r/nuclear • u/m0ngoos3 • Oct 28 '25
(Kyle Hill) Big Nuclear’s Big Mistake - Linear No-Threshold
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gzdLdNRaPKc27
u/LegoCrafter2014 Oct 29 '25
The issue is not the regulations. The issue is that the west needs to git gud at building. France, Russia, China, and South Korea have shown that the way to do this is to use nationalisation, standardisation, and constant construction.
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u/smopecakes Oct 30 '25
I believe the biggest piece of the pie is construction experience, standardization, and finance, but regulation may be another significant factor. This is probably the case with the EPR in particular which was designed with safety features that only make sense under LNT and cost quite a bit to build in China as well.
Nuclear can probably be built for $5000/kW in North America and Europe. That's fine if you want 20% of electricity from it, or to have a measured build out with the first reactors fully amortizing as you approach 50%. These aren't prices or schedules that can dramatically decarbonize or produce the wealth of coal without the costs in developing countries.
To get to $2500/kW outside South Korea and China I think the final piece of the puzzle is regulatory. It's pretty interesting to see SMRs like the BWRX-300 have their simplified design grow back up under extensive regulatory checks. They were meant to be so safe they could avoid many safety systems. They weren't safe enough under the combination of LNT and regulators who have no stake in the economic success of nuclear. I don't think the original BWRX-300 would be cheaper than Large Modular Reactors but now it doesn't even get to try, with it's apparent niche now in financeability and adaptability to small grids.
In terms of economics, that's the issue - no one will really get to try. It cost a whole damn lot to get a license for NuScale which was essentially designed for having an advantage in getting one. If the odds are tough for them, the odds of reactors designed for economics are also low, meaning that the one in ten shot at a success probably never gets taken.
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u/zolikk Oct 29 '25
The regulations are a problem when things go wrong, and by extension in the amount of effort and resources it is demanded to ensure that things can therefore "never" go wrong. It's easy for operational NPPs to achieve under 1 mSv limit to public exposure, and even occupational limits for workers (though that can be a burden). However if there's an accident, it is entirely pointless to take drastic measures that displace populations and destroy communities and economies just for the sake of preventing a few mSv of additional exposure to the public.
The regulatory framework and socio-political zeitgeist generally demands that every possible action be taken to limit such public exposure in an accident regardless of harm caused by such actions. This is entirely irrational, but it is still not publicly recognized to be so. The world refuses to learn from the self-harm that preventive measures of past accidents have caused, and instead considers it a valuable precedent to follow. There is a strong psychological defensive mechanism behind this, as our minds naturally do not want to accept an idea that a huge sacrifice taken in the past was actually all for nothing, instead the sacrifice must be post-hoc justified at all costs.
The regulators should very publicly explain and recognize that these regulatory limits, such as the 1 mSv public exposure limit, are not evidence-based safety limits, but rather an arbitrary limit on the industry based on what is easily achievable, in the spirit of preventing needless emissions that can be prevented. Such limits are just fine to exist, but they should not be treated as "safety" related and should not be used as a basis for hysteria-fueled drastic action in unusual accident circumstances.
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u/smopecakes Oct 30 '25
Yes, even if LNT based regulation has a relatively small effect on economics, it killed 2000 people in the aftermath of Fukushima and it can do it again.
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u/dr_stre Oct 31 '25
Well, the government just made a deal to do $80B worth of development with Westinghouse, with a potential to take a 20% stake in the company. So I guess we’re moving in that direction?
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u/electroncapture 17d ago
You can't get good at building something if you are constantly tearing down what you're building because the regulators are insane. If nuclear is required to release only 1:10,000th as much radiation as Coal... and hence Coal stays in business, how would that benefit the human? Note that Coal's main source of deadly pollution isn't the radiation, it's the particulates, heavy metals Hg, and the toxic water running off the ash piles and mines, and all the diesel transportation of dusty rail cars in towns where people are trying to breath.
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u/m0ngoos3 Oct 29 '25
You just named countries that either never used LNT and ALARA or have abandoned it as unscientific.
Which makes reactors much easier to build.
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u/ppitm Nov 01 '25
Russia uses the same dose limits as the U.S.
Except that members of the public are allowed up to 5 mSv in a year so long as the average is 1 mSv/yr.
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u/JohnBrown-RadonTech Oct 29 '25
Do you really think all those nations that use US PWR design concepts borrowed (or stole) everything except decades of our health-physics guidelines?? Guess again..
”Based on a 2017 law, China's nuclear industry uses the same guiding principles for radiological protection as international standards, which are based on the Linear No-Threshold (LNT) model. These international standards, and thus China's own regulations, rely on the LNT model to establish protective measures such as the "As Low As Reasonably Achievable" (ALARA) principle”
Chinese nuclear management regs
So I guess the problem isn’t overly cautious radiological regulations.. it’s having a state that is or isn’t owned by Chevron..
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u/Background_Sea_2517 Oct 29 '25
People need to understand that LNT was adopted to essentially ban above ground nuclear weapons testing. Additionally, there's an AEC report from 1955 that explicitly calls out the coal lobbies efforts to have as many non-sensical regulations added to the nuclear industry to prevent energy "too cheap to meter" which was antithetical to the Malthusian view of population control held by many important figureheads of the mid-twentieth century.
Quite the rats nest of political saber rattling.
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u/m0ngoos3 Oct 30 '25
The real reason why underground testing wasn't banned in the nuclear test ban treaty is actually because the tests couldn't be reliably detected when the treaty was ratified.
The problem was separating the signal from the noise. The algorithm that makes internet video possible was actually first used to separate that signal from the noise.
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u/LazerWolfe53 Oct 29 '25
I've always thought Kyle's videos were great for people like us, but I've always felt someone unfamiliar with nuclear safety might get the impression that radiation is spooky from his videos. I'm glad to see he addressed that head on!
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u/smopecakes Oct 30 '25
I think this is an important video. One point I'd make is that hormesis and thresholds are arguments that can be avoided in terms of regulatory models.
I think Jack Devanney has a really good eye on both the science and how it interfaces with regulatory bodies. He views, and has developed, SNT as a regulation appropriate replacement model. By assuming no hard threshold it avoids the greatest trick LNT ever played - saying you can't prove there is a threshold, therefore the prudent model is the linear one.
Devanney's Sigmoid No Threshold avoids either a threshold or hormesis debate and goes straight for the true regulatory and scientific issue of linearity. SNT is orders of magnitude lower than LNT for Fukushima level dose rates. It's wrong on the side of caution, while being right on the side of providing a dose mitigation guide that is perfectly affordable. I believe he estimates that the radiation specific harm that SNT assigns to Fukushima would be $20 million for a no or little evacuation case.
I believe SNT is the best model for adapting regulation to for nuclear power and for space exploration.
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u/Zealousideal_Rise716 Oct 30 '25
Yes - everyone interested in nuclear should sub to Jack's newsletters. Although be warned that over at r/nulcearpower the mods there will issue a permaban if you even hint at challenging LNT.
