[vtsnowedin]

Well I did not say it would be easy now did I?
They could use the moat as half their encirclement. Then probably a drive down the M-18 to Vasylivka then wheel right and drive West to the lake shore somewhere around Velyka Znamianke.
That probable can't happen until the Western bank around Kherson is fully cleared out so for now about all they can do is Hymars supply depots and convoys.

[Tanada]

Would not a "moderate" dose received by a child from a Chernobyl type release increase their chances of cancers several decades out thereby reducing their life expectancy?
I don't want to do a sky is falling rant but I do think it is wise to avoid that type of event if possible.

Mostly no, we have excellent records of Japanese survivors from both Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Children exposed to both moderate and high doses were tracked for life with the moderate dose 'kids' now being in their 77-95 age range. The number of excess cancers was a real factor, but not nearly as bad as the Media makes it sound, on the order of 5% increase. IOW if your unexposed community had a 20% cancer rate your exposed community had a 21% cancer rate (5% of 20%=1%). The media reports this as a 5% increase without explaining the part about it being 5% of 20% for a total statistical increase of 1% which is well within the normal variation you see in any population statistics.

Statistics do not lie, but how you present them can be extremely misleading if the listener doesn't understand how statistical analysis is done.

[vtsnowedin]

The old saying goes "there are three kinds of lies. There are Lies, Dammed lies, and Statistics."

[Doly]

Mostly no, we have excellent records of Japanese survivors from both Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki were atomic bombs exploding in the air, which is different from a nuclear accident happening on the ground. I've read that ground accidents release more radiation to the surrounding area than atomic air bursts, where most of the radioactive particles get dispersed quickly to a rather large area.

[Tanada]

Mostly no, we have excellent records of Japanese survivors from both Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki were atomic bombs exploding in the air, which is different from a nuclear accident happening on the ground. I've read that ground accidents release more radiation to the surrounding area than atomic air bursts, where most of the radioactive particles get dispersed quickly to a rather large area.

Contrary to Hollywood opinion the effects of radiation depend on two factors, dose rate and dose strength. We have good date on who at Hiroshima and Nagasaki received high prompt doses and who received moderate prompt doses. From that data we know that nearly everyone with a high dose either died within a few months or if they were a little bit lucky, a few years. Those who got moderate prompt doses nearly all recovered within a few months to their prior health status and a few more of them than average died of cancer but not a huge number more.

Those who received low prompt doses show the same pattern as those who receive chronic background doses, no measurable health effects. There are many people living in places where the background radiation is as much as five times that you would receive in the Chernobyl exclusion zone today and because of the fallout patterns most of those levels are little changed from 1996, ten years after the accident. In the Russian and Belarus portions of the exclusion zone these areas with normal background radiation have been reoccupied by the population. In Ukraine where a UN stipend is paid for the "uninhabitable territory" the exclusion zone rules remain in force even though they have no real baring on human health effects now that we are 36 years past the accident. There are indeed still scattered hot spots that need to be avoided or remediated, but compared to 1986 that task is quite easily accomplished.

[Doly]

Contrary to Hollywood opinion the effects of radiation depend on two factors, dose rate and dose strength.

Doesn't it also depend on whether you absorb radioactive particles into your body and incorporate them into your bones? Getting a blast of gamma radiation isn't the same as getting radioactive isotopes in your body.

[Tanada]

Contrary to Hollywood opinion the effects of radiation depend on two factors, dose rate and dose strength.

Doesn't it also depend on whether you absorb radioactive particles into your body and incorporate them into your bones? Getting a blast of gamma radiation isn't the same as getting radioactive isotopes in your body.

Absorbed particles give you a chronic dose, strength of the dose depends on what exactly you absorb and how intensely radioactive it is. For example if you were to eat powdered plutonium oxide dust better than 99.9% would pass all the way through your system in about 48 hours unless you have ulcers. The reason is the hydrochloric acid in your digestive system is not what it takes to dissolve PuO2 into solution so it is more or less chemically inert so far as your digestive system deals with it. On the other hand if you eat cesium, uranium, strontium or several others your digestive system will dissolve them and they will be able to pass into your blood stream and be distributed around your body.

[Tanada]

Discard the Linear No-Threshold Model of
Radiation Dose-Response

This is the edited transcript of the presentation of Edward Calabrese to Panel 3, “Principles of Science for Durable Economic Progress,” of the Schiller Institute’s June 18-19 Conference, “There Can Be No Peace Without the Bankruptcy Reorganization of the Dying Trans-Atlantic Financial System.” Dr. Calabrese is a Professor of Environmental Health Sciences at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He is co-editor of Hormesis: A Revolution in Biology, Toxicology and Medicine (2010).

Dr. Edward Calabrese is the author of over 750 published scientific papers and 10 books. He has studied extensively the historical underpinnings of the LNT (Linear No-Threshold) model and its application to cancer risk assessment and how we think about radiation exposure today.

He has documented that LNT was made policy based on fraudulent research, manipulation of scientific literature, and scientific misconduct by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences.

Instead, Dr. Calabrese supports the view that there is a non-linear, threshold-based dose-response for ionizing radiation and chemicals, arguing that low-dose exposures can provide health benefits. His work has recently been the subject of a widely viewed, 22-part documentary by the Health Physics Society.

