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Monday, March 18, 2013

Spreading Doubt On LNT (Again)

Surprise!  (NOT)

It's James Conca in his blog with the esteemed scientific journal Forbes.


He thinks the WHO Health Assessment on Fukushima (see upper right hand side of this webpage for link) was erroneous for calculating doses for those groups exposed to contamination.

He thinks LNT is a "hypothesis" which was used incorrectly by the WHO in carrying out their calculations.

Of course, he's wrong.

LNT is a more than half-century old scientific theory.  It's not just a simple, untested hypothesis.  The effects of radiation have been studied more than any other toxic material!

The WHO was not wrong to consider LNT.  Their dose calculation employs collective dose (multiplying the dose received by a population to infer risk).

A number of consensus organizations have warned against using collective dose because the risk comes from some previous study (usually the Japanese a-bomb survivor study, because it's the best).  Since populations differ, both in space and in time, including diets, smoking, non-radiological pollution sources, etc. the degree of uncertainty becomes very high and a risk derived from collective dose may be highly inaccurate.

However, in the case of Fukushima, we're talking about no significant difference between the a-bomb survivor population and those most exposed from Fukushima.  Only those factors which have changed with time will introduce some error, but to do no estimate would be a larger mistake.

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