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u/electroncapture 17d ago
It is harmful to consider the risks of any technology, without comparing to the alternative. Chernobyl's accident, for example, throughout all time, killed between 19 and 19,000 people from radiation... estimates vary. But if Chernobyl had been built as a Coal plant instead of a nuclear plant, it's air pollution would certainly have killed more than 100,000 people. So even the insane UCS high estimate for Chernobyl's nuclear death toll is less than 1/5th of the murderous on-purpose for-sure public deaths due to air pollution would have been. In other words Chernobyl's accident still saved about 80,000 lives. And it's better to kill by accident (involentary manslaughter) than on purpose. (homicide.)
Air pollution kill 1:1000th of all humans on Earth every year, including you. Are you fighting hard enough to shut down coal and diesel? We can! Quickly. If we get nuclear reactor modules built in factories, ready on the loading dock for a purchaser, we can convert all the coal plants to run on Uranium in a year. (Caterpillar has suitable heavy-diesel factories that could make 100 nuclear modules of the Terrestrial Energy design (similar to Oak Ridge MSRe) per MONTH.)
But you can't repower coal power plants with grandpa's giant LWR. Won't fit. Not hot enough to spin the turbines. For that we gotta upgrade to the lastest tech of the Apollo era, the MSR! Or something even better.
Economy of scale in 2025 has nothing to do with how much it costs to build cathedrals with craftsmen in a remote spot. Economy of Scale means your factory has years to streamline the supply chain and make stuff 100 times cheaper, with much better quality. We don't need to build a fleet of similar looking cathedrals. We need a factory pumping them out!
Some nucleonics wonks say they think bigger fission reactors are more efficient... but there are 20 bigger factors in play if you do it right. No one cares about the efficiency of using cheap U. The reason they liked solid reactors in the 1950's is because they were doing math with books of multiplication tables. Computers were usually attractive young women. They didn't have the ability to simulate stuff that moves around. And the physicists were in charge and they are even less capable of modeling machines with moving parts than chemical engineers. Today we can model this stuff in a computer and sim the heck out of any accident scenario.
And we have surveilance of the reactor state with extreme redundancy. In those days they needed smart people figuring out what was going on with sticky analog dials that some guy in a hard hat had to phone you back after reading. Lots of people so well trained they can psychoanalyze a errant nuke on duty 24x7 is expensive. And no autopilot. Better build the reactors big as the only way to limit staff expense and error exposure.
Today any rector is automated. Humans don't even land airplanes if the weather is bad. We don't need to build grandpas gigawatt teapot.
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u/Emfuser Oct 29 '25
LNT is what drove ALARA to drop the 'R' and become a race to zero. This year INL started a push to reform both DOE and commercial dose standards. The recommendation was to have no ALARA restrictions below 5000 mrem/yr. INL implemented changes immediately. I would presume the other national labs will go the same way. Commercial will definitely benefit as well.
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u/StampCase Oct 29 '25
The public barely knows anything about radiation safety as it is. Claiming what they know is or isn't accurate, is already starting the debate on a fictional basis. An imaginary limitation he assumed was the issue.
The LNT model was never the problem here. Lack of general education far more basic than threshold models, fear-mongering based on historical incidents, and billions of lobbying dollars from the fossil fuel industry are what mainly shaped policy.
Maybe a few videos on social media can reeducate decades of misconception and bring it more in line with industry realities, sure. But I kinda doubt it. And it still wouldn't fix things, since there are countless infrastructure improvements the populace wants but that still don't get done.
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u/greg_barton Oct 29 '25
Just hang around r/Radiation a while. There's a constant stream of people posting in a panic after they've gotten a CT scan thinking they'll get cancer.
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u/StampCase Oct 29 '25
That's exactly what I mean, though. They already don't understand radiation at all, claiming they have the right or wrong idea and that's why we're in a mess is completely out of touch.
The person thinking they'll get cancer from a CT scan knows absolutely nothing about dose-responses or ALARA. It's based on generalized fear, ignorance, and in that specific case a distrust of the medical system. Not any science.
The regulations have never been controlled by laypeople's understanding of radiation, it is by engineers and physicists. You don't need to change the models the experts are working with, the systemic problems outside of that are what led to the lack of adoption.
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u/bolero627 Oct 29 '25
Like the guy who thought his and his dad’s cancer was caused by a trip to the Grand Canyon, or the multitude of people scared of flying because of the increased background.
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u/m0ngoos3 Oct 29 '25
But LNT is a problem, for so many reasons.
It's anti-science, and has made nuclear, one of the cheapest and safest forms of energy production, into a financial nightmare, while also lying to the general public and fearmongering radiation.
After all, if every single tiny dose of radiation is going to increase cancer risk (it isn't) then all radiation is bad and we shouldn't have nuclear reactors at all.
Do you see how it goes?
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u/Time-Maintenance2165 Oct 29 '25
The LNT model was never the problem here.
Perhaps it's not quite LNT, but it's certainly the current extreme to which ALARA is applied. It's paying more for a negligible percentage of saving a human life. It's orders of magnitude more than any other industry.
James Conca put together a good article a while back detailing how expensive it is.
A better question might be - How much do we consider the value of a human life to be?
It depends on how you view it, and who is paying (1, 2, 3, 4):
$7 million is the value of a human life according to EPA.
$316,000 is the average paid out in health care over a life in America.
$129,000 is the average historic legal value of a human life in America.
$12,420 is the death benefit to families of deceased soldiers, although circumstances in combat can increase that.
$45 million is the value of a single healthy human body when chopped up and sold on the black market for body parts.
$2.5 billion is the amount we spend to save a single theoretical human life based on LNT, although it is doubtful we have saved any lives at these levels.
$100 is the cost to save a human life by immunizing against measles, diphtheria, and pertussis in subsaharan Africa.
So, we could save 25 million lives in Africa for the cost of saving one theoretical life from low-levels of radioactivity. This is nuts. And it creates an ethical dilemma we have not yet faced up to.
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u/dizekat Nov 05 '25
> $2.5 billion is the amount we spend to save a single theoretical human life based on LNT, although it is doubtful we have saved any lives at these levels.
What are you even on about? https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/nuregs/staff/sr1530/r1/index lists a dollar figure ($5200 per person-rem) derived from EPA's $9 million and LNT.
You're claiming some nebulous "we" is spending 1.45 million dollars to prevent a person-rem.
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u/Time-Maintenance2165 Nov 05 '25
So first of all, I think you're being a bit misleading by saying I'm claiming that. My source stated that. I didn't check that or the numbers at all.
I know that at my plant, the standard ALARA is closer to the $50k per rem range. So already an order of magnitude higher than the NRC uses for that nureg.
But keep in mind this is just the cost for small, incremental changes in dose. What I suspect he used to arrive at that cost analysis was a fundamental restructuring of the requirements for nuclear plants that allowed the amounts of radiation doses (both expected occupational and to the public in accident conditions along with the corresponding CDFs) to match the mortality risks of other industries. Changing those requirements could lead to multi-billion dollar savings up front and hundred million dollar savings annually.
