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Flying in Airplanes Exposes People To More Radiation Than Standing Next To a Nuclear Reactor (businessinsider.com)
Traveling the skies by jet lifts us far from the hustle and bustle of the world below. From a report: But many flyers don't know that soaring miles above Earth also takes us out of a vital protective cocoon -- and a little closer to a place where our cells can be pummeled by radiation from colliding stars, black holes, and more. You can't see these high-energy charged particles, but at any given moment, tens of thousands of them are soaring through space and slamming into Earth's atmosphere from all directions. Also called cosmic rays or cosmic ionizing radiation, the particles are the cores of atoms, such as iron and nickel, moving at nearly light-speed. They can travel for millions of years through space before randomly hitting Earth. These rays don't pose much of a risk to humans on Earth's surface, since the planet's atmosphere and magnetic field shield us from most of the threat.
Even failed plants, aside from Chernobyl, have not harmed anyone from radiation. Everyone should know that as well, but they don't.
If there were substantial cancer risks due to flying, the data miners at insurance companies would have already correlated their payouts on treatments for high-frequency fliers like pilots and would be raising their premiums. Insurance companies are very much on top of cancer-causing workplaces.
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Yes, a very slight increase in cancer risk but not necessarily attributable to radiation. Prostate cancer is a risk, evidently is from prolonged sitting (truck drivers see similar risk). The problem with tying cancers to occupational or medial radiation is that the risk factors are so small to begin with, potential correlation is often overcome by uncertainty. What we do know is the risks of these types of exposures are very very low.
For example, you could put your bed 2 meters from a loaded spent fuel dry storage cask, and sleep there every night for 8 hours, your exposure in a year would be less that the annual exposure to where there is any observed health effect.
Then again, it might be more important to some people to scare the public with scary factoids than to provide education. That's my observation at least.
Spot on!
Reading the line "tens of thousands of them are soaring through space and slamming into Earth's atmosphere from all directions" my first reaction was:
Divide "tens of thousands" by the surface area of the atmosphere.
My next thought was to divide my own profile surface area (maybe 1 square meter?) by the surface area of the Earth's atmosphere (500 trillion, or thereabouts) and multiply that by "tens of thousands" to come up with the probability of getting hit by a cosmic ray.
Then I realized that the OP stated "at any given moment", and realized that you can't multiply by the number of "moments" in a flight.
The article is complete emotional bullshit.
I'm sorry, but most or all of these are classified as class 4 or higher on the IAEA International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale.
For a class 4 to be declared, one of the criteria is that it must have caused death by radiation poisoning.
What you're pointing to when saying 0 deaths is that none of the individual deaths can be proven to be due to the increased radiation. Much like the tobacco companies claimed that smoking was harmless because you couldn't prove that any individual death was due to smoking. It's just as disingenuous, and is easily refuted by statistics showing that cancer death rates have indeed gone up both in the aftermath of Fukushima and Three Mile Island. Whether one can point to any specific death and conclude that that one death was caused by it is irrelevant. The IAEA looks at the statistics.
As for your claim that one needs to differentiate the reasons for the reactors - why exactly? A reactor that produces electricity and a reactor that enriches plutonium are both reactors, with a risk of radioactive contamination. There have been accidents and releases of radioactive material in both. Quite often the same radioactive materials. And the claim was that reactors was safe, not that electricity producing commercial ones were. Moving the goal posts doesn't help.