In Taiwan, recycled radiocontaminated steel was inadvertently used in the construction of over 100 apartment buildings, causing the long-term exposure of 10,000 people. The average dose rate was 50 mSv/year and a subset of the population (1,000 people) received a total dose over 4,000 mSv over ten years. In the widely used linear no-threshold model used by regulatory bodies, the expected cancer deaths in this population would have been 302 with 70 caused by the extra ionizing radiation, with the remainder caused by natural background radiation. The observed cancer rate, though, was quite low at 7 cancer deaths when 232 would be predicted by the LNT model had they not been exposed to the radiation from the building materials. Ionizing radiation hormesis appears to be at work.
That was the one topic that always baked my noodle at DoE. In animal tests the low dose group consistently outlived the controls. I wanted to write papers on the topic but consistently got shot down. The upper tiers were worried about public perception of “radiation can be good” papers.
fun fact: low doses of radiation are actually known to reduce cancer rates. there’s quite a bit of research into it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hormesis#Radiation
That was the one topic that always baked my noodle at DoE. In animal tests the low dose group consistently outlived the controls. I wanted to write papers on the topic but consistently got shot down. The upper tiers were worried about public perception of “radiation can be good” papers.
Yeah that’d absolutely result in a lot of Americans giving themselves cancer
licking radium paintbrushes to own the libs.
Nuka-Cola stocks skyrocketing.