The long-term danger of lower doses is a rather different thing, though, and that took a lot longer to be well understood. There are a lot of things which are dangerous in large doses but harmless or even beneficial in small doses, after all.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=PdfExcerptURL&_imag...
About that work at Hanford:
http://www.hanfordproject.com/atmospheric.html
"Classified studies done at Hanford revealed how radioiodine traveled through the food chain, increasing in concentration as it moved upwards into higher consumer species. Clandestine studies conducted at Hanford revealed how high dosage levels of ingested iodine-131 in sheep showed "virtually complete destruction" of their thyroids and those of their offspring. [3] Hanford officials repeatedly assured the public that, "not one atom" has escaped the facility. At one press conference officials stated bluntly that the facility was "safe as mother's milk" even as they were well aware of the possibility of compromising the health of both workers and the general public through Hanford's plutonium production activities. [4]"
And about Hanford as the facility:
"For more than forty years, Hanford released radioactive contamination into the environment while producing plutonium for the U.S. nuclear arsenal during the Cold War era. Although the majority of the releases were due to activities related to production, some were also planned and intentional."
I certainly could be wrong, but you and the others replying to me do not seem to be doing a very good job distinguishing between short term, high-dose effects (which were pretty well known) and long term, low-dose effects (which seem to have taken a lot longer to figure out).
We know about the DNA since 1954, we know that the radiation particles destruct it as soon as they hit it. There's no any known mechanism under which the long-term effects can be anything but negative.
The only ones who "benefited" are comics heroes like Spiderman. But do I have to point they don't exist? The only others who "benefit" are those who are doing the nuclear projects.
And I'm not against nuclear in general. If that's the best we can do to provide the energy we want to use, we have to do it. But effectively inventing the health "benefits" is too much.
What you're describing -- and what most people who don't have a specialized education in the nuclear field commonly believe -- is something called the "linear no threshold" hypothesis (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_no-threshold_model) of radiation exposure, and although it's commonly used because it's definitely the safest and most conservative way of responding to radiation exposure, it's rather controversial and probably wrong.
If you're curious and want to find out more, there's a lot of fascinating material about the subject available publicly, including some analyses of life expectancies in areas that have much-higher-than-normal background radiation (off the top of my head, Kerala, India is one such locality).
There is plenty of evidence suggesting that exposure to low levels of radiation for extended periods increases cancer probabilities.
Yes. They even knew they were going to fake the results:
http://www.ieer.org/latest/iodnart.html
"For example, in 1953, the Public Health Service was asked to obtain milk samples in St. George, Utah, near the test site. But the service took a sample from a carton of milk purchased in a store, not from a local farm or dairy -- at a time when the majority of residents of southwest Utah obtained milk from their own cows and many others purchased milk from neighboring farms.(12)
According to Morgan S. Seal, a fallout monitor with the Public Health Service, the testing procedure was not very useful either. "In the case of milk, we even treated it with perchloric acid to get rid of all the organic residue....we knew for a fact then that those oxidating techniques completely eliminated any iodine in the material that you were treating."(13)"
It should be pretty clear just from looking at the timeline. How are they going to discover a long term cancer risk by studying the population only eight years after exposure began?
(http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/radiation/dir/mstreet/commeet/meet1...)
"From 1963 to 1965, at the Atomic Energy Commission National Reactor Testing Station in Idaho, radioactive iodine was purposely released on seven separate occasions. In one of these experiments, seven human subjects drank milk from cows which had grazed on iodine-contaminated land. This experiment was designed to measure the passage of iodine through the food chain into the thyroids of human subjects. In a second experiment, three human subjects were placed on the pasture during iodine release, and seven subjects were placed on the pasture in a third experiment. In addition, "several" individuals were contaminated during yet another experiment when vials of radioactive iodine accidentally broke. Cows grazed on contaminated land and their milk was counted in four of the experiments; in the remaining three, radiation measurements were made only int he pasture. (Category 10.001, Number 173)."
"During the 1960s, at the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory, 57 normal adults were fed microscopic spheres containing radioactive uranium and manganese. These experiments were designed to determine how fast such spheres would pass through the human body after ingestion. It was believed that particles of this size could be produced by the atmospheric reentry and burnup of rockets propelled by nuclear reactors, or of radioactive power supplies. (Category 1.003, Number 106)."
