> There is no evidence that insignificant doses of radiation do any damage.
A single high energy photon causes DNA damage which is easy to replicate. The theory you are supporting refers to rates of cancer, but has zero direct evidence from cancer rates to support it. And that’s the problem, science defaults to the older theory which in this case is the linear model.
> A single high energy photon causes DNA damage which is easy to replicate.
Which is relevant but unpersuasive; for me to agree +-1 photon to make any difference to getting cancer I'd have to suspend everything I know about statistics. We get hit by an ungodly number of high energy photons. If one cases cancer, there are probably others.
At some point, the doses become to small to matter.
> science defaults to the older theory
No it doesn't. Science defaults to the simplest/most likely theory and chooses the balance between those two things based on evidence. Age of the theory has nothing to do with it.
We have evidence that the flat earth theory is wrong, for example. Nobody can claim it is a serious contender despite being an ancient theory.
Similarly, there is evidence that the LNT is stupid. So while people can claim it is a contender because the evidence is weaker than for the globe it shouldn't be a default. The default should have a threshold below which we admit we've seen no evidence of any harm and people have been looking for decades. There is a lot of cancer out there naturally.
And even then the most likely truth of the matter is that nuclear accidents are good for cancer outcomes because it makes people actually screen for cancer. Then they catch all the non-nuclear related stuff.
It’s a default specifically when you have no evidence to replace the existing theory. Flat earth fails on evidence, radiation threshold fails for lack of evidence to support it over an older theory. It’s a very different situation.
It’s known that it takes multiple mutations to get cancer, but people are constantly getting cancer thus there must exist people that have almost gotten cancer and will get it from a single unlucky photon in a specific ___location. And other people who will get every other mutation eventually.
Thus from all known evidence we have the minimum threshold for extra radiation causing cancer and everything else being equal is exactly one photon. Calculating specific odds is much more difficult, but any theory that has some radiation level as absolutely safe is wrong.
That’s not to say it’s a pure linear relationship, but the slope can’t be zero.
Note, I am not saying a linear model is accurate and I doubt it is. But the threshold has both massive theoretical issues and zero direct support. Putting it next to string theory as an interesting theory, but completely untested science.
> Flat earth fails on evidence, radiation threshold fails for lack of evidence to support it over an older theory.
We've got oodles of evidence. People have been looking to black-eye the nuclear proponents for 40 years after Chernobyl and nobody has turned up any evidence. At some point, maybe 20 years, maybe 30 years or even 40 years the overwhelming lack of any evidence of harm becomes evidence that none was done.
> That’s not to say it’s a pure linear relationship, but the slope can’t be zero.
Well no that isn't true. Stepping out of the nuclear realm, this is very similar to arguing that a railgun will blast a hole in a building, a wrecking ball will knock a smaller hole in a building and therefore enough youths punching buildings will statistically knock one over.
That isn't going to happen. If that logic works out we are talking a seriously troubled building. A building that a stiff breeze could knock over, and a building that is almost surely knocked over before the youths get to it to punch it. The slope becomes indistinguishable from zero - in fact, it probably is zero. I doubt you'll want to contest that but if you do I would encourage some reflection on what a feeble hill that is to fight on vs real-life policies that actually matter for bringing energy to millions of humans and saving a measurable number of lives vs coal power or even solar installation.
This argument that thresholds are impossible is taking no cues from all the other forces, where there are clear thresholds below which no damage is done. An equivalent number of spaced out flicks deals nowhere near the damage of a punch, and there is a threshold below which force does no practical harm. Your argument we shouldn't take cues from the other forces is the first people to look at the problem drew a straight line through the data and therefore you don't want to accept that vanishingly small forces are probably irrelevant. An opinion held in an unscientific defiance of the preponderance of evidence, I cheerfully add.
There is zero direct evidence for departure from the LNT at the doses that would be relevant for the larger population in a nuclear accident. The reason is simple: for any individual, the extra chance of cancer would be so small that it could not be detected in the very large background of cancer from all sources.
A single high energy photon causes DNA damage which is easy to replicate. The theory you are supporting refers to rates of cancer, but has zero direct evidence from cancer rates to support it. And that’s the problem, science defaults to the older theory which in this case is the linear model.