"Something must be done. This is something. Therefore, it must be done."
The urge to regulate almost routinely trumps the quality and even the fundamental appropriateness of (the principles and grounds guiding) the state's intervention.
Truth is often too complicated to be encompassed by something as simplistic as the compulsive notion that the world must be run by regulation.
Following up on my post Chernobyl Revisited, note another case of massive regulation failure:
Imagine if governmental regulators operated as though everything that is toxic in high doses were also toxic in low doses. They would outlaw things like vitamins, aspirin, zinc, selenium, and so on, while warning people to shield themselves completely from sunlight, oxygen, and water. That, in fact, is what they are doing with radiation. Everything in the world is toxic in high enough doses and most are also dangerous at inadequate doses, but many are life-saving in a middle range (called the hormetic range). Radiation is no different in that respect from things like vitamins, sunlight, oxygen, and water.
More here from Prof. Brook's article at BraveNewClimate:
Perhaps the greatest source of fear arises from the general misunderstanding of radiation and its effects. My earlier article in the March 16 issue of the GV News was criticized in a letter on March 20 for mentioning the hormetic (beneficial) effect of low levels of radiation. Hormesis, said the letter writer, is controversial and “just a theory.” The implication that hormesis has not been proven is simply false. There are more than 2,000 studies from around the world demonstrating its validity and reality, including many Japanese studies of survivors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear bombs in 1945.
Low levels of radiation are actually good for you, and insufficient levels are harmful to your health. But don’t rely on the government regulators in the EPA or FDA to tell you this. I know, I worked for the FDA’s Center for Devices and Radiological Health for almost 8 years before moving to Green Valley in 2004. While my friends there believe in the hormetic effect, they nevertheless say it would be too complicated to regulate radiation based on this truth (my emphasis, G.T.].
Instead they use the linear-no-threshold (LNT) approach. LNT pretends that even the smallest amount of radiation causes deaths from cancer. LNT further pretends that a particular total dose of radiation energy will cause the same number of cancers, several decades in the future, regardless of the number of people who share that dose. In other words, it implies that if one person exposed to 2 million mrems (a unit of radiation energy) will get cancer from it, then if 2 million persons are exposed to 1 mrem each, one will still get cancer from it.
LNT deliberately ignores several well known protective mechanisms against radiation damage, including stimulation of repair enzymes to fix damaged DNA, cell suicide to eliminate sick cells before they become cancerous, and stimulation of the immune system to rid the body of cells that are in danger of becoming cancerous. Low levels of radiation, in fact, act like a vaccine – a small dose of the germ and it stimulates your immune system to protect you against larger doses. The very word “hormesis,” like the word “hormone,” comes from Greek, meaning “to stimulate.”
In the U.S. on average we each experience about 360 mrems a year due to natural background radiation, with variation over a range of more than ten to one, depending on geography. This background comes from the sky (cosmic radiation from stars) and from the ground (radioactive elements that have been part of the earth since its formation billions of years ago, including uranium, thorium, radium, radon, polonium, and others). In fact, it is mainly the heat from radioactivity of these elements that causes volcanoes, geysers, hot springs, and even the floating of the tectonic plates, which in turn gives rise to earthquakes and tsunamis. Our food is already loaded with naturally occurring radioactive potassium (K-40) and carbon (C-14). Of the 360 mrems each year, about 20 mrems comes from inside of us from the potassium and carbon that we eat and absolutely need in order to live. That’s right, every one of us already contains radioactive material, round the clock.
Humans and other animals, as well as plants, have evolved in a veritable sea of radiation. If radiation were harmful at these levels, as LNT maintains, we wouldn’t be here. Furthermore the levels of background radiation vary not only within the U.S. but around the world, covering a range of about 200 to 1. The highest levels are found in Ramsar, Iran (26,000 mrem/year), Guarapari Beach in Brazil (7,500 mrem/year), and Kerala, India (7,500 mrem/year). If LNT were true, Iran, Brazil, India, and the Rocky Mountain states in the U.S. would have higher than average cancer rates and lower than average life expectancy. Yet the rates of cancer are lower, or at the very least not elevated, in the regions of higher radiation. Denver, for example, has lower cancer rates than New Orleans, though both the levels of cosmic and ground radiation are higher in Denver. The greater the altitude the less the shielding from cosmic rays, and the Rockies contain lots of uranium, radium, and radon, and the other radioactive elements.
Even the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) in January 2011 admitted that low levels of radiation are beneficial. But still the NRC promotes fear by maintaining an admitted fiction in their rules for exposure. See http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/bio-effects-radiation.html. So while hormesis may be artificially controversial, there are no studies that confirm LNT and thousands that prove it false. It would be no more controversial than the causal link between smoking and lung cancer if the government regulatory agencies would finally admit that they have been operating on a false basis. LNT has been called by Gunnar Walinder, former chair of the Swedish Radiobiology Society, “the greatest scientific scandal of the 20th Century.”
The source.
See also Anti-Nuclear Hysteria ...
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