His presentation is in the form of an interview, conducted by the Schiller Institute’s Kynan Thistlethwaite. Subheads have been added.

Dose-Response Is Non-Linear and
There Are Thresholds

Kynan Thistlethwaite: Thank you very much, Dr. Calabrese, for giving us your time and the opportunity to talk with you. Just to give a sense to the audience, can you say something about the LNT model, your research concerning the historical underpinnings of that model, and the way we think about it today?

Dr. Edward Calabrese: The LNT model is a dose-response model, a very general type of dose-response model. And just for the general public, the dose-response model is something that we all experience every single day: It’s how much we do something, whether it’s exercise, or consumption of alcohol, or anything—just, how much you do, and how that translates into an effect. It also relates to not just how much, but how quickly you do it. Say, for example, somebody has a glass of wine, and if they drink the glass of wine too quickly, they may feel light-headed very quickly. That’s an example of a dose-response, and a dose-rate response. It relates to common experiences. When we do certain activities, we see certain effects, and those are plotted on graphs. That’s the kind of the work that pharmacologists, toxicologists, and epidemiologists tend to do, when they try to figure out dose-response relationships and how drugs or pollutants, or anything, work on biological systems. That’s the general idea of a dose-response relationship, and it’s just something that one learns, probably by the time one is six years old. Except we put numbers around it as we get older and make it a bit more sophisticated.

In terms of the common-sensical situation, most people, I think, would believe that things tend to act via a threshold. It means that you may have to exceed a certain level of exposure before an effect may become perceptible or measured, or somehow register on whatever scale you’re trying to register it on. That’s how the belief systems tended to work 120, 150 years ago. And then, in 1930 or so, radiation geneticists in this country began to look at radiation and how it may affect the genome differently. An idea arose that there was no safe level of exposure, that there was no such thing as a threshold, that the effects of radiation were really different from chemicals or other things, and that every single exposure would cause a genetic change and was not repaired. And that the effects would be cumulative, that they would be irreversible, that they wouldn’t be repairable.

And when you linked all those three things together, what you ended up getting was a linear dose response. That linear dose response assumed that any amount of exposure would cause damage, and ultimately even a single ionization from a single radiation particle could have the potential to cause damage. Over time—I would say from about 1930 when this idea was first floated, until let’s say the late 1950s—it took about 30 years for this idea to resonate and to grow, and to get its following, and to take advantage of certain international situations, like the atomic bomb, like the above-ground testing, like fear of radioactive fallout; and ultimately, politicians and scientists and the world community moved from a threshold model to an LNT type of model, mostly on the basis of fear. Ultimately, fear has come to drive politicians and others, moving the country forward—or backward, however you might want to see how fear deals with our behavior and policies.

Weathering Peer Opposition

Q: Once you had published your findings concerning the foundations of the LNT model, and revealed its flaws, did you receive any opposition from your peers and other scientific institutions?

Dr. Calabrese: Well, I’d have to say that my challenging of the belief system of the scientific community, the toxicology community, the radiation community, began probably in a serious vein in the early 1990s. But I really wasn’t taken very seriously until the early 2000s.

If people don’t take you seriously, then you don’t become the object of a lot of attacks. Whoever is in the bullseye, people tend to think that person is significant. If you’re not really being attacked, then you probably realize you’re not very significant in the eyes of the opposition. I knew that in the 1990s I was onto something that was exciting, and was going to be hot, but I knew that I had to do a lot more work to get there—put it that way. I worked kind of quietly in many ways, you know, the way a researcher works, basically, by playing the game you’re supposed to: doing my work, publishing articles, and so forth.

And then, what happened for me was kind of a breakthrough, in both positive and negative ways. In 2003, I got a paper published in the journal Nature, and I was put into their publicity package. I had never published in Nature before, and I had never been in a publicity package before, but, wow!—I saw what that actually did. The paper didn’t just attack LNT, it also attacked the threshold model. I was claiming that this phenomenon called hormesis—which is a biphasic dose response, where low doses of harmful things could actually be beneficial—was I believed the dominant dose-response model that should be operating in toxicology.

That was really a radical statement! It was like saying the field got everything wrong, right from the very beginning. And because it was so quirky and so challenging, I think it got the attention of the editorial board at Nature. They wanted to float the idea, that is, they wanted to allow me to float the idea. As I was to learn later—because some insider on their editorial board told me this—the big fight was over how many words I would be allowed, and how many figures. They were fighting over 2,500 words with two or three figures, and they ended up giving me 1,500 words and one figure. So that’s what I got in my paper.

When I got the article into Nature—and I got into the press package—I ended up getting a lot of publicity—frontpage articles in multiple newspapers. In my hometown, you might say, the Boston Globe ran one; I got a bit story in the Wall Street Journal. U.S. News & World Report did a very big piece, put my picture in there. Eventually, later on, Science journal did a four-page story, with my picture in there as well. Lots of other things happened, all kinds of debates. And so, I went from kind of a non-entity into a known commodity, or “new kid on the block,” so to speak.