"From 1961 to 1963, at the University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory, 102 human subjects were fed real fallout from the Nevada Test Site; simulated fallout particles that contained strontium, barium, or cesium; or solutions of strontium and cesium. This experiment was designed to measure human absorption and retention of these radioactive substances. (Category 11.001, Number 186, Part A)."
"Reports by the United States National Research Council and the National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurements and the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR) argue[16] that there is no evidence for hormesis in humans and in the case of the National Research Council, that hormesis is outright rejected as a possibility despite population and scientific evidence.[17] Therefore, estimating Linear no-threshold model (LNT) continues to be the model generally used by regulatory agencies for human radiation exposure."
There's no even any logical proof that the radiation, that even in the lowest dosages destructs the DNA whenever it hits it, can make beneficial mutations instead of simply producing a cancer. That the "chemical agents" can be beneficial in low dosages isn't the issue as the radiation isn't a chemical agent but a DNA destruction agent.
Note: "Radiation hormesis is the hypothesis that low doses of ionizing radiation (within the region of and just above natural background levels) are beneficial."
No proof of that.
And from further down in the article:
"Until the [...] uncertainties on low-dose response are resolved, the Committee believes that an increase in the risk of tumour induction proportionate to the radiation dose is consistent with developing knowledge and that it remains, accordingly, the most scientifically defensible approximation of low-dose response. However, a strictly linear dose response should not be expected in all circumstances."
There's a lot of confounding factors that make studying low-level radiation doses hard, including background radiation and the long timelines involved. I'm perfectly fine regulatory agencies working with an assumption of a LNT model until conclusive proof otherwise is provided. These agencies should be focused on safety and lean conservatively when in doubt. But attempting to call it not a debate is misleading at best.
It's a long jump from "the destructed DNA is in percentages better repaired at low radiation doses than at higher ones" (if even that is provable, compared to simply "the DNA was less hit") to any reliable proof that the low doses are actually beneficial.
Again, who actually has the interest in presenting this unsupported "beneficial" claim as the "debate"?
And why does there have to be an agenda, as opposed to simply being an unresolved scientific point of contention? We don't know if there's life on Europa either, and I'm sure there's scientists on both sides. But I wouldn't say any of them have an agenda except for making the best educated guess they can, lacking any solid evidence one way or another.
EDIT: Also, to reply to an earlier point:
> There's no even any logical proof that the radiation, that even in the lowest dosages destructs the DNA whenever it hits it, can make beneficial mutations instead of simply producing a cancer.
It can also just kill the cell. If it kills problematic or pre-problematic cells more proportionately than healthy cells, then the net effect could be positive. Such disproportionate effects are the very basis of otherwise indiscriminate treatments like chemotherapy [0].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemotherapy#Mechanism_of_acti...
Because there's no way that the radiation particles don't destruct DNA if they hit it. The "debaters" don't have any scientific explanation how it can be even "harmless" not to mention "beneficial."
Chemotherapy is just "let's kill enough of this guy's fast replicating cells to kill the cancer cells before they kill him." There's absolutely no any connection there to the radiation effects on the DNA.
> Chemotherapy is just "let's kill enough percentage of this guys cells to kill the cancer cells before they kill him."
That's exactly what I said with "otherwise indiscriminate treatments." Our body is not a homogenous mass of one type of cell; different cells react differently. If cancer cells react disproportionately negatively to a substance than other cell types, then that substance could be useful to treat cancer. All forms of hormesis are basically an extension of this idea: that the harm done by a substance can be otherwise offset by positive effects.
The radiation is not a "substance" it's a radiation, the destructive and completely non-selective bombardment of all the molecules reached by it. It's not a chemical effect at all, but a nuclear one.
I suggest that those who claim the additional low dosages are beneficial start to expose themselves to such. Somehow I doubt they'd do it. It's always for somebody else.
Linearity in the observed statistics is absolutely not the same as "beneficial." Even if the statistics gets "fuzzy" for low enough doses who can actually claim the real benefits?
Also: the actual dosages matter. The low enough dosages are something where we simply don't have anything to compare to as "full absence". We get some level of radiation all the time. Even eating a banana gets you a little of the radioactive stuff. And we (as animals) get cancer all the time.
http://www.livescience.com/9680-cancer-kills-wild-animals.ht...
Which is exactly why the Wiki article I originally linked discusses laboratories specifically built to reduce background radiation in order to further this research. (Which is certainly a strange step to take, given that there's apparently no debate.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_hormesis#Effects_of_...