This essay criticizes the LNT hypothesis, which exaggerates radiation risk as always proportional to dose, and examines the movement to revise nuclear safety standards and its significance.
It sharply questions how exaggerated fear of radiation has distorted nuclear policy, climate strategy, and the world’s energy choices.

2019-06-08
They must surely be praying every day that the green groups, that is, the radical environmental protection advocates, will not notice the revision of nuclear safety standards.

This is a chapter I posted on 2018-07-21 under the title, “The following is an article I found while searching for the English pronunciation of Professor Edward Calabrese of the University of Massachusetts, a toxicologist.”
The following is an article I found while searching for the English pronunciation of Professor Edward Calabrese of the University of Massachusetts, a toxicologist.
The Wall Street Journal, December 1, 2015 article.
Changing the Rules on Radiation.
Will U.S. regulators fundamentally change radiation safety standards?
Regarding measures against global warming, Wade Allison, Emeritus Professor at Oxford University, has an idea more realistic than all the proposals at this week’s climate summit in Paris.
That is, to increase by one thousand times the permissible upper limit of radiation exposure to the public and workers from nuclear power plants.
The politicians gathered in Paris may notice that although the host country of the summit, France, ranks twentieth in per-capita income, it ranks fiftieth in greenhouse gas emissions.
The reason is well known.
France generates 75 percent of its total electricity from nuclear power.
France, while other countries since the 1950s have been bound by the unsupported dogma that radiation exposure is always dangerous in proportion to the dose, owing to fears of nuclear war and concerns related to atmospheric nuclear testing, has pushed ahead with nuclear power in defiance of that current.
This dogma, the LNT hypothesis, simply put, is like saying that a bullet fired at one foot per second has one nine-hundredth the probability of killing you compared with one fired at 900 feet per second, the actual muzzle velocity of a .45 caliber automatic.
According to this hypothesis, known as the Linear No-Threshold, or LNT, model, the Chernobyl and Fukushima accidents should have caused predictions of thousands of cancer deaths, but in reality that has not happened.
Sweden finally admitted two or three years ago that the disposal of nearly a year’s supply of reindeer meat after the Chernobyl accident had been unnecessary.
In Japan in 2013, among those who were forcibly evacuated in order to avoid exposure, which had almost no health effect and was for example less than the amount residents of Finland receive routinely, 1,600 people lost lives that need not have been lost, including through suicide and through being unable to receive necessary medical care.
In 2001, the then chairman of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission acknowledged that no excess incidence of leukemia attributable to the Chernobyl accident had been observed.
In Taiwan in the 1980s, 1,700 apartments were built using recycled steel contaminated with radioactive cobalt.
A 2006 study found that the cancer incidence among residents of those apartments was lower than normal, and the researchers stated that by reconsidering estimated radiation risk, billions of dollars in costs could be reduced in the operation of nuclear power facilities, and the construction of nuclear power plants could also be made easier.
This recommendation is justified.
In fact, exaggerated fear of radiation has been a major factor driving up the costs of nuclear safety measures, waste storage, and licensing.
The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission has begun soliciting public comment on whether it should review safety standards in light of more advanced thinking that takes into account the fact that organisms which evolved in a natural radiation environment possess cellular defense responses to low-level radiation, something called hormesis.
One of the petitioners for this review, Dr. Carol Marcus, Professor of Radiation Medicine at UCLA, points out that the LNT hypothesis lacks scientific basis and that regulations grounded in this hypothesis impose extraordinarily large costs.
Mr. Allison, and Edward J. Calabrese of the University of Massachusetts Amherst, a toxicologist who has fought on this issue for decades, deserve praise.
In Professor Calabrese’s latest paper, published this October in Environmental Research, he examines how geneticists involved in the Manhattan Project in the 1950s promoted adoption of the LNT hypothesis in order to enhance the authority of their own research.
Up to the present, hundreds of papers have accumulated evidence refuting LNT.
A research paper published last year by the Institute of Radiation Biology in Munich showed that low-dose radiation triggers certain cellular defense functions.
These research results have important consequences.
Regardless of its inferiority in the costs of both safety and efficiency, coal became the dependable power source of the early twenty-first century.
China and India would probably not choose coal now.
From among the products already developed in the advanced industrial nations, they would choose reactors that are affordable, safe, and clean.
How foolish we have been until now.
More human beings die in a single month in coal mines than the total number of accident fatalities in the entire history of the nuclear industry.
Many objections may be raised to saying this, but if the LNT standard is applied, coal is more dangerous than nuclear power.
According to the American Lung Association, particulate matter, heavy metals, and radioactive substances emitted by coal-using facilities are estimated to cause 13,200 deaths annually.
Let us reconsider here the logic of Al Gore, the former presidential candidate who advocated environmental protection.
In the 1980s, when politicians rose and attached importance to climate change, including carbon dioxide increases and global warming, they rejected nuclear power on the basis of abstract ideology, even though it was the most appropriate solution to the carbon dioxide problem.
The Obama administration should be able to make a calm judgment, provided at least that it is not under the watch of its left-wing supporters.
In the White House, they must surely be praying every day that the green groups, the radical environmental protection advocates, will not notice the revision of nuclear safety standards.
Perhaps the Keystone pipeline accident may have been good in the end.
Unfortunately, merely because The New York Times’ nagging commentary would denounce it as a betrayal of the green movement, the president runs the risk of abandoning one of the few positions that could help with the difficult problem of climate change.
January 6, 2016.
Translated by Takayama Sanpei.