What happened after that was that people began to get concerned, because here was somebody who was saying that not only was LNT wrong, but in fact toxic substances at low doses, he’s saying, could produce even beneficial effects. He must be crazy, and if he’s not crazy, he must be dangerous. In any case, he has to be challenged, and probably stopped. We’ll see how serious he really is.

Advice to Science Students

Q: America should produce many more people capable of doing what you did. You are also a teacher. What do you think any student who wants to discover something in science has to understand to prepare themselves?

Dr. Calabrese: I’d have to tell you that my development in this area really happened after I was 50 years old, OK? I’m very broadly trained. I’m a very traditional person, a very traditional scientist, a very traditional lab-oriented person. I’ve taken a broad range of courses, and so I’m very “old school.” I’m very old school when it comes to the breadth of my reading, but also in terms of being “hands on” in the laboratory, so I kind of, hopefully, paid my dues and understand the process, and am very self-critical.

But I have to tell you something that was very significant for me, that might be very useful for students: When I was a young Ph.D. student, there was this publication called Current Contents. We’d have a journal club meeting every week, and we’d try to take a look at the most recent papers, and see what’s happening today.

After I got through graduate school and started to become a faculty member, I had to keep up on everything, but I actually developed a very inverted way of learning: When I was to write anything—and I wrote a lot of books and so forth—instead of looking at what was current, I went down and got the very first thing that was ever written on something, and then got every single thing that happened since that time.

I would never read the most recent article first! I read that last! I’d go to the very first thing, and I’d read what they discovered, then I’d say to myself, “What should the next experiment be? How would I do it?” And then I’d look to see what was done. Most often, what I thought should have been done, was never done!

I kept making this inverted cone step going forward, and it changed entirely the way—I began to see science as history. And I began to see science as biography. And I’m saying, most of our good ideas were lost along the way.

Whereas, the way science is taught today, and all days, is a straight line, from the beginning to right now. It’s a straight line. Actually, science is anything but a straight line! It’s a jagged line, there are gaps in it. I think the best ideas were never even thought about or followed up on. And yet, all we do is think it’s a straight line and we go to the most recent things.

Somehow, I picked that up on my own, and this was actually at the core of how I believe I’ve made these historical discoveries on LNT—just doing something differently, and thinking about it very differently than the impatience of scientists today, who just have to read the most recent thing.

I’m all in favor of recent: I look at things every single day, what’s happening today. But I don’t forget that you really have to go back to the original—original stuff—and then you track it. Then you track it. You have to do twice as much work, but it’s synergistically better than if you don’t. So, I believe that’s part of what’s led to my lucky discoveries, along the way, you might say.

Conditions for Future Scientific Breakthroughs

Q: How do you believe new fields of science will be opened in the future? What do you think are the conditions required for new breakthroughs to happen?

Dr. Calabrese: It’s interesting you raise that. In some ways, I’ve had a chance to experience both the negative and also the positive sides of it—how quickly theories develop. I’m going to give you an analogy, all right? The analogy is: I read a book a good number of years ago, and was looking at how an idea gets accepted, and how it gets spread through the colony or the society. But in this case, it was anthropologists who were studying two colonies of baboons. The two colonies were geographically isolated, but the researchers knew the social structure from the highest-ranked male to the lowest female baboon, in terms of their power structure.

The investigators were going to teach the baboons a very new and important way of acquiring food, and they wanted to see how long it would take the idea to be learned and adopted by all the other members of the colony. And so, in one case, they taught this knowledge to the top male. It took about three hours for all the other baboons to learn, observe, pick it up from the top male and do it. The anthropologists then went to the other baboon colony, and taught this knowledge to the lowest female. It took months and months for this great idea to be adopted.

I said to myself, “Wow! This is amazing, it depends on—good ideas, it’s the same idea, but it depends on who has the idea as to how quickly it gets picked up.” So, what’s happened with me? This idea of hormesis, radiation hormesis and the like, was a revolutionary idea back in the 1980s. This big database, called Web of Science, had about 10 or 15 citations per year then. Forty years later—and I’ve been working on this extremely intensely—the citations are over 18,000. You might say, that’s an awful lot; it’s been really, really slow on the uptake, but now it’s now going up quite fast.

As the equivalent of the female baboon, the lowest-ranked person, it has taken me 40 years to get my great idea going. If I had been, I’m going to say, the Dean of the Harvard School of Public Health, or if I had been somebody else of some notable something or other, and had the idea that I had early on, it would have revolutionized this world by now!

And so, I think that one of the big issues here is that there are certain social structures that can accelerate good ideas and social structures that make it very difficult for ideas to be adopted. It tells you something about either the political structure, the social structure, or something, but I can tell you, my ideas, either because of my low standing in society, or whatever else is going on, have taken an awful long time. OK, that’s the negative side, all right?

On the positive side, I have believed in my ideas, I have studied them, and I can tell you that I understand what I am talking about far better because I’ve worked out all kinds of various problems by myself, with nobody even giving me a thread of encouragement! They mostly shun you, they reject you, they do all these things. But eventually, what will happen, as in this case, is that, I know—in fact, I’m being proven correct over time on these other ideas. The same thing is true on this LNT thing.