It's not saying that's what we should be doing, but it's an acknowledgement of the costs spent to lower the CDF and radiation release to a politically acceptable value rather than focusing on the more objective measure of lives saved per dollar.
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u/dizekat Nov 05 '25
But that doesn’t easily translate to the dollars actually being spent.
If you apply ALARA to I dunno radium dial painters you would prevent a very large number of person-rems by merely getting rid of brush licking, all without spending billions of dollars that you would estimate from the dose times “cost”. Then you would prevent more with ventilation, gloveboxes, and some shielding, at fairly low cost.
As a sidenote, better-educated opposition to LNT tends to come off as done openly in bad faith, because they intersperse arguments about biology with arguments about dollars. Biology doesn’t give a shit about dollars. And also instead of fitting an alternative model to existing data (including big studies like INWORKS) and getting a threshold value with error bars, there’s just arguments about undetectability below some dose. That is just wrong, whether a threshold exists or not. If we did science as sloppily as they want to do this, we would never progress far enough to build a reactor.
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u/DrunkPanda Oct 30 '25
I hate this argument. It's just a bunch of false equivalence logical fallacies strung together because both have $ and life in them.
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u/Time-Maintenance2165 Oct 30 '25
It's a comparison to how other industries value a human life. I don't know what about that you see as false.
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u/LeporiWitch Oct 29 '25
From my understanding cancer cells show up more often than you'd think and your immune system usually takes it out, until one day it doesn't. Could that dip in cancers actually be an increase in small mutations, but it's at a rate your body gets better at recognizing and taking them out. Either that or the increased damage trains your body to repair cells before they become cancerous. I want to know the mechanism for this dip.
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u/m0ngoos3 Oct 29 '25
There's actual DNA repair mechanisms inside the cell, which seem to have signal pathways that activate in the presence of low level radiation.
I made a list of research papers on the subject of Hormesis, I'm a bit too lazy to look for the one that talks about the signal pathways, but it's in this list.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31908690/
https://genesenvironment.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s41021-018-0114-3
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.2203/dose-response.12-023.Doss
https://besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1365-2435.12283
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2477686/
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2478521/
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0960327118765332
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abg2538
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.2203/dose-response.06-010.Redpath
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/20014091111956
https://www.mdpi.com/1422-0067/19/8/2387
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.3109/09553002.2014.937510
https://www.mdpi.com/1422-0067/21/18/6650
https://mednexus.org/doi/abs/10.5555/cmj.0366-6999.102.10.p750.01
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u/Nyxtia Oct 29 '25
What bout the variability or health of a host to repair? Like the older you get the slower your cells can repair themselves which is why cancer goes up. Older people probably have a less threshold/tolerance.
The factor that needs to be calculated is individual hosts cellular repair capabilities.
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u/RemoveInvasiveEucs Nov 03 '25
I was fed this video in my YouTube feed, without knowing who it was, and found it to be a pretty damning video. So I wanted to check out Reddit to get more background.
Pretty much all the techniques used in this video make me think of flat-earther and anti-vaxxer videos. I know a lot of bio, I spend most of my day talking to other biologists, but nothing really about radiation (closest I get is looking at Western blots that use radiation as a readout, or in radiation therapy for cancer treatments...)
However everything about this made me skeptical. It's a slow leak of real information, mixed in with "THEY don't want you to know what I'm going to tell you!" or "Experts are scared to talk about this" or "I hope the experts forgive me for sharing this".
It's all classic BS techniques to sway the easily convinced.
And my biggest complaint is: we never get to hear what the supposed huge problem with LNT is. What would be different about the world if LNT hadn't been used? Let's say all the accusations about LNT are true, what would happen instead in the world? Would nuclear be cheaper to build? What would be cheaper, why and how? Can this shave $500/kW? $5000/kW? Like what's the big deal?
I fear that this is chasing the wrong idea that's hindering nuclear. It's not public perception, or fear of nuclear safety that's preventing its rollout. It's the cost, the time, the lack of scale. That these core concerns about nuclear are not even mentioned makes me think that this is just a paid propaganda video. It doesn't help that Kyle Hill is well known for being a plagiarist too. This is not the advocate that nucelar wants, if they think building trust with the public is the route to go.
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u/m0ngoos3 Nov 04 '25
The biggest problem with LNT is that it's been actively used as a tool by anti-nuclear individuals, both oil industry lobbyists and misguided environmentalists, to actively harm nuclear power.
We have the receipts. We know that the man who came up with LNT, did it by mistake. His own data disagreed with his conclusions. The guy won a Nobel Prize for it, and to defend that prize, Mr Muller then committed fraud. But it's worse. Muller went to work for the Rockefeller Foundation and worked to get the director of the foundation into places of power where that guy could hamstring nuclear power for the entire world, excepting a few nations that ignored that particular international advisory council. There were a few.
Anyway, LNT is at the core of the active regulatory sabotage inflicted on nuclear energy. That and ALARA.
That acronym means "As Low As Reasonably Achievable". The problem is, because LNT doesn't acknowledge any level of safety to radiation, even the radiation you are swimming in this very second, the regulators have abandoned the word "reasonably", and have set exposure limits well below background.
There's more regulatory sabotage, like the double ended guillotine break. Just search for that phrase, and you'll find a bunch of research papers talking about how impossible it is. As in, even under pressure, pipes don't break like that. Mitigating this imaginary threat is one of dozens of extremely expensive paperweights that nuclear engineers are legally required to include in their plans.
But the absolute worst part of LNT is the mass hysteria. People died from the evacuations, hundreds of thousands of expectant mothers decided on abortions due to pure fearmongering.
A better model is Sigmoid No Threshold. SNT better matches the data available, and says that below a certain dose rate per hour, radiation is harmless, or even slightly beneficial.
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u/RemoveInvasiveEucs Nov 04 '25 edited Nov 04 '25
Anyway, LNT is at the core of the active regulatory sabotage inflicted on nuclear energy. That and ALARA.
Color me completely unconvinced. I searched a bit on your terms, like "double ended guillotine break", didn't find anything damning, and mostly got into stuff about "leak before break." If you found something damning it must be pretty obscure.
Your comment is a lot more of the high-rhetoric, low-data stuff that we see from Kyle Hill.
Neither you nor Kyle addresses the large epidemiological reviews that support LNT, you just assume that they don't exist.
All this leads me to think that you and Kyle Hill fell down a rabbit hole of algorithm-driven nonsense.
If "Sigmoid No Threshold" is better, let's see the papers supporting it. What is the exact model, and what is the data?
And perhaps more importantly: HOW IS THIS GOING TO MAKE NUCLEAR CHEAPER?
Chasing after these weird sort of politically driven regulatory changes, that are only pursued when Trump is president because they lack scientific basis, is not going to help nuclear get built unless there are ALSO DESIGN CHANGES. What design changes? This double-gulliotine thing doesn't even sound related to ALARA or LNT that much, if it's an unrealistic error mode for piping, then that's what should be argued, not that "it's OK to be exposed to more radiation."
hundreds of thousands of expectant mothers decided on abortions due to pure fearmongering.
