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Monday, November 21, 2011

Radiation Phobia & LNT

This is a bit of a weird opinion piece.  It discusses the need to continue funding the DOE's Low Dose Radiation Research Program.  But the author seems to think that continued funding will overturn the LNT model, and that will reduce radiophobia.

Radiophobia is an unwarranted fear of radiation.  In other words, the people suffering from it don't understand LNT to begin with.  If they did, they would realize the cancer risks are usually trivial and they wouldn't be phobic.  They are phobic because they don't understand LNT and aren't interested in any sort of accurate risk assessment.

BEIR VII, which was tasked with determining the best radiation dose response model, looked at the types of studies done by the LDRRP and others (see Chapter 2), and concluded LNT is the best model.  The LDRRP continues to provide new insights and may lead us to overturn LNT (either because the dose response is super-linear or supra-linear at low doses) one day.

I don't think that will have much psychological effect on radiophobes.

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