In the beginning, when I brought out that [Herman Joseph] Muller probably lied in his Nobel Prize speech, and that Muller probably didn’t actually induce gene mutations, and I got bopped on the head, I got flushed down the toilet, and I got treated with, “You’re a marginalized scientist, you’re kind of a nothing.” They really specialize in name calling and other ways to marginalize one. I’ve always taken great solace in the fact that the criticisms that I got were that I’m not as smart as Muller, and I didn’t go to an Ivy League school, and I’m a marginalized scientist because I work on this hormesis thing. But eventually, when the name calling was all done, I said, “Well, all these things are true, but would you do me a favor, and tell me where my mistake is?” they just went back to recycling the personal attacks, rather than addressing the issues of science that I would raise.

So, you have to listen to what the criticisms are. If the criticisms are just how stupid you are, or the fact that you don’t have a Nobel Prize, or the fact that you didn’t go to Harvard University—well, all those may be true, but that’s not the relevant question! You have to look at the relevant question.

There are different ways in which people try to prevent you from going forward, and to marginalize you. And you just have to try to understand what the basis of the arguments should be which are valid, and those arguments which aren’t valid. And then hopefully people will get around to—but you have to be strong, and you have to be courageous, and you have to be self-critical. You know, you have a lot of critics out there, but the most important critic in your life is, guess who? It has to be you! You have to be your own worst, toughest, raunchiest, most difficult person to satisfy. And if you can be all those rough, tough things, to yourself, the rest of the world’s going to seem kind of easy when you face it.

Link

[Tanada]

Researchers: Flawed 1956 National Academy of Sciences report on radiation risk should be retracted



Many fear radiation without much understanding of what ionizing radiation is, how it works and what the actual risk is. This lack of knowledge and public perception combine to make people fearful of all things nuclear, which has had serious consequences.

Fear of radiation colors the public acceptance of medical procedures involving radiation, radiation therapy and nuclear power generation.

Newly discovered evidence shows that a flawed 1956 report issued to the public by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (NAS) played a large role in establishing the erroneous yet widespread view that ionizing radiation at any level is dangerous.

Until that 1956 report became widely publicized, the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), which had regulated radiation levels and other nuclear matters, operated under what was called a threshold approach. The AEC considered high levels of ionizing radiation to be harmful and having a cancer risk, but considered radiation levels below a certain threshold to be not harmful.

After the 1956 report, the AEC threshold model of radiation was replaced by the so-called linear no-threshold model, which held that all levels of radiation were harmful. Further, the AEC 's jurisdiction was replaced by a new federal agency, the Federal Radiation Council, which adopted the linear no-threshold model approach to radiation risk.

The factual and ethical flaws in the 1956 report came to light in March 2022, when Health Physics Society researchers were preparing a documentary on how the linear no-threshold (LNT) model came into being. In the course of their research, they discovered files, including letters and documents, on the scientific aspects of a 1960 report that included material on the 1956 findings.

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The new findings

The new findings are reported in an online preprint of an article to be published in the journal Health Physics. The authors are Edward Calabrese, a toxicologist and professor in the department of environmental health sciences at the University of Massachusetts (Amherst), and James Giordano, a professor in the departments of neurology and of biochemistry and chief of the Neuroethics Studies Program at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C.

The peer-reviewed Health Physics is published monthly by the Health Physics Society, a nonprofit scientific organization of specialists in radiation protection.

The report in question is a 1956 report prepared "for the general public," summarizing a technical report of the 16-member Genetics Panel of the NAS Biological Effects of Atomic Radiation group, or BEAR. As the authors explain, the report to the public had major media coverage but it was not written by or even reviewed by the panel members. Instead, it was prepared by a third party, who had not participated in the genetics panel discussions, an editor at Scientific American magazine.

The public report was rushed to publication, without the panel's review, the authors state, to coordinate with the release of a United Kingdom report on ionizing radiation effects. The report made headlines in major U.S. newspapers and copies were sent to every U.S. public library.

The researchers found a series of letters from four eminent Genetics Panel members in the files of the next BEAR report, issued four years after 1956. Panel member Alfred Sturtevant, a geneticist, wrote, "I have felt that the [report] issued in 1956 was a mistake, since it was not checked by the committee members, and even the chairman did a rather hurried job. It contained some inaccuracies and many rather unfortunate wordings....”

In particular, correspondence from the 1956 panelists took issue with the statement in the public report that "human gene mutations, which produce observable effects, are believed to be universally harmful."

How did this happen?

When Current Science Daily asked Calabrese, co-author of the Health Physics article, how this could have happened, he pointed to a series of circumstances.

"The writing by a third party for the general public is not a bad thing," he emphasized. "It can be very effective. However, the scientific panel would need to review, and approve the report."

"In this case," he said, the public report "was supposed to be overseen by the chair of the panel. Theoretically this might work. However, the chair of the genetics panel was not a geneticist or a biologist, but a mathematician, and this created a serious problem."

Calabrese said that the panel chairman, Warren Weaver, as a mathematician "was not able to properly understand all the important genetics and biology features of the evaluation."

Why was Warren chosen as chair?

Calabrese said he thought it was because the Genetics Panel was thought to be the key BEAR panel and that the NAS president at the time, Detlev Bronk, thought he could control Weaver more than he could the other panel chairs.