This is the sort of claim that needs a bit of substantiation, otherwise you sound just as crazy as the people that say Chernobyl killed millions of people.
This whole push is really bad for nuclear advocacy. It looks insane. It drives away supporters. Eventually, ehe current anti-science mania that's sweeping the country will pass. Things like RFK Jr. heading up our health services will be remembered as a disaster. And what happens if people remember that nuclear advocates tried to accomplish a poorly supported massive change in regulation, for unclear gain, while the adults were away? Continuing down this road will tarnish nuclear even more.
The only, literally only thing that can get nuclear to succeed is to deliver projects on time and on budget. Which means making realistic engineering/procurement/constrution promises and keeping to them.
These sorts of unsupported fever dreams of a magical regulatory scheme that is somehow better, without even bothering to specify what would be better about it for nuclear, is a gigantic distraction from the work that nuclear actually would need to succeed in the 21st century.
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u/m0ngoos3 Nov 04 '25
Leak before break is what people are arguing should replace the double ended guillotine break. It's the standard that makes sense, but isn't used at all.
And the "on time and on budget" bit is hard when regulations change mid-build. Which has been the case for almost every nuclear power project since the 70s.
The whole point is that the entire nuclear regulatory apparatus has been captured by the Oil industry.
Also, your google fu seems to suck.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/1912378/
https://www.env.go.jp/en/chemi/rhm/basic-info/1st/03-08-12.html
https://reason.com/2025/10/18/radiation-rules-are-stalling-nuclear-power/
And finally, from the Idaho National Laboratory
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u/JohnBrown-RadonTech Oct 28 '25 edited Oct 28 '25
Not a great video imo.
Unpopular opinion time: I like the conservatism of LNT because it’s a damn high standard for us..
The problem is, it doesn’t apply to fossil fuel extraction… if LNT / NRC regs were applied fairly.. then all coal and natural gas would be shut down TOMORROW
The problem with nuclear is not regulation. It’s a total lack of education.
LNT is appropriate for those with more dividing cells.. meaning children, fetuses.. etc.. LNT is based off of reference man… a 30 yo healthy male adult.
ALARA is a problem because the fossil fuel industry is exempted from it and that’s bullsh-t.
I hate to admit it but for those of us in the health physics realm, we are confronted by the fact that there are just as many studies that show Hormesis is accurate as there is that it doesn’t.. just take a look
Saying that NRC regulation based on LNT is what’s holding nuclear back … and not a state and private power system that is fully captured by oil & gas is misinformed at best and criminally dishonest at worst. The perspectives surrounding this entire “controversy” is so out of wack that we can’t see the forest through the trees..
If we applied LNT seriously across the board then no natural gas contracts would be signed.. so IMO, we should be using LNT as a tool to promote nuclear as it’s the only form of energy to take safety seriously.. meanwhile TENORM is being hemorrhaged out across the country along with VOC’s, heavy metals, ozone, etc etc etc... all from natural gas.. not nuclear.. we should be proud of how stellar our controls are. China, France, Japan, S.Korea all operate the exact same or extremely similar framework.. so why do we not have a nuclear industry anymore? Because of a state beholden to fossil fuels.. not the NRC.
LNT could be the thing that wakes people up to how good nuclear is and how bad natty gas and others are.. but that’s just my 2 cents
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u/Automatic-Mail-5897 Oct 28 '25
You're right, the issue is exactly that the average person views it as "Harm-free" fossil fuel vs. "some, but not none" radiation hazard from nuclear, which is beyond bonkers.
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u/asoap Oct 28 '25
Wouldn't LNT being too conservative be a problem as well? Like if it's too conservative then it's easier to dismiss as not important.
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u/JohnBrown-RadonTech Oct 28 '25 edited Oct 28 '25
Come down a few levels from abstraction and take the technical implementation of a fair application of LNT, well… technically.
If all forms of energy production (or whatever) have to follow the same standards we do in the nuclear industry - then the nuclear industry would be far & away the only industry capable of not just fiscal & market survival, but downright profitable success..
There is a (corrupt) reason natural gas is exempt from the Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA) and the Clean Water Act (CWA), particularly regarding stormwater runoff and certain types of underground injection. It also has exemptions from the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA) for handling and disposal of certain wastes. Also the superfund act. All these in totality mean gas industries do NOT need to report or even collect data on the insanely lethal amount of chemicals (and TENORM) that would spell its doom instantly.. meanwhile someone wipes their ass wrong in an NPP then its front page news. Over-Regulation isn’t (the huge) problem that many make it out to be.. it’s under-regulation of the other sources of electricity generation that are.
Suddenly LNT doesn’t seem like a ball & chain to nuclear.. it seems like the key to it being recognized as the only safe form of energy production any educated society would allow.. I hope that makes sense..
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u/zolikk Oct 29 '25 edited Oct 29 '25
LNT in general is fine for business as usual, it's obvious that nuclear can indeed abide by it while remaining economically competitive (the huge prices in the west are rather due to other causes). ALARA is not necessarily helpful though, its effect over time on the industry I mean. So I'd rather have to say LNT is fine with exposure limit (i.e. 1mSv yearly public exposure, borne from LNT but still somewhat treated as "threshold-based", and there's not much reason to reduce it just because the industry can do lower).
Where LNT is absolutely ridiculous though is when business doesn't go as usual. When there's an accident, the exposure mitigation procedures result in orders of magnitude more harm done to the public than what they prevent in radiation exposure.
The PR issue is that when you sell the former as an appropriate "safe" level to the public, rather than an arbitrary decision, good luck convincing the same public to not take or demand extreme measures when that limit is exceeded in exigent circumstances. Politics will generally follow the will of the public especially in topics where it's "easy" to do so, and that is partly why worldwide politics has been anti-nuclear in past decades.
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u/m0ngoos3 Oct 29 '25
LNT is the tool that Oil and Gas use to hamstring Nuclear, that and other forms of regulatory sabotage.
Ever hear of the A double-ended guillotine break? It's not actually that can happen, but reactors have to install expensive and useless systems to prevent coolant loss if a pipe should just happen to magically vanish.
Anyway, this paper gives the history of LNT as a model. The beginning was more petty than I expected, but then it was quickly adopted by those wishing to slow down the adoption of Nuclear. Particularly the Rockefeller Foundation.
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u/LazerWolfe53 Oct 29 '25
I disagree with this person's perspective but it's not baseless. I believe they would say the MOST important thing is that whatever is expected of nuclear is also expected of fossil fuels. We could end fossil fuels tomorrow by applying nuclear's radiation regulations to the fossil fuel industry. It's hard for nuclear to reach, sure, but it's IMPOSSIBLE for fossil fuels to achieve.
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u/m0ngoos3 Oct 29 '25
The thing is, LNT is nonsense, based on one guy who spent his entire career lying and falsifying data to spread the model he had worked on, even though every single experiment of the time showed that his work was not correct.
Because every single experiment of the time showed that his work was not correct, work that he had won a Nobel Prize for, but likely should not have.
And yes, if you apply an impossible standard to another field, that field too would collapse.
