in order to accept what's called the linear no threshold hypothesis for
radiation's effect on living things
you have to accept also the belief that nature is stupid.
Over billions of years,
we have evolved immune systems because everything in nature
lives within a chemical environment and in a radiological environment.
700,000 years ago there was twice as much U-235 and so forth.
So, we have organisms that can survive in a 1000 times more radiation than a human can.
Well, why is that?
Cells have the abily to repair the broken
bonds in DNA, they have the ability to
perhaps repair some protein damage
They have the ability to digest the junk that is produced by damage,
and they have the ability to actually eat themselves and kill themselves.
So cells can actually die intentionally becacause
they've become so screwed up inside because of various
forms of chemical or radiological damage and
that's actually what happens when you have radiation poisoning - You've killed cells -
typically in the intestinal tract first -
that are very susceptible and not able to handle that amount of radiation.
So, here is just a chart from Wikipedia about metabolism and all of our cells.
A cell has exogenous damage from the outside world - radiation chemistry and so forth,
It has endogenous damage from inside itself, because it has a metabolism it
burns its fuel internally for energy.
And, the most damaging things are oxidants,
hydroxyl radicals, alcohol, those kinds of chemicals that have
a lot of oxygen available to corrode the insides of cell.
The reality is that over a few billion years mother nature
figured out how to deal with this and so, every second every cell in our body
does a repair of some sort -
DNA repair in particular In case of a break in a DNA strand.
Natural radiation is in our bodies all the time - because we eat.
Potassium-40 is a low content of natural potassium but it's radioactive and its within our bodies.
We have about 4400 decays per second within our body - of potassium-40
So, our bodies are busy being radioactive.
In 1946, Herman Muller got a Nobel Prize for his work with radiation and things on genetic mutations.
And, in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech,
he basically said there's a linear relationship between radiation dose
and the problems that it causes for the organisim.
But, his data didn't actually support that.
This was an interview done with someone who knew about that
from years later within the IEEE Spectrum [publication] a little while ago
and basically stated that his data didn't say that, and the people who worked for him
disagreed with what he said in his Nobel expect acceptance speech.
However, the problem was that than the National Academy of Sciences took his words
and that's the beginning of the standard for the linear no threshold dose.
In other words, no dose is too small not to cause trouble.
And, we know that is not true from actual measurements.
This is another example of a radiation lie - from England.
Christopher Busby was a doctor who said that there was Leukemia
in kids in Wales being caused by a nuclear reactor there.
Well, it turned out he had fibbed.
When they did the analysis of his data he
had done things like counting the incidence of Leukemia twice,
he had mixed up figures from small and rural areas,
creating clusters of Leukemia that didn't exist.
In fact, when they looked at the actual Leukemia cases in one particular region,
instead of having ten cases, there was one.