"Added to this situation was intense time pressure because the U.S. and the U.K. wanted their reports published the same day," Calabrese said. "All these factors came together, thus creating the now-discovered mess."

The additional problems that Calabrese and his co-author point to are that "the NAS indicated that the report represented the views of the panel, which they did not. The NAS lied to the public and never corrected the record."

Also, Calabrese said, "the panel members were aware of the problem and never corrected it either. They became part of the problem and an ethical dilemma."

Would the panel have written it differently?

Calabrese said he couldn't speculate on whether the report would have been different if the panel members had written it.

"It is not possible to answer, since there were 16 members," he said. "These people had strong personalities, and sometimes could not play well together, so one can never know what their discussion might have yielded."

Later, he noted, the four members whose letters were discovered to have criticized several parts of the 1956 report.

"First, they were upset because mistakes in the 1956 BEAR report were copied and put into the 1960 report," he said. "This drove them crazy. And they were upset that the 1956 report, which was not written well, had a spectrum of errors. One of the panel members, geneticist Hermann Muller, although a proponent of the linear no-threshold theory, threatened to quit the panel if the NAS was going to continue to publish reports with his name on it without his approval."

All these elements together have had a major policy impact.

"The 1956 report undercut the authority of the Atomic Energy Commission," Calabrese said. "It led President Dwight Eisenhower to remove cancer risk assessment from the AEC and to create a new federal group to do this, which supported linear no threshold. Later this group was incorporated into the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency."

"It's hard to underestimate the report's impact. It affected major policy changes worldwide," Calabrese said.

NAS should correct the record

What do the Health Physics authors want the National Academy of Sciences to do now?

"I have asked the president of the NAS to be honest with the government and the general public and correct the record by retracting the 1956 report and tell the public why," Calabrese said. "It is unethical to publish a report that is not written and approved by the so-called authors. This report was the cancer-risk assessment founding document for the country and the world."

The NAS president has rejected this request, Calabrese said.

The article concludes: "In sum, given the public significance of this report, its widespread publicity and distribution, regulatory significance, and its prompting of several congressional hearings [1957, 1959, 1960] concerning radiation risks and risk assessment, the activities constituent to the development, publication, and distribution of the 1956 BEAR I Genetics Panel report to the public should be deemed unethical, in violation of formal definition of responsible conduct of research (Office of Research Integrity 2022), and injurious to both public health and trust.

"Therefore, we opine that the evident misconduct should be acknowledged and the NAS report should be formally retracted."

---Edward Calabrese & James Giordano, Ethical Issues in the US 1956 National Academy of Sciences BEAR I Genetics Panel Report to the Public, Health Physics, preprint, July 2022. DOI: 10.1097/HP.0000000000001608.

LINK

[Tanada]

Link to full article below quote, article includes many pictures of relevant emails that I did not move over to quote as images are a PITA to copy.

Emails Reveal: Bureaucrats censor radiation risk science fraud by cancelling whistleblowers; Huge implications for nuclear power

What if the public’s fears about common exposures to radiation were not only baseless, but the product of epic science fraud? And what if the people we have trusted with setting radiation safety standards have knowingly suppressed that reality for decades, including up to the present day?

JunkScience.com is presenting for the first time emails uncovered via the Freedom of Information Act that expose the inner workings of a little-known bureaucracy dedicated to keeping in place the so-called “linear non-threshold model” (LNT). The LNT is used by regulatory agencies to set permitted exposure standards for radiation.

So if you have been concerned or scared of anything associated with radiation — from medical diagnostics to TSA screening to radon in your basement to nuclear power plants — you have been an unwitting victim of the LNT. As explained in this recent article, the LNT has been responsible for producing crippling fear of low-level radiation exposures.

These emails are to and from a veritable Who’s Who of the current radiation safety establishment, including employees and affiliates of the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurements (NCRP), the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) and the Health Physics Society (HPS).

Depending on the reader’s familiarity with the LNT and the recent exposure of it as science fraud by Ed Calabrese of UMass Amherst, it is recommended that readers first watch and have their minds blown by the amazing 22-part Health Physics Society (HPS) video series featuring the incomparable Calabrese’s unparalleled research on the origins and development of the LNT: HPS.org | YouTube.com. It is 10 hours of truly incredible content. No exaggeration. A written summary of the video series is here (Web | PDF). A two minute-long teaser clip is below.

Top off your shock and amazement by reading what the FOIA-ed emails show is occurring now. You will no longer wonder why the LNT remains in use despite lacking any sort of scientific underpinning. But you will perhaps start to wonder why anyone believes any sort of government-related science at all.