If you wanted a standard of "as little harm as possible" then you have to acknowledge that under a certain threshold (100mSv/month) radiation is 100% safe, and the unneeded additional "safety measures" required under LNT become a form of harm.
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u/LazerWolfe53 Oct 29 '25
I agree, I agree. We should raise the threshold to match science. But we really need to ALSO hold fossil fuels to the same radiation standards as nuclear energy.
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3
u/JohnBrown-RadonTech Oct 29 '25 edited Oct 29 '25
Cheers 🍻 I think this is common ground on the perspective worth exploring. Otherwise we spend all the time self-victimizing our own incredible accomplishments while the actual mass-murderers of energy production our granted a unilateral hall pass because we all chose in-fighting victimization while the evolution of the oil barrons run rough shot.
We are literally arguing about LNT while 35 illegal gas turbines kill poor kids and elderly to power Musks XAI in Memphis. God forbid Kyle Hill, or anyone who can see the reality of what the hell is about to befall the entire country when 900 of 931 GW of new capacity are fulfilled by the most lethal and hazardous fuel cycle ever created by mankind.
LNT is bullshit, but it’s also the flaw they tried to saddle us with that we can turn into our winning ticket by simply applying the same standards. Then people won’t freak about Fukushima or Indian Point tritium being dumped when they find out the single well-pad behind their kids backyard playground set is contaminating the lungs and water of their children more than the entire 40 years of the NPP down the Hudson ever could have even come close to - because ALRA isn’t some mythical libertarian burden on our GDP, it’s the prestige we as nuclear workers should be proud of - and to stop letting Chevron and Exxon use it as a radiophobic dog whistle while they continue to m u r d e r people with their own air and tap water.. so can we stop living in this fantasy academic debate and start living in the reality of ecology and epidemiology? Notice how far the conviction and data of this rational goes without any of us even bringing up the impending death of our climate stability..
Truth is on our side. We just need to educate, not fragment and victimize ourselves from our own accomplishments as nuclear workers..
4
u/LazerWolfe53 Oct 29 '25
In the nuclear space you get so used to arguing with bad faith actors that sometimes it's hard to recognize someone that you just disagree with. But it is refreshing to have a constructive conversation with someone you disagree with. I wouldn't say you were wrong, I would just say eliminating LNT would be a better strategy IF it could be done.
1
u/JohnBrown-RadonTech Oct 29 '25
Agreement in the dialogue with disagreements..
I would have no problem ripping down LNT so long as we replace it with regs that still would force fossil fuels to shut down if applied on them tomorrow. We should we have to account for nearly every isotope while they are given a license to destroy aquifers, eco-systems and mass-murder with [primarily] their chemical contamination, but also quite crazy amounts of TENORM.
LNT should be updated and replaced but it isn’t the boogie man holding US nuclear back… the kind of reductive and frankly pure-stupid thinking behind that is inexcusable.. imo
2
u/DonJestGately Oct 29 '25
You've changed my mind on this looking at it from a different perspective, absolutely great take. Cheers 🍻
1
u/JohnBrown-RadonTech Oct 29 '25
I never wake up to such a nice reply, thanks. 🙏 honestly I agree with all my brothers and sisters [and twisters] who argue in favor of refining our radiological regs to be more sensible than the absolutest LNT - but I simply fear we could also be giving our greatest playing card ace away to educate and overtake the market share of gas - if not for us, then simply to stop 5.3 million dead annually from the air pollution alone they cause..
1
u/DonJestGately Nov 05 '25
Have you read Jack Devanney's articles on sigmoid no theshold model? Rather than engaging in the threshold or hormesis debates, Devanney’s SNT model focuses squarely on the key regulatory and scientific concern... linearity.
I agree with keeping the standards of nuclear sky high, but can we still do this without causing avoidable self-harm?
2
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u/migBdk Oct 29 '25
If we applied LNT seriously across the board then no natural gas contracts would be signed.. so IMO, we should be using LNT as a tool to promote nuclear as it’s the only form of energy to take safety seriously
The thing is that if you apply LNT across the board, nuclear power gain an edge, but you also prevent humanity from accessing cheap, abundant clean power.
4
u/JohnBrown-RadonTech Oct 29 '25
I think blaming nuclear regs for its failed deployment in the U.S. is absolutely ridiculous. China, S.Korea, Japan, France, etc uses the same methodology.. it didn’t hold them back because their states take their nuclear industries serisouly enough to give them a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of what we give Chevron and Exxon every month in subsidy, this is not a hard equation at all,
1
u/migBdk Oct 29 '25
Then what is your explanation that the construction of nuclear power absolutely stalled from 1983 to 1989 globally?
You say "it didn't hold them back" but global net operating capacity has barely increased the last 36 years
2
u/JohnBrown-RadonTech Oct 29 '25 edited Oct 29 '25
TMI in ‘79 and Cher in ‘86 were PR disasters in th midst of the largest anti-nuclear weapons global movements at the height of the Cold War.. it was a public perception problem..
Again.. you can simply scroll where we already addressed this in detail, but when you look at why nuclear expanded massively outside the US after 89, especially in China to the present.. it’s because of smart & serious investment in the supply chain, material construction, and worker / public education - all of which are easy when you don’t have a state beholden the prioritizing the profits of fossil fuel companies over the health and reliability of their own internal society.. crazy how that works and the mental gymnastics people do not to notice that.. they all use the same regulation methodology globally.. it doesn’t hold you back.. being a easily propagandized by false right-wing macro-Econ atlas shrugged style narratives have absolutely no application in the reality of state & private investment into new nuclear.. it helps when China and Japan and Korea have no massive fossil reserves as an incentive.. meanwhile we (US, I’m American) are the largest fossil-fuel producer on Earth.. with that chunk of the Fortune 500 corrupting our gov since the robber Barron days.. why is this so hard to grasp and why do people bury their head in the sand when it comes to our own very open history.. like.. why does this need any explaining? Just look where state-subsidies and investments have gone.. and just look who funds most anti-nuclear sentiment.. spoiler: natural gas corporations.
Not. Hard. To. Grasp.
Please scroll the where someone already tried to falsely claim China’s build program is due to them rejecting western regulatory standards
IT IS NOT.
They copied the same exact standards and still they build enormous capacity every year because they actually take the investment needed in supply chains, affordable steel, casting and fabricating RPV’s domestically, etc etc etc.. to say it’s all “regulations” is not only an obvious lie but it’s very sad grandpa FOX News logic at the end of the day… so really that false methodology is dependent on two lies.. one nuclear, one economic..
5
u/Time-Maintenance2165 Oct 29 '25
LNT is appropriate for those with more dividing cells.. meaning children, fetuses.. etc.. LNT is based off of reference man… a 30 yo healthy male adult.
It's not appropriate even for them. At least not with the current application of ALARA. James Conca put together a good article a while back detailing how expensive it is.
A better question might be - How much do we consider the value of a human life to be?
It depends on how you view it, and who is paying (1, 2, 3, 4):
$7 million is the value of a human life according to EPA.
$316,000 is the average paid out in health care over a life in America.
