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Mushrooms And Geiger Counters
jonerik writes "This article in the New York Times details the efforts being undertaken by Moscow food inspectors to keep radioactive produce out of the city's open-air markets and off of dinner tables. And the efforts are paying off, with seizures of 'hot' produce up by 10% so far this year vs. last year. Laced with cesium and strontium thanks to the radioactivity released by the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in 1986, forest produce (including berries and mushrooms) is more difficult to track than farm produce, but the inspectors apparently manage to keep on top of it, with one exception: Old babushkas who sell illegal produce from the sides of streets and who city officials are hesitant to crack down on."
LNT stands for "linear no threshold" (a threshold below which no ill effect occurs). The presence of repair mechanisms does not cause a threshold to appear magically: if radiation can kill at high doses with a repair mechanism, then it can kill at very low doses with a repair mechanism because repair mechanisms are not perfect.
Now, in the presence of repair mechanisms, the curve might be non-linear: at very low doses, it might be easier for the body to repair occasional damage. In fact, there are very good reasons to believe that this is the case, and that kind of behavior was certainly plausible in the 1940's.
But that doesn't invalidate the LNT model--the LNT model isn't intended as a best estimate of actual damage, it's an attempt at a conservative choice of an upper bound. Merely knowing about the existence of repair mechanisms doesn't affect that choice--if we wanted to make the upper bound more aggressive, we'd have to know a lot more about the behavior of those repair mechanisms than we do.
Furthermore, we have learned other things since the 1940s. For example, we have learned that a single change in a DNA base pair can cause cancer or other diseases.
I am all for safety standards on nuclear power. But I want them to be based on the latest scientific data, not on out-dated 1940's guesswork.
Rest assured, it is. In fact, the latest scientific data suggests that nuclear power is overall not such a good idea--neither from a safety point of view or from an economic point of view. It's just that some people are so enamored with the technology (or have so much money invested in it) that they simply don't want to face facts.