This may be a “hot” one, considering lots of people do not like anything nuclear. If you would want to know my “bias”, well I have always been “pro nuclear”. So if you want to take this claim with huge mountains of salts, feel free to do so.

Here is a relevant wiki article for radiation hormesis. This is a proposed effect that certain amounts of radiation exposure may even be beneficial instead of harmful as LNT may suggest.

TL;DW for folks who do not want to watch video (I have not included examples or numbers)

  • Radiation from natural sources (like radioactive bananas you eat, or from soil or space) are always present.

  • Most nuclear safety guidelines consider that there are no “safe limits” of exposure to radiation. For example, there are safe limits of some metals in our body, there is no limit for mercury or lead exposure. There is a required amount of vitamins you need, but there is also a limit beyond which they are not safe. Radiation is treated like mercury in guidelines.

  • If it has no safe limits, then due to natural exposure, places with higher background exposure must have naturally higher rates of cancers developing - but the thing is, experiments and data collected does not match.

  • Your body has natural means to repair damage done by radiation, and below a certain limit, your body can withstand (and arguably benefit, see the linked article) the radiation.

  • Over estimating danger due to radiation leads to large scale paranoia, and leads to general public be scared of nuclear disasters, when they are not as bad ast they may seem.

And pre-emptively answering some questions I am expecting to get

  • Do you support nuclear bombs? Hell no. We should stop making all kinds of bombs, not just nuclear.

Are there not better means of renewable energy generation like

  • solar? - no, you still need rare erath metals, you need good quality silicon, and you need a lot of area. Until we have a big “stability” bump in perovskite solar cells, it is not the best way. is it better than fossil fuel? everything is better than fossil fuel for practical purposes.

  • wind? geothermal? - actually pretty good. but limited to certain geographies. if you can make them, they are often the best options.

  • hydro? - dams? not so much. There are places where they kinda make sense, for example really high mountains with barely any wildlife or people. otherwise, they disturb the ecosystem a lot, and also not very resistant to things like earthquakes or flooding, and in those situations, they worsen the sitaution.

  • WhyJiffie@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    5·
    1 day ago

    I think you are drawing the wrong conclusion. what we know is that there are people who handle it well. but we don’t know if generally all people would, around the world. differences in genetics could mean differences in radiation tolerance.

    • Red_October@lemmy.world
      22·
      1 day ago

      What we know is that in every situation where that data IS available, people handle it well. What you’re saying is “but what if there’s a mystery variable that we have no evidence of that would make it a disaster.”

      • Dimand@aussie.zone
        21·
        1 day ago

        There is very clear data showing people do not handle radiation well. Plenty of data from Japan that shows a clear correlation of increased cancer rates with increased radiation exposure rates. This data is statistically significant as there were a lot more people than usual getting cancer.

        Getting statistical significant data at lower radiation levels is very hard, as the shot noise goes way up as cancer rate deltas go down to near zero. We just don’t have enough data to know for sure what the correlations are, and no ethical way to get it.

        • Red_October@lemmy.world
          12·
          22 hours ago

          Tell me you didn’t watch the video without telling me.

          It literally addresses Japanese cancer rates and the correlation with radiation doses.

          • Dimand@aussie.zone
            1·
            20 hours ago

            It was in the first 5 min that he mentioned it and it’s a clear example of available data that clearly shows a cancer correlation with radiation. I don’t see how this could be a case of people handling it well.

            Let’s be very clear. I’m not saying this LNT wrong and I’m also not saying it’s right, but that we don’t have enough info to know one way or the other what the effects are in the low dose case. It’s an area of active research where it is almost impossible to get good data.

            • Red_October@lemmy.world
              11·
              4 hours ago

              So you didn’t actually watch past that first five minutes, then, to the part where he talks about how LNT completely breaks at low dose levels and shows, with multiple sources, how low doses actually correlate with lower cancer rates than even baseline no-dose groups.