be as deceitful and dishonest as your good self is no revelation. Overestimating harm can cause unnecessary deaths as the Fukushima tsunami demonstrated.

"As a precaution against health effects, more than 150,000 people were evacuated to avoid exposures comparable to those received by people living in areas of elevated natural radiation. According to the Reconstruction Agency, 1632 people who had survived the earthquake and tsunami were confirmed dead as of March 31, 2012.18 The social costs of the evacuation and the economic costs of the nuclear energy shutdown in Japan have been enormous."

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7476350/

Fester,

You’ve gone from accusing the LNT model of being "unscientific" to now claiming it's outright fraud. But quoting heavily from Calabrese and hosting interviews on the Health Physics Society site doesn’t prove your case - it proves you found someone who agrees with you.

That's not fraud. That’s academic dissent.

The consensus, as maintained by the ICRP, BEIR VII, UNSCEAR, and the NRC, continues to favour LNT for a reason: it errs on the side of caution where certainty is biologically and statistically difficult.

//There is not consistent validation of the LNT model below 100 mSv…//

Correct - and again, no one said otherwise. As you yourself noted earlier, LNT is primarily a policy model, not a fine-grained predictive one. It exists because conclusive evidence at low doses is hard to obtain, not because the risks are known to be zero. That doesn’t invalidate it - it makes it cautious.

//The studies that you cite are very much in the minority…//

Actually, no. The INWORKS cohort, which includes nearly 400,000 nuclear workers across multiple countries, found a dose-response relationship at low levels of exposure. That’s not fringe. That’s frontline epidemiology, published in BMJ and cited by BEIR and IARC.

And your last reference, to Fukushima:

//The social costs of the evacuation and the economic costs… have been enormous.//

No dispute there. But what’s your solution - scrap safety margins? Assume no risk? The mistake was how evacuation was handled - not that caution was unjustified. If overestimation caused unnecessary deaths, underestimation could have caused worse. The answer isn’t to pretend radiation is harmless - it’s to plan better.

And yes, cherry-picking includes lifting quotes like:

“The LNT model… was based on inappropriate extrapolations.”

That comes from a 2018 review article pushing radiation hormesis - again, a minority position. You ignore 70 years of cautious regulation and multinational data to amplify a handful of dissents.

If you want to argue for policy reform, go ahead. But stop pretending that a few contrarian studies invalidate the entire consensus. They don’t. Not by a long shot.

John,

"But stop pretending that a few contrarian studies invalidate the entire consensus. They don’t. Not by a long shot."

Yet more dishonesty from you. A glaring problem with the LNT model is a failure to find any risk from background radiation, which can be up to twenty times the average value. Nuclear industry workers currently receive exposures of less than the average background radiation, so claims of it causing cancer are dubious.

The latest UNSCEAR report included a reference with the comment:

"It is acknowledged that the possible risks from very low doses of low linear-energy-transfer radiation are small and uncertain and that it may never be possible to prove or disprove the validity of the linear no-threshold assumption by epidemiologic means."

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30585971/

So in other words John, any effect of ionising radiation below 100msv, positive, negative or neutral, is likely impossible to determine with an epidemiological study.

The other foundation of the LNT model, that radiation damage is cumulative and additive, regardless of whether continuous or discreet, was disproved by Caspari, but upheld by fraudulent research. It also makes no sense in light of an understanding of free radical generation and repair mechanisms of living organisms.

"If overestimation caused unnecessary deaths, underestimation could have caused worse. The answer isn’t to pretend radiation is harmless - it’s to plan better."

I am all for safety margins, but a "lower is always better" approach can be far more harmful, as was the case with Fukushima. Note also that you and Bronwyn claimed that a radiation exposure less than 1/200th that of average background radiation caused cancer in children. That isn't just fearmongering, it's downright dishonest.