Why you should care about this:

Radiation safety standards. Virtually all radiation safety standards — e.g, medical and dental treatment, occupational exposure standards, nuclear plant safety, radon in the home — are all based on the LNT. The International Commission on Radiological Protection (ICRP), an independent non-government organization, is currently undertaking a review of its recommendations for radiation safety. The HPS video series was produced with an eye toward informing it on the actual history of the LNT.
Chemical safety standards. All chemical safety standards addressing cancer risk — e.g,. EPA drinking water, air emission and hazardous waste clean-up standards — are based on the LNT. The LNT gives regulatory agencies like EPA maximum arbitrary power over the regulated community and the public mind.
Medical imaging. Many members of the public refuse diagnostic x-rays, fearing a risk of cancer predicted by the LNT.
Nuclear power. Excessive fears of nuclear power and nuclear accidents come from use of the LNT. These fears can themselves be deadly. No one was directly killed by radiation from the 2011 nuclear accident at Fukushima, but more than 1,600 people died in the ensuing panicky evacuation.
Nuclear war. The possibility of nuclear war and or a dirty bomb detonated in an urban area or off the coast of, say, California — think Ukraine war, the Iran and North Korea nuclear programs, and China’s aggression toward Taiwan — all raise the the possibility that Americans and others may have to deal with radiation risks and potential evacuations. Strict application of the LNT guarantees these will be hysterical and disastrous.
Reliability of government and institutional science. For many, there is little more authoritative than media reports with phrases like “Scientists say…” or “Government scientists say…” or “Nobel prize winner says…” But Calabrese’s work shows how terribly wrong it is to treat scientists, especially government and institutional ones, as if they exist on some higher moral and intellectual plane than the rest of us. They don’t.
Other social and economic impacts. The LNT foments fear, which causes poor decision-making during times of crisis. The model implies there’s no safe exposures to radiation resulting in enormous costs to building nuclear plants or cleaning up contaminated environments to prevent low level exposures that pose no threat. Thus, applying the LNT wastes resources via an unjustified fear that ultimately harms public health.

1. Introduction

The linear no-threshold model (LNT) for cancer risk assessment is the foundation for a vast amount of radiation and chemical regulation in the US. First adopted by the radiation safety community in the 1950s, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has been its main sponsor and enforcer since the 1970s. Nonetheless, over the decades, many scientists and radiation safety experts have questioned the scientific validity of the LNT in the low dose/exposure range, and the EPA’s strict and unyielding application of it for those low doses/exposures, which happen to represent the vast majority of regulated exposures.

Over the past several decades, University of Massachusetts professor Ed Calabrese has conducted truly amazing historical research about the LNT’s origin and history. Calabrese’s work revealed the true and sordid history of the LNT’s development. He has demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt that the LNT was adopted for low doses/exposures despite it not having any supporting scientific data. To apply the LNT to low dose/exposure situations and call it “science” can now be shown to be an utter fraud. Words fail to do justice to the stark nature and significance of Calabrese’s revelations.

Until recently, Calabrese has been content to publish his findings in peer-reviewed academic journals. JunkScience.com has spotlighted many of them over the years. But in 2021, the Health Physics Society (HPS), a prestigious society of radiation safety experts and professionals, approached Calabrese to report his findings to the wider public. The result is a compelling 22-part, 10 hour-long video series which can viewed at HPS.org, YouTube.com or at JunkScience.com.

Shortly after the HPS video series was released in April 2022, an activist conducting research on a separate topic shared responses from a Freedom of Information Act request with Calabrese as his work with HPS had been mentioned. Intrigued and not one to leave any stone unturned, Calabrese sent Freedom of Information Act requests to federal agencies that use/rely on the LNT. Much to his surprise and chagrin, the emails revealed a covert campaign to:

Discredit Calabrese and his video series and to
Overthrow the current leadership of the HPS because it is viewed as being anti-LNT.

The emails and covert campaign are revealed here for the first time publicly. While Calabrese’s research and video series expose the dishonest way the LNT was developed and cemented into regulatory risk assessment, these emails expose the dishonesty, scheming and unscientific behavior of those trying to keep the LNT cemented in place.
2. Brief Description of the LNT

The linear no-threshold model (LNT) has been relied on by regulatory agencies for radiation and chemical risk assessment since the mid-1950s. The LNT is just a model, that is, an assumption vs. a scientifically validated fact. And it is a crude one at that. It is used to determine permitted levels of exposure to radiation or chemicals when there is no scientific data showing harm at low dose/exposure levels.

In an illustration from the HPS video series (below), the solid blue line shows a range of exposure for which there is real-life or laboratory data showing increasing risk of harm of health with increasing dose of radiation. The dashed blue line shows the exposure range for which there are no data. By use of the LNT, that low dose/exposure risk level is presumed to be linear with increasing dose with no safe level of exposure. [Note: In this illustration the line doesn’t go through the graph’s origin because, in the case of radiation, there is naturally occurring radiation (from the Earth itself and space) that we are all unavoidably exposed to every day (called background radiation). The health risk from this background level is presumed to present zero risk.] But through use of the LNT, all additional radiation risk is presumed to increased the risk of harm in linear (or proportional) fashion.

Because the LNT is not based on real-life observations or laboratory data, it is not the product of science, but rather something called “science policy” — i.e., an arbitrary political assumption made to fill a gap in knowledge or uncertainty in the science used in regulatory risk assessment. Science-policy decisions are said to be “conservative” in nature. This is not meant in a political context but in the context of “better safe than sorry.” Science policy decisions are an early form of the so-called “precautionary principle.” There are many types of science policy decisions made in regulatory risk assessment. But the LNT is perhaps the most prominent.

