> Drinking one beer a night for a year is a lot less harmful than drinking 365 beers in one go. The same applies to radiation exposure, but regulation doesn’t agree.

Stating something confidently doesn't make it true. Show me the data.

The article is long on emotion, exposition, but very short on the data.

There's a big concerted effort to change this regulation, but it's not based on data, it's based on feelings.

It's quite likely that there's non-linear response, but it could just as easily be that the dose that's tolerated well in a 1 day exposure, might have higher risk when spread out over 365 days. When they say something like:

> nor any major chromosomal aberrations.

They don't have the technology to measure DNA damage that might be significant. I've spent some time in the past examining the REBC dataset of whole-genome sequencing of tumors of thyroid cancers from Chornobyl, where you actually do see the types of translocations that cause cancer from radiation.

We can't detect these types of translocations in non-cancerous tissue. The only reason we can see them in cancer is that the cancer has replicated billions of times, giving us many many many copies of the translocation to put through DNA sequencing. Doing the type of sequencing where we identify translocations that happen in individual cells, before the cell has become cancerous, would require a good amount of engineering effort, and I've never seen anything like it. And in 2006, when the study was published, we barely had any of the latest sequencing technologies.

> Chen interpreted this as evidence of the health benefits of radiation. This theory, known as hormesis, holds that low doses of stressors, including ionizing radiation, can improve health (in this case, reducing cancer risk) by triggering the body’s repair systems in much the same way that exercise improves fitness by stressing the cardiovascular system. While popular among a small community of researchers, it has not gained widespread acceptance due to limited and conflicting evidence in humans.

Yes, limited and conflicting evidence in humans. Yet these sorts of propaganda efforts are pushing hard on the idea being present, being obvious.

This article is not science, despite trying to put on airs of science. The data does not support their claims.

Let's see actual review articles published making these claims that aggregate over large numbers of small data. Let's see whether such aggregation claims hold up on scrutiny from those that have spent a lot of time thinking about this.

The active regulatory push to invalidate LNT should follow the science, not be ahead of the science.

Plus, the whole goal of this, to somehow how make nuclear construction cheaper, does not seem to be well served by changing LNT. The costs of nuclear are massive because it's a big constructuon project with lots of coordination. Making concrete walls 50% as thick is going to do very little to lessen the massive costs, which are related to construction productivity, or rather the lack of it in the West.

It seems like the nuclear industry tries to focus on anything except the one thing that will actually make it succeed: get really good at construction.

▲ 627467 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> There's a big concerted effort to change this regulation, but it's not based on data, it's based on feelings.

Is the regulation based on hard, systematic and replicated data? Looks based on emotion (fear, greed) too

▲ teravor 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

in a world where there is no safe low radiation dose, it would be quite easy to generate the data to demonstrate this. so either low doses cause no harm or cause such minimal harm as to be safely disregarded.

luckily the government is moving away from your position: https://www.eenews.net/articles/nrc-considers-eliminating-ha...

not having cheaper nuclear energy imposes a far greater cost on society.

▲ glitchc 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

No safe low radiation dose, you say? Well then, you had better stay away from red meat, brazil nuts and even bananas.

Consumed them already, you say? Well I guess you're screwed then.

	▲	cwillu 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I believe you misread the comment you are replying to.

▲ epistasis 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Luckily? The NRC is considering it, hopefully they follow science rather than popular propaganda.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-026-69285-4

> in a world where there is no safe low radiation dose, it would be quite easy to generate the data to demonstrate this.

This is the classic fallacy seeing an absence of evidence and using that as evidence of absence!

And the lack of evidence goes both ways, it should be easy to show that current regulations are fully safe by doing epidemiology to show that living close to a nuclear power plant carries no additional risk!

So let's go looking for those epidemiological studies...

> May 19 2026 - Does Proximity to Nuclear Power Plants Increase Cancer Risk? New research finds correlation between disease and living close to a facility

> Koutrakis says that his advisee’s research is notable because it is the first series of studies to systematically demonstrate associations between residential proximity to nuclear power plants and cancer outcomes across multiple settings using large, population-based datasets. “This work fills a critical gap in the literature by providing large-scale, systematic evidence on a question that has remained unresolved for decades.”

https://gsas.harvard.edu/news/does-proximity-nuclear-power-p...

And what do they see?

