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In the first place, David badly misquoted me (carelessly, not intentionally I assume):
On 2017-12-07 15:34, DW via Marxism wrote:
Jeff is wrong when he suggest people might consider moving from areas of high levels of background radiation that occur naturally in many areas.
No, I said there are places that I would avoid spending much time at. One of Brazil's nicest beaches, Guarapari, has background radiation levels reaching over 100x of the levels where most people live. Spending a day in the sun there can be like getting a dozen chest x-rays. I would choose a different beach.
But here is the crux of the issue:
This goes to Jeff's fear of radiation as well: there is no evidence that small dosages of radiation that exist at background levels have a thing to do with cancer.
This is exactly the problem: we don't firmly know that does "have a thing to do with cancer" but we also don't know that it DOESN'T. The cause of most cancers is unknown so currently we can't even rule out background radiation as the leading cause of cancer.
The reason I talked about the history of awareness of radiation dangers is that at every point where people just didn't know, it later did become known that they had earlier been too complacent and that the dangers were greater than previously imagined. That might not happen again, but if you don't know whether something is dangerous, but have reason to believe it could be (such as knowing for sure that it is dangerous at a much higher level), then the prudent course of action is always to regard it as dangerous until proven safe.
I would recommend the Nature article Louis pointed to, which seems to summarize the current (but poor) knowledge concerning risks from low-level radiation exposure, and claims to contradict the hypothesis that below a certain level radiation is not a cause of cancer. This is the big question that is so very difficult to measure for the reasons we have been discussing. It's difficult to detect statistically one additional cancer case among 10000 people. But that small increase could mean 100 deaths in one large city alone. If there were 100 deaths due to a building collapse, then people would condemn those responsible and ask why such a preventable accident were allowed to occur. One could ask the same question concerning artificial sources of radiation or radioisotopes in the environment.
In addition to the Nature article, there is a lot of reference information on low-level radiation exposure at the website of the US Environmental Protection Agency (content which I guess Trump hasn't gotten around to axing since he was too busy removing their content on global warming!):
https://www.epa.gov/radiation/radiation-sources-and-doses - Jeff _________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