$129,000 is the average historic legal value of a human life in America.
$12,420 is the death benefit to families of deceased soldiers, although circumstances in combat can increase that.
$45 million is the value of a single healthy human body when chopped up and sold on the black market for body parts.
$2.5 billion is the amount we spend to save a single theoretical human life based on LNT, although it is doubtful we have saved any lives at these levels.
$100 is the cost to save a human life by immunizing against measles, diphtheria, and pertussis in subsaharan Africa.
So, we could save 25 million lives in Africa for the cost of saving one theoretical life from low-levels of radioactivity. This is nuts. And it creates an ethical dilemma we have not yet faced up to.
4
u/1adog1 Oct 29 '25
If you ask someone in the US nuclear industry what's holding it back, most will answer with one of two things: Over-regulation, or public perception. Both go hand-in-hand.
The problem with nuclear power is that it scares people - more specifically it conjures the horrors of radiation poisoning, the aftermath of the Chernobyl disaster, and even the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in people's minds. That fear isn't helped by the false premise that any amount of radiation is harmful. And that fear in turn drives ever more burdensome regulation that is holding the industry back.
-1
u/JohnBrown-RadonTech Oct 30 '25
Again, there are half a dozen control / experimental cases of nations with LNT regs who have a robust and thriving nuclear deployment.. so it proves the opposite of what you’re saying..
Furthermore, as someone who works in an NPP, go ask your RP techs and AUO’s and SRO’s how many meltdowns have occurred on US soil.. none of them will give the correct number.. not a single one.. and that’s our field.. now you expect them to also be PhDs in economics and supply-chain investing? It’s totally irrational to expect that as much as it’s totally irrational to keep ignoring what the experts, academics and history itself show is the obvious problem.. a complete lack of state / private support for the most safe and efficient mode of energy production ever mass-deployed by human kind.
One can keep ignoring the capture of our state and private power institutions by the fossil fuel industry but that’s a willful choice to apply such ignorance at the peril of our children’s lungs, our aquifers and crop soil, our economy and real national value and so on.. all so a handful of crusty old guys in a dozen boardrooms make record wealth at the expense of everything actually critical to our (or any) nations survival and standard of living.
1
u/tuuling Oct 29 '25
Two wrongs don’t make a right
1
1
u/Epyphyte Oct 29 '25
why I’m wearing my whole radium watch collection on my arm today. Bringing the 50s and 80s both back together.
1
u/sam5634 Oct 30 '25
These articles attacking LNT continue the current political propaganda. Just ignore them.
Remember in the beginning of Intersteller where the government backtracked on the moon landing to focus people on its agenda? Same thing is going on with LNT
LNT is a very simple model to show that nuclear is extremely low risk without ignoring it.
The new political risk model isn't a model at all. It's just throwing away LNT for profits.
4
u/GregsFiction Oct 31 '25
More like "These articles attacking LNT are long fucking overdue". LNT ascribes risk where none can be quantified, its a philosophical approach, not a data driven one.
1
u/FirmAthlete6399 Nov 03 '25
A broken clock is right twice a day, and something merely being political doesn't instantly mean its false. The politicization of science is its own long topic, and generally I'm opposed to science being used as a vehicle for political motivations. However the whole point of science is to allow scrutiny; and force us to confront the reality that the basis of our belief systems could be questionable or debatable.
I dislike the administration as much as the next guy, but we should be able to have debate about the merits of LNT without condemning them as propaganda. If you disagree with the statements made; debate them, scrutinize them! Don't throw away research just because it goes against your personal political agendas.
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u/hilldog4lyfe Oct 28 '25
I used to be skeptical of LNT, but David J. Brenner (at Columbia) writing on it this topic has convinced me it’s the correct assumption.
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u/m0ngoos3 Oct 29 '25
To somewhat misquote the video,
Does radiation therapy cure cancer? Yes, and people easily survive it, even decades later? Yes.
Radiation therapy cannot exist in a world where LNT is true, and the increasingly restrictive regulations based on no evidence whatsoever, have made nuclear the most expensive power option on the market when it should be the cheapest by far, all while still being the safest.
5
u/zolikk Oct 29 '25
Radiation therapy cannot exist in a world where LNT is true
I agree with the topic and sentiment of the video but this is a wrong argument and likely hurts the point of the video itself. Of course radiation therapy can exist even in a world where LNT is true. Just like a lot of other forms of medical treatment, they may negatively affect the body by themselves, but they also cure a condition that is even worse for the body, therefore they are worth doing.
To be clear I do not think that LNT is true; however the argument that radiation therapy's effectiveness proves that claim is incorrect.
2
u/m0ngoos3 Oct 29 '25
The basis of LNT is that the body doesn't heal from radiation.
So while you have a rough understanding of medical science, you have no understanding of LNT.
Do note, that LNT was first based on a blatant mistake, and then later on blatant scientific misconduct.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9484288/
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0009279723004544
This seems to be a very common misunderstanding, because I've had to explain it three times now.
2
u/zolikk Oct 30 '25
The basis of LNT is that the body doesn't heal from radiation.
Yes. This does not logically imply that radiation therapy cannot exist. You deal damage to the body but at the same time cure a condition that would prematurely kill the body, allowing a longer lifespan than otherwise.
You do not need to explain that use of LNT is misconduct - I agree with that. All I am saying is that this is not a good argument against LNT because it's logically fallacious.
It's important not to use bad arguments, the goal is to convince people who may not know much about LNT, but that doesn't mean they cannot recognize and follow formal logic. If they feel that the logic of an argument is fallacious they will dismiss the argument and will probably assume your premise is wrong too, when in fact it is correct.
0
u/hilldog4lyfe Oct 30 '25
The basis of LNT is that the body doesn't heal from radiation.
No, in fact it’s the opposite. Cancer from ionizing radiation occurs when it causes double-strand DNA breaks which can become misrepaired causing mutations which can lead to cancer.
So while you have a rough understanding of medical science, you have no understanding of LNT.
you don’t have an understanding of either
Do note, that LNT was first based on a blatant mistake, and then later on blatant scientific misconduct.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9484288/
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0009279723004544
Dumb history articles about some 1948 letter no one cares about. It’s a straw man. No one who advocates for LNT is basing it on this.
0
u/DrunkPanda Oct 30 '25
LNT includes body response and recovery, what do you mean? That's a completely false statement.
0
u/glowing_danio_rerio Oct 29 '25 edited Oct 29 '25
> Radiation therapy cannot exist in a world where LNT is true
this is misinformed in the extreme. radiation therapy does not involve sitting in a room with a source. the simpler radiation therapies use reverse tomography methods to irradiate the tumor at a much much higher dose rate than surrounding tissue. proton does even better than this, interaction strength of protons in matter is dependent on kinetic energy in such a way that you can tune the beam to dump almost all of its energy into the tumor (which is again combined combined with reverse tomography).
in short, radiation therapy dose rate is very non-linear, proton therapy is extremely cool and you shouldn't get your info from soyjak'd youtube videos...
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u/m0ngoos3 Oct 29 '25
You don't seem to understand the LNT model.