> Using nationwide mortality data from 2000-2018, we assess long-term spatial patterns of cancer mortality in relation to proximity to nuclear facilities while accounting for socioeconomic, demographic, behavioral, environmental, and healthcare factors. Cancer mortality is higher across multiple age groups in both males and females, with the strongest associations among older adults, males aged 65–74 and females aged 55–64.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-026-69285-4

So there's a dose-response curve for cancer based on living close to a nuclear power plant. This survives correction for other confounders.

Notably, this is correlation not causation, but the only evidence getting close to disproving LNT actual leans towards super-linear, rather than sub-linear, correct?

▲ rozab 5 hours ago | parent [-]

I am looking at their county level distance-to-power-plant map and it's literally xkcd 1138.

▲ epistasis 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Then you are not understanding it. Looking at a map of people not close to power plants would show the same rough picture. People live where people live, of course! But proximity to nuclear power plants has higher incidence of cancer.

What is different about this study that's worthy of a national map is that it's an evaluation of national data, after having first found the discovery on smaller state level datasets.

▲ teravor 3 hours ago | parent [-]

there is a small problem though, everything in those power-plants is monitored. so there is no radiation increase anywhere to be found.

if it's the pollutants as the Nature paper claims without evidence, then any other industrial plant would also be emitting those. in fact, coal power plants will emit much more. chemical pollutants are no less dangerous than radioactive ones when the radioactive ones are too low to measure (that is not to say that coal power-plants don't produce radioactive pollutants, they do much more than nuclear power plants).

    > Nuclear power plants emit radioactive pollutants that can disperse into the surrounding environment, leading to potential human exposure through inhalation, ingestion, and direct contact. These pollutants can be transported through air, water, and soil, contributing to long-term environmental contamination

yet their source for this:

    > Radiation doses and cancer incidence among the population living within 25 km of three nuclear power plants (NPPs) in Ontario, Canada were investigated for the period 1985 to 2008 for radiation exposure and 1990 to 2008 for cancer incidence. This study design provided at least a five-year latency period between potential radiation exposure and cancer incidence. Around the NPPs, the incidence of childhood cancers, leukemia and non-Hodgkin lymphoma, in young children (aged 0 - 4) was lower than the general Ontario population, but not statistically so. Cancer incidence in children aged 0 - 14 was similar to the Ontario population. Overall, for all ages there was no consistent pattern of cancer incidence (all cancers combined and radio-sensitive cancers) across the population living within 25 km of the three NPPs. Some types of cancers were statistically higher than expected, others were statistically lower than expected, and others were similar to the general Ontario population. Although variations in all cancers combined and radiosensitive cancers were found in this study, the pattern was found to be within the natural variation of cancer in Ontario. During the period 1985 to 2000 (Pickering and Bruce NPPs) and 1985 to 2002 (Darlington NPP) radiation doses to members of the public from the operation of the NPPs, estimated on the basis of a hypothetical individual at the facility fence line, were ≤0.052 mSv/year; while for the period 2001 to 2008 (Pickering and Bruce NPPs) and 2003 to 2008 (Darlington NPP) radiation doses, more realistically estimated using the critical group concept for six age classes, were ≤0.0067 mSv/year. Hence, public doses from environmental releases of radionuclides from Ontario NPPs represent a very small fraction of natural background radiation (1.338 and 2.02 mSv/year) in the regions where the NPPs are located. Our study shows no evidence of childhood leukemia clusters around the three NPPs and that the incidence of all the cancers investigated for all age groups is within the natural variation of the disease in Ontario. The radiation exposure from NPP operation is a small contributor to the public’s total exposure to radiation and is not a plausible explanation for any excess cancers observed within 25 km of any Ontario NPP.

I wonder why none of these researchers just go and grab soil samples around the nuclear power plant and compare those to random samples from any other industrial installation... since it's such an obvious thing to do they no doubt did this, why isn't it in any of the relevant papers? could it be that the results are against their ideological anti-nuclear project?

▲ BigTTYGothGF 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Try looking a little closer, and you'll find it's not. South Carolina and Tennessee are obvious discrepancies in one direction, as are New York up by Lake Ontario, central Pennsylvania, eastern Washington, and the Iowa-Nebraska border.

▲ talon8635 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Regarding the beer analogy, can anyone on earth survive 365 beer servings of alcohol without dying? Are you demanding research that 365 beers at once is more harmful than 1/day/year?

	▲	lstodd 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		365 beers even if 0.33l.. one would die of acute electrolytic disbalance while being quite drunk, about same as if one would neither drink nor eat anything but water. edit: IIRC it takes about 10 liters of water to commit suicide. Depends on body weight of course.