Although the LNT is often used for regulatory risk assessments for exposure to chemicals, the focus, here, will be radiation risk assessment. The gap in knowledge with risk assessment for radiation exposures is the absence of data showing harm from low dose/exposure to radiation. We know from the Japanese atomic bomb survivor data, for example, that cancer risk increases with with proximity to ground zero for the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombings. The survivors have been extensively studied for decades and the dose-response curve (i.e., analogous to solid blue line in the graph above) is generally accepted to be linear and increasing with proximity to the explosions (i.e., higher exposures).

But what, if any, is the risk from lower and less intense exposures to radiation? The actual shape and nature of dose-response curve in that exposure region is controversial to say the least. To set regulatory standards in that region, where the vast majority of human exposures to radiation occur, the LNT is assumed and used. Although it is often cloaked, presented and discussed as science, the LNT and its application is, in fact, pure guesswork. It is not the product of science, but rather its absence.

practitioners of the “radiological priestcraft” are politically powerful, watchful over their domain and are aggressive in defending it.

Why does the LNT still hold such tremendous sway over regulatory risk assessment and standard setting? A better question to start with might be, how did the LNT come to be used in the first place? Enter, Ed Calabrese.

There is a standard history of the LNT, portraying it as the outcome of Nobel prize-winning science, followed by the adoption of this science by learned committees of the National Academy of Sciences. Then there is the actual history of the LNT as revealed by Calabrese and the Health Physics Society. And that history, without even knowing what it is until Calabrese’s work, is what the LNT priesthood is trying to prevent the world from knowing.

The emails unearthed by Calabrese reveal senior levels of the radiation protection community, prominent individuals and key institutions, scheming not only to undermine Calabrese but also conspiring to seize control of the HPS and to cleanse it of anyone in a leadership role who questions the validity of the LNT.
3. The Calabrese Videos and the Emails

To provide the public and radiation protection community with the benefit of Calabrese’s discoveries, the Health Physics Society (HPS) released in April 2022 a series of videos (HPS.org | YouTube | JunkScience.com) documenting and exposing the historic science fraud behind the LNT that Calabrese single-handedly uncovered.

In July 2022, Theodora Scarato of the environmental activist group Environmental Health Trust (EHT) notified Calabrese of the results of a Freedom of Information Act that EHT had submitted to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Scarato sent Calabrese 1,200 pages of the FOIA results, including email to and from Armin Ansari, a past president of the HPS (2012-2013) and current president-elect of the American Academy of Health Physicists (AAHP). Unexpectedly, these emails contained communications by and between HPS board members and others in the radiation protection establishment critical of Calabrese, HPS leadership and the video series.

After reviewing the emails and wanting to better understand expressed displeasures with HPS video series, Calabrese submitted his own FOIA request to CDC. This action is entirely consistent with Calabreses’s meticulous and thorough research methods. In Episode 4 of the video series, for example, Calabrese revealed how he purchased personal letters between key members of the 1956 National Academy of Sciences’ Biological Effects of Atomic Radiation (BEAR) Committee in order to better understand the motives and relationships that led to their recommendation of the LNT Model for use in risk assessment.

After receiving FOIA-ed material from CDC, Calabrese shared the results with HPS leadership.

The FOIA-ed information reveals a coordinated and covert campaign by John Boice, the past president (2012-2018) and current director of science of the National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurements (NCRP), and some HPS members to “save the Society.”

The cabal intended to accomplish this by covertly recruiting, nominating and electing HPS members to HPS leadership who had views consistent with their own, i.e., ignorant of the LNT’s history yet supportive of it. The emails revealed that many prominent figures in the field of radiation safety are acting to protect the continued reliance on the LNT model by suppressing relevant scientific information and silencing critics like Calabrese.

Only HPS members in leadership positions working at government or public institutions were the subject of Calabrese’s FOIA requests, some of which are still in progress. What follows is a presentation of noteworthy emails. It reveals how leaders in the field of radiation safety who hold influential or prominent positions on national and international committees, academic programs and government agencies nefariously control the exchange of scientific information to the detriment of the rest of us.

This is rank politics and political activism, not science.

LINK

[Newfie]

Tanada,

If you have the spare time I would appreciate you viewing the below video and telling me what you think.

https://youtu.be/gzmk53DJNUI

[Tanada]

Tanada,

If you have the spare time I would appreciate you viewing the below video and telling me what you think.

https://youtu.be/gzmk53DJNUI

I would rate the video as about 95 percent accurate and a good primer for those who know little or nothing about nuclear weapon effects. There was one glaring fact error near the beginning, he confused the half-life of Plutonium-239 and Plutonium-240. However that half-life is not significant to explaining how the devices work nor to how the weapon effects can harm or kill people.

He is also somewhat blase' describing the EMP potential effect because we have not actually used these weapons over modern devices it is true we do not know the potential damage level, but the risk we lose the entire grid infrastructure which would put us in a very bad situation. Maybe the system safeties would work, but even if they did the number of trained electricians who survive to reset the system might be too small to get things back in operation within a short time. Remember most of those electrician and grid operators live in the cities that would be targets and the power plants themselves would be targeted. For those two factors I knocked off 5 percent, but otherwise it is explained in language and with images any person of reasonable intelligence can understand.

[Newfie]

Thanks TANADA.

I mostly like his work, but have seen a couple of explanations that seemed a bit stretched to me or perhaps had an unspoken agenda. I saw nothing wrong with this video but thought I may be missing something.