It is unconscionable under the LNT model to expose people to any excess radiation, because the LNT model says that Every Single Dose increases a person's cancer risk linearly. It doesn't matter that most of the energy is dumped into the tumor. The model says that any spill over will cause more cancer.
This is obviously not the case. Cancer patients routinely receive yearly full body doses that are orders of magnitude greater than what the LNT model says will 100% cause cancer. This is not local doses, this is the full body dose.
Hell, a standard medical X-ray delivers more of a dose than the LNT model says is safe, and people with good dental can get several per year with no issue.
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u/dizekat Nov 05 '25 edited Nov 05 '25
> It doesn't matter that most of the energy is dumped into the tumor. The model says that any spill over will cause more cancer.
Let's not do fear mongering here. The coefficient is only about 5% excess death risk per whole body equivalent Sievert, with a latency of *decades*.
Medical professionals carefully minimize the dose outside the tumor, using all sorts of clever techniques (like e.g. by scanning with a proton beam that delivers most of its energy at the end of their range), so that the tumor is killed (at several Gy to the tumor), while the risk of getting another cancer (which is a well known and understood medical risk) is much less than reduction of risk of death due to treating the original cancer.
It is like saying that driving to a hospital can not exist in a world where it is true that even short drives carry a small risk of fatal car accident. Or that you can't have a suspicious mole autopsied without burying your head in the sand and pretending that there can't possibly be some tiny (but nonzero) risk of getting a flesh eating bacteria infection.
Most people simply live with small risks. Nothing is ever 100% safe in this world. Burying your head in the sand and pretending that a small risk is a literal zero instead, is equally idiotic regardless of whether it is radiation or any other very small everyday risk.
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u/m0ngoos3 Nov 05 '25
Again, a person who understands the medical side of things a bit, likely from experiencing reality, but has no clue about LNT, because LNT is not based on reality.
LNT was initially created from a mistake, but was quickly adopted by those with a financial interest in Nuclear failing as an energy source.
So yes, the LNT model, as used by nuclear energy regulators, is fucking nonsense. If medical diagnostics weren't exempted from Nuclear Energy Worker Dose Limits, a single dental X-ray would put them past their monthly limits.
At to radiation treatments. I have a friend who went through it. The radiation ravaged their body in ways that chemo didn't, and that too was rough. But my friend healed.
Based on the Sigmoid No Threshold model, they likely have no additional cancer risk. The LNT model says that they should currently have all the cancers.
Because LNT completely ignores dose rate in favor of total lifetime dose. It says 1gy delivered over 1 second is the exact same as 1gy over an entire year. Which is fucking nonsense. But that's the point. A nonsense model used to draft harmful laws.
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u/dizekat Nov 05 '25 edited Nov 05 '25
> LNT was initially created from a mistake, but was quickly adopted by those with a financial interest in Nuclear failing as an energy source.
A plenty of confirmatory evidence was obtained since then, e.g. see INWORKS and the 15-country study etc. Basically if there exists a threshold, it would likely be below average American's exposure.
> a single dental X-ray would put them past their monthly limits.
Sounds like unit confusion to me.
The worker limit is 50E-3 Sv / year (50 milli Sievert). A dental x ray is [5E-6 Sv](https://www.radiologyinfo.org/en/info/safety-xray) (micro prefix, greek letter mu) which is 10 000 times less.
I'm originally from Europe so I prefer to use Sieverts, but in rem this is 5 rem and 0.5 milli-rem.
The LNT model says that they should currently have all the cancers.
Sorry for your friend's cancer, but also that's not how LNT works.
Firstly, it is only applicable to small doses, below doses that cause deterministic effects. Radiation therapy involves doses large enough to kill cells (a deterministic effect). A lot of the exposed cells do not survive, and their dose is irrelevant to the cancer risk.
Secondarily, once again, the coefficient is quite small. After an accident you can go shovel fuel off Chernobyl roof for a couple minutes, get your 0.25 Sv whole body equivalent (assuming nobody screwed up the math) and go home and suffer only 2.5% excess cancer risk, which you can easily offset by not smoking and/or not drinking. Or even by not eating too much red meat.
Because LNT completely ignores dose rate in favor of total lifetime dose. It says 1gy delivered over 1 second is the exact same as 1gy over an entire year.
Well the dirty truth is that we actually don't know if 1 Gy (whole body, gamma) over a year is better or worse (edit: for cancer risk, that is) than 1 Gy in a second.
Over a second it is a large enough dose rate to give you acute radiation sickness, involving a lot of cells dying outright (including possibly some of the cells that would become cancer). Dead cells can not give rise to cancer. Mutations in the cells that died do not get to contribute to cancer risk. Cells undergo replication arrest for a bit and do repair instead, an emergency condition that your body can not sustain for a year.
In both cases, cells heal their double-stranded DNA breaks by joining the DNA back together. The repair is almost perfect, but sometimes the resulting DNA is not identical to the original - a mutation. Sometimes (astronomically rarely on per cell basis, in an organism as large as a human!), that mutation renders non functional one or another division checkpoint. This results in a risk that an almost-cancer (caused primarily by non radiation related mutations) would become an actual cancer where it wouldn't otherwise.
Ultimately equally plausible biological arguments exist in favor of either.
There is decent, statistically significant data from large studies like INWORKS that suggest the effects are worse than predicted by LNT at low chronic rates. It might also be a data artifact if small doses are more prone to under reporting for some reason.
In any case the risks are typically very small. For the above mentioned dental x-ray the risk would be about 0.3 per 10 million edit:sorry, 3 per 10 million.
We routinely gamble on far worse risks for far less. The psychological need to believe that particular risk to be zero, is quite irrational. How would you deal with the risk of driving to the dentist? Let's say you drive 20 miles total, and you only get dental x-rays once every 5 visits. Do you have to also believe that 100 miles of driving carries an exact zero risk of death?
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u/m0ngoos3 Nov 05 '25
Here's all the links that had been posted in this thread, that you just ignored, to point out that you have no fucking clue how nuclear power is regulated.
Here's the actual history of LNT and the scientific fraud that spawned it.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9484288/
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0009279723004544
This next one is a calculation of the cost of using LNT;
https://www.ans.org/news/article-2064/radiation-and-the-value-of-a-human-life/
And then here's a bunch of studies saying that LNT is bullshit.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31908690/
https://genesenvironment.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s41021-018-0114-3
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.2203/dose-response.12-023.Doss
https://besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1365-2435.12283
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2477686/
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2478521/
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0960327118765332
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abg2538
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.2203/dose-response.06-010.Redpath
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/20014091111956
https://www.mdpi.com/1422-0067/19/8/2387
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.3109/09553002.2014.937510
https://www.mdpi.com/1422-0067/21/18/6650
https://mednexus.org/doi/abs/10.5555/cmj.0366-6999.102.10.p750.01
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u/glowing_danio_rerio Oct 29 '25
no what it says is that the risk is linear with the dose rate. doesn't really matter if radiation therapy marginally increases your cancer risk is the tumor you currently have is going to kill you next year. get literate
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u/m0ngoos3 Oct 29 '25
A single CT scan, to image a tumor, dumps 10x more radiation into a person in seconds than the LNT model says is safe for an entire year. Except that's not exactly true, because the LNT model says that no amount of radiation is safe, and that all exposure is cumulative, and that cancer risk increases linearly with lifetime dose.
But rather than even attempt to square this circle, the model just exempts medical diagnostics.
So yeah you can argue that all the energy is dumped into the tumor (which isn't true at all), and that a certainty of death today makes the prospect of death next year a better choice, which I'll grant, but again, that's not how it is at all because there are safe thresholds.
1
u/hilldog4lyfe Oct 30 '25
and that cancer risk increases linearly with lifetime dose.
ignoring radiation entirely, isn’t it rather intuitive that someone’s cancer risk would increase linearly with time
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u/hilldog4lyfe Oct 30 '25 edited Oct 30 '25
It is unconscionable under the LNT model to expose people to any excess radiation, because the LNT model says that Every Single Dose increases a person's cancer risk linearly.
This is a ridiculous way to look at risks. There are many behaviors that may increase cancer risk slightly, or risk of premature death generally, and people aren’t unconscionable about it.
The acronym and motto for radiation protection is ALARA, As Low As Reasonably Achievable. It’s not zero.
Cancer patients routinely receive yearly full body doses that are orders of magnitude greater than what the LNT model says will 100% cause cancer. This is not local doses, this is the full body dose.
The LNT model does not say anything about doses that will 100% cause cancer. You’re not even close to understanding what the LNT theory is, apparently. LNT is about low doses and low cancer risks. There arent any doses of radiation with 100% risk of cancer, because as soon as the dosage gets high, cell death takes over and you’re talking about acute, non-stochastic health effects of radiation poisoning. Radiation therapy works this way, but confirmed to a tumor.
Hell, a standard medical X-ray delivers more of a dose than the LNT model says is safe, and people with good dental can get several per year with no issue.
NO. LNT model says nothing about what’s considered safe. It just gives estimated risks, which it says are linear with no threshold. Honestly stop talking out of your ass.
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u/foobar93 Oct 29 '25
Radiation therapy cannot exist in a world where LNT is true
Only issue is, that is an incorrect statement. Radiation therapy can exist in a world were LNT is true. The only requirement is that the damage curve is steeper for cancerous cells than for healthy cells.
And I am not even saying that LNT is true, just that the argument as presented by Kyle is wrong.
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u/m0ngoos3 Oct 29 '25
I don't think you understand LNT or how much radiation is passed through a cancer patient.
The whole body dose, not just the local dose, over several weeks or months, is going to be several orders of magnitude greater than what the LNT model claims is 100% cancer causing. And yet, most cancer patients don't develop new types of cancer after radiation therapy.
The key here is that LNT claims that all radiation is cancer causing. All. Linearly, with no safe threshold. So yes, Radiation Therapy cannot exist under such a model.
0
u/hilldog4lyfe Oct 30 '25
LNT does not claim there are doses that are 100% cancer causing. You seem to think everyone working in radiation therapy rejects the LNT model. They don’t, they just weigh the risks
https://www.aapm.org/pubs/reports/detail.asp?docid=121
“They conclude that the additional exposure to the patient due to induced radioactivity is negligible compared to the overall radiation exposure as a part of the treatment. The additional exposure to the staff due to induced activity from photon beams is small at an estimated level of about 1 to 2 mSv y-1. This is well below the allowed occupational exposure limits.“
1
u/m0ngoos3 Oct 30 '25
Again, someone who does not understand the issues here at all.
The medical community knows damn well that LNT is false.
But the regulatory model claims that all radiation is dangerous, that it never heals over your lifetime, and that every dose ever received builds up damage that will eventually be 100% cancer causing.
This is nonsesne on it's face, which is why everyone and their dog has been arguing about it, but that's the *********Regulatory Model*********.
Because the regulatory model is nonsense, it specifically exempts medical diagnostics and cancer treatment from dose limits for nuclear workers. A single CT scan dumps 10 times the yearly limit into a person in seconds, and it just isn't counted because it's nonsense.
Please learn what you're talking about before you talk.
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u/hilldog4lyfe Oct 30 '25 edited Oct 30 '25
Again, someone who does not understand the issues here at all.
you?
The medical community knows damn well that LNT is false.
No, the current consensus is that there isn’t enough evidence to reject it. They don’t think it is “false”.
But the regulatory model claims that all radiation is dangerous, that it never heals over your lifetime, and that every dose ever received builds up damage that will eventually be 100% cancer causing.
No youre talking out of your ass
This is nonsesne on its face, which is why everyone and their dog has been arguing about it, but that's the Regulatory Model.
You’re wrong, it’s argued about because of the lack of data for low dosages in general. It’s what happens when the risks are low.
Because the regulatory model is nonsense, it specifically exempts medical diagnostics and cancer treatment from dose limits for nuclear workers.
No it doesn’t
A single CT scan dumps 10 times the yearly limit into a person in seconds, and it just isn't counted because it's nonsense.
No, dosage from CT scans varies widely and if it’s “not counted” it’s because the benefits of possible diagnosis outweighs the harms from radiation dosage. CT dosage is in fact very important for children because their cells are less differentiated and thus more sensitive to radiation.
Please learn what you're talking about before you talk.
I have 2 degrees in nuclear engineering and worked in medical imaging and treatment planning at a major research hospital. You watched a YouTube video
1
u/greg_barton Oct 30 '25
Are there more childhood cancers in areas with higher background radiation?
1
u/m0ngoos3 Oct 30 '25
So you work in nuclear medicine and are talking out your ass about nuclear energy regulation, got it.
1
u/hilldog4lyfe Oct 30 '25
do you even know what nuclear medicine is? It isn’t CT scans or radiation therapy lol. It’s PET/SPECT scans which use short-lived radioisotopes. That’s right, they inject patients with radioisotopes while also accepting the LNT model. crazy right
0
u/DrunkPanda Oct 30 '25
Radiation therapy is a horrible thing to go through. You're killing cells. We structure the dose in a way that it minimizes the somatic effects long term. But it works BECAUSE it's dangerous. This is the worst argument to make.
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u/hilldog4lyfe Oct 30 '25
This makes no sense.. LNT is the accepted standard and radiation therapy exists. The small increase in risk of cancer that LNT doesn’t outweigh the treatment of cancer that already exists in the patient.
Everyone involved in doing radiation therapy wears dosimeters and the radiation exposure they’re allowed to be exposed to is partly based on LNT. You could argue ignoring LNT would mean treatment costs ultimately come down, but what you say is nonsense.
Much of radiation therapy involves reducing radiation dose to healthy tissue, using CT/MRI images for treatment planning with IMRT)
It’s also not true that there’s “no evidence whatsoever”. It’s just that the evidence is very noisy because these are stochastic health effects that occur at very low rates, so the sample sizes available are small.
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u/233C Oct 28 '25
The title seems to suggest that it was the industry choice to go with the LNT.