[theluckycountry]

There is a big difference between the radioactive particles released by a bomb, Hiroshima, and a nuclear accident, Chernobyl. There is also a vast difference in the amounts. Little Boy contained 64 kilograms of highly enriched uranium, and only about a half a kilo underwent fission. It was an airburst and the rest was blasted far and wide by the heat and turbulence of the fireball. The Chernobyl accident and resulting steam explosion and fires released at least 5% of the reactor core into the environment, Chernobyl 4 reactor core had 192 tonnes of fuel, so nearly ten tonnes compared to 60kg. Most of Chernobyl's material was deposited close by as dust and debris, but the lighter material was carried by wind over Ukraine, Belarus, Russia, and to some extent over Scandinavia and Europe

Chernobyl contained a variety of radio active elements in quantity, iodine-131, cesium-134 and cesium-137. Very toxic to health. Then there was all the plutonium that was scattered across the reactor and local area. Deadly! We've seen the videos of US solders walking into ground zero after a detonation, an airburst where the majority of toxic stuff is lofted far away. Same with the Gadget test, Oppenheimer and the general walked right up to the towers base, no real drama. Such is not the case with a nuclear reactor explosion. The entire region around Chernobyl and Fukushima are deserted to this day whereas Hiroshima was rebuilt not long after. What caused all the after deaths there was peoples exposure to the gamma rays on detonation, not fallout. The exact same thing that killed thousands of workers who were sent in to clean up Chernobyl in the weeks after the accident. They were waking across graphite loaded with radioactive particles.





You cannot compare a nuclear blast in the air with the explosive destruction of a reactor on the ground. They are chalk and cheese. The simple fact that these reactors are sealed and abandoned is a big hint. They cannot be cleaned up because they are deadly to man and machine. Accidents with nuclear weapons have occurred, plane crashes in the US and most famously the beach near Salerno where the radioactive soils were removed where the bomb had spread its guts on impact. The Three Mile Island meltdown was minor, but that reactor, Unit 2, was shutdown and never restarted. It never blew up, just part of the core melted down but no one is going to unbolt it and try a repair, they are just too dangerous to tinker with.

If you want to believe the death tolls from contamination as reported by governments and their agencies in the mass media that's your business, but the coverups have been going on since day one.
https://daily.jstor.org/hiding-the-radi ... mic-bombs/

Fukushima grapples with toxic soil that no one wants https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/ ... adioactive
Fukushima is a pooch screw of mammoth proportions. Even accepting the government proclamations it's a situation no one in their right mind would want to deal with.

[Tanada]

There is a big difference between the radioactive particles released by a bomb, Hiroshima, and a nuclear accident, Chernobyl. There is also a vast difference in the amounts. Little Boy contained 64 kilograms of highly enriched uranium, and only about a half a kilo underwent fission. It was an airburst and the rest was blasted far and wide by the heat and turbulence of the fireball. The Chernobyl accident and resulting steam explosion and fires released at least 5% of the reactor core into the environment, Chernobyl 4 reactor core had 192 tonnes of fuel, so nearly ten tonnes compared to 60kg. Most of Chernobyl's material was deposited close by as dust and debris, but the lighter material was carried by wind over Ukraine, Belarus, Russia, and to some extent over Scandinavia and Europe

Chernobyl contained a variety of radio active elements in quantity, iodine-131, cesium-134 and cesium-137. Very toxic to health. Then there was all the plutonium that was scattered across the reactor and local area. Deadly! We've seen the videos of US solders walking into ground zero after a detonation, an airburst where the majority of toxic stuff is lofted far away. Same with the Gadget test, Oppenheimer and the general walked right up to the towers base, no real drama. Such is not the case with a nuclear reactor explosion. The entire region around Chernobyl and Fukushima are deserted to this day whereas Hiroshima was rebuilt not long after. What caused all the after deaths there was peoples exposure to the gamma rays on detonation, not fallout. The exact same thing that killed thousands of workers who were sent in to clean up Chernobyl in the weeks after the accident. They were waking across graphite loaded with radioactive particles.





You cannot compare a nuclear blast in the air with the explosive destruction of a reactor on the ground. They are chalk and cheese. The simple fact that these reactors are sealed and abandoned is a big hint. They cannot be cleaned up because they are deadly to man and machine. Accidents with nuclear weapons have occurred, plane crashes in the US and most famously the beach near Salerno where the radioactive soils were removed where the bomb had spread its guts on impact. The Three Mile Island meltdown was minor, but that reactor, Unit 2, was shutdown and never restarted. It never blew up, just part of the core melted down but no one is going to unbolt it and try a repair, they are just too dangerous to tinker with.

If you want to believe the death tolls from contamination as reported by governments and their agencies in the mass media that's your business, but the coverups have been going on since day one.
https://daily.jstor.org/hiding-the-radi ... mic-bombs/

Fukushima grapples with toxic soil that no one wants https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/ ... adioactive
Fukushima is a pooch screw of mammoth proportions. Even accepting the government proclamations it's a situation no one in their right mind would want to deal with.

You have a couple fundamental misunderstandings of the situation but given you dismiss everything I say on the subject out of hand I won't bother correcting them this time around. It gets tiresome.